Beyond the Columnated Ruins

On the Bandoppler site (via Zoilus), Van Dyke Parks discusses, among other things, his plans to do some arranging for the next Joanna Newsom record, and I like what little Newsom I’ve heard enough to be intrigued. Still kind of ambivalent about Parks, though – or at least, about the first three solo albums, the stuff I know best. (Discounting the Smile factor, which is a whole other conversation & I’m no Beach Boys expert anyway.)

On the one hand, Discover America, Parks’s second album, would probably have to go on any list of my all-time favourites. It’s an overt tribute to Caribbean sounds and 1940s pop music, defined by its tropical lilt, quirky instrumentation (heavy on steel drums and the like), and Parks’s crazily limpid vocals. But it’s not a straight homage, either; the weird gaps in the rhythms, the sometimes echoey tones, the comedy (check “Jack Palance”), and the implied concept-album conceit (complete with spoken-word “Introduction”), all create something more than mimicry, while never implying anything less than respect for Parks’s source material.*

Other than that....

I’ve tried to get into Song Cycle, the debut – believe me, I’ve tried many times. Certainly it has some lovely moments here & there, like the intro and outro to “The All Golden.” But overall the arrangements & song structures seem ridiculously over-ornamentative, decoration that’s not actually decorating anything. There’s really not much of any solidity to discover underneath, it seems to me – you either just golly-gee away at how abstractly pretty it all is, or (in my case) you don’t.

Clang of the Yankee Reaper, the third solo LP, follows more directly from Discover America in sound & approach. It has a great title track (and for that matter a great title), but otherwise it’s always felt to me like Parks’s eccentricities have become a little too normalized or internalized, the songs & arrangements more straightforward & less interesting. (I’ll note for the record that I actually first heard Clang well before discovering Discover, or else I might wonder whether first-come-first-served syndrome is at work in my reaction.)

So anyway, here’s a song from Discover, chosen almost at random. In many ways it’s a disservice, to you and to the record, to isolate one track, since the whole of the album is so much greater than the sum of the songs. But what can you do? Well, you can buy it here.

The title track from Clang, on the other hand, lifts right out, so here it is too. And also a Lee Dorsey/Allen Toussaint record that Parks covered on Discover.** (Buy some more Parks here, and some Lee Dorsey here.)

• Van Dyke Parks, “G-Man Hoover”
• Van Dyke Parks, “Clang of the Yankee Reaper”
• Lee Dorsey, “Occapella”

* I’ve never had much urge to go educate myself about that source material, which I think/hope speaks more to the record’s sui generis quality than to a general incuriosity on my part. (Since I’m usually happy for any excuse to do some cratedigging, or virtual cratedigging these days.)

** I said much urge.