Pot pourri (Van Dyke Parks) (LP 3445 - 3449)

Van Dyke Parks  Song Cycle (CD, Warner Bros. Records, 1967) ****  

Van Dyke Parks  Discover America (Vinyl, Edsel Records, 1972) *****  

Van Dyke Parks  Clang of the Yankee Reaper (Vinyl, Edsel Records, 1976) ***  

Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks  Orange Crate Art (CD and Vinyl, Warner Bros. Records, 1995) *****  

Van Dyke Parks  Songs Cycled (CD, Bella Union Records, 2013) ***  

Genre: Art pop, orchestral pop 

Places I remember: Marbecks Records, Record fair in New Plymouth (Discover America), Southbound records customer (Yankee Reaper)

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: G Man Hoover (Discover America)

Gear costume: Sailin' Shoes (Discover America)

They loom large in his legend (The Album Collection playlists): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5

Active compensatory factors: He is an interesting character. Thanks to his association with Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys (see Orange Crate Art below) he is well known outside of his culty fringe status as a solo artist, and he's also a bit Zelig-like - turning up in the credits of plenty of my favourite albums.

Song Cycle was his debut album in 1967. A heady year! It's a bizarre kind of autobiographical concept album centred on Hollywood and southern California. It's genre blending takes in orchestral pop with elements of Tin Pan Alley songwriting, bluegrass, ragtime, and musique concrète.

VDP: I wanted to capture the sense of California as a Garden of Eden and land of opportunity. It was a very big deal to me: What was this place? What has it become? What will it become? And what does it mean to be here? ... [I wanted Song Cycle to be] relevant to its time and part of the free press of its time, as a watchword to the errant youth that was showing up here in droves.

His second album, Discover America, is a work of genius in my humble opinion. All the songs are covers but Parks adds his customary orchestral touches superbly, so that they all sound like his songs.

It's an eclectic collection - calypso songs, as well as songs by Allen Toussaint, Little Feat (Sailin' Shoes), even a snippet of John Philip Sousa (Stars and Stripes Forever). Its quirky brilliance is all Van Dyke Parks, though. 

There is an emotional heart at the base of this album that I don't feel is present on Song Cycle, and the steel band/Trinidad approach is inspired, hence this being my favourite album from him.

Clang of the Yankee Reaper, his third album, continued to explore and use calypso music as its inspiration. It also continued to feature mostly cover versions. AllMusic sums the album by stating that it 'explores more arcane Americana on an album that ranges from New Orleans to the islands to the classics'. 

It doesn't hold together as well as his previous two and the man himself later called it 'brain dead'. Ouch.

 

His eighties albums don't do it for me, so we next find him in 1995 with Brian Wilson providing the inspired lead vocals on Orange Crate Art (I've written about that one previously).

The final album in this list is Songs Cycled from 2013. It was his first since Orange Crate Art but the music is nothing like that album.

The title is a deliberate echo of his debut and he has indicated it's likely to be his last, so he's come full circle.

VDP - "in both cases, there’s a maverick on the loose, with a highly personal set of tunes and instrumentals. All of them reveal an iconoclast tilting at windmills, railing at tyrants, barking at masters of war, and celebrating a shameless commitment to the very definition of ‘Americana’."  

Where do they all belong? That's it for Van Dyke Parks, but he's bound to crop up on the credits of other albums I buy in the future.