page_title: Smile (Beach Boys album)
section_title: 1970s
hierarchical_section_title: Smile (Beach Boys album) / Availability / Release rumors / 1970s
caption_attribution_description: English: Carl Wilson at the Ronald Reagan Special Olympics Event in June 12, 1983.
context_page_description: Smile is an unfinished album by the American rock band the Beach Boys that was planned to follow their 11th studio album Pet Sounds. It was to be a twelve-track concept LP assembled from short, interchangeable musical fragments similar to the group's 1966 single "Good Vibrations". Instead, the album was shelved and the group released a downscaled version, Smiley Smile, in September 1967. Over the next four decades, few of the original Smile tracks were officially released, and the project came to be regarded as the most "legendary" unreleased album in popular music history.
  The album was produced and almost entirely composed by Brian Wilson with guest lyricist Van Dyke Parks, both of whom conceived the project as a riposte to the British sensibilities that had dominated popular music of the era. Wilson touted Smile as a "teenage symphony to God" to surpass Pet Sounds. It was planned to feature word paintings, tape manipulation, elaborate vocal arrangements, experiments with musical acoustics, and comedic interludes, with influences drawn from psychedelia, pre-rock and roll pop, doo-wop, jazz, ragtime, musique concrète, classical, American history, poetry, cartoons, and mysticism.
context_section_description: The band's 1969 contract with Warner Bros. held a clause which guaranteed a $50,000 advancement to the group provided that they deliver a completed Smile album by 1973 – Brian was not consulted on this stipulation. On February 28, 1972, Carl announced the imminent release of Smile at a London press conference. When asked if he had been working on the album, he replied that he had, during the previous June, and that the group had created safety copies of all the tapes. He claimed that these tapes were now fully assembled and new vocals had been overdubbed where necessary. Melody Maker printed a list of songs that were to be included on Carl's proposed version of Smile, some of which "seem[ed] to come under the overall subtitle of 'Heroes and Villains'". They were: "Child Is Father of the Man", "Surf's Up", "Sunshine", "Cabinessence" (incorporating "Iron Horse"  [sic]), "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow", "I Love to Say Dada" (incorporating "Cool, Cool Water"), and the original versions of "Vega-Tables", "Wind Chimes", and "Wonderful".
  When asked about the forthcoming release at a later date, Carl responded: "We've all had intentions of finishing the album, but something persists that keeps that from happening, and I don't know what that is." In April 1973, the band's assistant manager Steve Love wrote a memo to remind the group that, "pursuant to the terms of contract between Warner Brothers and Brother Records, Inc., The Beach Boys' Smile album is supposed to be delivered to Warner Brothers no later than May 1st or $50,000 is to be deducted from any advance to the group after May 1st." No album was delivered, and as threatened, $50,000 was held back from the group's next payment (equivalent to $288,000 in 2019).
  In 1973, Brian told a Melody Maker reporter that there was not enough material to compile a Smile album and that it would never be released. During the interview, he performed the beginning of "Heroes and Villains" on piano and shifted to an "unfamiliar lyric and tune", explained by Wilson to be the song's full original version. Marilyn was astonished when told of the event. She said that Brian had not performed "Heroes and Villains" for anybody in years. In a 1976 interview, Wilson stated that he felt an obligation to release Smile and offered that the album would come out "probably in a couple years."
  In his 1978 biography of the band, David Leaf wrote that Smile "can never be completed as Brian intended, so a compromise solution might be to release the surviving tapes and outtakes in a series of records called The Smile Sessions [like] Elvis' Sun Sessions ..." The book included quotes from Johnston, who said that such a release would be a "bad idea" commercially. He explained that it could only satisfy a highly-niche audience and said the material was too inaccessible for mainstream record-buyers. "Sometimes, you're kind of let down. Say you discover the tapes and you say, 'Oh yeah?' It's been talked about so much…It would live up to your expectations [only] if you were Zubin Mehta analyzing a young composer's work." In a later interview that year, he told Leaf that the band's manager James William Guercio had insisted on opening L.A. (Light Album) with "Rock Plymouth Rock/Roll". Johnston said: "I wanted to make up a collage, but I want Brian to be the one to put the collage together. I can tell he still feels funny about that stuff. You know, there a lot of Smile stuff intact …"
caption: Carl Wilson (pictured 1983) took charge of preserving the Smile tapes with band engineer Stephen Desper in the early 1970s[270]
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