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I've been in this town so long that back in the city
I've been taken for a lost and gone
An unknown for a long long time
Fell in love years ago
With an innocent girl
From the Spanish and Indian home
Home of the heroes and villains
Once at night Catillion squared the fight
And she was right in the rain of the bullets that eventually brought her down
But she's still dancing in the night
Unafraid of what a dude'll do in a town full of heroes and villains
In the cantina
Margarita's keep the spirit high
There I watched her
She spun around and
Round in the warmth of her body
Fanned the flame of the dance
Dance Margarita don't you know that I'm in love with you
Dance
Dance
You're under arrest!
My children were raised
You know they suddenly rise
They started slow long ago
Head to toe healthy wealthy and often wise
At three score and five
I'm very much alive
I still got the jive to survive with the heroes and villains
I've been taken for a lost and gone
An unknown for a long long time
Fell in love years ago
With an innocent girl
From the Spanish and Indian home
Home of the heroes and villains
Once at night Catillion squared the fight
And she was right in the rain of the bullets that eventually brought her down
But she's still dancing in the night
Unafraid of what a dude'll do in a town full of heroes and villains
In the cantina
Margarita's keep the spirit high
There I watched her
She spun around and
Round in the warmth of her body
Fanned the flame of the dance
Dance Margarita don't you know that I'm in love with you
Dance
Dance
You're under arrest!
My children were raised
You know they suddenly rise
They started slow long ago
Head to toe healthy wealthy and often wise
At three score and five
I'm very much alive
I still got the jive to survive with the heroes and villains
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Enjoyed reading those interpretations. Agree Dark Mind-its American history but think a little later than you indicate. The spirit that must be kept high is the pioneer spirit.
I don’t think it’s about the Pilgrim fathers, I think the time is later, 1850s-60s-ish, the speaker is one of those pioneer characters like Raphael Pumpelly who went to Arizona to mine / exploit the resources and lived cheek by jowl with the Native Americans, constantly at war, and recording their experiences- 'to write in the rough' Spanish and Indian home seemed to be gesturing at Mexico, again another scene of white settlers arriving from the Great Northern Cities to try and make good and eventually settling.
It's one of those settlers looking back on his life with an agreeable feeling of contentment at a life lived well.
I think the line that clarifies things a little is the one from a snippet not used in the final track, ‘Bicycle rider, see what you’ve done to the church of the American Indian’.
My guess is that it’s essentially about the interaction between black culture / white culture, (white exploiting black ) which fits the song but could be alluding to rock n roll itself. Brian once described his music as ‘White spiritual music’. The song is a mish mash of black and white influences - (the la la las are very similar if not stolen from Ben E King’s Spanish Harlem) and whitey’s barbershop close harmony.
‘Heroes & Villains’ is an ambiguous or playful/ironic title. Were the pioneer Natty Bumpo characters Heroes or Villains? Were they bold self reliant characters who forged a path for civilisation, or cruel dead-eyed adventure capitalists etc etc…yawn yawn.
Cotillion could just be a cotton flag , could it not? Blasted with holes by disgruntled natives but still proudly aloft.
God bless us, one and all!
Perhaps the man from whose perspective the story is told is the one who accidentally killed her? I'm thinking about the line "You're under arrest" and "My children were raised". The second line sure sounds like he didn't raise his children himself, maybe because he was jailed for the murder? The lines "My children were raised/You know they suddenly rise/They started slow long ago" make it could refer to the fact that he's been gone for a long time and did not see his children grow up.
So basically it's about a man who leaves some city in the north and goes to live in a town near the border. There's a lot of fighting but he knows that there will one day be peace even though he might not live to see it ("Stand or fall/I know there shall be peace in the valley"). He falls in love with Margarita who performs at the cantina. She might also be the girl he has children with. One night a gun fight breaks out in the cantina and he accidentally kills her and is arrested. While in jail he's children are raised by other people, maybe a relative, a friend or complete strangers, and when he's finally free again they're all grown up and living ordinary, peaceful lives ("Head to toe healthy wealthy and wise"), probably up north. Now he's old and writes about his experiences so that people may learn from the mistakes made by the "heroes and villains".
What do you think?
"Once a night, Cottilion squared, the fight
and she was right in the rain of the bullets that eventually brought her down"
It's a play between Cottilian being a dance (where the pairs form a square), and between Cottilian being a girl name (square in this context being stoping the fights)
He personificate the dance as girl squaring the fights, but someday she is killed by bullets which means the dance (which may mean any form of distraction) no longer holds the tensions between the people.
That may happen in some event in pilgrims history, but I don't know so much about this part of history (I am not American by the way).
The part about Margarita is also a ambiguity about Margarita (drink) and Margarita (name), and the "You are under arrest" part shows that the narrator is drunk (maybe literally or with the girl).
Anyway this part is about girls and drinkings passions.
You can see here that the persons are not singular but represent situations, as well as the narrator represents the pilgrims.
That way the innocent girl probably means the local habitants (indians), or maybe it is the region, because in history you see that the pilgrims didn't want to go back to England.
The childrem raising part is probably about the new generations and cultures.
In the next songs you see the pilgrims exploring, seeing fields, constructing trains and transport and etc (1rst suite), gaining culture and maturing their sentiments and conscience (2nd suite) and the 3rd suite is about elements and finally reaching Hawaii (Brian Wilson himself described the album about being a trip from Plymouth to Hawaii).
I think with these VDP songs you have to look for the money words first, and the one that jumps out at you first is "Catillian." Catillian is ambiguous all by itself: it could be a Spanish debutante dance, or it could be a woman representing all of Spain (Castillian), or it could be a deliberate misspelling of Cotillian, a French dance--or, of course, it could be a woman named Catillian. I think it's used here because it's meant to suggest more of these, not less. But you come away with young woman in a dance, as the rest of the lyric ("she's still dancing in the night unafraid").
One quality heroes and villains both possess is courage--Catillian is unafraid, despite it all. The hero/villain of the song is Catillian, whatever Catillian is.
So that's where you start off: Catillian, a woman dancing, a hero or a villain, maybe both.
~~~
Back to the start: "I've been in this town so long"...I'm fully absorbed by this. Maybe even obsessive. People are forgetting about me.
Here's what has absorbed the singer:
"Fell in love years ago..."
With Catillian...
"an innocent girl, from Spanish and Indian home..."
It could be so ambiguous as to be any Latin American nation, a Spanish and Indian home. A girl representative of the New World, personified as a woman, a product of both the Indian world and colonial Latin America, home of the heroes and villains.
"Stand or fall I know there
shall be peace in the valley..."
Despite the bloody past, there will be peace. That matches the vision of Smile.
"And it's all an affair of my life..."
My obsession, my study of this, the reason I've disappeared, that I've been taken for lost in the city.
"My children were raised..." is to me the most elliptical of the elliptical elements of this song. It sounds perfect within it--it's really a reprise of the first melody, I think it's placement in the song later is to say this much: OK, I've obsessed about all this stuff, I've been gone in dreamland here, and still things worked out anyway, I raised my own family, made my own life--in fact, this is the way you do it, by letting yourself be absorbed in whole other worlds. This is how you become your own hero and a potential villain to others too.
The final reprise is the final plunge.
"I've been in this town so long
so long to the city..."
In other words, I'm no longer in your world at all, I'm in this one, where I've been gone for a long long time. It's the affair of my life, my pursuit of this other world.
"Sunny down snuff I'm all right..." to me that's an artful, even playful rendering of the brutal side of Spanish-Indian history. Despite it all, despite the four centuries of brutality, now I can look at this time, examine it, study it, and I'm all right.
Finally, "Just see what you've done" is a final admonishment to the listener, and fits very nicely with the whole rest of the song. To paraphrase: I've gone this route, I've done it, walked away from this world, let myself be absorbed in another world, fell for the story behind the innocent girl from the violent cultural clash of nations, and everything worked out for me anyway, my kids are all right, and I'm all right too--in fact, this is the way we can now become heroes, or potentially villains too--and what have YOU done?"
That's my interpretation. I've been listening to it since it was released.
Definition: The tracks that were released as singles, and made number one either side of the Atlantic.
Though I try not to include a personal opinion as much as possible, I feel I must. I first heard this track when I was very young. The first thing I thought was, like a lot of tracks I did back then that I heard, "Oh, it's a song, it's music, I must get interested in it". Now, when I hear music, I automatically think... "What's this song trying to say?" This is mainly due to the fact that I've found this site.
The long phrases and tempo change, for me, are what make this track. Just like any Wilson/VDParks track, it has something hidden. A hidden meaning, a hidden lyric. Personally, I think that Van Dyke Parks hated Cabinessence's "Nestle in a kiss below there" line. Merely because it just wasn't "deep". Unlike the whole of Surf's Up, which has hidden meanings which I've tried to summarize to the best of my ability, that line just didn't have anything to warrant its VDP-ness.
According to Parks, the age of the concept album is passé. That's due to the fact that the public wants some kind of instantaneousness via albums. This was shown in this piece. There is no instantaneousness, as far as I'm concerned. This track is a grower, and as such, will continue to grow. Upon me. It has consumed me for so long, and I'm not seeing that fade now.