By Billy Florio
There were two geniuses behind The Beach Boys/Brian Wilson’s brilliant pop symphony SMiLE. One was Wilson himself. The other was recruited by Wilson to write the lyrics to such classics as “Cabin Essence,” “Wonderful” and “Surfs Up”; that man is Van Dyke Parks.
Long before the SMiLE sessions ended abruptly, Parks had removed himself from the production. An argument with Mike Love over the lyrics to “Heroes and Villains” caused Parks to leave the studio, allowing SMiLE to collapse. Parks moved on, to Warner Brothers, where he then made his first solo album, Song Cycle. On Song Cycle, Parks takes what Wilson was trying to do on SMiLE and pushes it a step further. While Wilson was grabbing bits and pieces of Doo-Wop, Jazz and Soul and transforming them into pop songs, Parks took similar influences (Jazz, Blues, Country and Ragtime) and turned the pop songs into them. He left the songs still in the context of their genres and strung them together in a song-cycle, altering song structure and pop formulas. If Song Cycle was heard by a larger audience than it was (it was not a popular album in its day, and only looked back on as a masterpiece), it would have changed pop music forever. What Parks does is still far ahead of what many other similar artists are doing today.
Song Cycle is a brilliant piece of art that shows Parks genius more than SMiLE even did. On SMiLE Parks managed the lyrics, and while the lyrics on SMiLE are unquestionably genius, (“A shanty town, a chanty in Waikiki / And juxtapose a man with a mystery / A blue Hawaiian capture his melody / and Liliuola Kalani will sing to me”), Song Cycle allows Parks to show off his knack for melody as well. He creates incredibly beautiful songs that tie together his themed lyrics with elegant music. He also includes songs written by Randy Newman (whose music always seemed to be similar to Parks) and Donovan Leitch. Song Cycle is an incredible companion to SMiLE and at times could be better than it. In a perfect world, every musician trying to be “progressive” would be issued a copy of Song Cycle, and forced to listen-but if this was a perfect world, people would also stop asking: “Wasn’t that the guy from ‘My Mother The Car’?”
The Chronicle gives ´Song Cycle´, by Van Dyke Parks five out of five stars.