Wilson... Phillipps

Martin Phillipps ponders the soundtrack to the Brian Wilson doco I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times and Orange Crate Art, the new album from Wilson and composer Van Dyke Parks who worked on the Beach Boys’ legendary Smile sessions and scored strings on the last Chills album.

Article from Real Groove magazine, 1995. Reprinted with kind permission.

There are times when it seems that any preconceived advancements of the human species take place in such a small and bourgeoisie percentage of the population as to be almost negligible. Our environment, language and dress may change but, essentially, the animal stays much the same and ground-breaking creative movements or radical artistic departures are mostly the invention of a fad-hungry media. Anyone’s credentials for this constant heralding of the new art would have to be dubious at best. The selective process will usually be at the expense of the more subtle or darker aspects of human expression. Designer rebellion or same-as-it-ever-was dance music with some new technology will always be sold as the more modern music however regressive it actually is. But with the future always as uncertain as now - what if you choose to aim at a different tomorrow as opposed to that anticipated by the malleable masses?
The future is only what we choose to make it and some outcasts choose to ignore the darker destiny dictated by our nineties nihilists and continue to look to a possible time to come which would include that most important and rare ingredient - hope.

 Van Dyke Parks’ music has never been fashionable and it is less so now more than ever but I don’t believe that equates it with irrelevance. His is a truly alternative view of where we are now and where we may be going. It would be unfair to call Van Dyke Parks pretentious because that’s a criticism, along with self-indulgence, designed to restrict the flow of creative outpouring to a more easily digestible, and marketable, trickle. But he definately wasn’t thinking too much about other folk in the “real” world when he started off in the sixties and seventies with projects like his extravagant debut album Song Cycle and his pop interpretation of Beethoven’s Ninth - not to mention the horrific and unreleased results of a massed Trinidad steel band massacring the Theme from Jesus Christ Superstar and other tunes.
He’s come a long way since then but his music is still for those who want to listen, think and explore uncharted places and foreign sensations.

  Somewhere in America’s view of it’s own history, but mixed together with some classic storytelling, (somwhere between The Music Man and the Land of Oz), his music would be piped out of every colourful corner store.
  The new Van Dyke Parks/Brian Wilson album Orange Crate Art has the atmosphere of classic American movies and literature. Obviously personal yet quite open and evocative it works as a whole and, after the closing credits style instrumental of Gershwin’s Lullaby, there is the sad but sweet residue of nostalgia.
As is normal with Van Dyke there is a lot going in the lyrics, melodies (some quite like others from his back catalog) and in the colourful arrangements. There is, sadly, probably too much going for the average nineties music buyer.

  Van Dyke Parks did the string arrangements on one of my songs, Water Wolves, in 1992 thanks to an introduction made possible by Peter Holsapple who was also working on my Soft Bomb album project. I found Van Dyke to be a genuine and amiable eccentric with a fascinating and entertaining manner of speech/prose he has cultivated for his own ideal world. Earlier I’d had the embarrassing privilege of sitting beside two Japanese toursits in LA as a slightly drunk Van Dyke performed his songs and, in between, gave his audience a stern talking to about Pearl Harbour Day and “staying awake!”

  I spoke to him of The Chills trying to sleep in the stern of an overnight ship between Sweden and Dover grinding it’s way through pack-ice for hour after hour and also Water Wolves’ theme - the fear of being eaten by sharks (and other unlikely occurances). He told me of an early childhood crossing of the Atlantic and of looking out the porthole to see waves towering taller than the luxury liner his family were travelling on. With this communication established he set to and composed a remarkable and exciting setting for my song. Not exactly what I would have done myself (had I the ability) but most acceptable as one of many possible interpretations of that particular tune.

  Van Dyke parks has never been a consistantly amazing song writer - his strength is in the realisation of atmospheres and lyrics for his own and other’s music - and his new album Orange Crate Art sounds more like a Van Dyke Parks record than a real collaboration with anyone else. But, without the benefit of composer credits in front of me, it appears to have benefited greatly from the involvement of Brian Wilson.

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