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Biography by Bruce Eder and William Ruhlman
In a field where the term "genius" is handed out freely, Van Dyke Parks is
the real article. As a session musician, composer, arranger, lyricist,
and singer, he's contributed significantly to several decades' worth of
inimitable masterpieces credited to other artists, as well as
generating two or three masterpieces of his own. Born in Hattiesburg,
MS, in 1941, he was a musical prodigy and attended the American
Boychoir School in Princeton, NJ. He studied the clarinet and also
worked as a child actor, on-stage and on television, co-starring with
Ezio Pinza in the 1953 comedy series Bonino, and also working in movies, including Grace Kelly's final film, The Swan (1958).
He remained dedicated to music, however, and studied at the Carnegie
Institute and majored in music at the University of Pennsylvania. In
1964, a year after graduating, he was signed to MGM Records as a
recording artist, releasing "Come to the Sunshine," which had some
local chart action in Phoenix, AZ, and threatened to do something
nationally without succeeding. (It did promise enough to require that
Parks put together a band to back him on-stage, whose members included
a young Stephen Stills.) He became a session musician and worked with
Sonny & Cher (when they were "Anthony & Cleopatra"), as well as
playing sessions for producer Terry Melcher on records by Paul Revere
& the Raiders and other artists. On the Byrds' Fifth Dimension
album he played the Hammond B-3 organ, and he also played keyboards on
sessions for Judy Collins, and arranged songs for Tim Buckley.
It was also Melcher who got Parks together in 1966 with Brian Wilson of
the Beach Boys. A prodigiously gifted composer, Wilson was no lyricist,
and he needed one who could match the daring new music he was devising
in his head — this resulted in their collaboration on the SMiLE
album. Initially, only "Heroes and Villains" emerged from their work
together as a modest hit single but a well-loved one, and the project
languished over Wilson's worsening emotional and mental state in 1967.
Fragments and pieces of the project turned up on ensuing albums into
the early '70s, and Parks also played a key role in completing a song,
"Sail on Sailor," that gave the Beach Boys a rare early-'70s single
success. (In an early-'80s interview, incidentally, Parks said —
without blame or recriminations — that he had never received a penny in
royalties from his work with Wilson or the sales of the Beach Boys'
records, a situation that was no doubt tied to the confusion
surrounding the sale and ownership of their publishing, which was later
nullified.
In 1967, as work on SMiLE
came to a halt, Parks was lured to the newly invigorated Warner Bros.
label by producer/A&R chief Lenny Waronker. His new professional
berth led to a single, "Donovan's Colours," credited to "George
Washington Brown," and its response - especially a pioneering piece of
pop/rock criticism by journalist Richard Goldstein - helped redefine
"rock" as distinct from rock & roll. Parks and Waronker were
responsible for transforming the Tikis into the pop/rock novelty act
Harpers Bizarre, which became a new success for the label. Out of their
work together, and all of these other projects - and the creative stew
that Waronker had set boiling at Warner Bros. and its new sister label,
Reprise - grew Parks' Song Cycle, a debut album that was the
very definition of the word "eclectic," incorporating folk, classical,
Broadway, ragtime, jazz, '50s pop, and rock & roll influences. It
won the Record of the Year Award from High Fidelity/Stereo Review, and
although it never sold in big numbers, the LP stayed in print for
nearly two decades.
He then did session work with a variety of artists, not releasing his second album, Discover America, which revealed his immersion in Trinidadian music, until 1972. Clang of The Yankee Reaper,
another eclectic collection, followed in 1976. But Parks maintained his
"day job" — film work on scores by Ry Cooder and others, writing and
arranging for Shelley Duvall's children's TV series, and other
pursuits. Finally, in 1984 came the brilliant Jump!, a concept album (and proposed stage musical) based on the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris. It was followed in 1989 by Tokyo Rose,
which concerned the state of American-Japanese relations. In 1988, he
released a live album, and in the next decade he collaborated anew with
Brian Wilson, who finally released a finished realization of SMiLE with new recordings on the Nonesuch label in 2004. (By
that time, however, dozens of unauthorized bootleg editions of tracks
from the 1967 sessions had surfaced, to the delight of fans.) Two years
later, Parks began contributing lyrics to another Brian Wilson project,
That Lucky Old Sun, as well as lending his arrangements to
Silverchair's Young Modern (his second collaboration with the
Australian band) and Inara George's An Invitation.
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