Van Dyke Parks: return of a musical maverick | Music | The Guardian

Van Dyke Parks Barbican Hall, London E2. Starts 23 June 2012

As the small, white-haired, bespectacled man in a sleeveless cardigan took his seat a few rows from the front of the stalls in London’s Royal Festival Hall one night in 2004, several dozen people among the already packed house greeted him with a standing ovation. Those who did not recognise the seemingly insignificant figure were soon apprised of his identity and importance: this was Van Dyke Parks, the former wunderkind who, almost 40 years earlier, had supplied the lyrics to the work whose world premiere the audience was about to hear: Brian Wilson‘s SMiLE, the album designed for the Beach Boys at the height of the 60s but abandoned in despair and left to acquire the status of myth.

Reconstructed under the supervision of its authors and a small orchestra of acolytes, SMiLE turned out to be, if not quite the “teenage symphony to God” that Wilson had promised during the album’s original gestation period, then a compellingly original symphonic portrait of America, studded with brilliant moments of pop fantasy. At the conclusion of the performance the lyricist stepped up to share another ovation with his old friend, relishing the belated acclaim for a work that had once been engulfed in acrimony.

As a child chorister and actor in the 1950s, Parks had sung under the batons of Toscanini and Beecham, performed Silent Night to the accompaniment of Albert Einstein’s violin, and appeared in Grace Kelly’s final movie. Yet his first substantial contribution to pop music was initially met with incomprehension and disdain when Mike Love, the lead singer of the Beach Boys, took angry exception to the wordy, allusive, double-punning lyrics being supplied by Parks to Wilson, the group’s chief composer and resident genius.

via Van Dyke Parks: return of a musical maverick | Music | The Guardian.

Strange Random Beach Boys Quote:

“Music is Brian Wilson’s best friend, lover, everything. On a one-to-one basis, it’s the only thing that has never wronged him.” – Van Dyke Parks

Related articles

• Orange Crate Art – Van Dyke Parks (timbrosnan.wordpress.com)
• News in Brief: Portishead, Van Dyke Parks ft. Robin Pecknold and Daniel Rossen, Real Estate, Summerfest (pitchfork.com)
• Van Dyke Parks To Play Barbican (thequietus.com)
• Van Dyke Parks On Mountain Stage (wnyc.org)
• Wind chimes (scrapydo.wordpress.com)
• L.A. Weirdos (longform.org)

Greg Lake – I Believe in Father Christmas (1975)

Image via Wikipedia

Video, Lyrics and Making Of for one of the best Christmas Songs ever.

Quick bit of trivia – the instrumental “chorus” between verses is called “Troika” from Prokoviev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite. Another part  of the  same Suite (“Romance”) also ended up in Sting’s Russians.

Hope you enjoy it and Merry Christmas from the Exit blog!!

They said there’d be snow at Christmas

They said there’d be peace on Earth

But instead, it just kept on raining

A veil of tears for the Virgin birth

 

I remember one Christmas morning

A winter’s light and a distant choir

And the peal of a bell

And that Christmas tree smell

And their eyes full of tinsel and fire

 

They sold me a dream of Christmas

They sold me a Silent Night

And they told me a fairy story

Till I believed in the Israelite

 

And I believed in Father Christmas

And I looked to the sky with excited eyes

Then I woke with a yawn

In the first light of dawn

And I saw him and through his disguise

 

I wish you a hopeful Christmas

I wish you a brave New Year

All anguish pain and sadness

Leave your heart and let your road be clear

They said there’d be snow at Christmas

They said there’d be peace on Earth

Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or Hell

The Christmas we get, we deserve

Strange Random Santa Quote:

Christmas at my house is always at least six or seven times more pleasant than anywhere else. We start drinking early. And while everyone else is seeing only one Santa Claus, we’ll be seeing six or seven. – W.C. Fields, The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips & One-Liners

Related articles

• The Meaning of Christmas (savesavesave.blogspot.com)
• Cif readers on … Christmas hits (guardian.co.uk)
• Christmas Bells (marybiever.wordpress.com)
• The five worst Christmas songs of all time (telegraph.co.uk)
• The 10 Most Annoying Christmas Songs [Video] (gawker.com)
• The story of Seattle’s big 1921 Christmas Eve broadcast (seattlepi.com)