We Need A 'Renaissance of Wonder': Van Dyke Parks Makes Musical Connections

Songwriter, musician, producer, TV and Film composer, and all around component of culture Van Dyke Parks began working professionally in music California in the 1960s, moving from the guitar to the piano with the spike in popularity for guitar-paying partly prompted by Bob Dylan's rise. 

Collaborating with Beach Boys songwriter Brian Wilson led to a project known as SMILE, which was never completed, but later released a box set in 2011. Parks and Wilson returned to a collaborative project in 1994 with Orange Crate Art, a celebration of California history and culture, and that project has now been re-released, specially remastered, on its 25th anniversary.

Meanwhile, Parks' life in music has been incredibly varied, which leads to entertaining tales, and as he says, "You can't make this stuff up". The progressive politics he espouses are in keeping with his progressive, experimental attitude in music, which has led him to pursue very personal album projects (and he's planning a new one!) and quite challenging work in TV and film as well. You can check out the first rollicking discussion we had with Van Dyke Parks here, and read on below to hear about why we need more wonder in our musical lives. 

Hannah Means-Shannon: Are you interested in doing things like livestreaming from home, or are you too busy for that?

Van Dyke Parks: These jobs that I’m working on now include two quadrophonic art exhibits, one at the Chicago Art Institute, and the other at the Hammer Museum, creating “quad sound”, sound that really travels around the room.

HMS: Wow! Are they purely sonic, or are there visual components?

VDP: Oh, there are visual components. An African American professor from the Arts Department of the University of Pennsylvania e-mailed me to provide music for his project, which will be the History of Plantations as it applies to America, and specifically Trinidad and Tobago, where he spent two months in kinetic art, still art, and a mural being woven in silk in Belgium. You can’t make up this stuff!

HMS: An international effort.

VDP: Stuff gets thrown at me. The nice thing about not having a five-year plan is that you’re never distracted, nothing is beneath you, you must choose carefully. I’m getting to the punchline—once this gets done, I’m writing some songs, and that will be my next album. But I pray that if I write it in the main, or in the part, in quarantine, I would like to reveal it when we are out of quarantine. That’s what I want to do. I’m not here to do much more than Tweet and Instagram. I Tweet therefore I am!

HMS: How important to you is the live interaction of collaborating in person with people, or the live performance aspect?

VDP: Well, those are two different things. Apples and oranges. I love them both. My favorite ad hoc moment, though I usually stay behind the camera, was a shot of me with Ry Cooder in Down in Hollywood, Part 2, and you can see in my performance how happy I am to be on such a high wire with so many superior talents, urging my balance. Pennebaker shot it. He did Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back.

There’s a stigma in looking back. You can see that in my work, but I thoroughly believe in tearing down each confederate statue, and always have. And now you can sign on, with me. I just signed a petition yesterday.

HMS: Great!

VDP: Those statues should be replaced with a statue of Dolly Parton!

HMS: Yes, I saw that online!

VDP: I’m on the cutting edge.

HMS: Is it any different in your process when you’re composing a song for your own purposes, versus when you’re composing for TV, film, or a more commercial project?

VDP: My mind tends to wander and goes places. In an album I did called Tokyo Rose, I discovered the collapse of the American psyche when the Japanese hit the bubble. When they bought Rockefeller Center. That bothered me. I decided to make a joke out of it, thinking it might be the shortest distance between me and a listener—laughter. I did the record, flying in the face of authority. An executive at Warner Bros. said, “You can’t call this Tokyo Rose! Or have ‘trade war’ on it. We have a sister company in Japan!” I knew that. Of course, that album dropped like a stone. Maybe because I was singing on it. [Laughs]

Funny that I would meet at one of his last concerts, on a bus behind the stage, after one of his encores, Levon Helm, and he loved Tokyo Rose. Maybe he was the only other person aside from Kurt Vonnegut who understood it. Kurt Vonnegut called me about it two months after it came out, at a Canadian festival.

HMS: So that was very much a personal project for you?

VDP: The records, the albums, are highly personal to me. Regarding Jump, I didn’t want the morality tales of Br’er Rabbit to be ignominiously discarded. They were survival tales when I was a child, what Mark Twain called them, “Our most precious set of stolen goods. The Rosetta Stone of American Folklore.” This from a man who went with a steel band, 28 black men and a bus driver, through the South of the United States in 1971 to promote a record album. I don’t need to be told what has always been in my work: Black Lives Matter. Every life matters, too. We are all God’s creatures. That’s the way I look at it.

I do believe in taking down the generals. We should leave them aside. We need empathy, and that is why we need to take the statues down. We want to empower these people who built America. These are the anonymous.

In Orange Crate Art, by the way, there is the Wilson Ranch, Brian Wilson’s heritage, and so I set out to write what I know, and entertain Brian, and bring him back into the studio. That was on my page that day.

With Tokyo Rose, Kurt Vonnegut understood it. There were multiple phone calls, hourly phone calls for a couple of years with Kurt Vonnegut when I had a WATS line at Warner Bros. And the reason that he called me was because he had written a book called Hocus Pocus, and Hocus Pocus examined the same tragi-comic Yankee dilemma. The same sense of true crisis felt by Americans who wrap themselves in the flag so carefully, and all of the sudden found it was entirely useless.

So there’s always something highly personal in doing the albums.

Then, in a picture, things can get ugly. Maybe a man and a woman are kissing each other passionately and hate each other to pieces. They need a wall full of strings. “This is going to take some money. What am I going to have to spend on this scene? I’m going to need 17 string players to make this thing sound clear.” Or, this is homie in the hood with the blaster on the shoulder. This is a different world. You better be able to pick up what they are putting down or you are out of a job!

In fact, I think I did a very good job as an “assignment writer” and I love being on a leash. Look at Harold and the Purple Crayon, the series I did with Sharon Stone. Dig it! In one of the pre-production meetings, a “bullshit session”, talking to the producer about music, which, as Frank Zappa points out, is like “dancing about architecture”. So we’re there to talk about music, and he says, “Van Dyke, don’t forget that in this episode, Harold’s goldfish dies. And we may be addressing an unattended 3-year-old child in a living room somewhere in America. So I want you to keep that in mind.” Believe me, that ain’t for sissies!

HMS: [Laughs] Yeah. Geez. That’s harsh.

VDP: I did it! I didn’t even turn to Jesus. I did use a Sitar in the piece. I explained the physical science of rain. I got it from the bubbles to the clouds, in the song, and I think that was as good as anything Harry Nilsson did in Puget Sound. In The Brave Little Toaster, I think I did three really fine songs per epsiode, writing for children.

I did a parody of myself. There was a song called “Black Sheep” which was in the Walk Hard movie. It lampoons the epic psychedelia that is supposed to be reminiscent of SMILE. So I parodied myself on an orchestral level, and I co-wrote the lyrics with Michael Andrews, and it was marvelous and almost plausible. Because musical farce is probably the most difficult thing ever invented.

For example, at the beginning of “Movies as Magic” starts [VDP plays on the piano a movement by Strauss, and then the opposite of that movement, which opens the song. Then VDP plays a phrase from Gone with the Wind, then an altered version of it.] Two misquotations start “Movies as Magic”.

HMS: Intentional misquotations. Those are allusions.

VDP: Why do I do that? Let’s call it what Lowell George and I used to call “the art of cliché”. This is a discipline.

I’m from Pop Art. Andy Warhol gave us the redux version of Campbell’s Soup Cans. He doesn’t tell you what to think. There’s ‘What do you think?’ Don’t overthink that.

People have the attention spans of a cocker spaniel, and this is a magazine format, let’s face it. “Can you boil this down to nine syllables or less?” Nobody has time to consider the span of the album.

HMS: Sure.

VDP: We’re defying it. That means “we”, Omnivore Records sticking their neck out, and Brian Wilson giving permission to dig up these bones. These are validations out of the parking lot. This is the courage that has been contagious in this. Which during a pandemic is the only course.

HMS: Where attention spans are even shorter…

VDP: Yes. I’m feeling very religious about the whole damn thing.

HMS: It sounds like you would prefer people to listen to an entire album at once, as a single creation, with your work. Is that true?

VDP: Well, yes, albums are intended to be albums, and by contract, not intended to be commingled, cross-collateralized or otherwise.

Which, of course, has turned out to be my demise. The song “An Invitation to Sin” on the Br’er Rabbit album disqualified it from Emmy nomination in the Children’s division. So, yes, I am being erased, not only by Donald Trump, but everything I stand for, everything I’ve worked for in my maturity, since my adolescence.

HMS: Because you produce challenging work, you mean? That it’s being side-lined or marginalized?

VDP: Yes, as it relates to the albums and their contents. Sure. But I still proved early, with commercials for Ice Capades, that I could produce a thought in seven second with a two second “ring-off”, it’s called. So, I employ clichés a lot.

HMS: Do you think that people who don’t admit to or honor their influences are being disingenuous? Like musicians who follow strongly in the traditions of certain compositions and don’t acknowledge that?

VDP: No, I think that’s okay. We’re allowed, as musicians, to do that. Someone accused Mozart of repeating himself, and he said, “Sir, I am paid to repeat myself.” So sometimes you repeat even yourself. I find myself using idiomatic music, like Charles Ives did in his serious music, to always work within the precept that you seek. You want the audience to be able to come back and that your work will have the starch to weather further consideration. And to invite further inquiry. A sense of discovery that isn’t somehow forced upon the listener and doesn’t tell the listener what to think.

HMS: So, like with Orange Crate Art, it’s a fresh opportunity for people to evaluate it on their own terms?

VDP: Yes, right, and with that age, and aromas, and memories. Nostalgia is pain. We don’t want to think about things that pain us. There are “intimations of immortality” in going back and seeking what Ferlinghetti calls “a renaissance of wonder”. To be in awe, to consider lateral relationships and horizontal things that connect us. Beyond our fucking scramble to the ceiling for the progress of profit.

I think, fundamentally, that is what Mel Brooks’ God [in Blazing Saddles, a God who is “strict”] is doing right now, slapping us down. And it will be shown in the spikes ahead how foolish our man-centered ideals have become in an age when we need to hasten to another Presidency and an environmental protection, which is, in my view, Richard Nixon’s only redeeming act.

HMS: I have one more question for you: Can you tell me how you managed to wind up in Twin Peaks? I was curious about that.

VDP: Oh, I just knew the director. He just asked if I would do it, and I thought that I should. The judge was a man who I acted with on Broadway in 1957. His name was Royal Dano, one of the greatest portrayers of Lincoln, preferable even to Henry Fonda, in my mind. That’s a very detailed question!

HMS: There was no way I was not going to ask that. Thanks!