Smiley Smile
June 4, 2014 5:07 PM   Subscribe

Tom Smucker, one of the first wave of rock writers, gives The Beach Boys Smiley Smile a close listen.
posted by sleepy pete (11 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Awesome, awesome album. Miles better than Smile - and I have (and love) the 'everything but the kitchen sink' Smile Sessions box set. I'm so glad Brian abandoned the Spector-eque route he had been progressing along, and let the Beach Boys return to more of a group effort. 1967-1973 saw the full flowering of the talents of Carl and Dennis, and you can really hear the beginnings of the group just decelerating to a simpler approach on Smiley Smile.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:42 PM on June 4, 2014


(Looking forward to reading the lengthy reviews of each song by someone who claims this to be the 'best album ever'! Thanks for posting!)
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 5:44 PM on June 4, 2014


I love Smiley Smile forever and ever! I really really love that album OK now I'll read TFA.
posted by maggiemaggie at 7:20 PM on June 4, 2014


I think this is a key observation (from the Vegetables review): "If we haven't heard Vegetables before, [The Beach Boys] sure have, (all those Smile sessions) and they have the vocal chops to understate but bounce along and embellish the melody."

That's what I hear throughout Smiley Smile - all the experience gained from those all-too-precious Smile tracks is reworked into relaxed, confident, *warm* versions.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 8:21 PM on June 4, 2014 [1 favorite]


Wonderful

If Smiley Smile needs justification as an album beside yet beyond both versions of Smile this is the track.


No, no, a thousand times no.

The version of Wonderful from the boxed set is hearbreakingly, breathtakingly beautiful. The one on Smiley Smile is like a defaced masterwork painting.
posted by kgasmart at 7:23 AM on June 5, 2014 [2 favorites]


I like Smiley Smile but Smile is the better work. Smiley Smile suffers a bit from being the rest of the Beach Boys giving Brian and Parks the middle finger in response to the intensity of the Smile sessions.
posted by tommasz at 8:37 AM on June 5, 2014


After reading the article:

First: one night in 1970 I think, on a sleepover at a friend's house, the radio was on all night and I woke up to hear Good Vibrations whiole everyone else was sleeping, and when the song was over the radio dj said the Beach Boys were a tired washed up band.

Second: I first encountered Smiley Smile and Friends a few years later, in my senior year in high school, because one of my brothers randomly bought them (they were sold as a double album set).

I listened to them nonstop that spring (and I wasn't even doing drugs, just a spacey teenager). I was that person with no knowledge of Smile. The article mentions the "hippies at home" vibe of Smiley Smile and I totally get it, although I never got the stoned part (really!).

At that time, no one could believe these were Beach Boys albums.
posted by maggiemaggie at 9:18 AM on June 5, 2014 [2 favorites]


and when the song was over the radio dj said the Beach Boys were a tired washed up band.

I bet they would have been fun to see live at that point, though.
posted by kgasmart at 11:51 AM on June 5, 2014


The version of Wonderful from the boxed set is hearbreakingly, breathtakingly beautiful. The one on Smiley Smile is like a defaced masterwork painting.

I feel precisely the opposite about the two versions of Wonderful - that the Smiley Smile version is "heartbreakingly, breathtakingly beautiful", and that the Smile version is "like a defaced masterwork painting".

Neither of us is wrong in our perceptions. Art is so subjective.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:42 PM on June 5, 2014


These in-depth track analyses are fantastic. Here's an excerpt from the analysis of Fall Breaks and Back to Winter:

It's a wordless, initially jarring, lower register, minor key vocal refrain, cartoonishly ominous, answered by a harmonica and organ or accordion that does indeed reference the Woody Woodpecker song. Repeated six times to the fade at two and half minutes.

The repetition is part of the humor. Maybe even a statement about late sixties ideas about progress. We aren't going anywhere, the train isn't leaving the station, the car isn't leaving the hamburger stand, we're in a cycle. The vocal refrain sounds unresolved, dropped on us from an unknown somewhere, which the Woodpecker response resolves and then leads us back to. Six times.

And yet . . . each Woodpecker response is a bit different, building some changes. And within each response the texture reverses, a sound at the bottom of the mix comes forward and takes the melody (like the bass player taking a solo in a jazz trio). The embellishments, whether sound effects, voices, or instruments, deployed with, well, taste, echo the two previous tracks just enough to reassure us we are still in the same album.

And as usual with prime Brian Wilson, as slight as this track might first sound, it's actually fascinating. The untrained ear can absorb this as both pleasing and weird.


This is really thoughtful writing.
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 9:57 PM on June 5, 2014




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