Thursday, July 13, 2017

"Heroes and Villains"

Yester-day I listened to the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey reissue from 1990, and I remembered a reference in "Heroes and Villains" that I'd recognized before but had forgotten about.  It's in the lines:
My children were raised, you know they suddenly rise.
They started slow long ago, head to toe; healthy, wealthy and wise.
(They're how they're written in the liner notes from the 2004 SMiLE.)

The "healthy, wealthy, and wise" part seems to come from "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."  (I'd thought this was a Benjamin Franklin quote, but The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says it's a proverb from the 15th century.)  Both the lyrics and the proverb rhyme "rise" with "wise," which makes me a bit more confident that they're related.