Brian Wilson's SMiLE

[soniclovenoize]

Originally Posted by fuzzyroes

I guess there's really no conclusive way to know what the order would be. What we do know is that (thanks to the list that was submitted to the record company that has since surfaced) the tracks that we have today are essentially what would have ended up on the album albeit for the most part unfinished versions. (so it's not like there's some trove of different songs that didn't pop up on the new versions)

Conclusive? No. But I believe you can calculate the probability of what was to be included, based on the session chronology and interviews at the time.

I think there are some things (not a trove though) that showed up on the new version that most likely would not have ended up on the final album, all of which Van Dykes wrote new lyrics in 2003 for them:
- "Song for Children"/"Look" - was one of the very first things recorded for the Smile project, and was quickly dropped and not worked on again. It even included a melodic passage that ended up on "Good Vibrations" (since it was started before "Good Vibrations" was finished) so this song really bit the dust.
- "On A Holiday" - like "Look", one of the early Smile songs that was worked on and then set aside and never revisited. This is important because all the other key tracks were revisited continuously.
- "Blue Hawaii"/"I Love To Say Dada" - this was one of the final things ever recorded for Smile, and some think it was after Brian had given up hope for the album. It's not exactly clear what these recordings were for, but it eventually evolved into Beach Boys "Cool Cool Water" off of Sunflower. But it may or may not have been on Smile, most people 1nclud3 it on their Smile mixes as the Water element. It certainly did not exist as "In Blue Hawaii" in 1967

And then it starts to get more complex... One of the interesting things about Smile is that some songs begat other songs. The fragments of "I'm In Great Shape", "Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine", "Barnyard", "All Day" (which turned into "My blue Hawaii"), the chorus of "Vege-Tables", the chorus to "Do You like Worms" and even the intro to "Fire" were all originally different segments of "Heroes and Villains". Brian would record them, then decide the segments were better off as their own songs and further develop them. So you can't be certain if things like "Barnyard" would have actually been on the album or it was just a scrap that got cut from "Heroes and Villains". Specifically, "I'm in Great Shape" was listed as it's own track, but we are uncertain exactly what would have been included in that, since it was not fleshed out really.

The order itself, I think my point in my essay was that it wouldn't have been conceptual and thus the order of the 12 tracks arbitrary (or at least a non-narrative)

You theorized that the list submitted to Capitol Records wasn't meant to be a tracklist but merely a random list of the songs that would be included, but I'm not so sure about that. Vege-tables is listed near the bottom of that list and wasn't that one of the songs that was mostly finished and going to be angled as a single? If that's the case wouldn't it be one of the first songs wrangled off?

That's because the tracklist was submitted to Capitol in January 1967, but the final Vege-Tables tracking was done in April. When he wrote it, it wasn't finished, except for an earlier version which was most like a part of The Elements.