Show 38 Part 2 - 29 minutes 30 seconds - Beach Boys Smile Part 1
Shrunken Head Lounge Surf Music Radio - A podcast by Rick Horvath
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Shrunken Head Lounge Surf Radio Show Running Time: 29 minutes 30 seconds Beach Boys Smile Part 1 The genesis of Smile lay during the recording of Pet Sounds. On February 17, 1966, during the sessions for Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson started work on a new single, "Good Vibrations", the most expensive — reputed to have cost more than $50,000 — and complex pop recording of the time. "Good Vibrations" was created by an unprecedented recording technique: nearly 30 minutes of seemingly unrelated musical sections were recorded, then spliced together and reduced into a three-minute pop song. Many within the Beach Boys' camp were skeptical, but the song quickly became the band's biggest hit yet, which went to #1 in both Britain and the USA. Smile was intended to be an entire album produced in the same fashion. In an October 1966 interview, Brian Wilson quipped that the Beach Boys' next project was "a teenage symphony to God". His plan was to take his work on Pet Sounds to a new level, with an album-length suite of specially-written songs which were both thematically and musically linked, and would be recorded using the unusual sounds and innovative production techniques which had made their recent hit "Good Vibrations" so successful.