“Heroes and Villains” by The Beach Boys

"Heroes and Villains" was meant to top "Good Vibrations". Brian Wilson pictured it as an Old West musical comedy, his first collaboration with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, who drew the words from California's early history, Spanish settlers and American Indians included. The Beach Boys finally issued it in 1967 as the first release on Brother Records; it appears on Smiley Smile and belongs to the unfinished Smile project.

No song in their history had a harder birth. Wilson chased at least a dozen versions through nearly all of the Smile sessions, some six to eight minutes long, spent around $40,000, then scrapped almost everything and assembled most of the released take over three days in a makeshift studio at his house. It still climbed to No. 12 in America and No. 8 in Britain, but it fell short of expectations, and his bandmates preferred the longer edits.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.