10 Great Rock Albums Recorded In Really Weird Ways
6. The Beach Boys - Smile
In order to outdo the band’s 1966 mega hit Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson wanted to create an album that had no borders or recognisable points of stop and start - every track would morph together as it progressed. It was a tall order so Brian had to bring in the big guns. By which we mean a lot of drugs.
In February 1966, Brian Wilson began writing and recording Smile. The project started with the purchase of $2,000 ($17,000 in today’s money) of marijuana and erecting a hotboxing tent in his dining room where the table used to be.
Wilson abused Desbutal during this time which made him exceedingly paranoid. Days after asking his band mates to wear toy fire helmets and be recorded around a steel drum full of burning wood to draw them into the drama of the track Fire, a house on the same street burnt down to the ground. Wilson’s drug-addled brain decided that the music that he had been making was responsible and the song was shelved.
50 hours of tape were produced over the course of five years that contained bizarre half-baked compositions of “underwater chanting”, a Wild West movie score and, of all things, “The Beach Boys faking a group orgasm”. It’s probably a good thing then that despite languishing for five years, Smile never officially released.