I was going to make a comment about how we should really all be talking about how Van Dyke Parks feels about the modern Middle East, not ourselves, given the section of the forum we're in...
But then I realized that this kind of conversation, however heated and ugly in moments, is something I used to see online *all the time* but haven't really witnessed in years. When an algorithm is resorting people's comments in real time and showing different things to different people, it's impossible to go back and forth like this. Odd. Never would have thought I'd miss something like this. But however much the board may be dying, I really do prefer these backwaters of the internet that haven't changed since the early 2010s.
On topic, I just want to say two things:
First, I think the way Van Dyke Parks talks about Palestine is telling. Connecting it to his childhood idolization of Winston Churchill, then moving immediately to Big Oil and the extinction crisis. It's a sort of associative way of thinking that I don't think is very common, and that is also reflected in much of Park's music. (And the environmental causes Parks pivots too were, of course, also where the Beach Boys could find common ground politically in the early 70s, the place where "square" Mike and Al could fully align themselves with the hippies. No coincidence that Mike and Dennis's greatest cowrite was on the subject! (depending on how you feel about Only with You, I suppose, but I've always thought it was a little slight, albeit gorgeous and certainly better than any song I've ever written! But Pacific Ocean Blue is one of those oddly singular songs that most bands come up with one or two of in their careers and the Beach Boys came up with so often that they didn't both to release them half the time!))
This paragraph from Parks's interview also really struck me:
I think that it’s important to remember that I was employed by the grace of Brian Wilson‘s conviction that I could do something to help him reinvent himself in his work. I did my best, and knowing that sustains me in my late age. But the reason that I am here, it’s all within the compass of the golden rule. I believe mankind was invented for the purpose to demonstrate reciprocity, empathy and goodwill. I always felt that Brian Wilson deserved the best that I could bring him, whether he knew it or not. The lyrics were also highly abstract, only as a result of music that was highly segmented, anecdotal, and of a higher spiritual plane. I felt as bewildered as anyone could be about the abstract nature of the music, but I found it to be quite beautiful and it turns out freestanding creativity, not dependent on the lyrics at all.
This strikes me as humble, observant, and the words of someone who cares a lot about this music, and has spent a lot of time thinking, and probably hurting, over what happened in those few months in the mid-60s. It's not going to help us solve the puzzle of Smile, of course, but it's still a pretty incisive comment from a principle, all these years later. And I do think it's true that all the different moods and ideas Van Dyke Parks brought to the table did, in fact, reflect the incredible richness and variety of Brian's music, which was and is saying many, and many contradictory, things at once.
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