Song Cycle

33⅓ Main Series #74

by Richard Henderson

Posing more riddles than the average sphinx, with its decipherable answers pointing somewhere dark, Song Cycle was anything but passive. I had already witnessed hippie bands playing with their backs to the hall, so the thought of late '60s musicians being interested in their audience struck me as a concept bordering on revolutionary.

The debut album from songwriter and pianist Van Dyke Parks, Song Cycle first appeared in 1968 on Warner Brothers Records. Its twelve songs led listeners through Joycean wordplay and sound collages to reveal messages of dissent and personal loss, at odds with Parks' buoyant, riotously eclectic music. Monumentally ambitious and equally expensive, Song Cycle resembled a film - possibly Citizen Kane - more than the pop music of its day; like Kane, Parks' masterwork was adored by critics yet all but ignored by paying customers. In his efforts to plumb the mysteries of this quixotic record and its subsequent fate, Richard Henderson interviews several of the key figures involved with Song Cycle, notably Parks himself and producer Lenny Waronker.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2008

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

For years i have purchased and sold back my various copies of Van Dyke Park's "Song Cycle." There are albums one gets right away, and then there are others that are a total head scratcher. And for me, "Song Cycles" is an album to this day I don't have an understanding of it. Yet I keep downloading/buying this album. Mostly due to friends who swear to this album, but also there are sounds on this record that doesn't leave me. It is so eccentric, and believe me I own and love a lot of 'strange' recordings. But "Song Cycle" is like listening to someone's inner thoughts that are not connected to other thoughts.

Richard Henderson's short book (part of the great 33 1/3 series) on "Song Cycle" and its making is an essential text to this weirdo album. One of the great things about the book is that it doesn't expose the mystery - because this is a recording that you are going to get or not get. And with frustration I have been stuck on the fork on the road where I don't know which avenue to take.

So in a nutshell for reasons I don't fully understand this album is quite remarkable, and its nice to have Henderson's text exploring "Song Cycle's" themes and early Americana, which to me, makes the U.S. a foreign world. Also it is great that something that was recorded 40 years ago is still a puzzle to the ears. I sense many future listenings to this particular sound known as "Song Cycle."

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here’s something we can’t deny Van Dyke Parks – Brian Wilson once explained : “I had written a piece of music and it went

da da da da da da da
da da da da da da
da da da da da da da da
da da da da da da da daaaaah

and I took it to Van Dyke Parks and he immediately wrote

My children were raised
you know they suddenly rose
they started slow long ago head to toe, healthy wealthy and wise

So I thought this is the guy for me”

By a man’s friends ye shall know him – Van Dyke played the organ on the Byrds’ 5 D (Fifth Dimension), played the crazy piano and produced the sunny Harper’s Bizarre stuff like Anything Goes, co-produced Randy Newman’s AND Ry Cooder’s first albums, and as we saw, wrote the lyrics for the ineffable album-psychodrama Smile. He also named Buffalo Springfield.

If you were churlish you might point out that Randy and Ry didn’t ask him back, and that after the disintegration of the Smile project poor old Brian was catatonic for 25 years. But that would be churlish.

HOW DID THIS TRULY STRANGE RECORD GET MADE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

By 1967 record companies were hiring young hipsters to help drag their whisky and soda asses into the florid end of the 1960s and the kind of thing the young hipsters did was to give each other ridiculous record deals so that because of the giant generation gap which in the 1960s was at its WIDEST EVER some young people got to make some quite crazy records which they would not have got within fifty miles of doing at any other time. The old guys had NO idea what this new psychedelical thing was so the next loony idea was just as loony as the last one to them. Try em all! One of them will be the million seller! We haven’t got a clue! So this is why they gave Van Dyke Parks age 24 a lot of money and an orchestra and balalaika players (several) and bass marimbas and seven months to do whatever he wanted.

Song Cycle was eventually released in 1968.

1968 – my favourite year in popular and unpopular music. Consider :

THE NOTORIOUS BYRD BROTHERS The Byrds
WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT The Velvet Underground
THE HANGMAN’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER The Incredible String Band
A SONG TO A SEAGULL Joni Mitchell
GALLERIES The Young Tradition
BOOKENDS Simon & Garfunkel
MY PEOPLE WERE FAIR AND HAD SKY IN THEIR HAIR Tyrannosaurus Rex
FRIENDS The Beach Boys
A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS Pink Floyd
SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO The Byrds
MUSIC IN A DOLL’S HOUSE Family
IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD The Moody Blues
MUSIC FROM BIG PINK The Band
WEE TAM AND THE BIG HUGE The Incredible String Band
THIS WAS Jethro Tull
ELECTRIC LADYLAND Jimi Hendrix Experience
STRICTLY PERSONAL Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band
THE WHITE ALBUM The Beatles
THE DOUGHNUT IN GRANNY’S GREENHOUSE The Bonzo Dog Band
ASTRAL WEEKS Van Morrison
THE YELLOW PRINCESS John Fahey
THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE John Fahey

So, Song Cycle – some quotes

Warner Bros Records' then president Joe Smith :

Van Dyke’s record is such a milestone, it’s sailing straight into the Smithsonian Institute, completely bypassing the consumer.

From an Amazon review

Worst album of all time. Worse than the most pretentious excesses of Micky Dolenz in the late 60s. Worse than Crispin Glover's album The Big Problem Does Not Equal The Solution. Worse than William Shatner's album The Transformed Man or Leonard Nimoy singing Proud Mary. As bad as the singing of Hervé Villechaize, but at least Hervé spared us any vinyl releases. Quite stunning that any record company would fund such insipid trash or that any listener would share Parks' delusion that this was in any way meritorious

Some views from the website Rate Your Music

sometimes feels more like a science project than an album, but this is SUCH a unique approach to composition and arrangement that I can't help but admire this to the nth degree

*

Holy Christ this album is obnoxious.

*

Unfortunately I just dont like the songs and find the whole thing cloying and twee. Parks voice is also weak to the point of distraction no matter how many production ideas are thrown at it . Its a very pretentious and unenjoyable record

*

The result of all of Mr. Dyke's intellectualism: a kludge of an album. These songs flow so awkwardly that I almost feel like looking away at parts. It's a car accident in music form.

*

experimental art-song, eccentric orchestrations, candy-floss vocals, unintelligible lyrics. Not as eclectic as it pretends, as many of the tracks sound very similar in style and attitude. Outside the ambit of rock and pop music, and even psychedelia although it is vaguely psychedelic. The thin under-modulated, remote (though fairly clear sound), and barely intelligible lyrics, undermine whatever power it might have had.


VAN DYKE'S LYRICS

(note use of the following unusual song words: juxtaposed, toxicity, inasmuch, coots)


By Palm Desert to market to buy.
Tenderfoot up to date palms of the real estate.
By Palm Desert springs often run dry.

I came west unto Hollywood, never-never land.
Juxtaposed to B.B.D. and O.
Beyond San Fernando on hillside manors on the banks of toxicity those below and those above the same.

Just suppose the youngster knows he's had a good deal of fortune and up through the babble on the fair banks complicity, buy your leave or stay beyond the game.

Inasmuch as you are touched to have withstood by the very old search for the truth within the bounds of toxicity. Left unsung so I have strung the frame.

A Southwester in the yard invested with the garden and camped in concentration of a tall lilac to peel the rust off purple arbor. Time is not the main thought from under the rain wrought from roots that brought us coots to hoot and haul us all back to the prime ordeal. Dust off Pearl Harbor time.

What's that? What do I think of it? Oh - well... I did give it a listen today, all 33 minutes of it, and I did read this cute little book, so after all that I think I can safely say that I think Song Cycle is. Yes, that's it - Song Cycle definitely is.

[Paul Gleason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henderson's book on Song Cycle is an excellent entry in the 33 1/3 series. It's as multifaceted as Van Dyke Parks himself, covering Parks' biography, the recording process of Song Cycle (one of the best but least-listened-to records of the past century), the album's cover art, and the album's reception.

I won't spoil your reading of the book by telling you all the fascinating facts that Henderson provides about Parks' life. But here's a taster: when he was a boy, Parks sang to Albert Einstein's accompaniment.

It's cool that Henderson resists the temptation to dwell on Parks' involvement in SMiLE. He rightly acknowledges that Song Cycle exists in such temporal proximity to the record that Parks wrote with Brian Wilson that Parks' almost equally brilliant work is overshadowed by something that, until recently, was the stuff of legend.

But Parks did write those lyrics, as well as a few successful solo albums. In addition, he's collaborated with The Byrds, Randy Newman, U2, and Joanna Newsom, among many others.

Parks is that rare combination of musical genius and poetic mastermind. Imagine Dylan and Brian Wilson inhabiting the same body and you'll get the idea.

But, first and foremost, pick up a copy of Song Cycle - and be blown away by one of the most creative, interruptive, musically complex, and truly psychedelic albums of the twentieth century. The record came out in 1968 - and vies with Astral Weeks, Electric Ladyland, The Beatles, White Light/White Heat, and any other triumph you can think of from that year.

Parks is an American genius - an heir to Melville and Twain.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

For every success story in the Los Angeles music scene there is one of obscurity, as in Emmitt Rhodes, The Electric Prunes and The Screamers, to name just a few. They're not failures, more like obscurities, and Van Dyke Parks' "Song Cycle" album is another case in point. Willfully dense, insular and enigmatic to the point of xenophobia, "Song Cycle" was the darker-cum-autistic flip side to "Pet Sounds" sunny surrealism, even carrying the relay baton passed by Brian Wilson's train whistle at the end of "Caroline No" (in "The All Golden").

Richard Henderson attempts to explain it all to us with Parks vascillating between cooperation and still keeping it hazy, which is an artist's right. This makes the book, like the album, occasionally frustrating, because tracks aren't always explained completely in full. I found Parks' generosity in giving undrerpaid violinsts, harpists, folk singers and balalaika virtuosos their day in the sun genuinely touching. Truly a man by the people and for the people.

P.S. I read this book in Palm Desert (to market to buy) last weekend, no lie, and temperatures went up to 110 degrees. Within five minutes under the sun the binding totally melted and all the pages came spilling out from the covers. Truly a moment even Van Dyke would appreciate.

[peyton slepekis · Rating 3 out of 5]

there were a couple of neat anecdotes and stories sprinkled in with some cool stories from the recording sessions being the main highlights but i was kinda hoping for more of analyses of the compositions, lyrics, and their inspirations.

[dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up.

[A R · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do you make one of the best albums of all time boring? by inserting meaningless personal stories and unrelated facts to pad out a sub-100-page book

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good stuff indeed. VDP is a musical genius, and the opening half of this book brought some interesting new perspectives, though of course, I can't ever seem to fall in love with any of the song by song descriptions. I mean, it's like putting someone else's listening experience into your brain. Still, some good excerpts within, though still sort of middle of the road for the series.

[Karlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good overview of the album Song Cycle and ultimately the strange career of Van Dyke Parks. This is my second book in the 33 1/3 Series (it far surpasses the other I read on OK Computer), and Richard Henderson's love for the album is infectious and seems genuine.

[HTHI Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This was more interesting than some of the others in the series because both the album and the writer and old... While I'm not particularly interested in the 1950s or 60s, I gained a new respect for Van Dykes Parks and The Beach Boys." --Manny (Spring '15) ****

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

These little books could become a problematic habit. I have to avoid them. Sometimes I fail.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the most interesting fact was that Van Dyke Parks visited Malta while working on the Popeye soundtrack

[Jamison Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice entry in the series. Makes me want to track down this record I don't have.

[Salt344 · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful introduction to an iconic 1968 album and its fascinating creator.