A late night drive with Van Dyke Parks...


I remember buying a copy of Van Dyke Parks' 1968 album SONG CYCLE at a flea market when I was in high school (late 70s-early 80s)... it was still sealed, a dollar. I listened to it and obviously didn't "get it" when I heard it way back then, and I don't even think I still have that copy of the album anymore. It may be in a box in one of my two storage spaces... I'm not sure.

Anyway, recently a friend on a Beach Boys' message board asked me if I'd like a copy of the CD reissue, and a few days later, in my mailbox, was a free copy of SONG CYCLE.

Like I said, I obviously didn't get this album in 1980... but I sure get it now. Brian Wilson may have abandoned SMILE in 1967, but Van Dyke Parks picked the ideas right up and ran with them. Wow. The almost classical voicings of the instruments... the interpolation of folk songs and standards... minimal use of traditional (for rock and roll, anyway) percussion. Either Van Dyke learned a lot from Brian, or the two of them were on the same musical plane. Probably a little bit of both.

Strangely, given its title, SONG CYCLE is less of a "song cycle" than SMILE. Unlike Brian's magnum opus, SONG CYCLE doesn't really feature any recurring musical motifs or themes that pop up thoughout the set.

Again, I'm amazed that I didn't get it when I got it.

Listening to this album was a bizarre experience. As I wrote this same friend who sent me the CD...

"I got up this morning VERY early (before 2 am) and just felt like taking a drive... a lot of people I know like to go into the city... I got in the car and drove out into the country, in the dark, out to this little market about 40 miles west that has 24 hour gas and coffee... anyway, on the way out I listened to Radio Canada (there's something I like about hearing music on the radio that I've never heard before, will never hear again, and sung in a language I don't understand... there's nothing in the experience but the music, the realization that the moment will not last, and the expectation that I will probably be surprised) and on the way back, after a handful of French-Canadian pop, I put SONG CYCLE in the CD player...

"It was very cool... the music seemed to be synchronized to the drive, to the bends in the road... at one point, I was approaching a pair of flashing traffic lights and the lights were almost dancing to the rhythm of the music... tempos seemed to accelerate and decelerate as I did, the music swelling and modulating with the curves and bends of the road. Finally, as I pulled back into town near home, that last track played, so quiet I almost couldn't hear it.

"It was musical synchronicity.

"I didn't really get to hear many (make that ANY) of the lyrics... I was mainly absorbed in the drive and the night and the FEEL of the music, which is very sweeping, evocative... it's very clear to me that he took the ideas Brian had with SMILE (short pieces woven together into an integrated whole, with snippets of standards interpolated and interspersed... unusual arrangements where non-percussion instruments or sections of instruments keep the rhythm and the pulse going) and put them to work in his own way... although as a unified whole I think SMILE works better because it's more cyclical, the thematic elements of it tied together more wholly.

"I sort of remember listening to it back then and not liking Van Dyke's voice, and thinking it was a little too cutesy. I couldn't get behind it back then... I wasn't ready for it, I suppose. Tonight, though, I was ready for it, and there it was.

"It reminds me in a way of Charlie Chaplin's film music in his movies like MODERN TIMES."

It would be sweet if Van Dyke and Brian could get together to do another collaboration. That having failed, though, I have SONG CYCLE, plus JUMP and CLANG OF THE YANKEE REAPER and the rest of Parks' solo discography to keep me busy on future late night drives.