Smiley Smile

According to Van Dyke Parks, Smile was partly intended to reclaim popular music from the influence of British acts like the Beatles (pictured in 1964).[8]

The Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds, issued on May 16, 1966, was massively influential upon its release, containing lush and sophisticated orchestral arrangements that raised the band's prestige to the top level of rock innovators.[9] Early reviews for the album in the US ranged from negative to tentatively positive,[10] but the reception from music journalists in the UK was very favorable.[11] The group had recently employed the Beatles' former press officer Derek Taylor as their publicist.[12] Bothered by the popular view of the Beach Boys as outdated surfers, leader and songwriter Brian Wilson requested that Taylor establish a new image for the band as fashionable counterculture icons, and so a media campaign with the tagline "Brian Wilson is a genius" was initiated and promulgated by Taylor.[13]

In October 1966, the group followed up Pet Sounds with "Good Vibrations", a laboriously produced single that achieved major international success. By then, an album titled Smile had been conceived as an extension of that song's recording approach, with Wilson composing music in collaboration with lyricist Van Dyke Parks.[14] Wilson envisioned Smile as an outlet for all of his intellectual occupations,[15] such as his fascination with spirituality and its relationship to humor and laughter.[16] He told Melody Maker: "Our new album will be better than Pet Sounds. It will be as much an improvement over Sounds as that was over [our 1965 album] Summer Days."[17] By the end of the year, NME conducted an annual reader's poll that placed the Beach Boys as the world's top vocal group, ahead of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.[18]

Bel Air, Los Angeles, where Brian Wilson relocated to in April 1967 and set up a home studio.[19]

Business partner David Anderle attempted to form Brother Records, an independent label, with the intention of giving "entirely new concepts to the recording industry, and to give the Beach Boys total creative and promotional control over their product."[20] A February 1967 lawsuit seeking $255,000 (equivalent to $2.07 million in 2021) was launched against Capitol Records over neglected royalty payments. Within the lawsuit, there was also an attempt to terminate the band's contract with Capitol before its November 1969 expiration.[21] In April 1967, Wilson and his wife put their Beverly Hills home up for sale and took residence at a newly purchased mansion in Bel Air. Wilson also set to work on constructing a personal home studio.[19]

Parks permanently withdrew from the project in April, with Anderle following suit weeks later.[22] Between mid-April and early May, Wilson took a four-week break from studio recording.[23] On April 26, Carl Wilson was arrested for refusing his draft into the US Army and later released on bail. On April 28, in an effort to promote the group's upcoming UK tour, EMI issued the single "Then I Kissed Her" to the chagrin of the band, who did not approve the release.[24] On May 6, a week after stating that Smile was to be released "any moment", Taylor announced in Disc & Music Echo that the album had been "scrapped" by Wilson.[25] However, Taylor's assertion of the album's cancellation at that point was likely to be spurious.[26][nb 1] The Beach Boys were still under pressure and a contractual obligation to deliver an album to Capitol.[28] For most of May, the touring group embarked on a run of shows in Europe while Brian resumed scheduling recording sessions at professional studios, some of which were cancelled on short notice.[29]

Throughout 1967, Wilson's public image was reduced to that of an "eccentric" figure as a multitude of revolutionary rock albums were released to an anxious and maturing youth market.[26][nb 2] For a time, the Beach Boys had been the Beatles' chief rivals,[31][32] and Wilson was concerned that if Smile followed in the wake of another critically successful release by the Beatles, then his album would be received with unjust comparisons. His race was effectively lost when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (May 1967).[33][nb 3] By June, Wilson declared to his bandmates that most of the material recorded for Smile would be abandoned.[29] In an interview conducted in January 1968, he intimated that he had run out of ideas "in a conventional sense" and had been "about ready to die" before Smiley Smile. He said: "I decided not to try any more, and not try and do such great things."[37]

Since the recording of "Good Vibrations" in 1966, Wilson had established a new method of operation. Instead of working on whole songs with clear large-scale syntactical structures, Wilson limited himself to recording short interchangeable fragments (or "modules"). Through the method of tape splicing, each fragment could then be assembled into a linear sequence, allowing any number of larger structures and divergent moods to be produced at a later time. Smiley Smile continued this approach.[39] The album also continued Brian's exploration of "party tracks"—a form of music which includes the sounds of people shouting and making noises, as if at a party.[40][nb 4] Brian had enacted this approach with Beach Boys' Party! in 1965,[40] thereby mixing that record's style with the modular composition method he devised for "Good Vibrations".[41]

Most of Smiley Smile was recorded at Brian's improvised home studio from June 3 to July 14, 1967.[42][nb 5] The core instrumentation consisted of organ, honky-tonk piano, and electronic bass[44] played by the Beach Boys themselves, rather than the session musicians employed in much of their previous work.[45] Brian became obsessed with a three-tiered Baldwin organ during the album's recording, resulting in a more minimalist approach to the new arrangements.[38] The organ gave the album its central timbre.[46] Most of the piano was played by Brian, and most of the bass was played by Carl.[47]

It was the first album for which production was credited to the entire group, instead of Brian alone.[48] Dennis Wilson explained: "He wanted it that way. He said 'It's produced by the Beach Boys.'"[49][nb 6] When asked if Brian was "still the producer of Smiley Smile", Carl answered, "Most definitely."[51] He described Smiley Smile as an improvised, low-effort affair that was "more like a 'jam' album."[52] Brian acknowledged: "We had done about six months work on another thing, but we jumped and ended up doing the entire thing here at the house with an entirely different mood and approach than what we originally started out with."[53] When questioned on why the band took the approach they did, he stated, "We just had a particular atmosphere that we were working in that inspired the particular kind of things that were on the album."[53] He said that he did not "have any paranoia feelings" recording the album: "[W]e had so much fun. The Smiley Smile era was so great, it was unbelievable. Personally, spiritually, everything, it was great."[54]

In his book about psychedelic music, author Jim DeRogatis referred to Smiley Smile as a work of the "ultimate psychedelic rock library".[5] Conversely, Stylus Magazine's Edwin Faust wrote in 2003 that the album "embraces the listener with a drugged out sincerity; a feat never accomplished by the more pretentious and heavy-handed psychedelia of that era. It is for this reason Smiley Smile flows so well with the more experimental pop of today".[56] According to music theorist Daniel Harrison, Smiley Smile is not a work of rock music as the term was understood in 1967, and that portions of the album "can be thought of as a kind of protominimal rock music".[57] He continues:

Smiley Smile can almost be considered a work of art music in the Western classical tradition, and its innovations in the musical language of rock can be compared to those that introduced atonal and other nontraditional techniques into that classical tradition. The spirit of experimentation is just as palpable in Smiley Smile as it is in, say, Schoenberg's op. 11 piano pieces. Yet there is also a spirit of tentativeness in Smiley Smile. We must remember that it was essentially a Plan B—that is, the album issued instead of Smile.[58]

Academic Larry Starr said that the album's "unexpected juxtapositions of textures and formal elements" give the effect of an "inadequately edited home movie rather than that of well-articulated musical conceptions".[59] Similarly, music journalist Richard Williams wrote, "It contains fragments – mostly vocal, with minimal instrumental accompaniment – which have all the epigrammatic, enigmatic power of Japanese haiku. 'Wonderful' and 'Little Pad' contain passages written in the conditional tense (i.e. the songs move easily between reality and fantasy), a technique evolved by Godard in the cinema and which only Wilson, as far as I know, has picked up in pop [as of 1971]."[60]

Music journalist Domenic Priore notes that when the Beach Boys were taken out of professional studios, "the discipline of the clock, rates and overtime disappeared".[61][nb 7] In 1976, Mike Love, recalling how "She's Goin' Bald" was a song about fellatio, commented: "We were stoned out of our heads. We were laughing our asses off when we recorded that stuff."[62][nb 8] Dennis remembered the album as "the most fun thing we ever did."[64] Bruce Johnston did not participate in most of these sessions.[52] He later called the work "very spacy" and "weird", but "so subtle and so damn innovative."[65]

Carl Wilson famously compared Smiley Smile to "a bunt instead of a grand slam".[66][67] From the vast sum of material Brian had recorded for Smile, only portions of the backing track for "Heroes and Villains" (recorded October 1966) and the coda for "Vegetables" (recorded April 1967) were used for Smiley Smile.[46] Comparing Brian's original Smile mixes with the Smiley Smile version of "Heroes and Villains", Al Jardine called it "a pale facsimile ... Brian re-invented the song for this record ... He purposefully under-produced the song."[68] "Good Vibrations", which was recorded sporadically from February to September 1966, appears with no differences from the original single.[46] Brian reportedly objected to the placement of "Good Vibrations" on Smiley Smile, but for the first time, he was outvoted by his bandmates, who insisted on its inclusion.[69]

"Wind Chimes", "Wonderful", and most parts of "Vegetables" were completely rerecorded with scaled-down arrangements.[68] "Vegetables" was reworked as a kind of campfire song,[46] "Wonderful" traded its harpsichord and trumpet for a haphazardly-played organ, high-pitched backing vocals, and a doo-wop sing-along section.[70] The marimbas in "Wind Chimes" were replaced by organ and dissonant noise.[71] Other tracks only extracted minor elements, such as a melody line, from other Smile pieces. "She's Goin' Bald" borrows the verse melody from a Smile fragment known as "He Gives Speeches",[68] "With Me Tonight" is a variation on "Vegetables",[72] and "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)" lifts a recurring melodic hook from "Fire".[73][nb 9]

David Anderle thought that "what Brian tried to do with Smiley Smile is he tried to salvage as much of Smile as he could and at the same time immediately go into his [long-discussed] humor album."[75] According to a contemporary Hullabaloo article, "The title, suggested by [Wilson's cousin] Barry Turnbull, reflects the album's happy concept, it is taken from the Indian aphorism, 'The smile that you send out returns to you.'"[76] The cover artwork featured a new illustration of Frank Holmes' Smile Shoppe, this time located in the middle of an overgrown jungle.[77]

Smiley Smile was produced without any direct involvement from Van Dyke Parks.[78] The only songs that appeared to have no connection to the original Smile album were "Little Pad" and "Gettin' Hungry".[66] In addition, while the Beatles' Paul McCartney was present at an April 1967 session for "Vegetables", the recording where he allegedly provides celery biting sounds was not used on Smiley Smile.[79]

Smiley Smile was recorded with an eight-track tape machine, with all the different musical sections spread out across numerous reels of tape. In other words, intros, verses, choruses, and endings were each allocated their own reel.[80] The Beach Boys recorded using what was predominantly radio broadcasting equipment, which lacked many of the technical elements and effects found in an established studio.[80] The studio set up at Brian's house was, in its mid-1967 incarnation for Smiley Smile, in its infancy. Due to the sporadic nature at which Brian decided to produce the record at his home, there was little time to fully outfit the Bel Air residence as a properly-equipped recording studio.[80]

Tracks were typically constructed around a performance of Wilson playing piano that was usually mixed out of the final recording. This process was equivalent to the use of click tracks a decade before they were common.[81] Some recording accidents were used to their advantage, such as in "With Me Tonight", which contains an informal link between the verse and chorus by way of a voice saying "good", as in "good take", spoken by the band's friend Arny Geller from the control room.[53][55] Tape manipulation was another prominent feature, with varispeed being applied to a few vocals.[55] On "She's Goin' Bald", a new device called the Eltro Information Rate Changer was used to raise the pitch of the group's vocals without affecting the tempo.[82]

The home set-up was moved between different areas as the sessions progressed.[83] This led to unconventional ways of achieving particular sounds at the home, such as a replacement for what would be achieved by an echo chamber. The album's engineer Jim Lockert recalled how "Brian's swimming pool had a leak in it and was empty, so we put a microphone in the bottom of this damn near Olympic-size pool and the guys laid down inside the pool and sang so the sound would go down the wall of the concrete pool into the microphone – and that was part of the vocals on one of those songs."[80][nb 10] Some vocals were also tracked in the shower.[80] Lockert spoke about the album's final mixing session at Wally Heider's Studio 3 in Hollywood:

We went into Wally Heider's Studio 3 one night at five o'clock, we mixed the intro of each song as we went to a two track, then we mixed the first verse ... They didn’t want to make copies of it to put it together. So we'd do the first verse and mix it down and then we'd wipe off the vocals on it and then go in and sing all the harmony parts and lead parts for the second verse and record it onto the tape. ... We mixed each piece of this down as we went along ... so that the song was almost together by the time we were through. ... When we came out the next morning at six o'clock, the album was mixed down, cut together, and was complete. One of the guys from Wally Heider was my second engineer and he said, “Well, I never believed in miracles but I saw one tonight.” That’s the way they did it. It wasn’t my idea. They mixed it chorus and verse, chorus and verse and intro, and all the levels had to match.[80]

The Beach Boys performing "Heroes and Villains" at Central Park, 1971

Smiley Smile became the first in a three-part series of lo-fi Beach Boys albums (preceding Wild Honey and Friends)[2] and the first in a seven-year string of under-performing Beach Boys albums (ending with the 1974 compilation Endless Summer).[115] The Smile era is generally viewed as the ending of the Beach Boys' most artistically creative period,[116] and the point after which Brian began relinquishing his hold as the group's creative leader.[117][nb 17] Much of the group's subsequent recordings from 1967 to 1970 followed similar experimental traditions as Smiley Smile – namely, through sparse instrumentation, a more relaxed ensemble, and a seeming inattention to production quality.[118] Carl took Brian's place as the most musically dominant member, and Brian would not be credited as producer for another Beach Boys album until 1976's 15 Big Ones.[119]

Commenting on the album in retrospect, Bruce Johnston said it was "a thousand times better than the [original Smile] ... It's just the most underrated album in the whole catalog for me."[120] Dennis Wilson said, "It was not as ambitious as Pet Sounds was. But ... I listened to it in a jungle in Africa and it sounded great."[64] Conversely, Al Jardine felt that "there are some pretty cool songs on that album but I didn't like rehashing some of the Smile songs. That didn't work for me."[38] Mike Love wrote, "Some of the songs we recorded could barely be called songs. They were chants, spacey fragments, weird sound effects. Every group produces at least one bad album ... I don't think Brian wanted to be associated with it either."[121]

Smile material continued to trickle out in later releases, often as filler songs to offset Brian's unwillingness to contribute.[122] "Cool, Cool Water", an outtake from Smiley Smile and Wild Honey sessions, was partially rerecorded and issued as the closing track for Sunflower (1970).[123][nb 18] When The Smile Sessions box set was released in 2011, co-producer Mark Linett acknowledged that "there's things that some people think – should Smiley Smile sessions be there – [with tracks such as] 'Can't Wait Too Long', we get into a very fuzzy area".[125][nb 19] In 2017, additional session highlights from the album were released on the rarities compilation 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow.[127] The compilation was followed several months later with two more digital-exclusive releases: 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow 2: The Studio Sessions and 1967 – Live Sunshine.[128]

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[102]
Blender	[4]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[129]
MusicHound Rock	4.5/5[130]
Pitchfork	9.5/10[31]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[131]

Smiley Smile has since become a cult and critical favorite in the Beach Boys' catalog.[115] In biographer Peter Ames Carlin's estimation, "the album's reputation improved with hindsight", particularly after the release of "stripped-down warts-and-all albums" by other artists, including Bob Dylan (John Wesley Harding, 1967) and the Beatles (The White Album, 1968).[71] Writing in 1971, Melody Maker's Richard Williams referred to Smiley Smile as "The Great Undiscovered Pop Album", one that had been "either ignored or dismissed by the reviewers."[60] Its prevailing negative response mellowed after the record was reissued in 1974[115] – the same year that NME writers ranked it as the 62nd greatest album of all time.[132] According to Matjas-Mecca, following the mid-1970s, the album "began to acquire a fan base that heard magic in Brian's lo-fi production [and] is now considered an important work in Brian's catalog. In a world that embraces lo-fi art, the album is considered a masterpiece."[115]

Reviewing the album for AllMusic, Richie Unterberger called it a "rather nifty, if rather slight, effort that's plenty weird".[102] Spencer Owen of Pitchfork deemed it "a near-masterpiece. Without any awareness of Smile's existence, this album could have been a contemporary classic ... and although the album isn't anywhere close to the sonic revolution that Sgt. Pepper had already brought, Wilson's innovative production and arrangements still bring out the best in every single track."[31] Blender's Douglas Wolk called it "the Boys' psychedelic album — joltingly spare, druggy and funny, with the most gorgeous harmonies of their career."[4] Harrison compared Wilson's work favorably to that of classical composers such as Schoenberg.[58]

Less favorably, Kent maintained that the album "undersold the worth" of Smile with "dumb pot-head skits, so-called healing chants and even some weird 'loony tunes' items straight out of a cut-rate Walt Disney soundtrack".[101] The Guardian's Geoffrey Cannon viewed Parks' lyrics as "pretentious", believing that Parks "messed Brian up" during Smiley Smile.[133] Paste's Bryan Rolli ranked it at number 2 in a list of the "10 Most Disappointing Follow-Up Albums", calling it a "disjointed collection of minimalist recordings and a capella bits that are not so much songs as fragments of a shattered psyche".[134] In the 2004 edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, the reviewer described Smiley Smile as "inconsistent" and said that, given the context of its release in September 1967, "the album was like a strange throwback – it highlighted how out of touch these suburban California surfers had become with the psychedelic times."[135] In his 2007 book The Act You've Known for All These Years: The Life, and Afterlife, of Sgt. Pepper, Clinton Heylin writes that the album "sounded like a [throwaway] contractual obligation" and, together with its commercial failure, confirmed "one of the most spectacular falls from grace of any sixties band".[136]

In the 2000s, Smiley Smile began to be included in lists of "must-hear" albums compiled by various publications.[115] In 2000, it was ranked number 415 in Colin Larkin's book of the All Time Top 1000 Albums.[137] In a 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau and David Fricke named it one of the 40 essential albums of 1967; Christgau declared: "Towering it's not; some kind of hit it is."[138] In 2017, it was ranked number 118 on Pitchfork's list of greatest albums of the 1960s, where it was described as having "developed a small cult of its own, attracting those drawn to its stripped-down, highly spontaneous, and deeply stoned vibe."[7]

Smiley Smile anticipated lo-fi pop acts such as Animal Collective

In 2000, Smiley Smile was one of 100 albums featured in the book The Ambient Century as a chapter in the development of ambient music.[139] Pitchfork contributor Mark Richardson wrote that the record "basically invented the kind of lo-fi bedroom pop that would later propel Sebadoh, Animal Collective, and other characters."[7] Dedicated tribute albums include Smiling Pets (1998)[140] and Portland Sings The Beach Boys "Smiley Smile" (2013).[141]

Pete Townshend of the Who is a known admirer of the record, as is Robbie Robertson of the Band.[68] XTC's Andy Partridge considered it one of "the most influential records for me"[142] and it was a direct inspiration for his song "Season Cycle" (Skylarking, 1986).[143] In an interview with Time, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith stated that his "island" music picks include Smiley Smile, "Just for the melodic fuck all."[144] Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka, who composed music for the Japanese role-playing video game series EarthBound, cited Smiley Smile among influences on the games' soundtracks.[145] In 2017, the New York Observer's Ron Hart wrote that Smiley Smile sonically foreshadowed the work of Harry Nilsson, Elvis Costello, Stereolab, the High Llamas, the Olivia Tremor Control, and Father John Misty.[146] Comedian Trevor Moore stated that the theme song for his troupe's television show, The Whitest Kids U' Know, was based on "Little Pad", which itself had been used as the opening theme for their live shows.[147]

In later years, Smiley Smile became celebrated as one of the finest chill-out albums, and one that is suited for listening during an LSD comedown.[101] At least one drug treatment center played the LP for patients to help relieve their use of drugs.[148] Carl Wilson told the NME in 1970: "In Fort Worth, Texas, there is a drug clinic which takes people off the streets and helps them get over bad LSD trips. They don't use any traditional medical treatment whatsoever. All they do is play the patient our Smiley Smile album and apparently this acts as a soothing remedy which relaxes them and helps them to recover completely from their trip."[149]