Song Cycle (33 1/3)

This is an intelligent take on a classic left-field album. The Mississippi native has been hailed as a great American original - 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. 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 debacle of Welles' "Citizen Kane" is the stuff of a crammed shelf of film history books.In Van Dyke Parks case, his calling card and his bete noir both fit within the same cardboard sleeve of "Song Cycle". The album was released on Warner Brothers Records in 1968. It cost more than any recording made prior to that time (Warners would ultimately recoup its costs sometime in the early '90s). No one can say that the label didn't get its money's worth: "Song Cycle'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. Said lyrics were sung by their author, his piping tenor swathed in a galactic fog of studio effects.Van Dyke Parks' first album aspired to fill the void left by the nonappearance of the "Beach Boys' Smile" on which Parks had been the lyricist. Though he walked away twice from the growing chaos of the "Smile" sessions, in time he would find himself tarred with the same brush as the "Beach Boys" troubled auteur Brian Wilson, both co-writers characterized as drug casualties."33 1/3" is a series of short books about a wide variety of albums, by artists ranging from James Brown to the Beastie Boys. Launched in September 2003, the series now contains over 50 titles and is acclaimed and loved by fans, musicians and scholars alike.