The Making of SONG CYCLE - featuring van dyke parks and richard henderson

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim. 

Van Dyke Parks was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1943. After growing up studying music and working as a child actor, he moved to Los Angeles, California. He began performing in folk groups around town and ended up arranging “The Bare Necessities” for Disney’s The Jungle Book. He recorded singles for MGM Records and worked as a session musician for producer Terry Melcher, who later introduced him to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Parks’ was hired as the lyricist for the Beach Boys’ Smile album, but became disillusioned with the project and left in 1967. Producer, Lenny Waronker, then signed Parks to a contract with Warner Brothers as they embarked on recording a full-length album. Song Cycle was eventually released in 1968. 

In this episode, for the 55th anniversary, Van Dyke Parks and Richard Henderson, author of the 33 ⅓ book, Song Cycle, reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of Song Cycle. 

Van Dyke Parks: Hello, this is Van Dyke Parks and I'm here on Dan Nordheim’s wonderful podcast and give you all the scoop about the making of Song Cycle, over 55 years ago. So I think about the past. It's nice that we think about a 55 year span since the release of my first album as good. But I am happy with it, I know I did my best. I unfortunately didn't know why I was doing the album beyond the practicability of learning anything. I didn't want to be approved of or screamed at in a concert. That this was not my thing. I wanted to find what was going on in this incredibly developing technology that offered such studio wonders. Recorded music was coming of age, a golden age of analog.

So I staggered around Hollywood for a while in the early sixties, and in 1963 I got my first contract, I was at MGM Records. The first person to call me an artist was Tom Wilson. I was very uncomfortable with that word. I simply was fascinated by the studio, and I decided that this would be a great way for me to get into a studio, go ahead and call myself an artist. So I did that and I was very happy to have the two singles on MGM. I saw Steve Stills recently, hadn't seen him in 50 years in his arc of achievement, and he was in my band at that time. And we opened for the Lovin’ Spoonful. And there was the Mothers of Invention, in which I played a small part.

But then I started busying myself. I busied myself by being a studio musician. I could play written notes on the guitar. I could play guitar lines or I could play the piano because I'd gone to school to learn how to play piano, I played piano or clarinet. I played clarinet when my feet didn't touch the ground. I've studied music. It's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in the entirety. There’s nothing privileged about a discipline in music. It's a life of sacrifice. You learn that and you learn that with every contract that's thrown at you. And so I avoided contracts for a while, it was a smart move. Actually I was only 20 when I signed my MGM contract, and that's not legal or tender. But I had fun doing it. I learned a lot and I learned about the positioning of microphones in recording. That became very important to me. All of a sudden, having listened to the music of, Les Paul or Mary Ford, or Spike Jones for that matter, and many other pioneers in electronica with acoustic sound, this would be my fascination. Recorded music was different from live music. Suppose you have a mandolin. And then a wall of brass. Well darn it, the brass might engulf the mandolin. So by repositioning the microphones, which was taboo for some time, we found an entirely new opportunity in the point of view that recorded music can offer an assembly of musicians. So that gave me a lot of understanding. 

But I was a fixture in town and so producer Terry Melcher started using me as a studio musician as well as Ry Cooder. And we were regulars in that, in that group. It paid the rent, which is really a feat in Los Angeles County still is. And Terry Melcher produced some great rock and roll records, if you like, rock and roll, he produced some rock and roll records and we presented ourselves as Paul Revere and the Raiders, me and Ry and some other studio musicians. It was common to have musicians play for you. And I played for the Byrds on 5D. And then that work with Terry Melcher led to being introduced to Brian Wilson and being cast as a lyricist with Brian Wilson, which shocked me actually, because my aims were musical. I'm a dweeb, I'm sorry to say it. I don't give a damn about the other stuff. I'm not even interested in how the truck blew up. I'm not interested in, so interested in being in love or having lost my love or my truck or anything like that that pertains to the topicality of most songs. And I think the reason that I got the job with Brian Wilson was that I had been playing as a musician in Brian's works in the studio, and there came a time to arrange “Good Vibrations” to get it done so that I could get more involved. Because I wasn't really involved with “Good Vibrations.” I had been on the floor in the middle of “Good Vibrations” on a pedal, holding the pedals down with my hands because it was easier to manipulate the foot pedals with my hands than with my stocking feet. In the middle of “Good Vibrations,” you'll hear a very low organ sustained pedal tone. That's me on the floor. I suggested to Brian the cello because I wanted to see if I could get involved with a little more fancy, we're gonna get fancy here, we're gonna get some strings in here that aren't in the group that he's working with. And I was less mindful of the Beach Boys, so I was interested in Brian Wilson's development and my own. “So why don't we try a cello?” So he says, “Great.” I get to the studio and there's a cellist and there's a music stand, and his name was Jesse Ehrlich. And he was sitting there with no music on the music stand and rather perplexed. And I was in the control room with Brian Wilson and I had assumed that Brian was going to write some notes for him.Those notes weren't there. So we went to the chorus and I said to Brian, “Have him play eighth note triplets, secco, dry. Dry as a bone.” The fundamental of the chord. Eighth note, (sings cello part) “da da da da da da da da da da.” And as a result, got the ruby slippers moment of the song. I did that by my power of observation. I was there, lucky enough to be in the room with his gent and I said, “Arco.” Brian went on talkback, he said, “Jesse, Van Dyke says, ‘Barco.’” Jesse looked at Brian through the control room window. He said, “Barco?” I said, “Tell him with a bow, Brian.” So Arco, it was. So I got myself a job as a lyricist because of that. Brian was busy being a musician, a genius. So it was time to put the lyrics on the words, and I did that. And I did it. I would say without apology, I did a darn good job. So, I did my best. I know that, and that is enough for me. 

Richard Henderson: I'm Richard Henderson. I'm a film music editor and radio broadcaster who wrote the book 33 1/3 Song Cycle for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series of books about individual albums. Van Dyke is, you know, is from the get go, one of the most eloquent people you'll ever meet in an almost Rococo fashion. And he's just a great raconteur and so Brian picked up on this and said, “You know, this is the guy that I want to have, do the lyrics for this big project I have in mind, the Smile project.” And Van Dyke watched this thing come apart at the seams. He had a front row seat for it to the extent that he left the project and then he had to be talked into coming back to the project. And you know, Brian would cancel sessions because somebody's girlfriend in the lobby was a witch. And like, just really goofy crap. Brian had discovered the big world of better living through chemistry and to the extent that it wound up fouling up the project. He was just, you know, just chasing his first high all through that. But Van Dyke was very together. He was, you know, he'd been a pro since he was a kid. He'd been in Amahl and the Night Visitors on Broadway. He'd been a semi-regular cast member in The Honeymooners on TV. He'd been in a movie with Grace Kelly when he was in short pants. I mean, he was like, he'd been in the business, he knew what it was to function in a businesslike way. And clearly these sessions were not being conducted in a businesslike way, you know, it was just like, “Okay, now we're gonna bring a horse in the studio and now we're gonna set a fire and a pale in the studio.” And it just got weirder and weirder. And also there was all this pressure from the other guys in the band who just wanted to keep making hit records. And this was not an obvious way to make a hit record. Pet Sounds hadn't yielded big hits. It wasn't like the kind of impact that they're surfing and hot rod music had. So this is the life these guys are used to and here's this new thing that's gonna undermine it. They don't want that and they certainly don't understand it. “Columnated ruins domino?” What does that mean to people who barely understand surfing, like only Dennis surfed and you know, the rest of them, just “What the hell? You're mess…” And like Mike Love's famous quote, “Don't fuck with the formula.” And Van Dyke just couldn't take it.

Van Dyke Parks: Having spent that stuff with Smile and it's unacceptable to the Beach Boys, et cetera, and created all the controversy because the lyrics all sat on a note and those notes were different. Those weren't “Barbara Ann” notes, they weren't “Caroline, No” notes, they weren't “I'm just a cork on the ocean notes,” which is by one of the great signature lyrics of Brian Wilson himself, very good lyricist. So I was happy, in a way, relieved to be out of my job as lyricist and all of a sudden, then it was time to do an album. And that came through Lenny Waronker having listened to the first song I wrote. It's called “High Coin.” “When times and places effervesce in words of wonder from down under, I'm no less. I'm fine, it's my time.” That was my first lyric. He was absolutely obsessed about “High Coin.” So he had a fledgling career as an A&R man at Warner Bros. and I had just been taught everything that Brian Wilson could teach me, and Lenny knew that. But I wasn't signed to a contract. I just did a record with Lenny, one record. It was called “Donovan's Colours.” But I didn't want to use my name because I really thought, I was still reeling from Kennedy's assassination and had a certain reticence about the fame thing seemed to me to be seductive and yet high hazard. So I didn't really need to be known. That was a fact. And so I did a nom de guerre, a name of war. I did an alias, George Washington Brown. I met him in Peru (laughs). Anyway, I did a fictitious character and we threw the record out to no one in particular. College radio, FM radio stations at that time were just gaining their prominence. They didn't have any real power. There was very little promotion beyond the $20 bills in the brown bags that promotion men gave to program, AM directors. This was a different game. We were learning how a record could be promoted. Nice thing about “Donovan's Colours,” that George Washington Brown played. It ended up on a jukebox in Greenwich Village and a man reviewed the record for a page of the Village Voice. He took a page to explain the phenomenon of this record called “Donovan's Colours.” Warner Bros. was then told by his article what they were thinking and what they started to think was that I was an artist, so I got that great contract. 

Richard Henderson: They gave them the keys to the candy store. Basically it's like, “What kind of budget do you want for this? You go it.” I mean anybody who meets Van Dyke is gonna be impressed by the guy, come on. I mean then as now. You know, very articulate guy, mannerly, clearly not just some long haired bell bottom kid on the make, he was something very different. And people responded to that in a time where weird was good and weirder is better. You know, that period, the Halcyon period where people like Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart got record deals. So he kind of flourished in this hot house period where Warner Brothers was this interesting terrarium where very unusual plants were allowed to grow and were nurtured. So yeah, that's the start of Song Cycle.

“Vine Street”

Van Dyke Parks: Well, you'll notice that the song that starts the record is called “Blackjack, Davey.” I consider it like The Tales of Brer Rabbit as a Rosetta Stone of American musicological and folklore value. This is a great piece of music. It's a ballad. It's Steve Young singing that song, that's how I started the damn record. Steve Young was a man of merit and deserving appreciation. And also I had a feel to, to the folk idioms, that's why “Blackjack Davey” is there. A real piece of Americana, something beyond my proprietary gain and this is the way I see the world. 

Richard Henderson: Van Dyke always valued Steve Young as an original American, like a really great, genuinely couldn't come from any other country kind of talent, Steve Young. And Van Dyke and he kind of were making the same sort of pilgrim's progress, trying to get their feet on the ground in Los Angeles at the same time. In any case, very interesting guy and Van Dyke sort of thought that his saga was worth chronicling. 

Van Dyke Parks: Then Randy Newman wrote a song for me. I wanted to get, make sure I got a song done. And Randy Newman, who had been taking odd jobs and like, oh my God, Peyton Place for TV and just a privileged child of Hollywood aristocracy, the Newman family, well agented and very talented. So Randy knew that I lived on Vine Street. He knew that I'd put out a record on MGM with Beethoven's beautiful 9th Symphony Corral that theme (plays Symphony No. 9 into “Vine Street” on piano).

By the way, he did a brilliant, a brilliant string arrangement, so graciously conducted by his uncle Al, who would die in three months of emphysema. His Uncle Al, who did the 20th Century Fox theme. The strings are Sul Tosto, they're very skinny. You'll notice it very high. So you hear mostly rosin. It's the absence of notes. Yeah, it's nice isn’t it?

So he knew that my first wife, my squeeze, made perfume in the back of the room. He knew all that and he threw this biographical wonder at my feet. I played guitar very well actually, that was a lie. But I went along with a gag and I recorded that.

“Palm Desert”

Van Dyke Parks: What I was coming up with was music of essentially an acoustic focus. Focus on real instruments playing, that's what I wanted to do. And in doing so, I wanted to make sure that everything was as demonstrable on “by Palm Desert.” I wanted to accentuate with timpani and I got timpani and believe me, I knew the $125 that went to Cartage for the timpani was not going into my rent. I knew that. A lot of other people were getting record contracts in the gold rush to Laurel Canyon from the Brill Building in New York. The musical center had shifted, but I didn't go and buy real estate and cars. I put my money into orchestras.

And then it goes into, “I came west onto Hollywood” and I thought because Nudies was making, clothes for people like Gram Parsons and so forth, all the rhinestone cowboys all over the place, a whole bunch of people. Hippies pretending that they knew how to mount a horse and never got saddled. But for that reason, I wanted to really make sure I used all the archetypes available, and that's why the steel guitar is there. It was so fabulous for me. I was not the first to really love the steel guitar in pop. Pop music had employed it and it crossed the aisle from country and rockabilly. But I remember Gary Lewis did something that he used a bunch of steel guitar and that was probably the first time I'd heard it in pop music, and I thought that would be a great instrument to center “Palm Desert.”

Richard Henderson: Have you been to Palm Desert? I mean, there's not a lot to write home about. I mean now it's filled with corporate wellness retreats and crap like that. But at the time, I mean, you could go to be like Gram Parsons and fetishize Joshua Tree and just wander around in the desert loaded. But with Van Dyke, it was just like getting away from distraction, you know, just being out there and doing that and getting a song out of it while he was there. But just him, huddled over a keyboard, working hard with staff paper, which has been his whole life. You know, whether he is film scoring or writing arrangements for someone else's record or working on his own material, he's very much almost a pencil and paper guy. But he is at core, very much a hands on, do your own work, musician. And I say that, do your own work because I exist in a forum where film composers are expected to have an army of little gremmies doing stuff for them. You know, like, “Oh, I'll come out with some right-handed melody, my arranger will turn it into the cue.” You know, “I'll have these ghost writers doing the cues I don't have time to get to,” stuff like that. But Van Dyke, very much that kind of do your own work kind of guy, hardworking guy. 

Van Dyke Parks: So I was in Palm Springs, “I came west unto Hollywood.” I thought about income disparity. I thought about a sense of place. I wanted the record to have a sense of place. That's why I did that stomp in Palm Desert. I wanted to have it be a luxurious moment in Southern California and with definitely, an informed optimism.

Richard Henderson: The full orchestra really is his canvas. I mean, he can sit down in a club and play, and many people have seen him do that, I've seen him do it a number of times. He can sit down a piano and have minimal accompaniment, string bass and maybe one other person and do a really engaging set. But having the full orchestra in the European understanding of that possibility, that's his canvas. That's really where he feels liberated and can take wing with music and do what he wants. Whereas people are waiting for studio technology or waiting for this, or waiting for that to make the thing happen, he doesn't really need that. And you get a sense of that in Song Cycle. Despite all the wonderful coloration that Bruce Botnick’s recording studio technique brings to the record, it's still a record that's very much composed and arranged in almost, you know, German way. I mean it's amazing to that end. So it exists in both worlds. It exists in the world of, you know, old school composition, it exists in the world of newfangled, “the recording studio as an instrument.” And he was the first who could legitimately claim to that, you know, well before Brian Eno, who was always heralded for doing that. So it exists in both camps. That duality makes the record that much more interesting. 

Van Dyke Parks: I got to experience the joy of a discovery and sometimes it went as expected, often, more often than not, entirely different. So Song Cycle proved that although I had five years of perfect attendance at Presbyterian Sunday School, but you wouldn't think I'm a Presbyterian after having heard that record. It has no idea how to presage, to understand what's coming next. It's deceptive because it is deceived. It was a tragic age for me. It was postmortem. I was very much with my brother in his grave. It was brutal. I wasn't communicating anything to anybody. So what did I do? As they said in Lit 101, when I went to school in Literature 101, they'd say, write what you know. So I wrote about the trauma of my recovery from my brother's death, which had just occurred in ‘63. I was recovering from that and the death of John Kennedy and all kinds of nonsense. Martin Luther King, and that list goes on.

“Widow’s Walk”

Van Dyke Parks: I really respected my mother's sister and she was laden with cancer. So I decided to write a song for her. 

Richard Henderson: And you gotta remember, this is all being put in a record at a time where people were breaking away from their families. The American nuclear family was considered an obsolescent item. And California especially, was filled with people that just took off from their families. Like, “Screw you, I'm gonna live the way I want to, dress the way I want to. I'm not buying into this Eisenhower era package.” And so families, family life, ancestry, not a big part of hip culture at all. People really divorced themselves from their families at that point in time. Many people never reconnected with their families. They joined Hare Krishna, they disappeared, they did a lot of weird things back then. And so here's this guy who is speaking a form of English that takes a lot of education to get to. He was very articulate, a very well educated guy, whose family mattered to him. And he realized the kind of illustrious one of a kind aspects of his family, his father led a dance band, which also figures into the lyrics of Song Cycle and his brothers. And I mean, the fact that he could play piano when he could barely stand. And they had more than one piano in the house, so they'd play duets, him and his other family members. You know, family and what came before him was very important to him. And that was something that was not on the table for a lot of people in hip culture in the late sixties. But it was just, you know, your own family, that was something you got away from. And here’s Van Dyke kind of delving into this and celebrating it. It was a very interesting take on things.

Van Dyke Parks: “Factories face the poor.” Income disparity. Yeah. “Put that in songs.” I do. I think about it all the time. I know so many poor people. My only regret is that I don't have more to give. That's my only problem on that. I want you to know that I'm grateful for every opportunity I had to explore these, they weren't whims, they were psychological survival tools for me at the time. I was a poor boy, I rented. I still have no savings account. I'm 79 and I'm a musician and quite happy in my work, it's evolution. 

Richard Henderson: Van Dyke was somebody who inhabited the past as much as he did the present. And as such created something that was kind of futuristic sounding. So he took terms that at one point in history, everybody knew what they meant, and you know, culture had just motored on past those terms and they didn't have meaning for most people anymore. Unless you were a New Englander and owned a certain kind of house, near the water, you wouldn't know what a widow’s walk was. But again, he's taking an architectural colloquialism and then making it literal, talking about widows walking. An extra dimension to the words he is presenting.

"Laurel Canyon Blvd"

Van Dyke Parks: My relationships with Warner Bros. were very problematic. I felt it was insultary. I knew because when Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra, came to my house in Laurel Canyon with Judy Collins to ask me what I was doing, and I played them Song Cycle. He went to Mo Ostin and he said, “Why isn't this out?” And Mo said, you know, he said, “If you don't wanna release it, I sure do, please.” I would've had an easier life with New York than in this cow town. I would have. it would've been okay. People weren't so concerned about fucking with the formula. It would've been easier. But my fun meter, I'm telling you the truth, it's on 10. I think that that is an elegant record.

“The All Golden”

Van Dyke Parks: I like the fact that Song Cycle successfully reveals an ambience, a refuge an album can offer. Sometimes it has an expositionary feel, sometimes it doesn't go anywhere. But, I was happy with it, I was happy with “The All Golden.”

(Plays “The All Golden” intro on piano) Nothing innovative, but a very good diaphanous way of entering it. On which there was a capstan in the tape machine that was going 15 ips. There was a capstan through which the tape travels. And I decided on the repeat to wrap the capstan irregularly, you know, so you hear the loud (plays piano note) and that would catch. Now all of this sounds totally loony, but if you think that I'm crazy, try Stockhausen or go to Esquivel in Mexico just hear, or Bob Thompson, who did many arrangements for me in my later career to learn how many musicians shamelessly wanted to explore these potentials. They might eventually come to mean something.

Richard Henderson: The farkle is one of those ideas that a few people, unknown to one another had at the same time or roughly the same time. But mostly the invention of either Doug Botnick or Bruce Botnick, depending on who you talk to. The two brothers, both engineers. Bruce also having a much more extensive career in record production, having worked with the Doors and Arthur Lee in Love and people like that. But it's like origami, it’s a little paper ring that you fold and fold the tape together, and you put it around a tape capstan, the little pinch roller and the rubber roller, the little spinning metal dowel and the rubber roller that's opposite it with the tape in between. And all things connect and they make the tape go forward. Well, if you put this little farkle thing, this little origami ring around the pinch roller, it causes the tape to wobble like this (makes wobble sound). Now you can just do it with a plugin, but at the time, this was very much this sort of mechanical approach. 

Van Dyke Parks: Bruce Botnick has mentioned “farkle,” he made up that word when I told him, “Let's wrap the capstan.” Bruce did my record, this is (laughs), as his career was unfolding, he had just, I think that he had just done the Doors. 

Richard Henderson: I always liked Bruce Botnick’s credit on the record, “stereo compositions.” Instead of just like, “recorded and mixed by,” “Stereo compositions,” a great example of Van Dyke's verbal specificity and how he could, with a very few words, open up a whole other realm of consideration for a particular job someone had done on his behalf. Very nice. 

Well, you know, it's the Horatio Alger story in a way. “Someone went west,” to reinvent their lives and turn it around for themselves. And it's very much the admiring portrait of, Van Dyke's depiction of Steve Young, and his travails and adventures in getting from where he came from to California and then trying to make a living for himself. But Van Dyke just recognized this, as I said before, this kind of quintessentially American aspect of him. 

Van Dyke Parks: Steve Young was a guy who was, Waylon Jennings wanted to be Steve Young. He was a charismatic era Alabaman, and he had a picture of George C. Wallace, who was a racist pig, on his wall and that had a Hitlerian mustache. And I knew that Steve was a man that, just as perplexed as I was about having been born in the South. It was not hip in the foment of all the race riots and the hoses and the dogs and the hangings and the, Oh my God. The songwriting form wasn't yet understood by me as a political force that it has become. Bob Dylan came out in ‘63, remember that? Beach Boys came out in ‘63. Rolling Stones came out in ‘63, remember that? I do. I was here. I remember when the Brits came over and co-opted our linguistics. I'm from Mississippi. I know what the blues are. I've heard them. This was, so faux fab faux music, blues from Britain was something of an irony to me. And it became copped by the reality that very few black musicians have an opportunity to play the blues in the House of Blues today. That's what happened with the branding of the Blues. White Kids got the woo woos and took it over. So I avoided the blues. I've stayed cheerful all the time. 

Richard Henderson: This is Van Dyke, very much conscious of, you know, English interlopers coming in and knocking us all out of business with everything after Beatlemania and then the, you know, amplified blues music that was coming out of England in the later sixties and things like that. You know, he was all about being American. So that was, Steve Young was kind of the representative of all that stuff for Van Dyke's way of thinking.

And “The All Golden,” just a fantastic tribute to him. It's one of the songs from Song Cycle that Van Dyke regularly included in his concert repertoire. I seem to recall hearing an acapella version of it at one point, which given how dressed up that song is on record, both with the arrangements and the mixing treatment of it by Bruce Botnick. It's just a song that is its own little world within those few minutes and a great piece of writing on Van Dyke’s part. 

"Van Dyke Parks"

Van Dyke Parks: The sinking of the Titanic, to me, was a great archetype. It shows the feckless folly of all human endeavor. I wanted to treat it with sobriety and sincerity because this was one of the big blows to me. This was such an astonishing brutality to me when I heard about the Titanic when I was a kid, that was as big as how they shot the Russian family in Russia, the Czar and his children. Man, I just couldn't understand. Or the Jews in Dachau. I was deadly serious about this, putting the Titanic in there and showing and celebrating that aspect of my own experience. But I had heard somewhere along the line from I think the songwriter Jim Ford, “happy songs sell records, sad songs sell beer.” Well, you know, I didn't have that wisdom when I did Song Cycle. I only had to do what I knew. I had to do what Lit 101 told me, I had to accept the fact that it would eventually be a self reckoning in a way.

"Public Domain"

Van Dyke Parks: (Plays “Public Domain” intro on piano). That's why there's a Mexican ostinato here. This record, to me, is as much a musical reference guide as Howard Zinn’s American Encyclopedia. And I really think it's got that capacity to question, and also it shows great inability. But it shows great desire and that desire is to serve and to be useful to other people and to entertain. Like Phil Ochs said, my good friend Phil Ochs said, “In such ugly times, beauty is the only true protest.”

Richard Henderson: He kinda like flipped the thing where “Public Domain” was credited to Van Dyke Parks, “Van Dyke Parks” was credited to Public Domain. It was just this funny little mind game he was playing at the time. There's no underestimating the significance of mind games at that point in time. I mean, people, especially if they had anything like an education as Van Dyke did, but we're also into better living through chemistry. The whole mind game aspect and “Let's play these little Joycian games with words and what we can do,” “Public Domain,” very much a part of that. Again, farkle implementation there on the harp. And again, this construction of a landscape. You know, you can hear the wind through the telephone wires on that one. You know, it's very much an environmental piece as most of the pieces on the record. And again, bring up Brian Eno, somebody who has cited Song Cycle as a favorite thing. And actually in one of his interviews, Eno defined Song Cycle as a record that only other musicians bought. He was very good at summarizing that. He was the source, of course, of that quote about The Velvet Underground, you know, “Their first record sold 20,000 copies, every one of those people started a band.” Well for Song Cycle, he's brought that up in interviews too, saying, you know, “Only other musicians could get that record. That's the record that musicians buy. And the regular folks with stereos don’t.”

Van Dyke Parks: If you're gonna go out there and be bare naked, you know, on a bucking bronco, you're revealing yourself. You might as well explore these components of personality. And I thought that was important . Of course, it was very shortsighted of me. I forgot that people might listen to this record. But I'm telling you the truth as we speak, that was beyond my comprehension. I could not imagine that anybody was gonna listen to this.

“Donovan’s Colours”

Van Dyke Parks: I did variations on the simple tune, a Do-Re-Mi tune called “Colours.” And I did whatever I could (plays Do-Re-Mi melody on piano). That was a good clarinet part. And it was just a little bijou, it was a tribute to Donovan. I felt so sorry for him cause everyone said he was a wannabe Bob Dylan. I felt sorry for the guy. I've always loved the underdog and a beautiful tune. Why not do it? So I did it and I thought it was wonderful.

When I did “Donovan's Colours,” you will hear a, it's called reiterated tremolando, marimba. I can't play marimba that well, but I had to. So I recorded the marimba at 7.5 inches per second, and then played it back normally at 15 ips. It achieved an octave. Now, nobody told me Pythagoras wasn't alive, and I'm no mathematician, but nobody told me that doubling the tape speed would create an octave differential. And isn't that great?

In “Donovan's Colours,” we were on three track tape, by the way, sir. Three tracks, and you could not bounce an adjacent track. So we went quickly from three to four track. This is while Brian Wilson's got two eight tracks up in his home up in the Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills actually. We went to four track. We bounced three to four. Started with a piano, and I concocted this somewhat of an orchestrion, I intended. It reminded me of an orchestrion on the ancient Dutch instruments that played band music and so forth, and you'd find them in saloons in the United States, in the Old West.

I don't get reactions to Song Cycle, people want to avoid it. You know, one time Ry Cooder gave me a CD, he said, “Please take this, people are turning it down” (laughs). You know, nobody wants a CD, it's true, nobody wants nothing. They don't want to hear. We've lost that capacity. You know, it's like the shuffle mentality has put us on a kind of like a very fast referential schedule. But I don't think people would want to embarrass me or themselves by concluding anything about the work. But I get a sense that it has been a buoyant utility for many people who have been depressed. Because it seems like if this isn't informed optimism, I don't know what is.

“The Attic” 

Van Dyke Parks: Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns both told me that they worked to Song Cycle, they painted to Song Cycle. Art Spiegelman, famous for his Maus epic, told me I saved his life. I mean, that Song Cycle did. I can't fathom the degree of proprietary interpretation people would take over the abstractions of the work, but I'm delighted that that could happen.

That's important to me. It's important to me that I know that I'm, I'm no Puzoo, I can't tell people what to think. I wouldn't do that. But in Song Cycle, when you listen to it, you can tell the kid is stumbling around. There's an attic, looking through his father's war letters. What a psychologically damaged boy. He must come from a dysfunctional family or so.

Richard Henderson: “The Attic” is just this kind of the sweet and sour of memory and remembering more than you want to remember and how painful that can be. It's kind of an evaluation of nostalgia and a denial of nostalgia. Very interesting song. At one point with this record, cause I just lived inside this record for a long time in a way I've lived inside few others, but at one point I decided to let go of decoding things and to let him live beyond interpretation. And I think in a way, Van Dyke's lyrical content speaks to his own eloquence. It speaks to the way his mind works, it speaks to his experience certainly and the experiences of those around him, people like Steve Young, for instance. But ultimately, I think to pay him the best compliment would be to allow Van Dyke to live beyond interpretation.

“Laurel Canyon Blvd”

Richard Henderson: Certainly Laurel Canyon was a big thing, but not big enough that he couldn't make fun of it. The “seat of the beat to meet,” and I mean all that stuff, to lampoon it a little bit and think it was a little bit too rank and file for him. I mean, he's always gonna be an outsider. But you know, Van Dyke's very, always very aware of who's doing what. And he knew that he was there at a special point in history, the forment of the whole singer-songwriter thing, which he was in at the get go of. And the fact that Laurel Canyon was the place to be, people getting signed to big record deals, who before were living out of a garage and people, because they had the right hair and dressed well, could get deals. I mean, “This is a balloon, people. We've had gold rushes before. It never turns out well. Okay, something's gonna go up, it's gonna come down.” I always loved the little like slowed tape effect they did on that (sings low “down”). 

“By The People”

Van Dyke Parks: The violin, Misha Goodatieff, the violinist Misha Goodatieff, played at the balalaika restaurant on Melrose. It's gone. Right next to Paramount Studios. It was in there that the violinist almost stabbed my mother in the eye when she came to visit me when I took her to a Russian restaurant. A poor immigrant. Who had nothing else to declare about his opportunity, show business opportunities in LA. How about it? I insisted that he (laughs and plays violin part on piano) do some kind of a diminished flourish or something. There is on this album, I believe there is a sense of confirmation to try to confirm people. Yes, I think that that's very important. Now even like say in this, in a present age, in this era of multiculturalism, and you'll know in Song Cycle, I was thinking about it. That's why I had a balalaika orchestra with five people. Have you ever seen a bass balalaika? Incredible! It's like a huge triangle. It's bigger than a cello. Oh man. And I had five of those Russians from, whence they sprang, had sprang, I don't know. 

Richard Henderson: Balalaika players on the record. And that was again, one of those situations where it's, let's find how many bars are empty in this little stretch of the multitrack tape so we can plug in the balalaika player and get out before we erase the thing that we've already got on the tape that's coming up next. I cannot emphasize the riskiness of doing that kind of thing. That was the kind of odds they were up against doing Song Cycle, trying to fit extra parts in. Cause Van Dyke was very much a creature in the moment, spontaneous thought that was his engine. And to be able to, “Oh, I, I found this balalaika player in a restaurant, we gotta have him on, we gotta have him on this song.” And figuring out the little spaces. And they would sometimes jump from track to track, just have a continuous part running through the record. But they were out of tape real estate to do anything with. So they have to find these little empty bars, dead bars for the different players to slot in the guy here. The guy here. I would not have wanted to be in charge of that. That's like such a high wire act.

Van Dyke Parks: I was interested in multiculturalism. I am today and I think if you want to cross the aisle, and we must, try either the food or the language. I'm on the food right now. When I go to a Korean restaurant. This is a way to learn. And the arts will help. But we have this multiculturalism and you can sense that I was in going in that direction on Song Cycle. That was before I exposed my ambivalence about Russia. Because my brother had been in the State Department and died there in the Cold War and I fear Russia. And I'm very sorry that Russia has turned out to be the very beast that those right wing xenophobic Republicans in the fifties thought it was. At the time, “By the People,” the Cuban Missile Crisis was a fresh wound where we were caught in a strategic embarrassment and at risk in a nuclear age. I had come from a childhood of duck, you know, “Under the desk when you're told,” cause of the nuclear, people were building bomb shelters. So Russia was my armada. That's what I thought of it. I was worried. It might be some basic problem of misunderstanding. That's why I thought about the Czar. I just want to use that word. I've always feared the Czars, whether in the record business or anything else. I mean, I learned about Russian brutality to some degree. I had no idea it was this malignant. It's just very sad. And, and for all I knew, my brother was offed by a Russki for all I know. All I know is I had to put his body in the ground and Dean Rusk got his body flown to us so that we could put him in the ground. I'm telling you, this was a compacted caricature of my prejudices about Russia, and I didn't care if it belched. I just remember (laughs), I remember there were moments of (plays Russian melody). I wanted it to sound Slavic. The Beatles hadn't, just had not done “Back in the U.S.S.R.” It was squatter's rights. I just wanted to do this thing that illustrated the reality of Russia in the Cold War for Pete's sake. And I wasn't writing rhinestone cowboy songs, and I didn't care who got laid in the backseat of the truck. I was writing different kinds of songs.

Richard Henderson: Joe Smith, the president of the company, came in, heard it through and said, “Song Cycle, hmm. I don't hear the song.” And you know, you think you're gonna get a “Good Vibrations” out of this or you're gonna get something else, and it's just not like that. It's a different kind of record. And in a way it paved the way for a lot of records to come. And it was certainly the beginning of that whole thing of like, critics’ favorites. Favorites that the rock critics that got the records for free loved the records and the people who had to buy the records, didn't know what to make of it. Hence this hideous discrepancy between what the record cost to make and the enormity of the intent behind the record and invention behind the record versus this paltry commercial response.

Van Dyke Parks: I can't tell you what a great practicality Song Cycle turned out for me and in a way, for Warner Bros., in spite of their insultory publicity. 

Richard Henderson: Well Stan Cornyn, a real character, he kind of came out of that Playboy magazine, Esquire magazine in the sixties, shag rug culture. He was one of those guys. He was like a “Mad Men.” And so he cooked up this idea, he cooked up this campaign based on the fact that it cost a lot of money to make this record. As much money I think as any album had been budgeted to that point in history, aside from maybe Brian Wilson's “Good Vibrations” sessions, you know, like “That much money to make a single?” So, you know, a lot of money spent on this record by someone who no one knew. And so he kind of started just being very literal about, “Okay, here's how much we still have to recoup on this record in big, bold Helvetica type across the top of the ad with a picture of Van Dyke from the cover and like, “Yeah, it's looking dark for the Song Cycle.” And you know, all this other stuff kind of making light of what a dismal commercial performance this record had done to date. So Van Dyke actually chased, Cornyn down in the hallway at Warner’s, you know, wanting to know if he was trying to destroy his career. You know, like, “Oh here's how badly my record's done, now the record company's making fun of it.”

Van Dyke Parks: At Warner Bros., I've been around a lot of heroes and a lot of villains. And I was just glad that they could write me off as a deduction. The U.S. citizens paid for that effort. And then of course they charged me the same amount, which was 32,000 bucks. They took it up to 37 because they made an album cover that was not acceptable to me. They made an album cover they were gonna throw at me called, “You Are Now Entering Van Dyke Parks.” And I said to them through my attorney, “No, they're not entering Van Dyke Parks. It's not gonna happen to me. They're not gonna do that.” Wasn't that glib? So I had to have the artwork changed. That was the first time the art department had been contested. Then here comes Randy Newman. I got a call cause I co-produced Randy Newman with Lenny Waronker, his first album. And I got a call from I.G. Newman, Irving G. Newman, my doctor, my doctor, my diagnostician, Randy's father. He said, “Get that fucking album reprinted. Get that fucking thing reprinted. What are you doing to my son? Referring to my son as that pudgy Hoagy Carmichael. That Nazi bastard get his name off my son's record.” Yeah, the doctor called me, so I had to turn down the art department once again and I generally left that industry having served as a bureaucrat, I couldn't take it. I did it to get back to work and enjoy the epiphany moments that I found in Song Cycle.

"Pot Pourri"

Richard Henderson: That record went through, this shows you how quickly technology was changing at that point in time. And so he started on 4-track, went to eight tracks, went up to sixteen tracks. But 16-track, I think came in right at the end of that. And the kind of postscript track at the end of the record, which is just Van Dyke playing piano and singing by himself. It's the simplest thing on the record. And that just occupied, they got 16-track to use, he used two tracks of the 16-track to do that (laughs). So that's kind of funny. But yeah, just Van Dyke, and he described it as, he wanted it to seem like someone in the far corner of a room by a window playing piano. And so it has this sort of distant, roomy feel to it. 

He described the setting for it, how he wanted someone in their mind listening to the record to picture someone sitting by a window with a piano, watching somebody outside watching this gardener, who I met later. Gardner, worked with Van Dyke forever. 

Van Dyke Parks: I studied the Japanese gardener. They're gone. They're gone. They're no more Japanese gardeners. It's all mow and blow and it's Latino. It's all the big gasoline machines. It's the Noise Brigade. You can't think. I'd like to re-release Song Cycle, however, there are just two components that I'm still looking for. Warner's Archives can't find “Pot Pourri” and “Van Dyke Parks,” the sinking of the Titanic. They can't find two components of the piece. That shows a problem in archiving. So as we speak or as I am heard, this thing called Song Cycle has been in large part erased. We are, many of us of that era are being erased because we don't migrate to new formats or in the absence of a format, a platform.

I was disappointed in many ways with Song Cycle because I didn't get what I wanted, but I got what I deserved and finally. Because it became a utility for me and I then went on to serve other people. And I think if you listen to Song Cycle, if you're tolerant, And if you've ever seen a Rauschenberg, I had one hanging on the wall. But you see this pastiche, a collage, as it were, It was big, it was fashionable. And it is, to me, pop art. I really think it's got the pop art. 

Richard Henderson: He describes himself at the time as a pop artist. He didn't think what he was doing was so different than what Andy Warhol was doing with soup cans or what Roy Lichtenstein was doing with comic book Ben-Day Dots. He was a pop artist and he was reflecting a lot of things in culture, especially in his local culture, you know, the culture that prized Laurel Canyon as this sort of hotbed of creativity and the place to be. And, you know, he took note of all these things and included them. It was all grist for his mill. In some ways listening to Song Cycle’s like twirling the dial on a radio and having it come up musical instead of just Dadaistic static. You know, it's like, “Here comes a pedal steel, here comes a synthesizer, here comes this, here comes that.” 

Van Dyke Parks: I think it is a very, a desperately, fiercely optimistic record. And the legacy I think is basically its influence on the technology that informed it. I think people learned how to do stuff by my having learned how to do stuff. 

Richard Henderson: Well Song Cycle's a very American record. It's a very forward thinking record, but it's got one foot firmly anchored in the past. Song Cycle represents the confluence of resources and talent and a bull economy in the country at a time when those things met in a way that they probably wouldn't meet ever again. But he made something new under the sun. And that's a big reason why I still love this record, why, you know, people like Joanna Newsom grab him to work with him. You know, because it has enduring value. 

Van Dyke Parks: But the thing is, I think that everybody senses that, whether it would be Grizzly Bear or my beloved, I love that guy from the Fleet Foxes, Robin. Some of these indie groups that say they have been influenced by my work or aware of it. I think that they understand we have an urgency, which is, it’s not cute to mute, and we need to stay involved in our work and agitate the sensibilities through some way. And I do that in the best way I can. We found out things about the studio and Song Cycle I think was a positive instrument even for those who detested its oblivion or pretense. One person I remember, isn't a funny, you can't forget it, one person called it “the Edsel of pop music.” So this is what I speak of when I speak of the authority of failure. I have received that. Crow tastes fine. I've received that. My joy has been in doing it. 

Outro: 

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Van Dyke Parks. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a  link to purchase Song Cycle. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

“Vine Street” (Randy Newman)

“Palm Desert” (Van Dyke Parks)

“Widow’s Walk” (Van Dyke Parks)

“The All Golden” (Van Dyke Parks)

“Laurel Canyon Blvd” (Van Dyke Parks)

“Van Dyke Parks” (Public Domain)

“Public Domain” (Van Dyke Parks)

“Donovan’s Colours” (Donovan Leitch)

“The Attic” (Van Dyke Parks)

“Laurel Canyon Blvd” (Van Dyke Parks)

“By the People” (Van Dyke Parks)

“Pot Pourri” (Van Dyke Parks)

℗ All songs BMI, except “Donovan’s Colours,” ASCAP

© 1968 Warner Bros. Records.

Produced by Leonard Waronker

Accordion – Carl Fortina

Advisor, Conductor – Kirby Johnson

Balalaika – Allan Reuss, Leon Stewart, Nicolai Bolin, Thomas Tedesco, Vasil Crienica, William Nadel

Brass – Arthur Briegleb, Richard Hyde, Richard Perissi, Thomas Shepard, Vincent De Rosa

Choir [Authentic Folk Choir] – Billie J. Barnum, Durrie Parks, Gaile Parks, Gerri Engemann, James Hendricks, Julia E. Rinker, Karen Gunderson, Nick Woods, Paul Jay Robbins, Vanessa Hendricks

Contractor – Donald Lanier, Tommy Tedesco

Effects – El Supremo, Jack Glaser

Engineer – Lee Herschberg

Engineer [Stereo & Monaural Compositions By] – Bruce Botnick

Guitar – Dick Rosmini, Ron Elliott

Harp – Gayle Levant

Percussion – Earl Palmer, Gary Coleman, Hal Blaine, James Gordon

Performer – Steve Young

Piano – George Washington Brown (tracks: B2), Randy Newman (tracks: A1)

Producer – Leonard Waronker

Strings – Armand Kaproff, Charles Berghofer, Darrel Terwilliger, Dennis Budimer, Donald Bagley, Frederick Seykora, Gregory Bemko, Harry Bluestone, Jerry Reisler, Jesse Erlich, Joseph Ditullio, Joseph Saxon, Leonard Malarsky, Leonard Selic, Lyle Ritz, Nathan Gershman, Philip Goldberg, Ralph Schaffer, Orville (Red) Rhodes, Robert West, Samuel Boghossian, Trefoni Rizzi, William Kurasch

Viola [Solo] – Virginia Majewski

Violin [Solo] – Misha Goodatieff

Woodwind, Reeds – George Fields, Jay Migliori, James Horn, Norman Benno, Ted Nash, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Scott, William Green

Episode Credits:

Theme Music:

“Winter Cold” by North Home

Intro/Outro Music:

“Love Me” by ings from the Afterthought EP

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam