Customer Reviews

Song Cycle

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In 1968 Warner Brothers were preparing to make pop music history by releasing an album by a young musician and songwriter called Van Dyke Parks. Song Cycle's budget of $$,$$$ made it the most expensive album ever recorded back then. The Warner bosses weren't worried, they knew it was going to be the biggest thing since Sgt Pepper and probably bigger. They were wrong, they were very wrong.
When Song Cycle was released it just didn't sell. It had received unprecedented pre-release rave reviews saying it things like:
"The most important, creative and advanced pop recording since Sgt Pepper";
"a work of creative genius";
"the most vital piece of musical Americana since Gershwin".
Parks also had an impressive pedigree as a musician on The Byrds '5D' and the first Tim Buckley album; songwriter for Harpers Bizarre and others; a musical arranger on Disney's 'The Jungle Book' and most famously as a collaborator with Beached Boy Brian Wilson. Despite the advance press and the pedigree it's hard to see how on earth Warners thought this was going to be a real big seller. It is undoubtedly a work of unique vision and ambition. Truly a masterpiece but with zero "radio friendly" 3 minute sound bites packed with catchy hooks. Even today Song Cycle is not an easy listening experience but it is a challenging and ultimately rewarding one.
I can think of no other record like it.Song Cycle is a musical travelogue, a sonic trip across the America of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Busby Berkeley musicals and John Ford Westerns. It has moments of real beauty such as 'The All Golden' and 'Donavan's Colours' but just as you're beginning to feel like you know which direction you're moving in, it whisks you up like a hayseed in the wind and then lands you somewhere completely different.
Warner Brothers reaction to the lack of sales was a strange but entertaining one. They started to run a series of adverts in the press stating they didn't care they, 'lost $$,$$$ on the album of the year', because it was a great album and people shouldn't worry about them, as they could afford it as they were making lots of money from lesser artists. Then they offered people the chance to send their worn copies of the album with one penny to Warners and they would send back two new copies, 'one to educate a friend with'. After all they had so many copies pressed up.
Whether or not this reaction by Warners was a bluff or not they have stuck by Van Dyke Parks, continuing to finance his self indulgent, uncommercial but often wonderful fare. The latest of these releases being a collaboration with Brian Wilson 'Orange Crate Art'. For me 'Song Cycle' remains his finest work.

This is a really trippy, funny, and bizarre album. Not trippy in the vein of say California contemporaries Jefferson Airplane or the Dead. NO. Way better and much more surreal. Comparison is pointless. Song cycle is immaculately orchestrated, yet detatched, and free of any "hippy bandwagon" fodder. I couldn't care less about connections to Americana or Gerschwinism. This album is a much more psychedelic and abstract than anything to come from a bunch of long haired LSD enthusiasts in their VW vans. What was this dude on?
Musically, the orchestration is way out there. All the rules and standards were thrown out. Read the credits. Look at all of the unusual instrumentation and droves of players who got the challenge of their lives. Imagine their reaction upon seeing the notation before them in the studio. Then perhaps they were even more bewildered (amazed, disgusted?) to hear the final product, complete with the processed vocals and innovative studio effects. Parks sounds like a hallucinating midget. The lyrics are equally odd. This is the most psychedelic album to come out of the USA! Not by a goateed tye-dier, but a better-groomed guy who'd look square at the love-in. Quite brilliant, indeed.

I couldn't get any of my friends to sit through this when it came out. It's sales at the time indicated the kind of reception the album got across the board, but this is classic Americana/Californiana music and I will not forget my fellow Californians who laughed at it.
The music here is dense, idiosyncratic, and difficult to get through, although it is much more lyrical than given credit for. It is easy to understand why Warner Brothers thought it would be an immediately famous debut. It was; it just did not get any airplay or reception. This album and the excellent "Orange Crate Art" with Brian Wilson proclaim a vision of golden California pre/post World War 2, and being a native and having grown up in the 1950's and 60's I understand perfectly well the semi-urban,semi-rural feeling of Los Angeles in that era. Pasadena was high-powered in a quaint kind of way, Santa Monica and the coastal stretches were untrammeled, and the desert was WAY out there.
People like my grandmother lived in neighborhoods, and knew their neighbors. The residents of Hollywood had bungalows and gardens. The car was not critically important. Mostly, Southern California had a community atmmosphere. This music reflects all that.
Joan Didion would like the presentation on these two albums. The atmosphere would suit her, I think.

Great, great, great stuff. Song Cycle is best listened to as one long story, these are not songs that will individually strike many as catchy, but as a whole, the record is an epic. So many ideas, so much theory, such a persistent and hard-headed ambition. Often in need of a more disciplined, traditionalistic producer, the work could have benefitted from slightly less rambling songwriting. But there exists nothing else like this, the flaws are easily overlooked. This is what it sounds like when talent is allowed to go full-tilt, because this was the most expensive record ever produced when it was released. Van Dyke Parks walks the walk here, he is the real deal. Extraordinary and challenging, demanding, rewarding, chock-full of instruments and moves, ahead of its time, but timeless. Shakes up your imagination and rattles your consciousness in the same way the very best music does. "Song Cycle" introduces interesting and divergent worlds and sonic landscapes, colorful and old-fashioned, heavily layered, multi-faceted, with rabbit-hole benefits. It's a joyously busy piece of Americana, a completely unique sound, one of the best American records. My favorite song on it is "Palm Desert" because I'm a big old pop brat, but I couldn't even decide which my favorite musical moment of the work is. There's so so many. Thousands.

Song Cycle-Van Dyke Parks. Fifty stars.

When I bought Song Cycle while in college in '67, I was immediately captivated by the clever, quirky lyrics, the rapid shifts in sound and tempo, and the way this record demands your full attention. That said, I didn't know anyone else who liked it! I loaned it to an English professor, who returned it with the droll comment, "Well, there's intelligence and perhaps even talent there."

Whether or not you love it, there is nothing like Song Cycle in your collection. Even later VDP albums, offbeat as some of the concepts were, did not approach Song Cycle for individuality. Song Cycle stands with B,S,&T's Child Is Father To the Man as the two late '60's albums for my Desert Island collection. What a thrill to find that such a commercial failure is available on CD. I'm ordering my copy right now!

A friend recently asked me to listen to an album called "Song Cycle" and then tell him what I thought of it. His manner indicated I might be in for something unexpected. I knew of Parks' involvement with Brian Wilson on Pet sounds, but until then didn't realize Parks was a recording artist himself. I played Song Cycle through headphones and soon found myself thoroughly engrossed in this densely layered masterwork. I later told my friend, "he can't sing, but this may be one of the most incredible albums I have ever heard". Parks' untrained, querelous falsetto was strikingly unusual and, that first time through, even unpleasent to my ears. No matter. The lyrics are dense and ingeniously constructed, not only in rhyme but subject matter. They show remarkable artistic and intellectual maturity for a man of any age, much less one in his early twenties. One gets the impression of a wry and highly incisive, but gently humourous mind at work. The recording production and string arrangements are equally ingenious and highly experimental, even by today's standards. Too bad the recording is somewhat noisier than other albums of the same era. Maybe Parks was trying to push the mutitrack technology of the time a little too far. Or maybe WB dropped the ball by not mastering it properly when they realized what he had created. Either way, my friend had to practically rip the album out of my hands many weeks later, and after many intent listenings. Time to purchase my own long-overdue copy of Song Cycle. Its experimental brilliance may doom it to relative obscurity, but I believe it will continue to have a resounding effect just below the surface of popular culture. Perhaps not a bad fate after all.

It's a little difficult for me to review this, given the fact that Van Dyke Parks is writing in a genre that I'm neither very fond of, nor familiar with. But I bought this [recently] after having read something awhile back in 'Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia' about how the jury was still out on whether Parks was a genius, or merely pretentious. [This was written way back around 1969--Parks had an entry in Roxon's tome mainly because of his late 60's work with the Beach Boys.]

But this isn't by any means rock music: there are hardly any guitars or traditional drum kit parts in any of the tracks. It's closest to a stylistic constellation which includes things like ragtime, tin pan alley, vaudeville, and even silent movie music--you get the idea. So I'm going to characterize the 'genre' as musical comedy soundtrack, which is how I relate to it. Mr. Parks uses some pretty sophisticated compositional and arranging techniques to turn this almost into a type of abstract art music. The way he continually references and quotes older American styles of music makes me think of similar (though less profuse) quotations by Charles Ives in his commemorative holiday tone-poems ("The Fourth of July" etc.).

There is a lot of hocketing in some of the songs, some achieved by extremely skillful playing and conducting of/by the string section, others (I think) by careful use of multi-tap analog delay. There is a serious layering together of parts: different instruments are coming in and out to produce a continuously evolving timbral texture. In this, 'Song Cycle' probably had no rival at the time in the rock/pop world with the exception of some of the tunes [e.g. "Sing This All Together", "Gomper", etc.] from the Rolling Stones' 'Their Satanic Majesties Request']. Please check out Van Dyke's amazing all-instrumental send-up of Donovan's "Colours" [titled "Donovan's Colours"].

At any rate, I'm inclined to go with the 'genius' tag as regards the music (especially the way it has been orchestrated), and call the lyrics a bit pretentious, though 'innocent' might be more fair. The lyrics, though legitimately aspiring to a sort of enigmatic and inspired stream-of-consciousness, are quite a bit choppy, and almost too cute. They don't have the organic flow and underlying unity of Dylan's dream song lyrics, nor the strongly grounded and very poetic metaphors found in many of Bob Lind's songs from around the same period. This young fellow's lyrical imagination may have been too windblown to nail down a good song, though most of the bits that are blowing in and out seem to have--each at its core--a grain of sincerity.

In terms of melodic and singing styles, one is reminded of several relatively well-known folks. First are Tim Buckley . . . plus Arthur Lee of the band Love, both who were living in southern California at the time and under contract with the Electra label [and very likely seeing each other at their respective gigs, cross-fertilizing one another]. Parks' voice doesn't have the strident power of Buckley (neither did Arthur Lee's, for that matter), but all three style some of their melodies in a similar fashion. Parks' softer sounding voice swings into the theatrically flamboyant at the endings of some of his phrases, much like Buckley. Then there are other tunes with more choppy melodic styling [and shifting meters] that remind me a lot of the Incredible String Band, who also began their creative ascent around the same time.

Once again, though, Parks' overall sound is more at vaudeville [though an almost abstract, futuristic form of it--with its self-conscious hocket effects, it shimmers at certain moments like Pharoah Sanders' groundbreaking progressive jazz album 'Karma', though Sanders sounds/feels more organic and natural].

After listening, though, I am left with a warm, elevated feeling. Seriously, I'd have to give this at least 4 stars; and after further listening, I can easily imagine bumping it up to 5.

Song Cycle is perhaps the greatest 'work' of truly American music ever written. That being said, most people love it or hate it. It has wonderful melodies that cycle from one song to the next, but is the internal rhyme schemes that captivate me. Example: in "The All Golden" one line about military service, "...one, two, three, four.." next rhymes with "..wend to sea for..", " Just suppose a youngster knows" is followed with " Juxtaposed to B.B. D. and O.". Great lines like the double-entendre of "Dreams are still born in Hollywood" occur throughout: there are dozens of these gems in the lyrics. It is an album to live with. Play it in the background and let it draw you in. When I bought this album in the late sixties I was able to write to warner Bros. for the lyrics, since lost in a house fire, but I believe they were autographed by VanDyke himself: I hope they are included with the CD.

Definitely a classic album, definitely different. You'll love it or hate it. I love it! Tracks like "Palm Desert", "The All Golden", and an instrumental version of the Donovan hit "Colours" are just three of the highlights on this CD. The lyric play is fascinating and humourous. It was a sales disaster when originally released in 1967. (For a while during the late '60s, WB had an offer that if you mailed them your old worn copy of "Song Cycle" and a penny, they'd send you 2 new copies!!) So I guess they had a bit of a problem selling this one to the public at the time. Still one of the great musical experiments, a successful triumph, and, yes, the CD comes with the full lyrics! (you'll need them). A unique album, and still unsurpassed for what it is.

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

Van Dyke Parks' SONG CYCLE is a great example of psychedelic dandyism in pop music. A mixture of modernist sound design and vaudeville Americana, Parks was an intellectual that overcame any notion of novelty by looking back to look foreward, musically. The late '60s would find artists such as Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Kevin Ayers all yielding to a dixie/music-hall inspiration... Van Dyke Parks was amongst their ranks as an intelligent songsmith, writing tongue-twisting puns and parodies, filled with political and comical leanings. These were entertainers in the theatrical sense, but with lyrics filtered through the darker shades of counter-culture experience. Producer Lenny Waronker and the Warner Brothers team, at this time, recorded artists that often showed no signs of yielding profit. Amazingly, they saw a need to have this music preserved for art's sake, which was expressed in many of their ad campaigns for Parks and like artists.

SONG CYCLE languidly brushes through terrains of American pastoral -- musically, historically and philosophically. "By the People" wears cynicism on its sleeve, plainly parodying American power. Born in Alabama, a bonafide folk musician at the age of nineteen, Parks is a worthy auteur to confer upon the American phenomenon. One of the genuine mini-treasures of SONG CYCLE is "Public Domain" -- "Yet all my dreams shall be nearer my god to thee/Nearer my god to thee/Nearer to thee," so the chorus recurs ad infinitum, as we stroll through the gospel oak of Bible-Belt Americana (before the sounds of bombs going off in the background come in).

The productions are experimental, with arrangements that almost seem to lack a time-signature, melodies flowing into non-melodic staccato parts and back to banjos, strings and bouncing woodwinds. The creaking lyrics juxtapose colours and ideas by breaking organization to create more of an impressionistic feel than a clear understanding... all of which suits the lyrics perfectly. Van Dyke's vocals also retain a grammaphone tonality that compliment the rocking-chair album jacket.

No lover of psychedelic pop should be without this album.