Writing
Composed in early 1966, mostly in a large sandbox holding a piano built in Brian Wilson's living room, "Heroes and Villains" was the first collaboration between Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. It is reported that when Wilson first played the melody to him, Parks devised the opening line on the spot. Various musical themes in the song recur in numerous other songs and musical fragments which Wilson recorded for Smile. The song makes heavy use of chromatic scales.
Like most of the Smile songs, "Heroes and Villains" is based around a deceptively simple three-chord pattern. It encapsulates Wilson's musical approach for the project, which was to create songs that were (for the most part) structurally simple, but overlaid with extremely complex and often highly chromatic vocal and instrumental arrangements, and capped by Parks' lyrics.
The lyrics for "Heroes and Villains" exemplify the allusive and playful nature of Parks' writing for Smile, evidently combining the experiences, feelings and preoccupations of both Wilson and Parks. Along with "Surf's Up" and "Cabinessence", it is lyrically among the most complex and ambiguous of all Beach Boys recordings. "Heroes and Villains" is generally thought to have been the first song written specifically for Smile, although "Barnyard" and "I'm in Great Shape" might have been written at about the same time.
Wilson is known to have been deeply influenced by the music of George Gershwin at an early age (especially "Rhapsody in Blue"), and Smile emulates both Gershwin's emphatic American-ness, and the episodic and programmatic characteristics of the composer's works. A short scene featuring Brian at the piano in the 2003 DVD documentary on the making of Smile suggests that Brian may have directly based the recurring "Heroes and Villains" piano motif on a variation or inversion of a fragment of "Rhapsody in Blue".
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