TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012290/0122440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 60

The Town Crier of Weird


A winning eccentric plays musical tag along the Pacific Rim

By JAY COCKS -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York


    A Yankee abroad in Tokyo sends in this musical report: "I
spoke of my love for MacArthur/ The man not the park in L.A./
`But you're  so much older!' she covered her shoulder/ And I
heard her say with a sigh/ `A soldier may never say die!'"

    That lyric, with its cross-cultural elisions and unsprung
rhythms stashed inside orchestrations belonging more to
Sondheim than Springsteen, is from Tokyo Rose, an elfin but
savage ten-song essay on the growing misalliance of Japan and
America. The record is not only big themed, it is big fun. That
combination of intellectual ambition and musical serendipity
can be recognized as the work of Van Dyke Parks by his legion
of . . . oh, say, 782 fans. We're not talking Milli Vanilli
here. But we are on the subject of someone rather terrific.

    Parks, 47, has the salt-and-pepper hair and gentle,
distracted manner of a day player in To Kill a Mockingbird. He
was born in Hattiesburg, Miss., during the waning days of World
War II. His father was the founder of Dick Parks and the White
Swan Serenaders, and when not being what his son calls "an
avocational musician," he pursued psychiatry as a colleague of
Karl Menninger's. Young Van Dyke landed his first professional
job with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1951 ("in
the boys' choir") and has been doing unexpected things ever
since. He acted with Grace Kelly in The Swan in 1955. A decade
later he was lodged at Warner Bros. Records as a cultural
curiosity and house genius, collaborating with such hothouse
talents as Ry Cooder and Lowell George. In 1968 he turned out
his first solo album, Song Cycle, a heavily layered and
intricately rhymed portrait of Los Angeles that is like Thomas
Pynchon on vinyl.

    "The work I do takes on a tremendously individual tone,
nonclassifiable as it is, because of my interest in things of
no great popular interest," says Parks, sounding out and
savoring each word as if he were sizing it for a verbal
nutcracker. "This," he adds, "has meant commercial
embarrassment to me." Tokyo Rose is only his fifth album since
Song Cycle so, clearly, Parks is not likely to give Billy Joel
a run for the heavy money; but the album is both witty and
topical enough to tempt the wide audience that has so far
eluded him.

    The album's songs are all variations on the theme of
East-West collision, which, as rendered by Parks, sounds like
a rush-hour pileup on the Golden State Freeway. Not that the
music is jarring; far from it. Melodies waft about like
tropical breezes, blowing a little irony in all directions.
Tokyo Rose begins with a typically peppy but odd Parks
arrangement of America -- jukebox Charles Ives -- and ends with
a tune about baseball (One Home Run) sung in English and
Japanese. In between is a chronicle of misunderstanding.
Manzanar is about the internment camps of World War II; White
Chrysanthemum is the poignant evocation of the death of a G.I.
who spent his waning days building Nissans down South.

    With its combination of musical whimsy and homicidal lyrical
glee, Tokyo Rose becomes an unlikely, indeed unwitting,
rejoinder to The Japan That Can Say No, the Japanese best
seller written by Sony's chairman, Akio Morita, and Shintaro
Ishihara that has stirred such debate with its pointed
challenges to America. Tokyo Rose is, in fact, an improvement
on it. You can dance to Parks if you have some appropriately
eccentric moves. And while he's riling you, he can always make
you smile.