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Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle
Van Dyke Parks
Song Cycle
(Warner Bros., 1968)
Van Dyke Parks is no slouch. Lyricist and collaborator for the Beach Boys’ (read: Brian Wilson’s) SMiLE album. Author of three children’s books. Arranger for countless musicians, plays, and films. He even had a cameo on the short-lived Twin Peaks series. Even with all these accomplishments, he is best known for his own stable of albums. But many people recognize Parks’ 1972 album Discover America as the true beginning of his solo career, completely overlooking the full-length Song Cycle that came out four years earlier in 1968.
Part musical traditionalism and part avant-pop genius, Song Cycle has been an underappreciated masterpiece-in-the-making for 40 years. Parks, a true pop master with a bent toward classical music and composition, recorded Song Cycle after his collaborations with Brian Wilson on the SMiLE album came to a halt in 1967 as Wilson’s mental health deteriorated. The album lacks the cohesive, finished qualities of Parks’ later works, which is why it falls just short of being a realized masterpiece.
A song cycle in the general sense is a group of songs that are meant to be performed in succession, thereby creating a cohesive, thematically linked unit. While the album is a little too spread out, a little too random, to truly be considered a song cycle, it is apparent what Parks was striving toward. The most blatant thread linking the songs of Song Cycle is that all the songs on the album are based in traditional forms but are realized here in a pop context. The record’s contents span the breadth of historical American music types: Bluegrass, show tunes, ragtime, jazz, folk, hymns, and more, all arranged with a classical edge and performed in a removed, detached style. This is accentuated by Parks’ distorted and otherworldly vocal tracks, which seem to hover in the air, a separate entity layered upon the complex music. It is this wash that truly colors the music with contemporary pop.
Thematically, the record spurns typical 1960s musical tradition. In an era where psychedelia was king and new forms of improvisational rock music (coming more from an intuitive, gestalt bond between musicians than from the logical mind) were widespread, Parks chose instead to structure his songs around traditional styles, leaning away from the overtly psychedelic rock music that permeated American youth culture in 1968. There are no bending guitar solos, no 10-minute drum jams and, thank god, no poorly played sitar parts. There are only finite songs that, in every way, are members of some of the most unpsychedelic genres of American music.
The lyrics, too, hint at a near disdain of 1960s American culture. While many musicians in the 1960s were singing the praises of hippiedom and hippiedom’s epicenter—California—Parks took a different approach. In “Palm Desert” he posits, “Beyond San Fernando on hillside manors on the banks of toxicity / Those below and those above the same.” Thus Parks equates California—or what California had come to symbolize—with poison. Parks vocalizes a similar sentiment in “Laurel Canyon Blvd” when he states, “What is up in Laurel Canyon the seat of the beat to greet and eat / At the heart of their companion way. / That’s up Laurel Canyon. / And what is up the canyon will even eventually come down.” At this time Laurel Canyon was a hotbed of bohemian and countercultural activity; it was also a home to doomed heroes like “Mama” Cass Elliot and Jim Morrison, who didn’t make it much past the dawning of the ’70s. When Parks predicts that “what is up the canyon will even eventually come down,” he is foreshadowing the death of the empty bliss that the decade’s subculture had become by this point in the late ‘60s. Like all things, decadence can only be piled so high on top of itself before it implodes.
With its odd (by comparison) sound and lack of typical late ‘60s values infused in the music, it is no wonder that sales of the album were slow. But sales were steady enough, and desire for the album was constant enough, that Song Cycle has been in print in one form or another since its release. It became a sort of unheralded classic in the musical underground, finding huge support in contemporary artists like Jim O’Rourke and Thurston Moore. In recent years Song Cycle was remastered and released with a bonus track by Rykodisc. Sundazed Records followed quickly with the release of a deluxe 180-gram vinyl edition, and Warner Japan released a CD version that comes in a replica LP sleeve in early 2008 (along with the rest of Parks’ catalog, which also comes in similar sleeves).
Those who like their pop served up on a platter of Americana will be sure to embrace this first full-length record by Parks. It didn’t quite fit in to 1968 when it was released, and it doesn’t quite fit in now. But the influence it has had on the music world over the last four decades is undeniable. Perhaps the rekindled interest and the slew of reissues will help elevate sales of Song Cycle from the slow and steady pace it has enjoyed for the last 40 years. Let’s not forget, slow and steady wins the race.
Listen: “Palm Desert“ [at therisingstorm.net]
**Be sure to check out Issue 1.13 in our Archive 1966-68 section for an original article on Van Dyke Parks**
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8 Comments
you wrote: The album lacks the cohesive, finished qualities of Parks’ later works, which is why it falls just short of being a realized masterpiece.
dear laine,
i happen to remember a full page ad in rolling stone magazine which quoted no less than the new yorker magazine, A milestone in American pop music.
you want others? ok:
All shimmering beauty.
- Time
The most important, creative, and advanced pop recording since Sgt. Pepper.
- Jazz and Pop
A milestone in the development of American popular music.
Cheetah
and there are many others at a reproduction of the orginal ad if you take about five minutes to search in google.
what more praise would you need
for a record to be a masterpiece?
sheesh…
sincerely,
d. whitney quinn
Dear D.-
Praise and laudations from any publication do not make an album (or any work of art) a masterpiece. And I cannot believe that you are citing ADS FOR THE ALBUM as your source. Do you think they would say “This album is a real piece of shit, but you should buy it anyway”? Of course not. Sales of the album were so weak that at one time that WB was offering a BOGO on the record in hopes that people would turn their friends on to it. I have worked in publishing for a long time, and I can tell you the following. At any of the three presses I’ve worked for, when we solicit reviews for a book, the only reviews that get “blurbed” (that is, adapted for ads or cover quotes) are the good ones. A book may get 30 bad reviews and one good one, and guess which one is going into the ad copy? You may PERSONALLY feel that the album is a masterpiece, which is your choice. But I stand by my assertion that there are very real problems with the album that make it fall short of “masterpiece quality” (Which is what, anyway? It’s arbitrary). I absolutely love this record, and I’m not trying to slag it. I wrote about it BECAUSE I love it. But just because some asshole at Time or Cheetah says it’s a masterpiece doesn’t make it so. I’ll leave you with this, a quote from a Rolling Stone review, since you hold them in such high esteem: “The album is hardly perfect.”
You seem to have confused the labels “psychedelic” and “acid-rock.” “Song Cycle” doesn’t sound anything like what the Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd were doing in ‘68, but it is certainly one of the two or three _most_ psychedelic records of that time.
Tell ya, these kids today go no sense of history.
Thanks.
@ Original Gangsta Dave. Today us young folks would call this anti- or alt-psych, which is a way of freeing ourselves from the rigid constraints of a pattern that we dig while still styling ourselves after it. It’s so postmodern. See also: anti-country, anti-folk, and alt-everything. That’s right, hyphens–and hyphy. Hope that helps you catch up.
Also, OG Davemeister, I never said the album itself isn’t psychedelic. It definitely is, or can at least be considered as such in the manner that you seem to be defining “psychedelic.” What I said was that it “leans away from the overtly psychedelic music that was permeating youth culture at the time” (what you would call acid rock). The forms around which Parks composed the songs are (whether you care to admit it or not) totally traditional (bluegrass, ragtime, etc.). While the album itself may be “psychedelic,” the songs themselves can be easily included in genres that, as I stated, are some of the most unpsychedelic of all time. In much the same manner, for example, as Brian Jones’ “Pipes of Pan at Jajouka” is psychedelic, yet totally traditional and unpsychedelic at the same time. If you played that record for a young, progressive person at the time, they would have said, “Yeah, man, totally psychedelic…brooooo.” But if you played it for a native of Jajouka, they would say, “Yeah, this is the shit my ancestors have been doing for centuries. This is musical traditionalism.” The interpretation, or arbitrary genres into which one shoves any music, are totally unique to the listener. But thanks for the input. And for the record, my sense/understanding/and knowledge of history, particularly musical history, are quite strong; and I’m not a “kid,” old man.
Been a long time since anyone commented on this review and Laine commented on their comments, but let me just say, stumbling upon it as I did this evening, every quality I hate in pop music critics – both in the review and in Laine’s comments – are here in spades. I’m glad you got in semiprint and all, brother, but, uh, the hyperattacks on the folks reveal another geek hoping to be deemed Mr. Lester Bangs, Jr. Funny thing was (and how quickly we forgot), for all his crassness, Bangs was a lot more human that…
typo! try again…Been a long time since anyone commented on this review and Laine commented on their comments, but let me just say, stumbling upon it as I did this evening, every quality I hate in pop music critics – both in the review and in Laine’s comments – is here in spades. I’m glad you got in semiprint and all, brother, but, uh, the hyperattacks on the folks daring to disagree, disrepectfully, with him reveal another geek hoping to be deemed Mr. Lester Bangs, Jr. Funny thing was (and how quickly we forgot), for all his crassness, Bangs was a lot more human that…
My head hurts. VDP is a genius. Enough said.