25th ANNIVERSARY RE-RELEASE: In 1966, when Brian Wilson prepared the follow up to his masterpiece Pet Sounds, he employed the services of Mississippi born Van Dyke Parks as lyricist for The Beach Boys next album, SMiLE. As history would soon document, SMiLE became the most famous unreleased album in rock history, it’s “completion” not seeing daylight until a Grammy-award winning box set in 2012. SMiLE’s original plan was to incorporate many different elements of American music in an avant-garde fashion, its musical format leaps and bounds ahead of anything that existed contemporaneously.
As SMiLE quickly grew in legendary terms, Brian and Van Dyke each went their separate musical ways, only to reunite briefly in 1972 for The Beach Boys classic, Sail On Sailor. So it was perhaps with great apprehension and excitement that these two musical giants should finally reunite in 1994 for some unfinished business. This time, however, the mission would be complete. The musical terrain familiar… a paeon to California. Now Omnivore Recordings releasing of the 25th anniversary special edition of Orange Crate Art by Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks.
By 1994, the roles had been reversed and it was Van Dyke who coaxed Brian into the studio to be the singer of nearly a dozen new songs he had written as a tribute to his home away from home. Parks writes in the liner notes, “Though my roots are somewhere else, far away, my limbs are here in Southern California… it’s here… that I have struggled desperately for a sense of place… Orange Crate Art is a continuum of that which stood, freeze-frame, at the release of SMiLE.
Twenty-five years on, this album which sounds like nothing before or since, has been re-mastered by multi-Grammy award, winner Michael Graves. Available on vinyl for the first time, the deluxe CD package contains three previously unreleased bonus tracks as well as instrumental track versions of 11 of the album’s songs.
Check out the full details here: http://omnivorerecordings.com/shop/orange-crate-art/
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Here is MIKE GEE's 1997 interview with Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks
IT'S the picture in the middle of the Orange Crate Art CD booklet that does it: on a perfectly green, lush lawn, beneath a perfectly blue, cloudless sky, flowers burst in bloom in the foreground, to the left facing some distant unseen horizon stares Van Dyke Parks, white hair diminished by the whiteness of his suit – he could be a plantation owner, if it wasn't for the California dreaming mansion in the background, all timbers, shackles, odd levels and angles; it reeks Gone With The Wind. To the right, partially obscured and partially framed by a burst of white daisies stands Brian Wilson hands clasped in front of him, blue sports coat, lighter blue shirt, jeans or slacks it's hard to tell. He's staring at the camera like an irate coach stares at a referee who's just given a decision he can't believe; like he's strong; like he's distant. The scene is so perfect, so star-crossed, so bloody impossible, it's surreal – right smack bang there in the front garden; it's haunting. You can stare at that picture for a long time. Trying to make sense of all the emotions. Play this duet for forgotten sentiments and sweet organics Orange Crate Art, their ode to California - a trip through the eyes of Van Dyke Parks and the soul of Brian Wilson – and the warmth of the sun becomes unbearable, just like Wilson's broken, flat, atonal, devastating and devastated vocal on Still I Dream Of It: "Will I ever learn the lessons that come my way, still I dream of it, of that happy day when I can say I've fallen in love, and it haunts me so that I could dream that somehow linked to all the stars above ... a little while ago my mother told me that Jesus loved the world and if that's true then why hasn't he helped me to find a girl and find my world till then I'm just a dreamer; I'm convinced of it the hypnosis of our minds can take us far away ..." Recorded at home in 1976 (and released on his marvellously spirited and emotional solo of 1996, I Just Wasn't Made For These Times) as a demo while his world crumbled and that sunny dreamin' turned dark and nightmarish and Brian Wilson fell into drug addiction, psychosis and a terrifying descent that left him a great fat, 154kg, blubbering mess, paranoid and fighting the memories of childhood abuse, playing in the sandbox – built into his living room – of some unknown world only he inhabited, that song, that performance and the picture remain the two most haunting glimpses of Wilson's extraordinary life. Few can overshadow the contribution Parks has made – the songwriter's songwriter, a poetic lyricist of immense craft whose lyrics to Orange Crate Art are closer to literary art and polished fiction than the sway and play simplicity of pop, who began way back in those glorious 1960s by producing the debut albums of Randy Newman and Ry Cooder, worked with Arlo Guthrie – yet Brian Wilson, albeit it quietly and strangely at times, casts a shadow so vast, so significant it is impossible to contain. Here, then, again is THE Beach Boy, the man responsible for an entire genre, the heart, the wave, the pulse of the immortal Californian quintet.
Not unexpectedly he is quiet, interrupting only occasionally, lets Parks do most of the talking, but when he does talk, it is in a voice that defies mortality – a beautiful, soul-scraped, cracked yet warm, scarred rumble of words that sometimes trip over each other, sentences that rush off in a skelter of tones slightly burred; there is presence, the reconstruction of Brian Wilson has worked long miracles to reach this point. And here also is history. Wilson, like it was yesterday, says, "He and I actually worked on a number of different little songs from the Beach Boys back in the mid-1960s .. " Parks picks up, "I worked for Brian as a lyricist in 1965 for the first time; if you were there you can't remember it. In fact, it was a celebrated case of a project that failed in a way – it never came to light. It was called Smile (the great lost Beach Boys album). It was for the Beach Boys and it followed their grand success of Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations." Brian remembers, "We did Heroes and Villains, Surf's Up, Wonderful and numerous different kinds of songs. And then I didn't see him for 10, 20 years, and all of a sudden one day he calls me up and says 'I'd like to do an album with you guesting on it' and he liked my voice so much he decided not to sing on it and went into producing me." Parks chuckles, "Heroes and Villains, I'm not sure, I believe that was a hit; I heard it was a big hit. I remember getting a Volvo out of the deal and that song was ... I really loved it because it was funny, but it was romantic, in a way rough hewn, vision of California and the pioneer spirit and the rough'n'ready aspect of frontier life. The Beach Boys did a great job on it and it was a happy memory."
This is one of the stories where legends queue up to be heard. On the sleeve notes to Wilson's I Just Wasn't Made For These Times, Don Was, producer, founder of Ze Records, and the man at the desk for that most memorable of occasions (on it Wilson reunited with daughters Carnie and Wendy from whom he had long been estranged and they added the background vocals to the reworked Do It Again), wrote: "In the fall of 1989, I was working with a band who turned me on to the bootlegged recordings of Brian Wilson's legendary, aborted Smile sessions. Like a musical burning bush, these tapes awakened me to a higher consciousness in record making. I was amazed that one, single human being could dream up this unprecedented and radically advanced approach to rock'n'roll.
"I was really stunned when I met him several months later. Far from the catatonic drug burn-out the tabloids loved to depict, the guy I got to know was lucid and happening. When we started to mess around in the studio, it became clear that he was capable of making a record every bit as complex and beautiful as Pet Sounds whenever he felt like it. How could a talent so great be so misunderstood and under appreciated?"
Perhaps, because like all geniuses - the word is used as it should be, with rare honour and respect for achievements beyond, way beyond, the normal - Wilson only really becomes Brian Wilson when he can release that one mighty bent within. Remember Hendrix just before he died said something akin to 'nobody understands what I do; my closest friend is my guitar' .. the same stultifying raw sad reality echoes in Wilson's work of today. When he sings, it is as Was says, " ... the weary voice of a man who's been hurled through the emotional wringer and yet, one can plainly discern the youthful sweetness, optimism and goodness that characterises Brian's soul."
Such eulogising makes the predictions of those who came to gloat - as little as eight years ago – over the fallen bloated corpse of the Beach Boy who got dumped seem exactly as they were – the saliva of starving biz vultures. One even went as far to say that Wilson's voice was shot, that he would never come back again.
Apart from the solo set that lays siege to that lie, Parks, more than any other, is better placed to comment. "Brian is the most athletic singer I know, he sings from a great C to a high E which is over three octaves – it's an incredible range and I don't know anybody who has that kind of range. In fact, Brian's instrument – his voice – is undiminished by age. It's an absolutely phenomenal voice. On Orange Crate Art (the song), Brian Wilson sings five doubled voices; he did so in two-and-a-half hours and we still had time to throw in a Chinese chicken salad."
Their detail is so peculiarly eccentric but heart-warming. Here, like in California they've carved the musically timeless out of the raw stuff of Park's imagery; it is the small that can represent the vast. The finite, the infinite. "I started singing Orange Crate Art standing," Wilson says, "and I went, 'nah, I don't like this' and I said 'do you have a chair?', so they got me a chair and I sat down; I did that song in the chair. The next time I went in, I went 'hey, where's that chair? Where's our chair?' I made a habit of sitting in the chair. I sat down the whole time and it was really, really pretty cool." Parks gently turns the tide of conversation, "The thing that drove this album wasn't a sense of nostalgia and to memorise the past and recite it - that to me is something that's been done more successfully by other people - but to idealise and bring to poetry and music the vision I have of California, and that was a response that was more like an urging of mine to protect what it is that is still here of California. It seemed quite urgent. "There is a lot of anger in the record and there's a lot of anxiety, too. I think it is born of an age of anxiety. Hold Back Time, for example, is a desperado's middle-aged cry and I kept thinking about - it was Harold Lloyd actually who held the hands of time back on the clock tower." Wilson was on another journey in time, "I got lost in my voice, I got lost in the music, but I was able to hang into there," he says, all proud; rather like the man who beats a demon and can't keep the grin off his face. "I think it is all out of instinct. I don't think there's any producer in the last 30 or 40 years who has been able to have it all in his head and go in and produce the record. He was so into the production and I was so into the artist's bag, y'know, there was really no chance to discuss much, except to get down and do it. But it's pretty much a work out of art, yeah. The word 'scary' comes up a lot because let's face it, some guys just have it in the bag." They pat each other, not gratuitously, but with the bonhomie of old sparring partners: each did their job and did it well. The musicality and exuberant spread of Orange Crate Art, its scent of the fruit and the vine of life that sprawls high and low across a musical tapestry is born pre-1954, as Parks points out, because then came Presley and "popular music changed forever; it became a more physical creature ... ". Yet there's no mistaking the sun; it hangs high every time Wilson hits one of the notes that seem so timeless, that carry back to the times as they were a changin'; the spirit of the radical avant pop of Pet Sounds (1966) and Smiley Smile (1967) still chime deep in the heart of Orange Crate Art. Whether it's sand or dirt between the toes, it's still Californian. Wilson doesn't miss the beat, he still knows, "It's a little lazier than the California of the Beach Boys. The vibe is there, but this isn't a rock'n'roll album, let's face it." He seems to chuckle. Parks says quietly, "I have to admit I get a little nervous when I'm with Brian in the studio; he has a terrific reputation." Good vibrations.
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