Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle by Henderson Richard

Author:Henderson, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2010-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

Producer Lenny Waronker and arranger Van Dyke Parks scrutinize charts during a Harpers Bizarre session.

In the control room during a recording session for the group Harpers Bizarre, with (from left) engineer Lee Herschberg, producer Lenny Waronker, arranger Van Dyke Parks, lead singer (and future Warner Bros. record producer) Ted Templeman, Harpers’ manager Carl Scott and music publisher Larry Marks.

As Parks wraps his singing around some tricky alliteration, the listener’s attention is drawn once more to the unusual treatment of his vocals. Often during the album, Bruce Botnick would feed Van Dyke’s voice into the rotating speaker mechanism contained in the Leslie cabinet usually found attached to a Hammond organ. The horns within the cabinet can be spun at varying speeds, imparting a mechanical vibrato, often of exaggerated depth and periodicity so as to yield truly otherworldly effects.

As regards the processing of his voice, Parks opines that “[Producer Lenny Waronker and I] had no fear of artifice. It was the right thing to do. That was all that I thought about. Lenny encouraged me. He was a willing accomplice, though he remarked years later to me that ‘You got the criticism.’ Really, I didn’t think too much about the vocalist, it didn’t matter to me.”

“Donovan’s Colours”

As previously noted, this was the initial song recorded and given a test release, prior to Warner Bros. authorizing the production of Song Cycle as a full-length album.

Van Dyke Parks recorded his take on this well-liked song by Donovan in response to seeing the Scottish troubadour treated miserably by Bob Dylan in the D. A. Pennebaker documentary Dont Look Back. Parks’ principal motive in covering the song was to express support for Donovan.

“[“Donovan’s Colours”] had multiple pianos,” producer Waronker enthuses. “Van Dyke’s piano playing was so great. I felt the more the better, without having much experience. Acoustic piano, electric piano tack … This was months before Song Cycle began.”

In recalling the genesis of his first album with this piece, Parks spoke of having “Stepped from one kind of music into something else.” Additionally, he deems this the most successful track on the record, though this judgment could reflect his ambivalence about a solo career, still lingering decades later.

The mathematics of the first 20 seconds of the piece are critical to both the unspoken scenario created by Parks and the rhythmic base upon which “Donovan’s Colours” is built. The composer drops a coin into a machine, which in turn starts a pneumatic motor; spilling out of this comes a rhythmic tattoo for piano and castanets. These few moments, which swoop past with such alacrity, contain the cleverness of a Rube Goldberg machine, the over-engineered chain reaction devices drawn by that cartoonist in the ’30s. There is much about Song Cycle, with this piece in particular, that put me in mind of Goldberg’s wonderfully imagined, ever so intricately connected components and events. A critic once disparaged Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, a film also infused with the antic spirit of Goldberg’s mechanical imaginings, asking in his review, “where does

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