{"id":20588,"date":"2021-03-04T05:30:35","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T10:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20588"},"modified":"2021-03-01T11:33:52","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T16:33:52","slug":"always-finish-what-you-started-van-dyke-parks-on-orange-crate-art-part-3-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/03\/04\/always-finish-what-you-started-van-dyke-parks-on-orange-crate-art-part-3-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Always Finish What You Started: Van Dyke Parks on ‘Orange Crate Art’ (Part 3 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"Parks recalls a visit to a friend in rural Virginia, nearly 2500 miles due East from southern California. \u201cI went past, Galax, where the Old Fiddlers Convention is held,\u201d Parks remembers. \u201cIt inspired me to write \u2018My Jeanine,\u2019 [set] in a place that doesn\u2019t exist and a time I haven\u2019t forgotten.\u201d He quotes from his own lyrics: \u201c\u2019Two bits for Cokes and jokes at the diner. Time was a magazine.\u2019 It\u2019s almost like a lamentation, kind of like \u2018the white boy\u2019s got the blues\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cIt was sad to me, as we speed away from a world that no longer exists without studying it more thoroughly. And that\u2019s what Orange Crate Art<\/i> would do for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The personal themes of Parks\u2019s album represented an opportunity for closure. \u201cIt was almost like it was my job to complete Smile<\/i>,\u201d he says. A remake of that lost album (Brian Wilson Presents Smile<\/i>) wouldn\u2019t appear until 2014, and The Smile Sessions<\/i> boxed set of original session material didn\u2019t surface until 2011. So in the 1990s, Orange Crate Art<\/i> looked to Parks like a project that could potentially pick up where the aborted album had so frustratingly left off.<\/p>\n

Parks says that the finished Orange Crate Art<\/i> brought forth \u201can intimacy that is the individual, that neither Brian nor I wanted to flog in public. Since Brian turned into a cork in the ocean and then got burned, I think he stepped back and wasn\u2019t really made for these times,\u201d he says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t going to contest that with any lyrics that had a bite. It was the most humbling experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orange Crate Art<\/i> was made at a time when recording technology was shifting, a time Parks characterizes as \u201cin the friction of the tectonic plates of technological music that are digital and analog.\u201d In the days before ProTools and pitch correction, Parks nonetheless created digital demos for the songs for Wilson. The new 2CD version of the album includes an entire disc\u2019s worth of instrumental mixes that he says show how he built the record. \u201cIt\u2019s terribly confessional,\u201d he says, \u201cand reveals the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new reissue from Omnivore Recordings also appends the original album with three previously-unreleased bonus tracks from the Orange Crate Art<\/i> sessions. Conceptually unrelated to the album, they nonetheless offer a window into Parks\u2019s creative mindset at the time, and the manner in which Wilson\u2019s vocals helped to put those ideas into tangible form. A reading of George Gershwin\u2019s nearly century-old \u201cRhapsody in Blue\u201d features Wilson\u2019s wordless vocal harmony; one can easily draw a direct line from Smile<\/i>\u2019s \u201cOur Prayer\u201d to the 1995 session outtake.<\/p>\n

In his essay for the reissue, Wilson soft-pedals his interest in the project: \u201cI haven\u2019t listened to it lately,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut I used to listen to it.\u201d Yet as with so many Brian Wilson statements, it should be received with some healthy skepticism. When Wilson recorded his own album of Gershwin music (2010\u2019s Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin<\/i>) he recorded an arrangement of \u201cRhapsody in Blue\u201d that sticks remarkably close to the manner in which Parks had cast it some 15 years earlier.<\/p>\n

A highlight of Orange Crate Art<\/i> is Parks\u2019s \u201cSail Away.\u201d Perhaps coincidentally (and perhaps not), Brian Wilson released a new song called \u201cSail Away\u201d on his 2015 album No Pier Pressure<\/i>. \u201cIt\u2019s the same show,\u201d says Parks with a hint of whimsy in his voice. \u201cIt was a matter of great irony to me that Brian would\u2019ve done the same thing, but with a different mindset.\u201d<\/p>\n

Van Dyke Parks is proud of the work he and Brian Wilson did on Orange Crate Art<\/i>. \u201cI\u2019m totally floored and elated that it\u2019s coming out [again],\u201d he says. \u201cThis record was totally born of need and of the highest personal regard, and it had<\/i> to be done that way. And now it\u2019s there for all to see, finally, and measure its motives and check out its ingenuity, and find out where the hemlines are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Today, a quarter century after its creation, Parks views the album as \u201ctrying to somehow salute Brian and also just to remind him \u2013 with considerable effort \u2013 that we did a good thing in this meeting.\u201d He believes that Wilson\u2019s experience of getting back into the recording studio led to his eventually returning to performing onstage. \u201cI\u2019ll tell you the truth,\u201d Parks says. \u201cit got him to the Royal Festival Hall in London where Smile<\/i> debuted. And I know, because I was there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Parks remembers something his mother used to tell him often when he was a boy in the American South. \u201cAlways finish what you started,\u201d she said. He considers his earliest collaboration with Brian Wilson \u201cthe job undone: that\u2019s what Smile<\/i> was to me. And anything I might do in the future would elaborate on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Parks is careful not to make too much of the whole endeavor. Orange Crate Art<\/i> \u201cis not the cure for cancer or the coronavirus,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I think it can beat the blues. It feels optimistic to me, and it feels like it has a sincerely informed optimism. And there is blood on the tracks.\u201d<\/p>\n

He corrects himself almost immediately. \u201cBut why speak about blood on the tracks at a reunion? It ain\u2019t proper. We don\u2019t do that here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Orange Crate Art<\/i> wasn\u2019t a commercial hit on its original release, and Parks doesn\u2019t expect that the expanded reissue will light up the 2020 charts, either. He quotes something he says his wife tells him often: \u201cWe\u2019re not going to make a dime out of this one either.\u201d Nor does he seem to mind. \u201cThe things that matter, you don\u2019t do for money. It is in the doing<\/i>,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s why we do what we do. If there\u2019s exaltation, that is the triumph.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part Two… Parks recalls a visit to a friend in rural Virginia, nearly 2500 miles due East from southern California. \u201cI went past, Galax, where the Old Fiddlers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20579,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,51,64],"tags":[416,1622,2306],"class_list":["post-20588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","category-pop","category-reissue","tag-brian-wilson","tag-omnivore-recordings","tag-van-dyke-parks","cat-41-id","cat-51-id","cat-64-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20595,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20588\/revisions\/20595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}