An Encounter With Van Dyke Parks

An Iconoclast's Complaint

I’ve just returned from the Folk Alliance International conference in Kansas City. Invigorating and exhausting, all in a good way. I’ll be writing about it in more posts this week. Meanwhile, posting this through multiple tech issues had been a priority before the conference. Please excuse typos, repetition, errors, or other annoyances.

When you read the résumé of Van Dyke Parks, you're not sure whether he should be given a Grammy for outstanding lifetime achievement or a summons for the reckless driving of a piano and orchestra.

A recommended introduction to the sweep of Parks' work now might be Moonlighting: Recorded Live at the Ash Grove, its cover designed to look like a 78 rpm record. Never has someone with such varied rock credentials since the mid-1960s seem to be made for an earlier time, yet still a visionary thinker.  

As a self-described "obedient child," he appeared in dozens of live TV programs in the infancy of both the medium and himself from 1951-1957. He was a student at the Columbus Boys Choir in Princeton; he sang in choruses on works conducted by Arturo Toscanini, among other greats.

He was a backing musician for folk groups such as the Brandywine Singers; wrote hits such as "Heroes and Villains" and "Surfs Up" with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys; wrote and played on sessions by groups ranging from Harper's Bizarre to Paul Revere and the Raiders, and produced the first recordings by Randy Newman and Ry Cooder. He was an early admirer of Lowell George of Little Feat, and Parks' version of Little Feat's classic "Sailing Shoes" appears in a few different sets.

Parks' 1972 album Discover America was for many of us an introduction to Trinidadian calypso music. On an album of Trinidadian classics, there are tributes to "Jack Palance," "Bing Crosby," and "G-Man Hoover." There are also two songs by Allen Toussaint: "Riverboat" (originally written for Lee Dorsey) and "Occapella."

"Calypso was something that dropped the rust off my hinge, always refreshed me in music," Parks said. " I liked the lyrical alacrity that I associated with Yip Harburg or Cole Porter, or any of the guys who really worked on words, that you miss in the music business today."

Whether calypso or his own orchestral works, "that organized sound of a multitude of players, of celebrants, has always interested me," Parks said. "Not to the extent of the Woodstock, or Altamont, or any of the electric mind disorders that have gone on in the name of rock and roll."

"Sailing Shoes" helped center the young mind on Parks' adaptive calypso esoterica. And he closes the live album Moonlighting with George's "Sailing Shoes," which has the melodic touch of a slide guitar played by Thomas Edison.

The Mississippi-born Parks was a backing musician for folk groups such as the Brandywine Singers, wrote and played on sessions by Harper's Bizarre, Paul Revere and the Raiders, played on "Eight Miles High" by the Byrds, and produced the first recordings by Randy Newman and Ry Cooder.

He emerged as a solo artist on the expensive-for-its time 1967 album Song Cycle. It opens with then-little known Randy Newman's "Vine Street," was produced so long ago by Lenny Waronker of Warner Brothers that he is identified in the credits as "Leonard" Waronker.

Sandy Pearlman, future co-manager, co-producer, and sometime songwriter for Blue Öyster Cult, wrote the cover story for Crawdaddy in the February, 1968 issue, a review of Song Cycle straight out of the "Aesthetics of Rock" school he created with pal Richard Meltzer. "It required prior modularization and neutralization of readymades to deprive them of their ever-implicit protest function. Conteporary readymades can be taken for granted. Can be. . . Rather than merely protest (a simple out-of-phase position), they can be the locus for really complex interference networks. . ." He refers a lot to Mahler: "a Mahleresque arrangement hinting at Charles Ives."

The magazine that made Song Cycle famous. The review of Buffalo Springfield Again was written by future Blue Öyster Cult drummer Albert Bouchard

Parks was still expressing regret over Song Cycle. It made Parks a cult hero, even though it seemed stars away from the rocke album was promoted with wild abandon by the soon-to-be-savvy Warner Bros. Records marketing team. It was hugely hyped, and a huge flop. (I had it on cassette that I played often enough that the tape wore out, though I didn't understand it.)

"'You know, it embarrassed me tremendously," Parks said."I didn't have a clue about how powerful a record release could be in the sense that it invades privacy." The response to the first album, he said, discouraged him from making another for a time, "from ever posing as an artist."

I spoke to Parks in 1984 as he was promoting his typically oddball "Jump!" album, based on the stories of Joel Chandler Harris' "Uncle Remus" and "B'rer Rabbit" tales in advance of a rare solo performance at the Bottom Line in Manhattan.

Parks said that "Jump!" was commissioned by the North Carolina Symphony. He said that spotting a fox in the beam of a flashlight while sitting on the porch of his family's vacation home in North Carolina provided the cosmic impetus for the project, but he also admits to more down­-to-earth reasons for falling in love again with Brer Rabbit and company.

The stories have been in disfavor for the last generation because they were thought to be racist in their-stereotypical portrayal of blacks, and written in a presumed Deep South black dialect.

"The songs are an antidote to the discomfort the Disney film inherited," Parks said, referring to the 1946 movie Song of the South. "The stories are contemporary, have such an ornate and elegant veil of sorrow, and still are so optimistic. The lessons in these stories are something I wanted to pass on to my children."

Parks thinks the stories work on a multitude of levels. "The rabbit is a proxy for the enslaved man," he said. "And I think even James Thurber would love its sexual posturings and mystery and mischief. I think the whole thing is mischievous. It's a story about the rules of survival before the advent of industry and its abuses."

Parks hits such as "Heroes and Villains" and "Surfs Up" with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and worked with Wilson on the notorious and incomplete "Smile" album.

"And they were tremendously concerned about their position vis-a-vis the Beatles, who were the only other act in town. As these nagging doubts, these shifting sands of doubt were being blown about I just dismissed myself and went and did my first record ["Song Cycle"] at Warner, Bros. It was as simple as that. It was without poison, but it was terrible. But it was reality, and I'm no ostrich. I knew the words weren't going over, and the music wasn't going over, so I left."                     

Besides his work as a recording artist, producer, songwriter and arranger, Parks also served as an executive with Warner Bros. In 1971, he had the then-visionary title of director of audio-visual services.

"I thought it would be nice to make promotional videos which were documentary in nature, but with musical numbers included," he said. "They could be rented to every school in the United States and still be shown in a first run neighborhood theater. They could also be shown on cable TV." Parks is typically tart and elliptical in observing today's rock video landscape. "I think rock video's only conspicuous error–and it's tremendous, aside from the inelasticity of the music which is shown–is the monopolistic concerns which run this racket. I think it's a major limitation."