page_title: Smile (Beach Boys album)
section_title: "The Elements"
hierarchical_section_title: Smile (Beach Boys album) / Potential contents / Tracks listed on Wilson's 1966 note / "The Elements"
caption_attribution_description: The Great Chicago Fire, an artists rendering, Chicago in Flames -- The Rush for Lives Over Randolph Street Bridge
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 Elements" was a conceptualized four-part movement that encompassed the four classical elements: Air, Fire, Earth, and Water. According to Anderle, Wilson "was really into the elements", so much so that he "ran up to Big Sur for a week, just 'cause he wanted to get into that, up to the mountains, into the snow, down to the beach, out to the pool, out at night, running around, to water fountains, to a lot of water, the sky, the whole thing was this fantastic amount of awareness of his surroundings. So the obvious thing was to do something that would cover the physical surroundings." To assist with the recording of this piece, Wilson instructed others to travel around with a Nagra tape recorder and record the different variations of water sounds that they could find. Vosse recalled, "I'd come by to see him every day, and he'd listen to my tapes and talk about them. I was just fascinated that he would hear things every once in a while and his ears would prick up and he'd go back and listen again. And I had no idea what he was listening for!"
  "The Elements – Part 1" (also known as "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" and commonly referred to as "Fire") was recorded in November 1966. Parks said he "avoided the 'Fire' sessions like the plague" due to what he believed was Wilson's "regressive behavior" in this period. The track was recorded under unusual conditions. Wilson instructed a friend to purchase several dozen fire helmets at a local toy store so that everybody in the studio could don them during its recording. Wilson also had the studio's janitor bring in a bucket with burning wood so that the studio would be filled with the smell of smoke. He subsequently recorded the crackling noises made by the burning wood and mixed them into the track.
  Anderle recalled that Wilson told the group "what fire was going to be, and what water was going to be; we had some idea of air. That was where it stopped. None of us had any ideas as to how it was going to tie together, except that it appeared to us to be an opera." Parks recalled that an elemental concept did not come up until later in the project.  One of the illustrations created for the album included "Vega-Tables" as part of "The Elements", but Wilson's note listed "The Elements" and "Vega-Tables" (as well as "Wind Chimes") separately. Wilson told Preiss that "Air" was an instrumental piano piece that was never finished.
caption: Artist's rendering of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, an event which "Fire" was based on
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