The Elements (Beach Boys song)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about a song from the Beach Boys' unreleased album "SMiLE". For the Tom Lehrer song, see The Elements (song).

The Elements would have been a suite of short sections by The Beach Boys for the abandoned album SMiLE that represented Earth's major elements (fire and water). Most of this suite was recorded but never finalized in its original form. Brian Wilson resurrected this track as "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" for his re-recording of SMiLE.

The first section of the piece was an organ-and-bass driven section (which, in its original Beach Boys recorded form, was labeled as an intro to "Heroes and Villains") to represent the sound of fire engines. The second and major section was subtitled "Fire", with weird instrumentation to represent fire. It has been said that Wilson was so bothered by a series of fires in the Los Angeles area that were taking place at the time of the original recording that he later suffered a mental breakdown. The musical motif of the "Fire" portion would be re-used for the Smiley Smile track "Fall Breaks and Back To Winter".

The third section was said to be the "Water Chant", another abandoned section of SMiLE, and the fourth and final was what became "I Love to Say Da-Da" (aka "In Blue Hawaii").

The 2004 Wilson arrangement consists of the first two sections of "The Elements".