‘Smile’ lyricist is beaming

Van Dyke Parks knows what genius is, and doesn’t hesitate saying so.

“I’ve been in the presence of genius,” says the 61-year-old composer, lyricist, arranger, conductor and instrumentalist.

But he’s not talking about the person rock fans might expect: his periodic collaborator, Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, to whom the tag has often been applied -- to Wilson’s everlasting embarrassment, Parks says.

Parks certainly is not referring to himself. The Mississippi-born, Ivy League-educated musician and raconteur is far too self-effacing to make that claim, even though some have applied it to his 1968 album, “Song Cycle,” a rich tapestry of American pop and folk elements.

No, this rock ‘n’ roll renaissance man is talking about the preeminent genius of the 20th century, Albert Einstein.

While Parks and his family were living near Princeton, N.J., he attended the American Boychoir School there. One year when the choir was caroling through the neighborhoods at Christmas, they stopped at Einstein’s house, and the celebrated physicist came out to listen as they sang “Silent Night.”

Parks, then a precocious preteen, sang his solo in German for Einstein. The man who revolutionized physics went back into his house, returned with his violin and accompanied Parks and the group on the rest of the song.

“I’ve gigged with Einstein -- I’ve met a genius,” Parks says, more to underscore a point he’s about to make than to brag. “I think the use of the word ‘genius’ is almost a slur. It’s a word to discredit the relevance of a real player in our lives. To take the advisory that someone is a genius, and then to dismiss his work, is really like keeping the fat and throwing out the brain. That’s for whalers.”

Parks has been a cult hero for four decades, but he’s recently seen his profile rise with the resurrection of his most famous undertaking: his teaming with Wilson to write the lyrics for “Smile,” the ambitious concept album Wilson scrapped in 1967 just as it was nearing completion.

To the surprise and delight of longtime Wilson/Beach Boy watchers, the two recently finished what they started so long ago, assembling “Smile” for a series of concerts that began in London in February and recording a “Smile” album that came out in September. The “Smile” tour culminates in a pair of hometown performances tonight and Wednesday at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

His estimation of Wilson, he says, is that he is “a real ingenious Yankee.”

Over lunch at a casual Hollywood restaurant, Parks elaborates. “I feel that he is an important part of the convergence of American soul and musical literature. I have no boots to lick when it comes to an opinion about what matters in our American zeitgeist, our own musical experience. Brian brought these two forms together in ‘Smile.’ ”

“Smile” was long considered, and heavily mythologized as, perhaps the great lost masterpiece of the ‘60s, one positioned to rival the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” as rock’s great leap forward. But a frustrated Wilson threw in the towel because the other Beach Boys and their label, Capitol Records, worried that its bold experimentation wouldn’t fare well with the public. Parks also walked out on the project well before it might have seen the light of day.

Since the world premiere of “Smile” in February in London, Parks has been basking in what he likes to call “the reflected glory” that’s been bestowed 37 years later on Wilson for delivering the work at long last.

“Something like this doesn’t happen to many people often, where you do something like this in your youth, you give it up for dead and then it hits you again with all of its emotive force after a long period of time.”

The abandoning of “Smile” was an albatross around Wilson’s neck for decades, and Parks says it was the same for him.

He’s released a handful of albums, but in recent years he’s worked mostly as an arranger, a role he finally discovered was his forte. “I found my specific, my specialty.... Great things can happen in a studio with an arranger.”

He’s done arranging for other performers, for films and on other projects that come his way. And he doesn’t miss being center stage: He’s worked as a child actor (he had a role in the 1958 Alec Guinness film “The Swan”); as half of a folk duo with his older brother, Carson, in the early ‘60s; and occasionally in conjunction with the release of one of his own albums.

For Parks, the reward of a life in music has nothing to do with celebrity or money and everything to do with creative expression.

“All has been about music,” he says. “That has been my calling card. Why I wanted to meet Brian Wilson was not to be a lyricist. I had no presage of some idea of the future.

“I had no five-year plan, and I still don’t. I’m an economic portfolio vacuum. But that doesn’t make me nothing. As a fool once said, ‘I may be crazy, but I do know right from wrong.’ ”