The Smiley Smile Message Board

So I recently bought the box set and I found there's a track called "Heroes and Villains (Intro)" which runs for a little over 30 seconds and when I heard it, I could tell it was clearly an excerpt from "Fire."  Was this just mislabeling or was that bit of what became part of "Fire" actually an intro to "Heroes and Villains" at first?  I can't really see how that works.

Also, another thing.  "You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone" is labeled as "previously unreleased" though it sounds to me to be the exact same version on Carl and the Passions.  Is this also mislabeling or am I missing some subtle difference?

I'd always assumed it's refered to as 'H&V intro' rather than 'Fire intro' simply because that's what it was listed as in the vaults. The H&V sessions on the Smie boxset have a couple of Fire-related tracks (i.e. tracks 6 and 30), obviously Brian was tinkering with the idea of Fire whilst working on H&V, or perhaps he intended to have this particular piece of music as part of H&V before realising it fit perfectly at the start of Fire.

As for You Need A Mess... Yes i'd wondered about that also. I'd always just assumed it was a mistake.

Didn't David Leaf tell Mark Linett to stick the H&V Intro in front of Fire, and it's stuck ever since?

Yeah pretty much.  As I've heard it the "Fire intro" was the final attempt at an introduction for H&V.  There were a couple other attempts as well and I think most (if not all) of them are on the box set.

I'd recommend also doing a search of this forum for a similar discussion-debate-argument about the aesthetics and the labeling of this particular track. The suggestion was made that it was a suggestion from David Leaf to edit the two together. Some of us, though not many if I recall, think that the origins of this may have come back in '67, but there is no proof of that in the form of a test edit or acetate or anything else.

The confusing thing becomes trying to piece together Brian's various Heroes-related fragments, because as the box set shows, he may have recorded a half-dozen variations on a similar theme, in this case that chromatic run, and labeled them all something connected with the word "heroes". It's a damn confusing thing to sort out when the guy recording and creating these things didn't have them sorted out in the first place.