page_title: Smile (Beach Boys album)
section_title: Artwork and packaging
hierarchical_section_title: Smile (Beach Boys album) / Artwork and packaging
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: Smile was to have included cover artwork designed by graphic artist Frank Holmes, a friend of Parks, as well as a booklet containing several pen-and-ink drawings, also by Holmes. He met with Wilson and Parks circa June 1966 and was given lyric sheets of their songs, for which he based his drawings on. By Holmes' recollection, his contributions were finished by October. The pieces were titled:
  "My Vega-tables" / "The Elements" ("Vega-Tables")
  "Do You Like Worms"
  "Two-step to lamps light" / "Surf's Up"
  "Diamond necklace play the pawn" ("Surf's Up")
  "Lost and found you still remain there" ("Cabinessence")
  "The rain of bullets eventually brought her down" ("Heroes and Villains")
  "Uncover the cornfield" / "Home on the Range" ("Cabinessence")
  Holmes based the cover on an abandoned jewelry store near his home in Pasadena. He recalled, "I thought that was a good image because of the way, any time you go into a store, you're entering something ... This was something that would be pulling you into the world of Smile–the Smile Shoppe–and it had these little smiles all around." Depicted inside the shop is "a husband and wife—a kind of early-Americana, old-style, 19th-century kind of image." Wilson approved the cover and took it to Capitol. Parks later said that the illustrations heavily informed the making of Smile and considered them to be the album's "third equation". He felt that he and Wilson would not have continued the project the way they did without thinking of it in cartoon terms.
  According to Vosse, the smile shop derived from Wilson's humor concept. He said that "everybody who knew anything about graphics, and about art, thought that the cover was not terribly well done... but Brian knew better; he was right. It was exactly what he wanted, precisely what he wanted." Parks recalled: "Frank was supposed to do something 'light-hearted', but there were no specific instructions and he came up with the perfect video vessel for realizing what we were doing, something I thought was an integral part of the situation. I think that still stands; I think of Smile in visual terms.
  In September, Capitol began production on a lavish gatefold cover with a 12-page booklet containing featuring color photographs of the group (ultimately selected from a November 7 photoshoot in Boston conducted by Guy Webster) as well as Holmes' illustrations. In early 1967, they added the repeated written instances of "Good Vibrations" on the album cover, which were not featured on Holmes' original design. The back cover featured a monochrome photograph depiction of the group, without Brian, framed by astrological symbols. Capitol produced 466,000 copies of the record sleeve and 419,200 copies of the accompanying booklet. They were stored in a warehouse in Pennsylvania until the 1990s.
caption: The Smile logo that was pictured on the original cover art
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