Laying down the tracks with Van Dyke Parks

The train was decidedly not bound for glory. It was only going to Hollywood. Pasadena, actually. But that three-day journey — taken in 1955 by 12-year-old Van Dyke Parks, aboard the ultra plush Super Chief from Princeton Junction — nevertheless provided compelling narrative grist for the composer’s latest musical adventure.

The album, “Super Chief: Music For the Silver Screen” is a collection of beautifully orchestrated scraps from the Pasadena-based Parks’ three decades of work as a film composer. With titles like “Dining Car,” “Flat as the Platte” and “The Continental Divide,” the pieces have been re-recorded and reimagined to tell the story of a boy’s luxury ride across America to the great frontier of Los Angeles. Parks was Hollywood-bound to moonlight as a television actor to help pay his boarding school tuition. “I was a piece of confetti on that black and white screen,” he says, of his roles in shows such as “Studio One in Hollywood” and “The Alcoa Hour.”

Among his many musical endeavors, Parks has scored a wild bunch of motion pictures, from “Goin’ South” to “Popeye” to “Private Parts.” He’s happy to embark on the rescue mission that became “Super Chief.” “It’s all instrumental. I’m so glad I could go there finally,” he says. “It was a bold move, to tell you the truth. And as I told my wife, it’s with a great orchestra. She says, ‘We’re not going to make a dime on this.’”
It wouldn’t be the first time. Parks’ debut solo recording as a pop artist, 1968’s “Song Cycle,” was critically lauded, but his record label, Warner Brothers, focused its marketing campaign on how hugely unpopular it was. Indeed, Parks’ solo work has been out of sorts in the popular marketplace.

His work may be described as highly elegant cultural anthropology — rarely sexy enough to go platinum. “That’s what I do for a living,” Parks explains. “Use recollection as a very practical tool for understanding. You have to pause to understand. Anyway, that world that we just left behind is a world that I prefer to look at in my music” — the trippy frontier imagery of the Beach Boys’ “Heroes and Villains” (for which he wrote the lyrics), perhaps being the most identifiable example.
“Super Chief” hits a little closer to home … more or less. “As my mother once said to me, ‘Van Dyke, you are troubled by the distinction between fact and fiction. … You never let the truth get in the way of a good story,’” he says with a laugh. “The only thing that I did in my record to illustrate that collection of music was the imposition of Joan Crawford on the luxury liner.” (Two tracks — “Joan Crawford” and “A Short Chat With Miss Crawford” — are named for the actress). “She wasn’t on that train. I lied about that. Everything thing else upheld.

“It’s an anecdotal rhapsody of a sort, and I hope it doesn’t put anybody off.”
Given that his last stop in 1955 was Pasadena, it’s fitting that Parks, a longtime Hollywood resident, would settle in the San Gabriel Valley. Now, 71, he relocated to Pasadena four years ago. “I appreciate that Pasadena still looks a handshake away from civility and there is some relationship to civility… that such people can walk the earth, so it’s kind of like, yeah, you can say it’s a nostalgia belt.”

For five decades, Parks has had his own uneasy relationship with civility as a highly regarded member of the L.A. rock ‘n’ roll community. As a session player, arranger and producer, he resides mostly in the shadows of fame, but his fingerprints can be found throughout popular music history.
In the 1960s, Parks was the hip crowd’s resident genius. The guy everyone wanted on their records. And he was happy for the opportunity. “It was absolutely a love vibe, but there was nothing mellow about it. Everybody was very urgent and I’d just go out with everybody. I could play with anybody. I learned how to back people up and that has been my forte.”

Other opportunities were less appealing: He was offered a spot in both Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Steppenwolf. But Parks preferred the freedom of freelancing. “You can’t make that [expletive] up,” he says. “I was there when all that stuff was happening. But I am noncompete by nature.”
Long known for lush arrangements for artists such as Inara George and Cassandra Wilson, “Super Chief” gives the orchestrator a chance to take his own bow. “This is my best work for others and I am now using it as a means of self-decoration. It’s entirely personal. I don’t think it’s a prerequisite to spend three days crossing the United States. You don’t have to have taken the train ride, but you should know about it.”

At 71, Parks can comfortably look through his life’s rear view mirror. “I have been a musician for over 60 years. I got my Social Security card in 1952 — that’s when I entered music, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York,” he says. “I’m a lucky man. But I am a very able musician and I had an incredible opportunity in the analog era of recording to be with some great groups.
“Anyway, that world that we just left behind is a world that I prefer to look at in my music. I enjoy that If I’m the man, that’s what I do. But if I’m working for the Man, I do what he says when he says … if he says. I love those things. I can take it all. It all illuminates … I’m just here to get the job done.”

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ERIK HIMMELSBACH is Los Angeles writer.