van dyke parks

...an early slice of art/pop from the hollywood hills late 1960's...orchestral cut-ups and poetry collide curteous of v.d.p pop kid genius...in fact he was way too genius for the citizens as this release was blanked by nearly everyone from squares right down to the underground...first off it was hyped as the 'record of the year' and the 'future of music', (that sort of garbage always brings with it a dose of bad vibes, quite often total disaster and bouts of drug addled depression)...to top that P.R. mess-up and go for broke, it was virtually given away for one cent by the record co. the next year in a 'loss-leader-giveaway-mail-offer' to any young heads willing to take the 'risk'...they ran this ad campaign twice as still the rock heads wouldn't take the bait and give up any scratch (not even one cent)...all in all a great insult to one of the immense singular disks of that strange period in hep noise time...

...more art grooves on vans second bid for 'stardom', and this time the pallet has some new colours to play with...digging some calypso vibes and arranging some trinidian songs/mixing decades and styles van comes up another trip back to times and places real or imagined in the whole return to roots/'get back' phenomena that was happening back in the unwashed denim-hippy days when uncle sam called for blood sacrifice both home and away...not to be confused with any world music hype that some may wish to lump this with, this is a well hep groove that don't sit next to nothing except the first effort...cats unsure of what's happening with this disk may need to play a couple of times before getting down for a lobe massage... just let the jams work their way to the center of the mind where anything should be possible...

2 comments:

  1. "Discover America" sounded so different from his first album I actually took it off the turn table after three songs because I thought WB might have slipped the wrong disc in the jacket. Nope. Put it back on, scratched my head, and started smiling. Don't think I've ever gone more than 6 weeks without sticking it back on the turn table. And we're coming up on 40 years soon!

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  2. it was and is a different sound from what was happening back then, both from van dyke himself and any other practitioners of the rock persusion, so any and everyone take jeffs advice and spin the disc...

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