In earlier centuries patricians brought together the scientific, the anecdotal and the mythical in Wünderkammers or Cabinets of Curiosity. In the cabinets these rich collectors made sense of the world in miniature, cataloguing and classifying the wonders of the world. But that was only the first step of two. For the cabinet to fulfill its function, people had to visit. The cabinet was a theater of the world and a theater of memory carefully plotted and designed by its creator, who became the guide when visitors entered.
Look at the artist on the cover of 'Song cycle' - he hides a vast universe behind his serious, studious brow. On the inlay of the cd I have he's at the piano, here's a student not at home in the world. Here's a man who needs a theater to make sense of the world. Here's a man industrious and meticulous enough to build one. He collects American locations (Vine Street, Palm Desert, Laurel Canyon Blvd, Alabama country fair, Silver Lake...), snatches of archetypical American life, folksongs from 'Blackjack Davey' to 'Nearer my God to thee' (or from Harry Smith to the Titanic), American vernacular. He collects snatches of American found sound (natural, industrial - spliced throughout the record). We've got the scientific and the anecdotal. The American mythmachine is Hollywood in the '30s - we see the whole thing through a Hollywood lens, scored by Ives. He's got the whole thing mapped out, classified and cross-referenced behind that brow.
'Song cycle' is not a tour of America, it's a tour of his private theater and Parks slips into his role as guide naturally (just like he would on 'Discover America' - his first steps into the real world): 'that's a tape that we made', 'Here's 'Laurel Canyon Blvd - we'll pass by here later again', half of the lyrics are geographical directions, here's a Public Domain melody I called 'Van Dyke Parks' which I cross-referenced with a song 'Public Domain' with my name on the composition', 'Donovan's colours'... Think of it, he sounds exactly like the guy guiding the bustour of Classical Hollywood locations, and you keep thinking 'Wait, wasn't he in those pictures? But he hasn't aged a day in fifty years...' He is the Creator who's hidden himself in the nooks and crannies of his theatre. He's got to sound a little touched by naive divinity, he's got to sound a little creepy. It's 'It's a wonderful life' and he's the angel.
***
Side one - from the Wild West to the death of the dream of Progress.
Btw, none of my interpretations are based on understanding of the lyrics. That's beyond me.
We start with a snatch of Black Jack Davey, a ballad of the West, straight from the Anthology of American folk Music.
But we get the rug pulled out from under us right away.
'That's a tape that we made, but I'm sad to say it never made the grade'
--- from the real world to the theatre, but we're not inside yet. 'Vine street' is the preambule, the guide's introduction, how he got from the real world to this palace of imagination.
Of course the preambule starts with a preambule - it's that kind of record.
'That was me, 3rd guitar [on the tape] / I wonder where the others are' - it's a real life he's left far behind, he doesn't even know them anymore (sadness in the melody), but what's more...
'I sold the guitar today / I never did play much anyway'
We hear the first piano sounds, this is the first sound of the theatre we're about to enter.
It's kinda obvious, but dramatically right - he needs a new sound, the guitar is gone. He's proud of it too, there's a sly smile on his lips. Wait till you hear what's in store!
Orchestral introduction - tadadada.
'Vine street' - the guide sings the chapter heading.
We're still not inside. These last 90 seconds sketch the guide's sentimental education. On Vine Street, he lived a real life. People he knew, the street buzzing with music (I love the way the orchestra perfectly intimates the way location, history and melody all intersect). It was an idyllic life of friendship and poverty. 'The crack of the backbeat on Vine street / swinging along on the wings of a song' - this is where he learned music. At the same time he's telling us how it came tumbling down: 'the people would pay to hear us play' - the orchestra comments they certainly did not.
And with a snap we're in - the curtains rise! The theatre begins.
'Palm desert' - the American dream!
You've got to have a hard heart to withstand these first 20 seconds. The thrill of positivity, the American dream stretched out before you in the widescreen landscape of the open desert on the way (listen to the way the accents mean movement) to Hollywood!
The song is straightforwardly structured: ABBAABA
A = the Palm Desert section.
B = a 30s Hollywood dance routine, its syncopations perfectly elegant, ready for Fred and Ginger's dance routine. Sentimental? You bet! I get swept off my feet.
'Dreams are still born in Hollywood': love that double entendre!
And yet the sourness creeps in already: 'hillside manors on the banks of toxicity'.
Both A and B are absolutely beautiful melodies, so gorgeous and evocative.
I want to remark on the remarkable pedal steel segue that opens and ends the central double A-section. Bands like Beachwood Sparks built an entire career out of those 2 seconds.
A returns - no more accents, it's all lovely rolling arrangements, birds are singing, a beautiful spring morning. Then the second A - an orchestral re-imagining.
The 3rd B-section: love those bells, a musical clock, time is running out.
And the last A drifts off in a dreamy haze, pedal steel again.
That's the dream!
'Widow's walk' - but on the other side of the coin.
Whose widows are walking? The factory workers, the day laborers, the miners who built Hollywood on their backs and for their efforts died in cave-ins, factory fires, or from dust lung.
She walks with a limp - you hear it in the first seconds 'Widow's --- walk - I do walk on'.
'As in days of yore' - contains years of longing.
'Widows face the future like factories face the poor'
The song sounds like 19th century reform-literature. 'Of course it is as God has seen fit, but with charity we can relief the poor off the street where we have to be confronted by their bad hygiene...' It's that kind of hopefull/hopeless twofaced discourse Van is getting at. Part of the vernacular.
The accordion is a nice sentimental touch.
Musically she has nothing to walk towards, except that rising and falling chorus line 'tada ta tada ta the widow's (rise) - walk (fall)'.
At 1'40" the landscape changes. Waves, bells...
Is this the widow talking in an unstructured, but beautiful rambling monologue? She doesn't know the structure of classical oratory, she will never be heard. But it ends on a chord which is almost triumphant - she knows life in ways civil society doesn't.
But something's wrong - the guide knows. He switches to one of the jolly exhibits 'Laurel canyon blvd', but it's rushed. He's lost his train of thought.
The music stops.
He's lost in a reverie. 'The all golden'
If ever there's been a musical passage fitting to signal the trance state! You can hear the vortex scrambling his mind. It's triggered by the contradiction between the dream and the widow's walk. Is the plight of the many a justifiable cost for the dream of a few?
And his mind starts riffing on the key to American society -social mobility (if one can get from there to here, it's ok, right?)
It's a picaresk fable -'he [our hero] 's not your run of the mill garden variety hayseed'.
He wants to see what he could see, so he joins the Alabama county fair.
Off the record, he is hungry but he works hard.
After two verses - sweet as cookie dough baked by Walt Disney, breezy like the adventure yarn our guide indulges in.
Then he gets on the railway - I love how in the space of one line 'Constant commentary by the wayside', you can literally hear him tossing those snide remarks by the wayside as the train picks up speed. Top of the world!
Things get off the rails - the first 'You will know why hayseeds go back to the country' is a happy taunt to those constant commentaries. But when they start singing about the 'stately union', you know someone's gonna get put in his place. The second 'hayseeds go back to the country' is a threat and the crowd's enraptured in joyful violence as the guide drifts off again in his trance.
Did I mention I LOVE this song? There's a piano solo after the second chorus as evocative as the Beatles' 'Flying'.
'Nearer my God to thee'
All of which leads him naturally to the sinking of the Titanic - the death of the Western dream of unstoppable Progress leading inexorably to a better world.
Phew.
***
Side two -
You'll be relieved to hear I can't find a narrative arc to side two, unless it's a trip from idyllic melody to nightmarish disharmony. I wouldn't put it past Parks to envision a program that runs from a Golden Age of idealized folklore ('Public domain') to the clatter and death of 20th century democracy ('By the people'). Maybe.
In any case, side two kicks off with two of the most classically beautiful pieces on the record.
'Public domain' - a history of the idea and uses of 'folklore' in a three-part suite condensed to 2'30" (and why not?).
Part 1 (up to 1'05"): that harp melody is so beautiful. Like an Irish folk melody springing newly-born and dewdrop wet from the spring green foliage of the great American plains.
Is he singing about the old time songs, coming at us like musical history, straight from the Alamo, the songs as unchanging code passed on through the ages?
Part 2 (up to 1'45"): all that beauty followed by the most hermetic 40 seconds of pure orchestra on the record. It keeps threatening to settle down into a melody, but it remains resolutely abstract. Folksongs picked up by Romantic European composers and developed into fierce and radical orchestral works?
Part 3 (last 45"): it resolves (like Paul McCartney's 'Woke up / Fell out of bed' rising out of the orchestra) into a sort of journal entry of Van Dyke's academic peradventures. It's part Bildung-song (one verse), part recollection of his own introduction to the public domain. Clearly the academic view didn't meet his approval, he had to go look for it on Vine Street. 'Doubtless more on sore wing than prayer [love the piano] / I up and just withdrew / to wander round there'.
The orchestra battles out the argument between 'art Public Domain' and 'folk Public Domain' for a few bars longer.
I know this sounds awfully theoretical, and I'm sure Parks had grand theories in mind with this record. But it doesn't diminish the pure musical pleasure of parts 1 and 3. So fresh and melodic and naturally flowing.
'Donovan's colours'
My favourite. And for those who can't get into the singing, an instrumental.
I heard that this song was recorded before the album and that it was the recording which convinced the label to fund the rest. A test run, if you will. I picture jaws dropping to the floor at that meeting, either at the amazing genius of the music or at the fact that it wouldn't sell a dime. It's like a master painter who's never had the free run of the workshop, getting one chance at a painting and throwing all the colours of his mind onto the canvas, more colour than the fabric can hold, ending up with an image so radiant with the glow of imagination, it's almost hyperreal.
A cross between the fragmentary recording strategy of Smile and a tone poem. Rarely has music so happy sounded so artful.
Begins with a happy piano, like being on a river that just keeps rolling along, almost ragtime or a player piano from a Wild West saloon, clappers
0'30": the rhythm's got it, carefree, idyllic melody. There is nothing unhappy about this music. Bells.
0'56": xylophones take over, rhythm stop-starts, swaying like a marching sousaband, carnival like.
1'20": the wheels come off, are you ready for the drop?, bassline is heaven
1'35": new rhythms, exciting, fireworks, nightlife
1'47": melody breaks open like a new dawn
1'55": there's the nightlife again
2'07": there's the dawn again
Something sinister creeping in there for the first time.
2'23": follow that bassline
2'40": back to the theme, searching for the beat, seems like it could fall apart at any time.
Slowly it unwinds and falls into silence. They're packing up the orchestra as it keeps playing.
'The attic'
Structure: verse - chorus - verse - chorus - bridge - bridge - magical segue - chorus vamp
Listening to write these notes has given me a new appreciation for this wistful, dreamy creation, which had passed me by a little before.
The bridge melody is one of the best on the record, and the 'magical segue' (2'23" - 2'37") blows my mind.
In general, the song makes me think of abandoned gentleman's plantation houses in Savannah during the Civil War. The chorus is something the characters in Capote's 'The Grass harp' could be humming at night up in that tree (if you haven't read it, I recommend it as much as I do this record, more maybe). Or maybe something the kids in 'To kill a mockingbird' sing in those endless summers chasing the spectral presence of Boo.
Lovely 'bullfighter' horns in the fade.
In fact, lovely all around.
'Laurel canyon boulevard' (second version)
Split right down the middle, this combines two distinct fragments.
The first is a new melody - sounds like the band is in a car heading out of town.
The second repeats the melody from side one: this time less hurried, clippety-cloppety, sounds like the band is on horseback riding out of town.
I don't know, not a track that I'd come back for.
'By the people' - a nightmarish vision which I think may be a eulogy for democracy in the USA. It makes 'Revolution 9' sound like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
Not all that pleasant to listen to actually.
Some sections, though I get lost myself.
Starts off with the Andrews sisters on varispeed, 'Bugle boy' sucked through a vacuum. 'Strike up the band' - American democracy was born in war. Still pretty melodic.
0'30": abstraction sets in, violins, more studio trickery
1'05": there's the creepy narrator, the orchestra follows his idiosyncratic delivery, no verse or chorus in sight, talking about 'proletarians' and 'darkies' - the first victims of democracy.
End with bees humming (or snoring???)
1'45": instrumental passage, more high pitched voices varispeeded, balalaikas
2'15": narrator talks about the Iron Curtain vs American Express
2'55": Steps leading downward. We're heading into the underworld with the narrator.
3'20": 'There is still a chance' - momentary rest and hope, harmony, the red white and blue.
Something about Russians leads us back into
4'00": Strike up the band (repeat of the first passage), Andrews sisters
4'40": Short repeat of 'step by step...'
4'50": lovely orchestral coda
5'00": rain sets in, church bells, the funeral, orchestra fades, democracy is being put into the ground.
Maybe it ain't so forbidding a song as I first thought.
'Pot pourri' - but Parks may have lost his mind in there.
The record ends with a fragment of the artist muttering to himself at the piano, lost in the imagination.
The engineer wants to go up to him and tell him the session's over.
The producer holds him back, pats him on the back and says 'Where he's gone, none of us can follow to bring him back'.
...
The end
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