Grow Where You’re Planted

An Interview By Joey Altruda

I can remember as a child hearing certain tunes by the Beach Boys that seemed to mysteriously stand apart from the band’s other repertoire. Spiraling, densely laden harpsichord tones swirled around lyrics with poignant, compelling torque. “Heroes and Villains” evoked an Old West setting; “Cabinessence” described a gothic meeting of East and West; and “Surf’s Up” spoke of generations uniting in a search for clarity. It wasn’t until years later, when a cult of musicians began trading bootleg cassettes of the previously unreleased Smile tapes, that I made the connection: Those songs were cowritten by Beach Boy Brian Wilson and a man named Van Dyke Parks.

Smile, a concept album born in 1967, brought the sophisticated arrangement skills of Brian Wilson into the raging Bob Dylan–influenced scene that had recently swept the Sunset Strip via The Byrds, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and The Doors. And Van Dyke Parks was integral to making it happen.

Born in 1943 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Parks has been involved in music since his boyhood days of studying clarinet. He met 1920s jazz-orchestra leader Paul Whiteman and jammed with Albert Einstein before he became a teenager. Parks came out West during the early ’60s and began playing at folk clubs with his brother Carson. By 1965, he had become an in-demand studio musician, playing keyboards on The Byrds’ Fifth Dimension and several other great records.

Parks was signed as an artist by MGM Records in 1964, and moved to Warner Bros. a few years later. There, he produced the first records of Randy Newman and Ry Cooder, and in 1971 created a pioneering audio/visual department—the first to film music videos to promote records. Parks has released nine albums of his own, including Song Cycle (1968), which recently topped British GQ’s list of the “coolest albums of all time.” And he has written arrangements for several prominent artists, including The Everly Brothers, U2, Carly Simon, Bonnie Raitt, Judy Collins, Bruce Springsteen, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Fiona Apple, and the Buena Vista Social Club.

After hearing for years that Parks lives near me in Hollywood’s Larchmont Village, I finally met him in spring 2005 at a party at my recording studio, Joey’s Place—a mint-condition 1950s studio on Melrose that I took over in 2000. Formerly called Electro Vox, it’s LA’s longest-running recording studio. Artists as different as Bing Crosby, doo-woppers The Shields, and G. Love have recorded there. Joey’s Place provided a comfortable setting in which to encounter a legendary musician, with Parks surrounded by classic instruments, tape machines, and memorabilia from the Charlie Parker and Fats Domino eras.

We immediately bonded as kindred spirits who share eclectic interests in instrumentation and audio dynamics—and, of course, music. My own artistic bents developed in a post-punk atmosphere conducive to influences from long-gone eras. My first band, the early-’80s group Tupelo Chain Sex, featured a rockabilly slant; in the mid-’90s, I explored a bebop twist on lounge when I recorded as Cocktails with Joey. When we met, Parks grooved right into our common knowledge of musical genres popular well before our respective times.

Curious to know more about the world of Van Dyke Parks and his journey through it, I sat down with the artist to discuss his work and life—with all its beats, bumps, and harmonies.

JOEY ALTRUDA: You’ve been working on an album. You want to talk about that a little bit?

VAN DYKE PARKS: Well, you never know what gets from the page to the stage, so I’m not sure [that] by the time the stage gets to the page or the magazine I’ll be anywhere near the theater, but . . .

True.

I’m not counting my chickens before they hatch, but I’m working on a record for Joanna Newsom. She is on Drag City Records out of Chicago, and she made a very good showing on her first record with harp and vocal and songs that she’s written.

And you’re writing string arrangements?

Generally a small orchestra around her: five woodwinds, two percussion, etcetera, and 21 strings.

You like 21 strings, don’t you?

Two brass. That’s the norm I use for impoverished record artists . . . to get at a small sound. It’s very interesting and it’s a phenomenon of strings that, of course, the larger the numbers, the quieter the potential. And I think about that because an orchestra should be used in accompanying vocalists to support them, and it’s a strange thing, you know, that one instrument may speak louder, even at an un-ambitious level, than an entire orchestra.

Alfred Newman, the great film composer who wrote the theme logo for Twentieth Century Fox when he was 18, told me when I met him that the quietest sound available was the philharmonic. Now, the [average] philharmonic [has] 98 players, and this is nowhere near that. But it attempts to be, so this group will try to wrap itself around this wonderful young singer’s rhapsody in her rapture of songwriting.

Alfred Newman is one of the gods of film composition, isn’t he?

Yeah, and his nephew Randy made an old man out of me. I produced his [Randy's] first record and got a chance to meet the great composer by so doing. I think Randy had abandoned any idea of a recording career himself. He was writing the score for Peyton Place, the television series, when I met him. He was a songwriter at Metric Music, where Lenny Waronker was the song plugger. They were teenage fellows who grew up privileged and then worked their way through the industry, both of them. Very interesting people.

Wow, that’s very cool. I just watched The Grapes of Wrath for the first time since I was a teenager. I don’t know the last time I actually watched the entire thing, but I’d seen it so many times as a kid. And Alfred Newman did that score. It’s just beautiful the way he takes an American folk tune and does themes and variations.

Well, it’s a funny thing about the things that we think—even “God Bless America”—the tunes that we think are entirely American but that come from first- or second-generation American citizens. That would include Irving Berlin. Now, the Episcopalians say that converts are the best kind, and I really believe that. I think that people that come into the United States [from elsewhere] really take a healthy, direct embrace of interpreting the country and trying to interpret the country in the arts. I really believe that, and in so doing, they become its principals. Gershwin was another.

Dvorák was really a transplanted American when this Czech composer came in here and wrote “The New World Symphony.” That’s a symphony of the New World, not for the New World. It was very interesting.

And you hear that song called “Going Home,” which you just assume is a black spiritual. But . . . it’s [perhaps] a facsimile of a black spiritual. It’s a new piece of music which then was adopted by black people. So it’s a very interesting world, that world of immigrants who come in and define us. And I think anybody who comes to California has the same problem. I certainly do, and I’ve been here most of my life. I first came out in ’55, but I’ve been here as an adult most of my life, and it’s still an exotic frontier to me.

Is that where your album Discover America (1972) comes from?

I think Discover America has a lot to do with wanting to inquire about what’s right and what’s wrong about this place. And I think it’s a healthy, skeptical work—entirely skeptical. I don’t think that it’s an informed optimism. I think most of my work, if you look at it, you’ll find a tremendous amount of skepticism all the way through the recorded career. All of those eight grand albums that I’ve done.

What about Song Cycle (1968)? I mean, that’s a very interesting album. I’m kind of lost for words to describe it, but it’s almost like an homage to this particular terrain here in Los Angeles.

Well, I think it’s transparent and very obvious that when I did that first album, I was under some psychological distress. I had just escaped from my brother’s funeral, and I witnessed the funeral of John Kennedy. I think it’s fair to say the whole nation was in a trauma in ’66, ’67, and ’68.

I guess the ’60s lasted from ’64—I define them as starting in about ’64, when people realized the personality of the Kennedy presidency and then approved of it. I would say ’69, that would be the end of the party, when the oil hit the water in Santa Barbara—the first major ecological disaster, compounded by the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King [the year before]. That was ’69—and the Manson murders, Altamont, etc. That, to me, is the end of the ’60s. So I think Song Cycle captures that pathos perfectly.

There’s no plot to it, and there’s certainly no singer, but you get the idea of the traumatic nature of the times. And yeah, the references in the album are of California, and I think the idea is to—the expression when I was a kid—“grow where you’re planted.” In fact, I had been planted here, and I’ve decided that that’s why I would take a healthy look at it, and that’s why you hear things like the Mexican American [influence], and so forth, start to creep into the work—with a lot of harp, and so forth. I was also thinking about the Cold War . . . Russia, which was a mysterious place on the other side of the world—or the universe, really. So, yeah, those influences are there.

Was Song Cycle influenced by your having just worked with Brian Wilson on his Smile project?

Well, I think it’s transparent and very obvious that when I did that first album, I was under some psychological distress. I had just escaped from my brother’s funeral, and I witnessed the funeral of John Kennedy. I think it’s fair to say the whole nation was in a trauma in ’66, ’67, and ’68.

I guess the ’60s lasted from ’64—I define them as starting in about ’64, when people realized the personality of the Kennedy presidency and then approved of it. I would say ’69, that would be the end of the party, when the oil hit the water in Santa Barbara—the first major ecological disaster, compounded by the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King [the year before]. That was ’69—and the Manson murders, Altamont, etc. That, to me, is the end of the ’60s. So I think Song Cycle captures that pathos perfectly.

There’s no plot to it, and there’s certainly no singer, but you get the idea of the traumatic nature of the times. And yeah, the references in the album are of California, and I think the idea is to—the expression when I was a kid—“grow where you’re planted.” In fact, I had been planted here, and I’ve decided that that’s why I would take a healthy look at it, and that’s why you hear things like the Mexican American [influence], and so forth, start to creep into the work—with a lot of harp, and so forth. I was also thinking about the Cold War . . . Russia, which was a mysterious place on the other side of the world—or the universe, really. So, yeah, those influences are there.

I was just going to say "Les Paul."

Les Paul is the next epiphany in music, a man who really took recording to another level. In 1953, that same year, “Memories Are Made of This” came out, with Dean Martin, which began with a very close-range stand-up bass. All of a sudden, a very dominant feature on a jukebox—hum job—jukebox in a truck stop—biggest thing in the world, that bass intro to “Memories Are Made of This.” So you started to hear how instruments were being miked closely . . . and then, of course, with Living Stereo and the phantom that goes from left to right—they demonstrated it with a train, and a Doppler effect.

And then Esquivel.

Esquivel . . .

He made the first Living Stereo album.

I was aware of Esquivel and also the great composer/arranger Bob Thompson, who’s still alive and in this town. So, yeah, the studio and the studio technique was job one. It was, like, 101 in recording for me. Song Cycle was definitely a time that I wanted to learn how to record and maximize the recording experience. I was 23 when I started it and when I finished it. And it shows a lot of effort and a lot of understanding of studio techniques. But it didn’t mean that I had solved anything. I created a problem for myself because I next had to find people around me who were worthy enough to merit my devoted assistance in the studio. And I found ’em.

I’m guessing that in this time the recording technique became a vital character in the process. You’ve composed, you’ve got musicians who are performing the music, and now the recording and studio technique is almost a musical instrument unto itself.

That’s right.

This is what you and Brian Wilson were both discovering at the same time.

I think that you have to be serious about stuff that hasn’t been taken seriously yet throughout life. I think it’s important to give serious consideration to the unexpected. Now, why would it be important to mike an instrument closer? A lot of people think that’s not very important, and they’re more interested in curing cancer or something, but to me this was an epic awakening. And by the time I went to produce Ry Cooder’s record, I actually instituted a lot of my lessons in a more restrained way, I’m happy to say. By bringing a solo mandolin in front of a really vigorous background, a rock-and-roll background, the mandolin didn’t go electric, but it came forward. And you hear that tremendous power of the plectrum reality in Ry’s first recording. All that would not have been possible had I not been interested in miking and so forth. It just wouldn’t have been possible. You wouldn’t have heard the damn thing.

You know, stuff like this matters. Now, when I came into the business, an arranger was known for one gift, and it had to come with the job, and that is how to make, as they would say, “the room sound.” What would it sound like when a group of musicians sat down and played it? Well, the room should sound good. All of a sudden, you hear the arrangement. Well, that whole necessity still exists in music in a way. But there was a new area to look into, and that’s what we wanted to do, find different proportionalities, and so forth.

Right, ’cause I find that I like the room sound combined with the close-miked sound. Certain instruments I don’t prefer to be close-miked because I want more of an ambient effect and not a clinical, isolated sound. And other things I really want featured up front as the kind of mixing and matching, you know, the piece of studio magic.

Well, that’s vital. Absolutely.

You know, when I hear bongos played on a Latin record, I want to know that they are out in the room and not close up like your face is in front of them, because it isn’t that way when you’re watching a band. That’s why I like those old Tito Puente records from the ’50s better than his later efforts.

Your own recording shows that kind of a faithful consideration to all those possibilities. And, yeah, it’s just, the thing about all of this is, of course, how Ted Turner says it only looks easy, but when you’re doing it, when the rubber hits the road, when you’re out in a studio situation, it’s a tremendously athletic situation. A million and one things to think about, and it’s a hell of a social calendar.

You have a whole bunch of people around you with a whole bunch of ideas, and the very challenge of the experience makes it, defines it as—that is, the recording experience—as something wherein you are a slave to revelation. If it’s any good, you’re going to find out where you’re going. You’re not going to know where you’re going until you get there [laughs]. If it has any iota of creative ethic, you’re going to find stuff out in the process. I don’t think there’s any joy that exceeds [the joy of] recording.

Yeah, sometimes you have a happy accident, where you didn’t plan for something to happen.

That’s where the stuff happens.

Sometimes, someone plays a mistake and actually it’s something cooler than you would have imagined writing on a piece of paper.

Absolutely. Give serious consideration to the unexpected.

One thing people don’t seem to mention in your interviews is the first single you made in 1966 on MGM Records, “Come to the Sunshine.” Where were you coming from when you made that?

I enjoyed this thing the Brazilians call desafinado, which means slightly out of tune. It’s where two strings of different mils [millitones] are played together—pressed together—on a fret board. They’ll come out with an irregularity, a strange harmonic, and a sea of wonderful partials not quite resolved. It’s very beautiful, and desafinado is a good word for it. I loved double-string instruments, so I used a lot of them. I believe I used six mandolin players on that record. “Farther Along” was on the other side [of the 45].

What about “Number Nine”?

That was a different single with Danny Hutton. Yeah, that was later. But I’d been in the Mothers of Invention, and that producer, Tom Wilson, is about 6 feet 5, a black man, Harvard-educated. He singled me out, and when I quit the Mothers, he found my number and he called me and asked me if I wanted to record, and that’s how I started.

You originally came out of the folk-music scene?

Well, that’s what brought me out here. You see, I think there are a lot of people—Bob Dylan is among them . . . Brian Wilson . . . and I must say that I am as well—who were tremendously influenced by the Kingston Trio, because they were the first Joe Average to hit the stage. And they did Joe Average and everybody thought, Well, if they can do it, why can’t I? It’s like George Bush in the Oval Office. We used to call George Bush Citizen Cocaine when he went to Andover, by the way, because he was a great dealer.

By the time I came out here in 1962, I sang in coffeehouses with my brother, and we were not dissimilar from the Kingston Trio. We did work songs and parlor blues, things à la Josh White. We did Mexican boleros. We did whatever we wanted. French songs . . . this, that, and the other . . . and kind of a left[-wing] sensibility in the death throes of the Beat era, which is really what attracted me to this place. By the time I came out here, Buck Wheat [David “Buck” Wheat, the Kingston Trio’s bassist] was already in a garage apartment of his own—I mean, reduced to very little. A man of great talent who was being overlooked because he was out of style.

I was very interested in him for his great intonation on his instrument, which is really—a bass like any other fretless instrument—it’s just a series of approximate pitches. But he did real well with any nail and hammer and nail. And then I met him, and by that time, things had changed. But he was a great man.

Yeah. He had a famous bass. His bass was supposedly the most gorgeous-sounding instrument you’d ever heard, the particular bass that he had.

They say that when he bought his bass, he went into an instrument shop that had about a dozen upright basses in there, and when he put his hands on this bass and plucked the string, all the other basses in the room vibrated in sympathy [laughs]. That’s how amazing his instrument was. You know, he was such a guru to many.

Well, he was really a holdover from the Beat generation. He had been there and done that. The Kingston Trio’s first record came out of the Hungry i in San Francisco, which was basically, you know, like most of those coffeehouses of that time and the places that I worked with my brother. They had poets. You know, you would go in there, somebody would be sitting with a Smith Corona typewriter and do your profile for a buck. Writers would survive like that. Poetry was read from the stage. And we had a ball. We worked with steel bands and Mexican groups. I remember Bessie Griffin and the Gospel Pearls, Long Gone Miles . . . people from The Delta would come up and sing, and so forth.

They were all up in there, between here and San Francisco and San Diego, housing a long stream of people of leftist sensibilities.

And these were clubs like the Prison of Socrates, Rouge et Noir, and Insomniac?

Right, I played those places.

Were these down here?

Yeah. Rouge et Noir was in Seal Beach. Insomniac was in Hermosa Beach, right across from the Lighthouse, as a matter of fact. I can remember 1963, playing that place, the Insomniac. Bob Hare was the owner. He lives out there. He’s still alive. I’ve seen him recently—vital and very interested in everything around him and a great collector of Beat art. Right across the street [from the Insomniac] was the Lighthouse—Howard Rumsey’s. It was the jazz boîte in town.

And I remember one night, walking in there and seeing for the first time, in her first appearance in the United States, Astrud Gilberto. She was singing a bossa nova called “The Girl from Ipanema,” and I followed her off the stage after her set. I was 18, she was 23, and I walked in there. I was going to tell her how much I loved her, and she was sobbing, shaking and sobbing because she was so nervous from her first performance, and I just at that moment realized that I was not far from virginity and she didn’t speak any English. And I was somehow looking at a mountain that I didn’t think I could climb.

But, you know, it was a great time, man. You know, Oscar Peterson . . . Thelonious Monk . . . all these people. Lenny Bruce went up here. Pandora’s Box, where I played, and others, you know, all kinds of places. Santa Barbara had a place there, an actual house. It was a coffeehouse. I remember David Crosby said in his book, his autobiography, [that] when he saw me and my brother, he realized that if we could do it, so could he. That’s when he decided to get in. He and David Lindley came to one of our shows there. So, you know, it was a wonderful world.

It’s interesting how so much of that era isn’t acknowledged.

I think what people are missing now—especially in music, with the advent of self-propulsion and the monastic experience of sitting in front of a synthesizer and getting a whole bunch of sounds, one man—it’s become much more of a singular adventure. It used to be peopled. Everybody would work on a thing. And the club scene that existed in the ’60s—if we look back with an appreciation for all of that—it represented a kind of an oxygenating of the process. It was an oxygen to get, to breathe in these rooms with so many disparate ideas and powerful forces: literature and music and art. The Insomniac, for example, did $250,000 worth of art sales in 1963. There was a Newsweek article about it. I read it and saved it. And that was a fortune in those days, $250,000 worth of art.

That was the art gallery. The coffeehouse was next door and they had a movie screen that played silent movies the whole time while people were having coffee and stuff. It was on this very interesting acrylic stuff from DuPont. The movies would be shown on that opaque surface, and then a chain would be pulled on the side, and the screen would go up. Then they would explode with a steel band or gospel music or a Mexican group or . . . me and my brother followed a lot of powerful kinds of world-beat events that took place. And it was world beat. It was a lot of different rhythms and stuff all colliding, a great kaleidoscope of color and new sounds, so it was a great time to really learn something about music.

I think so many young people are missing out because there are hardly any venues or you have to be a real smart person to seek out the one or two places like this that may exist. So much of it is DJ culture. Not to knock DJ culture, that’s a cool thing unto itself, but we’re missing the interaction.

And there was no such thing as pay-to-play. There was no such thing as getting paid to play, either, practically. It was a big deal.

Well, getting back to Buck Wheat for a minute, you know, he was a guru and a mentor to so many people—a young Miles Davis; Gerry Mulligan; John Coltrane; Lambert, Hendricks and Ross; and so many others. And he actually helped George Russell develop the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which is a different way of playing and hearing music, where all of a sudden you’re hearing all this different color coming out of the same scales that you thought of in a more diatonic way. Buck Wheat and George Russell were transcribing this theory from Lennie Tristano, the blind jazz-piano legend, when Lennie was in the hospital dying.

I didn’t know about this.

You know, I was probably Buck Wheat’s last student. He was a great mentor to me.

When did he die?

He died 20 years ago. He died in about ’85. He was 63.

Where did he live?

He lived in a loft apartment downtown at MacArthur Park.

Oh, that’s right. He lived down there. I remember that.

With his machine shop, where he would make gorgeous wooden jewelry.

Yes, he was a true artisan.

Well, I just wanted to touch on symbiosis.

Yes.

Like Paris in the ’20s or 52nd Street in the ’20s through the ’50s . . . the Beat generation . . . folk or psychedelia . . . the punk scene. People seem to have a symbiotic thing that happens for a while, where a lot of creative things go on, and, you know, it’s easy to say, Oh, I wish I was alive back then. But I think we have to look for our own symbiotic thing to happen from one generation to the next. And I wonder what it might be next, because nothing is regional anymore. It’s hard to have an individuality from one region to the next in music, in art, in culture . . . because we’re globalized.

Yeah. Well, I still think—I’m anti-globalization in a way, and I’m very interested in the preservation of regional values and definitions and syntax. I think that it’s the very thing that will preserve us: the variety of life in its expression, that very thing that we find, to our delight, is something that we should defend for successors. And I don’t mean necessarily that we all have to be breeders. You can be a raving homosexual and not even think about having issue, or you could be asexual, but I still think anyone who’s worth his salt must care about the successors to what it is that we’re doing. And I think that more important than anything [is the need] to protect the regional values and try to bring a regional stamp into our work, and to make sure we do it by growing where we are planted. That’s what I believe.

I think that that’s where symbiosis starts, and, you know, sometimes it falls on its smile and becomes something like the Boston Sound.

Sometimes it’s not exactly the symbiosis that maybe we had in mind. But I think it’s very important to—you mentioned symbiosis and in the same breath regional identity, and I think there’s a reason you did that. I think that’s because you recognize that there is potential in using a regional identity as a place to create that symbiosis, that spark that ignites thoughts and ideas and new expression.

But I know one thing. Paul Simon said, “It’s easier to get to Carnegie Hall from the street than it is to get from Carnegie Hall to the street,” and I agree with him. I also agree that the two luckiest men in the music business are Ringo Starr and Mike Love. So, you know, I might just slide through on somebody else’s coattails someday.

Yeah.

It might be you.

Well, let’s hope so. One last question: What do have sitting in your CD player right now?

I have two things that are pretty close, and both of them are fado. One of them is Mariza, and I don’t know the name of the other one. I just got it. It’s a group—Portuguese.

There’s another thing that I really love, which is a combination of synthetic and acoustic events. The most powerful songwriting, arranging, piano playing, and [singing] poet that I can think of in this racket called music is Paolo Conte and his [Nonesuch] record Reveries.

I knew you were a big fan of his, and I have fallen in love with his work.

That to me is it. I mean, it’s always nice to have somebody alive who scares you enough that you know there’s a potential in the human spirit. It keeps you on your toes and keeps you from giving up and wanting to sit on the bench.

Yeah, he’s so uniquely cool. His voice kind of reminds me of an Italian Tom Waits, for lack of a better analogy…

I think it’s fair to say that both are artists in their own rights. I think any comparison would be odious, but the fact is, Paolo Conte is the giant in my book. And he just—as far as I’m concerned—acquits the very idea that a song can have a revolutionary impact and still console.

And that’s . . .

That’s the name of that tune.