1
SONG CYCLE
One recent afternoon, I padded upstairs to my bedroom, dug up some legal weed I had stashed in a drawer, and got stoned. It was just after lunch, usually the most productive part of my workday, and the late summer sun illuminated my midday indulgence in clear, withering light. Back in my basement office ten minutes later, I donned my fancy Bose headphones (noise-canceling, consciousness-consuming, sonically perfected to some canine ear degree) and crawled under my desk to escape all other stimuli. I had important work to do. I clicked the Play button on my iTunes, lay down on the floor, and closed my eyes, preparing to hear—I mean really hear—Van Dyke Parks’s 1967 album, Song Cycle, for the first time.
Full disclosure: I’ve owned a copy of Song Cycle for at least twenty years and have listened to it, or tried to, dozens of times. I had known the record’s legend for probably twenty years before I bought it, and had come to admire the music in its grooves even as I found it inscrutable and—how can I put this?—an experience that was something other than fun. And I like eccentric art. But Song Cycle threw me off time after time. It requires your full attention and a willingness to open your ears and your mind, cut loose every expectation of popular music you might possess and let it take you over.
So, I went under my desk. No one else was in the house. The lights were dark, and so was my cell phone. Cut off, I willed the modern world away: the Twitter rage, the sanctity of shareholder value, the desiccated dreams, the institutionalized fuckery, the fact that everything is worse than it’s ever been—but when has that not been true?
In 1967, Van Dyke Parks, a twenty-four-year-old classically trained composer and pianist with his antennae tuned to the avant-most edge of the garde, came to his latest opportunity with wild ambitions. Given a multi-album contract with Warner Bros. Records (WBR), a deal that came with a big recording budget, creative control, and no deadline, Parks composed songs for an original album that would marry his intricately orchestrated music with Delphic lyrics invoking the dreams and disasters of America’s past while also opening new horizons for musical and spiritual exploration. Like the Beatles’ in-progress pop art masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Beach Boys’ unfinished psychedelic/symphonic Smile, on which Parks had served as Brian Wilson’s collaborator in 1966, Parks’s debut album would create its own curiously sparkling world. As Parks and his twenty-five-year-old WBR staff producer Lenny Waronker agreed, they would enter the studio each morning with no guidelines or boundaries. If Parks heard a sound in his head, he and Waronker would work for however long it took, using whatever tools they had or could invent, to capture it on tape.
None of this was normal—not in the popular music business of the mid-1960s, anyway. In 1967, when the top five singles of the year were, in descending order, Lulu’s old-school pop hit “To Sir with Love,” the Box Tops’ straight-rocking “The Letter,” Bobbie Gentry’s gothic country ballad “Ode to Billie Joe,” the Association’s romantic “Windy,” and the Monkees’ pop-rock “I’m a Believer,” the vast majority of pop songs could still be recorded, from basic track to vocals to overdubs, before lunch. But that’s not what Parks and Waronker intended to do, and it wasn’t what the visionary executive reinventing their record company wanted.
After I hit Play, I had time for a deep breath before the rising sound of a bluegrass band filled the emptiness: banjos, strummed guitars, a slide guitar, a string bass, and voices, all clattering through “Black Jack Davy,” an ancient American folk song about a scalawag who seduces a proper lady into abandoning her family and taking up with him. The rattletrap fades in fifty seconds, revealing a song within another song. This is “Vine Street,” an original tune Parks commissioned from fellow composer, pianist, and newly signed Warner Bros. artist Randy Newman. The scratchy opening vignette blooms into a string quartet and the winsome voice of Parks, as he describes what we’ve just heard: a tape of his old band, a folk combo of no repute whose members have long since vanished from his life.
Parks’s strings leap and tumble, speeding up and slowing down, alluding to eighteenth-century Europe, nineteenth-century ragtime, and the sentimental movie soundtracks of twentieth-century Hollywood, that never-never land where “dreams are still born.”
Or is that stillborn?
Hmm.
And here comes more, more, more: String sections collide with electronic keyboards, which keep their distance from the Russian violins and balalaikas. Steam locomotives rumble west in one song and then chug eastward through another. There are birds and single-cylinder motors; the dying blast of the Titanic’s basso magnifico horn; then a tattered verse of “Nearer My God to Thee,” artificially Dopplered to portray our movement past the doomed vessel. There are harps, chattering locust percussion, and electronic distortions of Parks’s wispy vocals, his words and melodies cloaked in gossamer and subjected to the cardboard tape-yawing device he and Waronker jury-rigged onto the recorder’s spindle and dubbed “the Farkle.” Also, they sped up almost every song. “I used to speed up everything,” Waronker says. “I was taking so much speed back then it just sounded better that way.”1
Parks was just as keen on high-velocity consciousness, and sometimes the fellows would get so pilled up they’d have to run around the block to calm themselves down between takes. But even when they were high, they were not sloppy. Parks was one of the rare hippie musicians who brought unerring discipline to his galactic explorations. His lyrics—multi-entendred musings on life, liberty, and the inevitability of death and failure—are Joycean in their linguistic invention and their Farkled perspective of America and the outer limits of physical and metaphysical existence.
Song Cycle clocks in at less than thirty-three minutes, but it’s such complicated listening that it can feel like hours. Just try to track the quirky harmonics written into the string charts or all the colliding time signatures, or the way a steam whistle cry jumps off the horn section’s melody in the middle of “The All Golden” and is then quickly resolved by the horn’s next note. Can you tell if the operatic shriek at the start of “By the People” belongs to a trained soprano or to a theremin wailing through the top of its range? I can’t. Then come the church bells and claps of thunder and a fiddle that is part front porch sing-along, part German surrealist horror movie. “Strike up the band brother, hand me another bowl of your soul,” Parks and his chorus chirp amid the bells and the light drumming of a rainstorm. “We now are near to the end / If you stay with the show say we all had to go…”
Later, I sat in my backyard blinking in the sunlight. Now it was Song Cycle that had me spinning. The inventiveness, the skirting of the impossible, the Farkling of reality by a pair of ambitious youngsters with more daring than common sense. So, what were they doing in the employ of a major American entertainment corporation?
* * *
To Mo Ostin, then the chief of the Reprise half of Warner/Reprise Records, Song Cycle was the living example of the albums he wanted his record label to be producing. This was in 1967 when Ostin was first in the position to put his imprimatur on the record company he’d been managing for nearly a decade. Forty years old and only just beyond the dark suits and skinny striped ties of the midcentury executive, Ostin had neither the look nor the spirit of a radical. He’d come up in the music business through the widely admired jazz label Verve Records in the 1950s and was tapped by Frank Sinatra to run his about-to-launch boutique label, Reprise, in 1960. When the singer sold his company to Warner Bros. Pictures tycoon Jack Warner in 1963, Reprise merged with Warner Bros. Records in a new company called Warner/Reprise. The conjoined labels ran mostly independently from one another, with Ostin at the fore of Reprise while WB’s Joe Smith performed the same duty at Warner Bros. The pair of execs came from different backgrounds and had very different personalities, but in the mid-1960s both had been quick to recognize that society, and particularly popular music, was on the verge of a significant shift.
If you were listening in 1966, you could hear it growing: in the increasingly esoteric songs of the Beatles, in the literary nuance of Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics, in the Howlin’ Wolf–meets–Ornette Coleman psychedelia of the Grateful Dead and so many other glitter-eyed bands lighting up the night in San Francisco. And you heard it not just in the music but also in all that other sixties business, in the don’t-trust-anyone-over-thirty stuff; the smash-the-stateism; the tune in, turn on, drop outedness; the everybody get together and try to love one another right now of it all.
The New Youth, as music critic and cultural observer Ralph J. Gleason called them, wanted the world and they wanted it now. And it seemed like a reasonable demand. It wasn’t like their parents were doing anything worthwhile with it.
* * *
In the circle of hip young artists in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, Van Dyke Parks was always somewhere near the center. Most of the L.A. scenesters, the Roger McGuinns and David Crosbys, the Peter Fondas and so on, knew him best for being Brian Wilson’s collaborator for the Beach Boys’ mysteriously shelved psychedelic masterpiece Smile and for his contributions to the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. He had charisma and could often be found delivering magnetic disquisitions on philosophy, history, and the pursuit of transcendent consciousness. Chicks dug that sort of thing, and Parks dug chicks, none more than his artist wife, Durrie. Parks was impish, five foot eight on a good day, with the paisley-and-tweed look of a stylish PhD candidate. Smart, talented, and handsome, the baby-faced post-collegiate Parks also had a life on him that you would not believe.
Born to a psychiatrist and English teacher and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Van Dyke had spent his grade school years developing a crystalline falsetto perfect enough to earn him a slot as a soloist in the American Boychoir. Attending the group’s boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey, Parks paid his tuition by taking jobs in New York City, first as the lead soloist in Arturo Toscanini’s 1951 live television production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. Parks’s stage presence earned him a side career in acting, playing a young neighbor on Jackie Gleason’s TV sitcom The Honeymooners, and then a child on opera singer Ezio Pinza’s short-lived family TV show, Bonino. The boy spent a summer in Hollywood performing in The Swan, a costume drama starring Grace Kelly, Alec Guinness, and Louis Jourdan. No one intimidated him. He’d already met, and sung Christmas carols in the kitchen of the Boychoir’s Princeton neighbor Albert Einstein; the genius accompanied the young singers on his fiddle.
After a year studying piano, composition, and arranging at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), Parks dropped out and joined his older brother Carson in a folk duo they called the Steeltown Two. The brothers moved to Los Angeles in 1962, only to break up their act a year later. Set loose in the recording studios and salons frequented by the city’s hippest young musicians, actors, and writers, Parks wrote and/or recorded a few clever singles for MGM, including “Number Nine,” a pop interpretation of the central theme in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and “High Coin,” a sparkling tune that describes the heights of his ambition. “I’m going for high coin baby,” he declared.
“I’m fine, it’s my time.”
Parks never recorded “High Coin” himself, but a handful of other artists did, and when he first heard Skip Battin’s version on his car radio, Lenny Waronker, a young record producer who had just taken an Artists and Repertoire (A&R) staff job with Warner/Reprise, lurched his car to the curb to listen closely. No kid could have written that song, he thought. But Parks was two years younger than Waronker, and when they met, the two musical adventurers became fast friends and recording studio collaborators.
On the day in late 1966 when Waronker brought Parks to meet Ostin in the Warner/Reprise offices across the street from the movie studio’s back lot in Burbank, the erudite artist enraptured the executive like no other musician, save Frank Sinatra, had ever done. Parks wrote great songs, had a unique voice, and could master any instrument. He could write arrangements for rock bands and orchestras, and he thought like a futurist. Eager to get Parks on board in every conceivable capacity, Ostin engaged him not just as a recording artist but also as a studio musician, arranger, and producer. Who knew where Parks’s brains, talents, and ambitions would take the company next? When the musician signed the deal on January 5, 1967, Ostin didn’t bother hiding his glee. “We thought he was a phenomenon.”
The Song Cycle recording sessions began in the spring and continued for more than six months, nearly as much time as it would take the Beatles to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and twice as long as it took Brian Wilson to create Pet Sounds for the Beach Boys in 1966. The only reason the Beatles could get away with spending that much time in the studio was because they were the most successful rock band in the world. That an artist with no commercial success would be allowed such a Beatle-size privilege was unheard of—except at the new Warner/Reprise, where artists really did come first.
Sometimes Parks would book a dozen or more session musicians and hand out fully composed scores for them all to follow. Other times, he’d call players in one or two at a time and arrange parts as they went along. Still other times, Parks and Waronker would come in alone so the artist could record keyboard tracks, or the two of them could work with sound engineer Lee Herschberg to find new ways to enhance or distort the sound of what they’d already recorded.
Herschberg, already a seasoned engineer with credits on records by Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Welk, Sammy Davis Jr., and many others, remembers the Song Cycle sessions as entirely professional: no scarves over the lampshades, no incense burning, and no colored bulbs screwed into the fixtures—only cigarette smoke in the air and the thrum of group creativity, its pitch elevated just a few cycles by the electrified blood running through Parks’s and Waronker’s veins.
Parks had opted to record for the Warner Bros. Records side of the company, and when its managing director, Joe Smith, came to hear the just-finished album in the fall of 1967, he took in the thirty-three minutes of musical dream logic and gave Waronker a quizzical look.
“Song Cycle, huh?”
“Yep.”
“So, where are the songs?”
The former Top 40 disc jockey turned promotion man turned company leader couldn’t hear the record—or he heard it, but he couldn’t comprehend its place in the pop music galaxy. But Smith could definitely see how much money Waronker and Parks had spent in the studio: somewhere between $75,000 and $85,000, which at that time made Song Cycle the most expensive album in Warner Bros. history. And for all that money, they’d brought him a record that didn’t have a single tune Smith could imagine hearing on even the underground radio stations popping up on the scarcely populated FM dial.
Smith left the room muttering and shaking his head. Waronker looked over at a red-faced Parks and waved it off with a casual hand. Don’t worry, man. There was no way Song Cycle wasn’t going to be released, Waronker insisted. As it turned out, the producer didn’t have to say a word to anyone. When Jac Holzman, founder, president, and chief A&R man of the still-independent folksy-artsy label Elektra Records, came to visit his Burbank colleagues and heard the Song Cycle acetate coming from Smith’s office, he sat to hear the whole thing. Afterward, when he heard Smith’s grousing about the thing’s weirdness, the fucking eighty big ones they’d spent, and the complete absence of commercial outlets willing to promote the thing, he interrupted him with the incredulous response, “You don’t want to release that? Shit, I’ll put it out tomorrow. What do you want for it?”
Smith may not have had the taste for musical adventure that Ostin had just then, but he had the rare capacity to understand that he didn’t know everything. He was also aware of Holzman’s magical ears. Less than a year earlier, Holzman had picked up on the nearly unknown L.A. band the Doors, who had paid him back instantly by becoming one of the top acts in the United States. And as Smith would admit to anyone, including people who hadn’t even asked, he was a Jewish kid from a nowheresville suburb of Boston, who had gotten lucky in radio and even luckier when he got into the record business. Parks was obviously brilliant, Waronker had his nose to the ground, and between those two and now Holzman trying to get his beak into it …
“Oh no,” Smith said. “We’re definitely putting it out. That’s a Warner Bros. record. For sure.”
On November 1, 1967, Smith got the Song Cycle ball rolling with a memo to the company’s network of promotions staffers, the local reps who hand-sold Warner Bros. vinyl to record distributors, disc jockeys, record store owners, and anyone else who could push a record into the hearts and minds of cash-carrying citizens. The promo men knew the value of the Next Big Thing, but like all professionals plying a fickle trade, they needed delicate handling, especially when the going got weird.
And handle them is exactly what Smith did in his memo. He started with a comic apology for not seeing them more often. (“I run around with only the top people now. Any night I can be seen with the Grateful Dead and other nice guys.”) He ran through some news about Peter, Paul and Mary’s new single and coming releases from the Association and Petula Clark before coming to a hard pivot.
“In November we have some strange LPs that will have you wondering if we’ve all gone on pot and acid out here. However, there are some changes in the business as you have learned and are learning from Arlo Guthrie and the Grateful Dead and etc., and a lot of things make sense now that wouldn’t have a while back.”
Bracing himself.
“We’ve got this new genius kid, Van Dyke Parks, with the wildest, most overpowering record I’ve heard in years. It’s very, very, very different and you won’t be able to drop it off without some explanation. More on that from us later.”
But hey, isn’t it almost Christmas?
“Keep going with that good product. It’s been a groovy year and we can wind it up big. Talk to you guys soon.”2
* * *
When Waronker played Song Cycle for Mo Ostin, Smith’s counterpart down the hall all but ordered a crate of champagne. He was still a Sinatra man at heart, but Ostin, who had signed Parks and then honored his whimsical request to have his music released through the Warner Bros. Records side of Warner/Reprise, could also hear how special this outlandish music was. Parks’s imagist lyrics had the fractal quality of Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraiture (misshapen eyes peering in two directions at once, mouths smiling and sneering at the same time), a reality distorted to the point of being the truest thing you’d ever seen or heard. “We thought we had the next Beatles,” Ostin says. He could already anticipate the great reviews Song Cycle would get. It was, he insisted, the perfect album for the recalibrated record company: artistically ambitious, wholly unique, entirely beautiful. He was sure it would be a smash, but even if it wasn’t, that was nearly beside the point.
Released in early 1968, Song Cycle hit the small but growing community of serious pop/rock critics like a burning bush. To the New Yorker, Parks’s creation was “a milestone in American pop music,” words echoed almost exactly by New York Magazine, who heard “A Milestone in Pop.” Time described the album as “all shimmering beauty.” Jazz & Pop went all in, hailing it as “the most important, creative and advanced pop recording since Sgt. Pepper.” Esquire included a wink and a nod with its “High Album of the Year,” but Stereo Review played it completely straight, designating it as nothing short of the “Record of the Year.”
The problem: hardly anyone wanted to buy the thing. Even after a year, Song Cycle’s sales stayed frozen somewhere around ten thousand copies, which would have been disappointing for an album that cost twenty thousand or even fifteen thousand dollars to make. And given Song Cycle’s eighty-K ticket, the situation was … well, problematic. So, what do you do with an eighty-thousand-dollar critical smash that can’t find an audience?
At Warner/Reprise, that’s where Stan Cornyn came in. A Grammy-winning author of liner notes and a publicity wordsmith going back to Warner Bros. Records’ first months in 1958, Cornyn had recently been tapped to serve as Warner/Reprise’s new director of advertising. The fact that he had never before written an advertisement, and in fact viewed the form with contempt, was not just okay with Ostin and Smith; it was what qualified Cornyn for the job. Ads for pop records, to the extent that they existed, had always been dull. Surely any change at all would be an improvement. And the lately fledged adman did not disappoint.
In pursuit of a public voice to reflect Warner/Reprise’s changing identity, Cornyn created an entirely new style of record advertisement. Aimed directly at the educated young record buyers whom Ostin and Smith envisioned as their core audience, Cornyn’s first Song Cycle ad was published on a full page in Rolling Stone and in dozens of the local underground newspapers in early 1969, more than a year after its release. Cornyn divided the page into halves, the top devoted to an enormous headline, which in this case was:
HOW WE LOST $35,509 ON
“THE ALBUM OF THE YEAR”
(DAMMIT)
Copyright © 2021 by Peter Ames Carlin