My weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world. You’ve been warned – here is this week’s tomfoolery material that I posted.
ART NOTES – the sole venue for the exhibit Degas/Cassatt will be the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. beginning this Sunday through October 5th.
QUOTE for today: at a Cheshire County Democratic dinner this past Saturday here in New Hampshire, our incumbent senator Jeanne Shaheen used a line that – surely – she will continue to use: “Each state is entitled to two senators …. but each senator is not entitled to two states”.
ALTHOUGH Great Britain has tried to emulate Germany’s highly successful program of industrial apprenticeship – there have been stumbles along the way; some of them cultural.
THURSDAY’s CHILD is Slinky the Cat – a West Virginia kitteh who suffers from neurological problems (that affect his balance) and had one eye removed from infection … yet the 15-year-old orange tabby remains “one happy-go-lucky guy”.
HAIL and FAREWELL to one-time heavyweight boxing champ Jimmy Ellis who has died at the age of 74 ….. drummer Bobby Gregg – who recorded as a session musician with Simon & Garfunkel and on Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” – who has died at the age of 78 ….. and Nancy Malone – whom I liked in her Emmy-nominated role in the early 60’s show The Naked City and later was the first female vice-president of television at 20th Century Fox, directing episodes of “Judging Amy”, “Star Trek: Voyager”, “Melrose Place” and “Touched by an Angel”, and winning a Crystal Award (honoring women in entertainment management) … who has died at the age of 78.
PROGRAMMING NOTE – I will be away next weekend, and so while I will be posting Odds & Ends it will be done early: thus, the “Who Lost the Week?!?!” poll may be missing some obvious choices from late in the week. You can still write-them-in, of course
VIDEO of the YEAR – or at least so far – this resembles an old professional wrestling interview gone berserk (after the 30-second mark) … but instead, it’s a Jordanian talk show about the Syrian crisis … and even the poor moderator got caught-up in it.
DESPITE all of the grumbling from Planet Starboard about taxation, most Western nations have high compliance rates, compared to Third World nations. The new tax commissioner in the central African nation of Burundi has some early success in trying to raise standards: with new staff, adding a VAT tax, better focused audits and convincing business to “swap corruption for tax”.
DO HAVE A LOOK at this profile (by Charlie Pierce) of Senator Elizabeth Warren – which is entitled “The Teacher”.
FRIDAY’s CHILD Noah the Cat – a Virginia kitteh who won an Animal Hero Award two years ago … for alerting a woman to a developing brain aneurysm.
BRAIN TEASER – try this Quiz of the Week’s News from the BBC.
SIGN of the TIMES – gamely carrying on at West 23rd Street in NYC is the Communist Party USA – at a building they “got a great bargain on” in the 70’s – but in a concession to capitalist reality: all but two floors are now rented out.
CONGRATULATIONS to the Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst (real name Tom Neuwirth) who won yesterday’s Eurovision Song Contest – think ‘American Idol’ for the entire European continent, with one entrant per nation – with the James Bond-theme-like ballad “Rise Like a Phoenix” ….. upsetting some Russian satellite nations.
SEPARATED at BIRTH – English film star Elliot Cowan (“Golden Compass”, “Alexander”) and the late Australian film star Heath Ledger.
…… and finally, for a song of the week ……………………… someone whose fifty-year career in music and the arts has gone largely under radar is Van Dyke Parks – who taunted a reviewer for the Guardian newspaper about the use of the words quirky and eccentric to describe him. They seem accurate to me: in describing someone who has been a composer, arranger, session player, producer, performer, actor and author (just for starters). He successfully pitched a song that Frank Sinatra recorded, turned down offers to join both The Byrds (as well as Crosby, Stills & Nash) and has worked with Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and most famously Brian Wilson – yet claims to have sought anonymity following the JFK shooting. His own performing is an acquired taste …. he has sometimes over-complex melodies and lyrics that endears him to critics, yet not always so accessible to fans. But he has such respect from the musical community that the Guardian reviewer referred to him as a “well-loved college professor whose classes are lessons in far more than the subject at hand”.
Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, his family first settled in Louisiana and then in Princeton, New Jersey (at the age of nine). His father was a psychiatrist who served during the Dachau liberation during WW-II, and played clarinet in a dance band while earning his was through med school. While studying music, Van Dyke once performed as a child soprano with the Metropolitan Opera in NYC and sang in German when a guest violinist (named Albert Einstein) visited the school. Later, he worked as a child actor in Grace Kelly’s last film and as Little Tommy in a lost episode of “The Honeymooners”.
He attended Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh – where one of his teachers was Aaron Copeland before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania but settled in Los Angeles in 1963 to join his brother Carson in a coffee-house folk group. This later expanded into the Greenwood County Singers (which included future RCA producer Rick Jarrard). They were seen by David Crosby, who cited them as a reason to join the music business. Parks left, moving East in order to join the Brandywine Singers in 1964.
Upon a chance encounter with the pioneering San Francisco band The Charlatans they were impressed with a song he wrote entitled High Coin – which (a) garnered some airplay in California for The Charlatans, (b) was later recorded by Jackie DeShannon and Bobby Vee, and (c) led to a recording contract for Van Dyke Parks – first at MGM and later with Warner Brothers. While at Warners, he also gained work as a session musician and songwriter for other bands.
Although his early recordings (and whose back-up band included a then-unknown Stephen Stills) did not sell: his songs were increasingly performed by others, and he helped transform an unknown band called The Tikis into Harpers Bizarre – who became a financial success for Warners.
While at Warners/Reprise he (as the Guardian essayist noted) “fitted-in everywhere … and nowhere”. He became friends with fellow songwriters Randy Newman, Phil Ochs and especially Harry Nilsson. He was briefly a member of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention but left because “I didn’t want to be screamed at”. He met Frank Sinatra while the singer was having a mid-life crisis, and pitched a song that Parks’ brother Carson had wrote. On the advice of Lee Hazelwood, Nancy Sinatra joined her father to record Something Stupid – whose popularity quickly ended the mid-life crisis.
In 1967, Van Dyke Parks released his debut solo album Song Cycle – with songs ranging from folk, show-tunes, rock, jazz, classical and other genres – that sold poorly and cost quite a bit in production for its day, leading to some upset executives at the label. But in a pattern that would repeat itself, Song Cycles was a big hit with critics (winning “Album of the Year” from Stereo Review) and stayed in print for nearly twenty years as a classic release. And in 1970, he took over the audio/visual department at Warners, thus producing an early version of promotional videos for the label’s artists (of which only one for Ry Cooder has survived).
Meanwhile, producer Terry Melcher introduced him in 1966 to Brian Wilson – and the two worked together (sporadically) for thirty-five years. He helped arrange the song Good Vibrations, and was asked by Wilson to write lyrics for his magnum opus Smile – which remained unfinished for many years, as Wilson descended into his drug-induced depression.
Van Dyke Parks was blamed – at least in part – by Wilson’s bandmates for his drug use, which Parks says was closer to being the other-way-around. Parks walked away at that time, though did later help arrange Sail on Sailor – one of the few Beach Boys hits during the earlier part of the 1970’s.
Parks resumed his own recording career in 1972 with Discover America – influenced by Trinidadian music – and in 1976 released Clang of the Yankee Reaper … another collection of eclectic music that did not sell well but got critical acclaim and a cult following.
He then left Warners and for most of the next ten years focused on work for film studios – writing scores for everyone from Sesame Street to Ry Cooder to Robert Altman to Jack Nicholson’s The Two Jakes to Pee-Wee Herman, to children’s shows to the old “Savvy Traveler” radio program on NPR. In 1984 he wrote the music to the album Jump! – based upon the stories of Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus – and wrote some children’s books.
In 1989 he recorded the album Tokyo Rose – a concept album based upon the state of US-Japanese relations. And during the time Brian Wilson spent apart from the band, the Beach Boys did work with Parks (on the song Kokomo and the Summer in Paradise album) but Mike Love in particular did not want Parks to work with Wilson. The two did join forces on a Wilson project in the 1990’s, Orange Crate Art from 1995.
In 1998 he released his first live album (including Sid Page as concertmaster) and helped arrange indie folk/rock singer Joanna Newsom on her second album in 2006.
Parks worked with Brian Wilson on two more projects last decade: arranging a live performance of the abandoned Smile project (which Wilson toured with) and also contributing some lyrics to Wilson’s album That Lucky Old Sun in 2008.
In recent years, Van Dyke Parks has had his hand in several projects: performing (with Bob Dylan and Ry Cooder) in the 2009 documentary The People Speak – based upon A People’s History by historian Howard Zinn – which you can hear at this link performing the Woodie Guthrie tune “Do Re Mi” – and arranged recordings for the electronica Skillrex project. In 2011, the Beach Boys’ original recordings of Smile were released after forty-four years – yet Parks was left not only out of the promotional campaign but also the liner notes (at the behest of Mike Love). Van Dyke Parks’ most recent recordings entitled Songs Cycled were issued between 2011-2012: six singles (yes, 45’s) with both new material as well as old unreleased matter and re-workings of old tunes.
At age 71, he is in no mood to retire: while allowing that he might like to perform more concerts (if the demand was there) he is satisfied with where he is and is still in demand for his services (as producer, arranger and session musician). And why not: in addition to the names already mentioned, you add Phil Ochs, Bonnie Raitt, Tim Buckley, Little Feat, Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright, Ringo Starr, U2, Judy Collins and others … plus newer performers such as Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear and the New Zealand singer Kimbra – who has a video diary of their performance together in Australia.
One of the songs that he recorded with Brian Wilson in 1995 was Sail Away, from Orange Crate Art – which is perhaps the best way to close, as Parks will forever be linked with Wilson. You can hear the complex, image-laden lyrics and melody from Parks and Brian Wilson’s pop sensibilities coming together.
When I desire company
I’ll leave my footprints on the sand by a reckless sea
Hoping you’ll come to meAnd we’ll explore what might have been
And leave the shore and give this tired old world a spin
When my ship will come inSun up! We’ll sail away the day that my ship comes in
Fast as the highest mast can take us to any old where but here
One captain’s paradise for two
Sky in a sea that’s twice as blue
It all waits for me and you when my ship comes in
