The Elements: Fire
"Fire" (also known as "The Elements – Part 1" and "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow") is an instrumental by American musician Brian Wilson that he originally composed for the Beach Boys' unfinished album Smile.
Wilson's friends, family, and colleagues later referred to its recording as heralding his period of psychosis and the unraveling of the Smile project.
Wilson produced "Fire" on November 28, 1966, at Gold Star Studios with 15 session musicians, including three bassists, four flutists, and a string sextet.
To help set the mood, Wilson instructed everyone in the studio to don a fire helmet, and had a bucket of burning wood placed in the recording space so that the area would smell of smoke.
Within a few days of the session, Wilson was frightened to learn that a nearby building had burned down shortly after the recording was made.
[1] According to band associate David 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.
[4] In Wilson's (since-discredited) 1991 memoir, Wouldn't It Be Nice: My Own Story, the hallucinations of his second LSD trip were said to have involved death by burning.
[10] Wilson's friends, family, and colleagues later referred to the events surrounding "Fire" as heralding his psychosis and the unraveling of the Smile project.
[1] According to biographer Steven Gaines, Wilson had recently cancelled a session involving "an enormous string section" because he felt that the "vibrations" were not right.
"[11] A gigantic fire howled out of the studio speakers in a pounding crush of pictorial music that summoned up visions of roaring, wind-storm flames, falling timbers, mournful sirens and sweating firemen, building into a peak and cackling off into fading embers as a single drum turned into a collapsing wall and the fire engines dissolved and disappeared.
"[14] Biographer Byron Preiss, who was lent an acetate disc of the recording, called it "a mad, impressionistic piece that crept up on you with the emotional chill of a real fire.
Wilson instructed an acquaintance to purchase several dozen fire helmets at a local toy store so that everybody in the studio could don them during the recording.
Wilson also had the studio's janitor, a man named Brother Julius, bring in a bucket with burning wood so that the room would smell of smoke.
"[18] The next day, Wilson returned to Gold Star with many of the same musicians to produce a rendition of "I Wanna Be Around" and the original piece "Friday Night".
[23] Another story involves Wilson attempting to set fire to the tapes only to find that they refuse to ignite, which further frightens him.
[1][nb 4] Wilson falsely claimed in interviews to have destroyed the tapes and later said that the track was one of the principal reasons that Smile was never finished.
"[1] In 1967, the band reworked the piece as "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter (W. Woodpecker Symphony)", which featured the melody from "Fire" in the form of wordless vocals.
"[25] "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" earned Wilson his first Grammy Award, winning in the category of Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
[32] The original Beach Boys recording was later released on the 2011 compilation The Smile Sessions, where it was combined with the vocals from "Fall Breaks ...".
