Van Dyke Parks
Van Dyke Parks
Song Cycle
USA Warner Brothers WS 1727 LP (1968)
also on Edsel ED CD 207 (1988 reissue)
Delirious, hallucinogenic visions of America’s past, present and future - both real and imaginary, seen from a detirminedly ecentric and off-beat viewpoint. Acid-tinged Andrew Wyeth paintings. But before you jump to any conclusions, let’s first state that Parks refused the druggie culture, as he did all libertarian components of the hippie movement, as gleaned from a statement concerning when he first met Brian Wilson on Terry Melcher’s lawn: ‘Those were the days of considerable drug abuse, not among us, but surrounding us.’ It’s possible to read the record as a warped National Geographic trip at high speed across the States: the very opening, a snatch of ‘Black Jack Davey’ with banjoes, invites us to set off on this vagabond journey like the Gypsy itinerant of this traditional folk song.
Strange snapshots and home movie footage have been fetched back from this voyage. We glimpse the Kansas midwest in ‘All Golden’ (although Alabama appears to be the setting). Laurel Canyon Boulevard is an address in California - the West Coast flavour permeates throughout, with the biblical journey ‘I Came West unto Hollywood’ confirmed near the end of side 2 by the impersonation of the Andrews Sisters. ‘Widow’s Walk’ could be somewhere on the East Coast, perhaps a Maine fishing village. ‘The Attic’ is surely a vision of a Dutch Pennsylvania home with hand-made Shaker furniture - ‘I was there upon a four-poster’… The vision is kaleidoscopic, switching us from one location to another, crossing time frames with lightning speed. Only the ring composition of the ordering of track titles makes the slightest concession to linear sense. Both lyrical and musical fragments are deployed, laid out in a mosaic technique which concocts broken images, and alludes to meaning rather than dictates it. The lyrics of ‘All Golden’ can give us - like Walt Whitman - a rich vision of a sun-drenched corn field, and for one second - with a pun about a ‘frigidaire’ - cuts in a vision of Betty Furness with a Westinghouse refrigerator in a 1950s suburb. Parks’ allusiveness in his lyrics seems to defeat some people. Mike Love of The Beach Boys still asks himself to this day what was meant by ‘The Crow Flies, uncover the Cornfield’.
The rich melange of musical quotes and samples is Parks’ greatest achievement here however. Charles Ives is the closest ancestor for this, both in his reworkings of traditional American folk music, and his fondness for having two or more different melodies played on top of each other. With Parks, while there are some specific quotations (which I believe include Beethoven and Scott Joplin), it is more the idiom and regional flavours he’s trying to capture - hence Country and Western slide guitar on ‘Palm Desert’, Appalachian hammered dulcimer and jazz swing drum kit on ‘All Golden’. But these spot-checks don’t convey the totality. Parks seems bent on swallowing American musical history whole, in the same way Melville’s Moby Dick opens with a huge catalogue of classical quotation.
Black music and culture are given a highly idiosyncratic twist on ‘By The People’, a lyric filled with many punning twists and turns, extravagant connections and heavy irony. The squeaky clean Andrews Sisters are juxtaposed with a menacing drawl in a patronising argot - ‘By chance are you gwine git out de way o’ de darkies’. What are to make of this? My guess this is as close as Parks will allow himself to social commentary, perhaps on the civil rights movement. As ‘Vine Street’ on this record is a Randy Newman composition (and Parks has other connections with his friend and fellow songwriter), we could compare notes between this song and Newman’s version of ‘Underneath the Harlem Moon’, a song apparently celebrating ‘the joys of racism’ as Greil Marcus has pointed out. (This also looks forward to 1984’s Jump, which we may discuss in detail in another column; it featured phonetically spelt out southern dialect for the lyrics, and Parks on the back cover dressed as a Southern Gentleman in a white suit.)
Song Cycle is incredibly dense, packs an overload of information into a record less than 40 minutes long, and can verge on the indecipherable unless you play it in its entirety, and pay close attention. Even today it sounds difficult - the weird recording, the constant changes, the sound effects - all stitched together like a patchwork quilt. It can shift from widescreen Technicolor visions as intense as those in Days of Heaven, to intimate piano / vox miniatures such as ‘Pot Pourri’ or ‘Public Domain’ - whose firework sound effects connect you to the Rockets Red Glare and the Fourth of July, but also suggests each composition is like a catherine wheel, sparkling for an instant before it vanishes.
The printed credits give you some clues as to how this overblown sound was committed to tape - not only the enormous session orchestra, but ‘Stereo and Monaural compositions by Bruce Botnick’ and ‘Sound Effects by Jack Glaser and El Supremo’. One antecedent for a record of this processed lushness is surely the exotica - stereo separation easy-listening records so beloved of the ‘cheesy-listening’ set (probably old hat by the time this goes out) - Esquivel, Mantovani, Les Baxter. Although I understand that even some classical music in the 1950s was recorded with enhanced echo, perhaps to give it that ‘concert hall’ effect.
Totally wayward and over the top, this record is a true oddity as extreme as Charles Laughton’s movie Night of the Hunter. Even if he had only made this record, Van Dyke Parks should be assured a place in world history. The connections between this and the project which immediately preceded it, Brian Wilson’s Smile, are fairly self-evident. I take one of Song Cycle’s subtexts as ‘The motor car has changed America’; for further information, simply watch The Magnificent Ambersons, or look at R Crumb’s cartoon ‘A Short History of America’. There’s a car-horn sound notated and played by French horns on ‘Palm Desert’, suggesting a 1920s Ford emerging out of the dust as the spirit of the age strikes out West. There’s a vision of modern commuter hell with the sad procession of cars glimpsed in ‘Laurel Canyon Boulevard’. We need only compare this with the Bicycle Rider of Smile - ‘See what you done to the home of the American Indian’.
Everything that can be said about Smile has been said. Parks always stresses his contribution was as a lyricist and not a composer. Smile, supposed to be ‘tragically lost’ is to my mind a total triumph - it lives on in the best possible way - that is, officially unissued, and uncontrolled by record companies. We know all there is to know about that overblown monstrosity Sgt Pepper. One of the worst aspects of an overplayed record for me is how you know what’s coming next - at least with the CD you can reprogramme to suit yourself, or to fit the supposed ‘original’ order. Smile however enjoys a phantom existence on bootlegs and tapes, and scattered across a half-dozen official releases - thus guaranteeing a far more open-ended interpretation by all who have discovered one of its many incarnations. Smile is the most subversive record, leaking out of the least expected places.
ED PINSENT