The Smiley Smile Message Board

Hi All,

Was listening to VDP's Song Cycle at work today and I have a question.

The track "Vine Street" begins with a Cowboy/Bluegrass track that fades out to be replaced with the following vocals:

That's a tape,
That we made...
Sad to say it never made the grade..

Is this VDP lamenting the fact that SMiLE never came to be released!? What do you guys think??

Never having heard the album or the song, and going strictly by what you just wrote, I'd have to say that it pretty much is a dig at SMiLE. I guess it all depends on when it was written; it could have been something that VDP had lying around for a year or so before he even worked with Brian, or it could have been written right after. Or, it could be a slight connection with The Beatles; I read the news today, oh boy/about a lucky man who made the grade.

Or it could have nothing to do with any of it  ???

Actually, isn't it a Randy Newman song? So it probably has nothing to do with it....

Not intentionally I think, but the man has a great sense of humor. I've heard a few Vine Streets and they all begin with a different intro. I bought the album the same month it was released and I've always regarded it as Van Dyke Parks' own Smile. Or at least, maybe Smile would have sounded like that album. Still love the album after all these years.

I enjoy "Song Cycle," but its only similarities to Smile are the lyrics of VDP and the ace musicians (Hal Blaine, Lyle Ritz, et al.).

IMO, what's truly great about Smile is the musical creativity of Brian Wilson and the vocal talents of the BBs.   Both of those are totally absent from Song Cycle.

BTW, some have speculated that the song "Laurel Canyon Blvd" might be about BW:
" What's up Laurel canyon, hay. What is up in Laurel Canyon the seat of the beat to greet and eat at the heart of their companion way. That's up Laurel Canyon. And what is up the Canyon will even eventually come down. "

Hmmm... dubious - Brian lived in Laurel Way, not Laurel Canyon.

Also keep in mind Randy Newman, not VDP, wrote "Vine Street." To my money, Harry Nilsson did the best version of "Vine Street."

I always assumed that intro was a clip of a song from one of Van Dyke's old bands.

Yes, I believe the band (and tape fragment) featured his brother on guitar as well. The reference is more about stuggling for success, not about an unfinished hyped-to-the-heavens album.

I think that the structure and intent of the song is that whatever artist records it inserts a segment of some piece of their music that was somehow abortive, either deemed unsatisfactory or uncommercial. It is a specific look back at an earlier time in the otherwise generic narrator-singer's career, when he-she was more professionally ambitious, which is now behind him-her.

I think.

Isn't this album supposed to be re-released in surround sound? Not that I have anything here to play it on yet but we are thinking of getting a surround sound system here. I love this album but I have always found the stereo mix to be kind of muddy especially on my favorite song "By The People".

Speaking of which, I'm in search of a decent sounding copy of "Come To The Ocean" if anybody here can point me in the right direction. I used to have a cassette with a scratchy vinyl rip on it and it has long since disappeared...

In November, Van Dyke said:

Was there ever a mono mix?

It would be funny if someone took a snippet from the cantina mix of "H&V" and placed it the beginning of "Vine Street" and started circulating it around as a bootleg off of an acetate that Van Dyke was playing at L.A. parties in '68. That's how you start a good urban myth. Not that I'm going to do it... :shrug

Yes, there is a mono mix circulating and seeing that the album came out in 1968 it wouldn't surprise me if the mono mix was a unique mix from the stereo one and not simply a fold down.

You know, I had an mp3 copy of the mono mix and never checked it out. It's 1800 miles away from me right now so I think it will be a while before I get to see the differences.

It's a tricky game to attempt to interpret Song Cycle, but I'd see VDP as part of the LA hippie scene in certain ways, but not really of it. I very much doubt whether Brian was ever really a part of the Byrds-Joni-CSN thing, really - and I think the song is really about those people, rather than Brian.

Bizarrely, the start on VDP's Vine Street isn't what Newman actually wrote for it. Nilsson uses the right thing -That 'Anita' bit - which works because it's supposed to be terrible cliched  pop that 'never made the grade'. What 'Black Jack Davey' is doing there only VDP knows... It might be a comment on the dying of the folk craze, or a hundred other things, knowing him.

I cannot remember where i read it, but someone emailed VDP and he said Song Cycle had a lot to do with his brothers death, although i personally can't hear much of that except maybe towards the end.

Steve Young is singing that bit, isn't he?

I always thought the intro of Vine Street was inter-changeable. Harpers Bizarre's version of it from their third album starts with a snippet of Bye, Bye, Bye - a song they previously recorded as The Tikis, their first band. That being said, VDP's choice may be more cryptic but also likely autobiographical

Any fan's of "Song Cycle" should check out Randy Newman's debut from the same year if they havn't already. They really are sister albums.

Unless Van Dyke had more than one brother (and I've never heard of more than one), that cannot be true, as Carson died in 2005.

I thought i read that in Priore.... and thought even he couldn't get that wrong.  ::)

I stand to be corrected, VDP may have had two brothers... but in some 35-odd years of reading stuff about/interviews with him, never heard of one.

Ah well... I stand corrected - VDP was one of four brothers. Thanks to bgas for clueing me in on that.

...his family grows by leaps and bounds...