Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle

Despite Warner Brothers Records' conviction that it had mid-wifed the American equivalent of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, "Song Cycle" wasn't rock music, and it didn't sell like rock music. This title offers an intelligent take on a classic left-field album. Despite Warner Brothers Records' conviction that it had mid-wifed the American equivalent of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, "Song Cycle" wasn't rock music, and it didn't sell like rock music. The album's arrangements taxed the storage capacity of multi-track tape and its lyrics allowed enquiring minds to follow a Joycean snakes-and-ladders path through multiple meanings, allusive wordplay and puns. "Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle" is an intelligent take on a classic left-field album. For good and for ill, the full arsenal of bouquets and brickbats available to music writers has been tossed at Van Dyke Parks during his tenure of forty years and more in the music business. The Mississippi native has been hailed as a great American original - Charles Ives in Groucho Marx's pajamas, was Rolling Stone's pull quote - and derided as a charlatan. He was among the first to achieve the questionable status of cult artist; defended by a vocal few, dismissed or ignored by the greater audience. His career arc, and indeed his own life invite parallel consideration with another maverick who made his name in Hollywood, the film director and actor Orson Welles. Both were immediately recognized as child prodigies and took full advantage of the status conferred upon them. Each had the mantle of genius conferred upon them; in both cases, the mantle was worn with increasing difficulty as the years progressed. Both men, perhaps unfairly, have been accused of never bettering their artistic debuts. The compounded triumph and…