with both my own attempts and various bootlegs over the years, it's too familiar to me to really excite me. I've listened to all the variously-assembled new editions (been up the allotment), and while I'm pleased it's "out there", I think the central problem remains.

The fact is that "Heroes & Villains", which really is the central pool of the album into which many of the other tracks dip, is not that great a composition. Melodically, it's almost club-footed for a Brian Wilson tune. Downdowndowndowndowndowndowndown etc., and the "chorus" is an a-melodic chant. The single, let's not forget, was something of a failure and a disappointment after "Good Vibrations", and there simply isn't enough substance there to warrant the re-use of sections in other tracks, certainly not enough for a suite with variations on a theme.

The only other song on the album with the sheer quality of imagination and execution as G.V. is "Surf's Up"; for the rest, there's rather too many middleweight compositions and half-formed ideas that seem more like creative dead-ends than just needing more work.

As much as I like B.W.P.S. for its sense of completion (and his Paris concert was one of the best I've been to in my life), I'm not entirely convinced by that, either.

It all comes down to "interesting", ultimately. And, apart from G.V. and S.U., emotionally enengaging. Brian's artistic distance and (dare I say it) pretension are all over this. "Pet Sounds" was him writing and singing right from the heart. Tony Asher's lyrics express human emotion; V.D.P's lyrics are a whole different kettle of ballgames.

Are you *trying* to make me splutter coffee all over my keyboard?!

...doing the rounds amongst Smile Scholars at the moment that it makes a much stronger album if you just concentrate on the 13 actual songs that Brian worked on between October 1966 & May 1967, when the "album" was officially scrapped & ignore all the fragments & not-quite-songs in favour of something that could conceivably have been released at that point.

Which gives you - in my favorite order, yours will differ...
Side 1
Our Prayer
Heroes & Villains
Do You Like Worms
The Old Master Painter/You Are My Sunshine
Cabinessence
Wonderful
Good Vibrations

Side 2
The Elements Suite:
Vega-tables
Wind Chimes
Mrs O'Leary's Cow
Love To Say Da-Da
Child Is Father Of The Man
Surf's Up

worked much better in a live context, those drums just sounded epic and seeing the string section put on their fireman's hats always made me chuckle.

...it still moves me more than Sgt Pepper or Pet Sounds. It would have been so perfect for 1967, too. At times it comes across like Pepper with a heart, with a smattering of The Basement Tapes thrown in for good measure.

(And I can start to understand Wilson's frustration that The Beatles got there first; and not just with that year's output. From the fairground music of Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite to the second side of Abbey Road, Brian Wilson seemingly thought of all this before The Beatles did; bound up in an album that wouldn't see the light of day for 40-odd years.)

But, as I've said before, the album was finished by its creators in 2004, and recorded with a band that sound satisfyingly like The Beach Boys. The great pity about Smile's two versions is that one isn't finished and one isn't by The Beach Boys. For the rest of my listening life, I will be wishing one was a bit more like the other, and that's that.

for you to have a go at telling us why it moves you, Lucas. There's nothing adversarial in this - add all the SMiLEY emoticons you want! I'm impressed by the music, find most of it enjoyable, but apart from a vague sense of, I dunno - loss? in Surf's Up, and a genuine spiritual uplift from Good Vibrations (at least, the original 45 version), it doesn't stir my emotions in anything like the same way as Pet Sounds, which I always think of as White Soul Music. The lyrical directness and honesty of Pet Sounds is a conduit for human emotion - VDP's lyrics ... uhhh ...

One of the reasons is that it's a melodic thing. I don't read or really understand the nuts and bolts of music, and have no intention to; so there's something intangible for me in melody that moves me. As long as it's something I can't quite pin down, I know that it will last that little bit longer. Smile is full of little moments like this. It's got that rare combination of being able to go straight for the heart whilst remaining curiously out of reach, which keeps me coming back for repeated listens. The only other album that's ever really done this to me is Music From Big Pink.

Don't get me wrong: I love Pet Sounds. There's just something slightly removed about it for me. That almost shouldn't make sense - God Only Knows, You Still Believe In Me, I Just Wasn't Made For These Times; these are as good as songs get - and yet Smile takes me somewhere else. I think it's braver, more cohesive, more elusive...by the time you get to the end of the album, I find I've been taken to places that no other music has taken me. To end where I began, I'm not entirely sure why this is. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's the way it should be.

did a marvellous version of 'Vegetables.'

the material out there, in top quality sound and now I can enjoy it for what it is..a fascinating, occasionally heartbreakingly beautiful audio jigsaw puzzle with lots of pieces missing. (Maybe Brian knows what is missing..but he's migrated to Disneyland and I'm not sure he's coming back)

It's hard to appreciate the record if you've already heard the 2004 remake, in a way I wish this set had come first. The fact that Mark Linnet and Alan Boyd used that as a template means it shows up the gaps rather a lot, but nevertheless they've done a cracking job with the material at hand, including flying in demo vocals for 'Barnyard' for example to try and patch that together..which works really well and they've really created the definitive versions of Vega-tables, Surfs Up, Wind Chimes and Wonderful.

It's hard to compare it to Pet Sounds, since that is such a fully realised piece of work.

On Pet Sounds he's freed from writing Surfin' USA and he's gleefully getting all his crazy jazzy chord changes and twisty turny melodies and letting it run wild.

Listening to the Smile CDs, you can hear he's just been getting off on finding strange harmonics from repetitive patterns. He gets fixated on little melody lines and two-chord parts and just wants to try them out on endless variations with different combinations of whatever instruments the Wrecking Crew can play. If you left him to his own devices and he didn't have the pressure of being 'The Beach Boys' songwriter he could have probably written some incredible Steve Reich type instrumental LP instead...but what he came close to doing was combining that approach to music with commercial 1960s Pop.
In comparison to what he was doing, Sergeant Pepper was just Revolver with some fancy string arrangements.

expect it in the bargain bins within a week of xmas

.....in about 1993, I'm really pleased that over the years I've turned down the opportunities of bootlegs and (although picking it up in an Oxy for 99p) never actually played the 2004 album.

A clear case of less being more I feel, because listening to it over the last week has been a revelation.

I'm now all primed for the Basement Tapes (again, I've got several books on that!) for the same reason.

having bought the 2004 LP first (that followed the documentary on Brian Wilson re-recording Smile).

What I can add to this argument is that having never heard Surf's Up before that point, the re-recorded version instantly became my favourite track. However, when I compared it with the earlier version (was it on Sunflower? I can't remember) I ditched the 2004 version and have always listened to the original version (well, whichever "original" it was).

All of which is a complicated way of saying that Brian Wilson's voice is a bit shot these days.

... the version of "Heroes & Villains" on the bootleg Smile (A Stereo Reconstruction by Purple Chick) sounds much clearer than on the new official release?

Some songs/performances are ephemerally beautiful (Heroes & Villains, Cabinessence, Wonderful, Wind Chimes, Surfs Up) but overall, the modal approach is so fractured it hurts to listen to. It really is the sound of a mental breakdown. It's a lot better when you remove the non-songs & Surfs Up is definitely best placed at the end. I'd put Good Vibrations at the beginning of side two as people definitely need cheering up at that point.

In 1967 it would have been compared to Sgt Pepper, obviously. I doubt it would have been a big seller. The Beatles had all the production values but were very focussed on songs (you can debate their quality).

However, I compare it more to The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, written by another maverick genius who also was damaged by drugs and mental illness. Piper is, amazingly, more coherent, less exquisite but more rounded. Despite its sidetracks into experimental sound & tenuous hold on structure, it seems more whole. I guess that's because it was actually finished at the time (with a little help from his friends).

In any case, SMiLE would have made 1967 an even more pivotal year for rock music

.....and 'Piper' was very much one person's burden (like 'SMiLE') whereas the pressure was shared around a bit more with the HJH's LP.

I wonder if the HJH's had split during the sessions for 'Sgt. Pepper's' (maybe if Brian Epstein had died a year earlier), and that record had come out exactly as it did in '67, whether we'd all now be saying, 'Here, where's 'Penny Lane'? Where's 'Strawberry Fields'. They definitely would have been on the LP.'.

Given record company paranoia over getting product to the public every three months in the 60s, I'd argue that this is probably 'more' like 'SMiLE' would have been like if it had actually been released in '67!