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All Music Guide:
In a field where the term "genius" is handed out freely, Van Dyke Parks is the real article. As a session musician, composer, arranger, lyricist, and singer, he's contributed significantly to several decades' worth of inimitable masterpieces credited to other artists, as well as generating two or three masterpieces of his own. Born in Hattiesburg, MS, in 1941, he was a musical prodigy and attended the American Boychoir School in Princeton, NJ. He studied the clarinet and also worked as a child actor, on-stage and on television, co-starring with Ezio Pinza in the 1953 comedy series Bonino, and also working in movies, including Grace Kelly's final film, The Swan (1958).
He remained dedicated to music, however, and studied at the Carnegie Institute and majored in music at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1964, a year after graduating, he was signed to MGM Records as a recording artist, releasing "Come to the Sunshine," which had some local chart action in Phoenix, AZ, and threatened to do something nationally without succeeding. (It did promise enough to require that Parks put together a band to back him on-stage, whose members included a young Stephen Stills.) He became a session musician and worked with Sonny & Cher (when they were "Anthony & Cleopatra"), as well as playing sessions for producer Terry Melcher on records by Paul Revere & the Raiders and other artists. On the Byrds' Fifth Dimension album he played the Hammond B-3 organ, and he also played keyboards on sessions for Judy Collins, and arranged songs for Tim Buckley.
It was also Melcher who got Parks together in 1966 with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. A prodigiously gifted composer, Wilson was no lyricist, and he needed one who could match the daring new music he was devising in his head -- this resulted in their collaboration on the SMiLE album. Initially, only "Heroes and Villains" emerged from their work together as a modest hit single but a well-loved one, and the project languished over Wilson's worsening emotional and mental state in 1967. Fragments and pieces of the project turned up on ensuing albums into the early '70s, and Parks also played a key role in completing a song, "Sail on Sailor," that gave the Beach Boys a rare early-'70s single success. (In an early-'80s interview, incidentally, Parks said -- without blame or recriminations -- that he had never received a penny in royalties from his work with Wilson or the sales of the Beach Boys' records, a situation that was no doubt tied to the confusion surrounding the sale and ownership of their publishing, which was later nullified.)
In 1967, as work on SMiLE came to a halt, Parks was lured to the newly invigorated Warner Bros. label by producer/A&R chief Lenny Waronker. His new professional berth led to a single, "Donovan's Colours," credited to "George Washington Brown," and its response -- especially a pioneering piece of pop/rock criticism by journalist Richard Goldstein -- helped redefine "rock" as distinct from rock & roll. Parks and Waronker were responsible for transforming the Tikis into the pop/rock novelty act Harpers Bizarre, which became a new success for the label. Out of their work together, and all of these other projects -- and the creative stew that Waronker had set boiling at Warner Bros. and its new sister label, Reprise -- grew Parks' Song Cycle, a debut album that was the very definition of the word "eclectic," incorporating folk, classical, Broadway, ragtime, jazz, '50s pop, and rock & roll influences. It won the Record of the Year Award from High Fidelity/Stereo Review, and although it never sold in big numbers, the LP stayed in print for nearly two decades.
He then did session work with a variety of artists, not releasing his second album, Discover America, which revealed his immersion in Trinidadian music, until 1972. Clang of the Yankee Reaper, another eclectic collection, followed in 1976. But Parks maintained his "day job" -- film work on scores by Ry Cooder and others, writing and arranging for Shelley Duvall's children's TV series, and other pursuits. Finally, in 1984 came the brilliant Jump!, a concept album (and proposed stage musical) based on the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris. It was followed in 1989 by Tokyo Rose, which concerned the state of American-Japanese relations. In 1998, he released a live album, and in the next decade he collaborated anew with Brian Wilson, who finally released a finished realization of SMiLE with new recordings on the Nonesuch label in 2004. (By that time, however, dozens of unauthorized bootleg editions of tracks from the 1967 sessions had surfaced, to the delight of fans.) Two years later, Parks began contributing lyrics to another Brian Wilson project, That Lucky Old Sun, as well as lending his arrangements to Silverchair's Young Modern (his second collaboration with the Australian band) and Inara George's An Invitation.
Wikipedia:
Van Dyke Parks (born January 3, 1943) is an American composer, arranger, producer, musician, singer, author and actor. Parks is perhaps best known for his collaborations with Brian Wilson, and especially for his contributions as a lyricist to the Beach Boys album Smile and Wilson's 2008 solo project, "That Lucky Old Sun (A Narrative)".
Parks has worked with such notable performers as Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, Haruomi Hosono, The Byrds, Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Joanna Newsom, Inara George, Keith Moon, Frank Zappa, and Ringo Starr.
In addition to producing, Parks has released seven studio albums of his own recordings: Song Cycle, Discover America, Clang of the Yankee Reaper, Jump!, Tokyo Rose, Songs Cycled, and with Brian Wilson, Orange Crate Art. He has also released a live album, Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove.
Early career [edit]
Born in 1943 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi as the youngest of four children, he reared in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Parks attended the American Boychoir School in Princeton, New Jersey. He began his career as a child actor. Between 1953 and 1958 he worked steadily in films and television, including the 1956 movie The Swan (which starred Grace Kelly). He appeared as Ezio Pinza's son Andrew Bonino on the NBC television show Bonino. One of his costars on Bonino was 14-year-old Chet Allen, who appeared as Jerry Bonino. Parks and Allen were roommates at the Boychoir School. Parks also had a recurring role as Little Tommy Manacotti (the kid from upstairs) on Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners.
During his childhood, Parks became extremely fond of old-style American music, most notably the sounds of Tin Pan Alley. This interest in Depression-era songwriting would correlate heavily with his artistic goals and interests during the 1960s and beyond.
Parks originally studied the clarinet, but had moved to the piano before enrolling (majoring in music) at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he studied from 1960 to 1963 and developed an interest in Mexican music. In January 1963 Parks learned to play the guitar; upon dropping out of Carnegie Tech, he relocated to Los Angeles to play with his older brother Carson Parks (writer of "Somethin' Stupid") as The Steeltown Two (later enlarged to the Steeltown Three), which eventually became the folk group The Greenwood County Singers. (Parks took a short hiatus from this group, moving to New England to be part of The Brandywine Singers). Around this time, his older brother Benjamin Parks was killed while serving in the Vietnam war.
Parks reacted strongly to Beatlemania. Of it, he claimed "I lived under a billboard that said 'The Beatles is coming,' and I got the sense that it was a plague, and that it was going to have cultural implication throughout the world...It's almost like the vestigial functions, the appendixes of the musical life that I had just begun to have a scant association with were begin excised from the body of music with the advent of folk music gone electric. So I started to learn piano." He has repeatedly stated his annoyance with contemporary pop music during the mid-1960s and the culture's increasing anglophilia, going so far as to say, "apart from Pet Sounds I didn't find anything striking coming out of the United States."
By 1964, Parks had an artist contract at MGM Records. In 1966 he was persuaded by producer Lenny Waronker to switch to Warner Bros. Records. During this time he worked frequently as a session musician, arranger and songwriter. Parks met Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson through Terry Melcher (who was then producing The Byrds). During 1966, Parks performed on The Byrds album Fifth Dimension (David Crosby had once asked Parks to consider forming a group prior to the formation of the Byrds, but Parks refused) as well as on the ill-fated Beach Boys project Smile. Also during this period, Parks' compositions, such as the hit "High Coin" for Harpers Bizarre, were becoming known for their lyrical wordplay and sharp imagery.
In 1965 Van Dyke briefly joined Frank Zappa's The Mothers of Invention on stage, where he was referred to as "Pinocchio".
Smile [edit]
Van Dyke Parks initially became aware of The Beach Boys during their early popularity in the early 1960s. Speaking on them in 1995, "I knew they didn't surf ... I felt some resentment about [them], and I had been a fan of 4 Freshmen and 5 Trombones ... Instinctively, I was not a Beach Boy fan. 'Something really dumb about it.'" He added that, "I loved Pet Sounds, you see. I came back to love them, and thought they had done a great job. It seemed to me that they would be fine in fighting spirit to take on this challenge of resting that trophy out of the hands of those interlopers."
In February 1966, Parks became acquainted socially with Brian Wilson, chief songwriter of the Beach Boys. In Wilson's ghostwritten 1993 autobiography, it was said that he gave his first impressions of Parks as being "a skinny kid with a unique perspective", and that he "had a fondness for amphetamines" at the time. Parks hesitantly confirmed this, but added "Those were his amphetamines. They were in his medicine cabinet. I'd never had amphetamines. I was working for Brian Wilson at 3:30 AM when he wanted to have his amphetamines."
Unsatisfied with Pet Sounds collaborator Tony Asher's lyrics for "Good Vibrations", Wilson first asked Parks to help him re-write the lyrics to the song; Parks declined, stating that he didn't think he could improve on them. During the recording of "Good Vibrations" in 1966, Parks suggested to Wilson that he have cellos playing eighth notes.
Brian Wilson soon convinced Parks to write lyrics for the Beach Boys' next LP, the ambitious but ill-fated Smile. In preparation for the writing and recording of the album, Wilson purchased several thousand dollars worth of marijuana and hashish for him and his friends including Parks.
In light of Wilson's increasingly fragile mental state, the group tensions and his signing to Warner Bros., Parks' involvement in Smile effectively ceased in March 1967, where he left to begin work on Song Cycle. Giving his reasons, "I walked away from the situation as soon as I realized that I was causing friction between him and his other group members, and I didn't want to be the person to do that. I thought that was Brian's responsibility to bring definition to his own life. I stepped in, perhaps, I 'took a leap before I looked'. I don't know, but that's the way I feel about it. As soon as I found out that—as soon as I found out I was entering an eat or be eaten situation—I was raised differently. I didn't want to be part of that game." Recording sessions ground to a halt soon after, as Wilson became increasingly withdrawn, and the album was shelved a few months later.
Recording artist [edit]
In 1968, Parks released his first solo album, Song Cycle (produced by his friend Lenny Waronker) which combined orchestral textures and traditional Americana-meets-psychedelic pop song structure. AllMusic's Jason Ankeny has described the album as
an audacious and occasionally brilliant attempt to mount a fully orchestrated, classically minded work within the context of contemporary pop. As indicated by its title, Song Cycle is a thematically coherent work, one which attempts to embrace the breadth of American popular music; bluegrass, ragtime, show tunes -- nothing escapes Parks' radar, and the sheer eclecticism and individualism of his work is remarkable. ...[T]he album is both forward-thinking and backward-minded, a collision of bygone musical styles with the progressive sensibilities of the late '60s; while occasionally overambitious and at times insufferably coy, it's nevertheless a one-of-a-kind record, the product of true inspiration.
Song Cycle established Parks' signature approach of mining and updating old American musical traditions, including ragtime and New Orleans-style jazz, and includes the Randy Newman song "Vine Street". The album reportedly cost more than US$35,000 to produce, making it one of the most expensive pop albums ever recorded up to that time. Despite rave critical reviews, it sold very poorly so Warner Bros publicist Stan Cornyn wrote a tongue-in-cheek advertisement hoping to promote it. Opening with a declaration that the label had "lost $35,509 on 'the album of the year' (dammit)", the ad suggested that those who had purchased the album had probably worn their copies out by playing it over and over, and encouraged listeners to send these supposedly worn-out copies back to Warner Bros, who would exchange it for two new copies, including one "to educate a friend with". Incensed by the tactic, Parks accused Cornyn of trying to kill his career.
Although Smile had dissolved, Parks' collaborations with Wilson hadn't for the time being. He was instrumental in getting the Beach Boys signed to Reprise, contributed vocally to "A Day in the Life of a Tree" and the writing of "Sail On, Sailor".
In September 1970, Parks was given the job of heading the audio/visual department of Warner Bros. records. This department was the earliest of its kind to record videos to promote records.
In 1972, Parks' travels to the West Indies inspired his second solo album Discover America. Discover America was a tribute to the islands of Trinidad and Tobago and to calypso music. Parks re-arranged and re-produced obscure songs and calypso classics. This direction was continued in the 1976 release Clang of the Yankee Reaper.
One year later, Parks was brought in to produce the third album by influential Japanese folk rock band Happy End. Sometime after, he became acquainted with member Haruomi Hosono, whom of which would go on to be one of the founding members of the extremely influential electronic band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Parks went on to produce his solo album Hosono House, and for the next few decades participated in several future projects by him.
Although he had only recorded two albums in the span of 13 years, he performed on a multitude of albums recorded by friends who were working in or around the Los Angeles music scene. During this time, Parks dealt with prescription drug abuse. He would later say of himself as being "dead for five years", and spent the former half of the decade "trying to regain an interest in living". After Clang of the Yankee Reaper, Van Dyke quit his day job at Warner Bros. and "retreated from further record interests, seeking the more gregarious plain-speaking of the film community...with no less satisfaction". He would spend the next several years focusing more on motion picture projects, such as arranger for Popeye and musical director for The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour, taking on as much work as he could to stay out of unemployment.
Parks made a slight comeback with the 1984 album Jump! which featured songs adapted from the stories of Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit. The album exhibits a Broadway-style reduced orchestra plus Americana additions like banjo, mandolin, and steel drums. Parks composed the album but did not arrange or produce it. Martin Kibbee contributed to the lyrics.
By 1984, Parks was refused future collaborations with Wilson, instead being informed by an unnamed representative that "Mike Love is Brian Wilson's exclusive collaborator". Though Parks would work with the other Beach Boys on songs such as on "Kokomo" and the Summer in Paradise album, he would not work together with Wilson until a few years later, during the aborted Sweet Insanity album.
During the mid-1980s, Parks wrote a series of children's books (Jump (with Malcolm Jones), Jump Again and Jump on Over), based around the Br'er rabbit tales, illustrated by Barry Moser, and loosely accompanied by Parks' own album Jump!. The books contain sheet music for selected songs from the album.
Following Jump!, in 1989 Warner Brothers released Tokyo Rose. This concept album focuses on the history of Japanese/U.S. relations from the 19th century to the "trade war" of the time of its release. The songs are pop tunes with an orchestral treatment including Japanese instruments and old Parks Caribbean favorites like steel drums. The album did not sell well and was not widely critically noticed.
Parks published a book called Fisherman & His Wife in 1991, which came packaged with a cassette.
Parks teamed up again with Brian Wilson in early 1995 to create the album Orange Crate Art. Parks wrote all of the songs on the album, except "This Town Goes Down At Sunset" and George Gershwin instrumental "Lullaby", with vocals by Wilson. Orange Crate Art is a tribute to the Southern California of the early 1900s, and a lyrical tribute to the beauty of Northern California.
1998 saw the release of Parks' first live album, Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove, which shows a love of the work of 19th-century American pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk as well as performances of several of Parks' better (and lesser) known songs. The live ensemble includes Sid Page as concertmaster.
In 2004, following the great success of his acclaimed live performances of the Beach Boys Pet Sounds album, and with the support of his band's musical director Darian Sahanaja, Wilson made the surprise announcement that he was going to finish the mythical record using his current touring band. He contacted Parks, who helped fill in gaps in the original lyrics, and the duo re-recorded the album and then presented it on a world tour, beginning with the world premiere performance at the Royal Festival Hall in London, which Parks attended.
Parks followed up this collaboration by providing some lyrics to That Lucky Old Sun (A Narrative), this time with almost completely new compositions written again by Brian Wilson.
In November 2011, after 44 years, a compilation box set of sessions from The Beach Boys' Smile was finally released by Capitol Records. Parks was personally absent from its advertising campaign and liner notes, and refused to comment on the box set despite initially giving his approval. After Mike Love suggested that Smile collapsed due to drug use in a promotional interview, Parks responded with a post on his web site that accused Love of "revising facts".
In March 2013, Parks announced the release of Songs Cycled, the first album of new material since 1995's Orange Crate Art. The album is set to be released May 6, 2013 through Bella Union and will feature new originals, collaborations, and cover tracks, along with re-recordings of older tracks, and guest spots from singers Gaby Moreno and Inara George of The Bird and the Bee.
Film and television work [edit]
Parks has also scored a myriad of music for feature-length motion pictures and television shows, including Sesame Street 's Follow That Bird, Jack Nicholson's The Two Jakes and Goin' South, Casual Sex?, Private Parts, Popeye (with Harry Nilsson), and The Company, and for the Pee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special.
Disney hired Parks to arrange Terry Gilkyson's Academy Award nominated song "The Bare Necessities" for the 1967 animated feature The Jungle Book. Parks had four songs featured in the 1987 Disney film, The Brave Little Toaster. He worked closely with David Newman on the film's score as well. He composed the theme song for Rudy Maxa's Savvy Traveler radio program on NPR.
The HBO Family series Harold and the Purple Crayon, is narrated by Sharon Stone with music and lyrics written and sung by Parks.
Parks composed the faux-psychedelic song "Black Sheep" (a parody of Smile and Brian Wilson's style in general) for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, sung by John C. Reilly, who portrays the titular character.
Parks has taken small TV and film roles including appearances in Popeye, The Two Jakes, and as Leo Johnson's defense attorney Jack Racine in episode #2005 of Twin Peaks.
Work for other artists [edit]
During the 1980s and 1990s, Parks grew considerably more active in arranging and producing albums by independent artists.
Parks has produced, arranged, or played on albums by artists including Delaney Bramlett, Vic Chesnutt, U2, Cher, Sam Phillips, Frank Black, The Beau Brummels, The Manhattan Transfer, Medicine, Sixpence None the Richer, Carly Simon, Little Feat, T-Bone Burnett, Stan Ridgway, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Victoria Williams, Bonnie Raitt, Peter Case, Gordon Lightfoot, Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow, The Everly Brothers, Saint Etienne, The Thrills, Scissor Sisters, Laurie Anderson, and Susanna Hoffs/Matthew Sweet's covers collection.
He and David Mansfield are co-credited with the music for the 2006 mini-series Broken Trail. He also contributed orchestrations to the Danger Mouse produced second album by UK psychedelic three piece The Shortwave Set in 2008.
He also composed orchestral arrangements for Silverchair's fourth album, Diorama, released in 2002, contributing orchestral arrangements on "Across The Night", "Tuna In The Brine", and "Luv Your Life". He returned for the following Young Modern album in 2007, providing orchestral arrangements on "If You Keep Losing Sleep", "Those Thieving Birds/Strange Behavior", and "All Across The World". Daniel Johns, the band's lead singer, traveled to Prague with Parks to have the arrangements recorded by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. The album's title is a nickname Parks uses for Johns.
In 2006 he collaborated with singer Joanna Newsom on the orchestral arrangements for her second album, Ys, which received widespread critical acclaim.
Parks worked with Inara George on a record released in 2008, An Invitation, and they performed two songs together on 8 January 2008 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, as part of the program Concrete Frequency: Songs of the City.
Parks is a guest musician on Echo by Mari Iijima, released in August 2009. Iijima sang "Calypso," on Parks' album Tokyo Rose.
In 2009, Parks performed in The People Speak, a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Parks performed with Bob Dylan and Ry Cooder on the documentary broadcast on Dec. 13, 2009 on the History Channel. They played "Do Re Mi" and reportedly a couple of other Guthrie songs that were excluded from the final edit.
Parks performed as a guest artist on the Grant Geissman Cool Man Cool album released in 2009.
