In rootless Southern California, the only cultural traditions are those which you create for yourself. Maybe that's why Van Dyke Parks is much beloved of that area's People of Taste and Style. Parks is an hallucinating cross-cultural index file of music oddities and sociological trivia; an island, however small, in a sea of taco sauce.

Song Cycle, his first album, bestowed neoclassical credentials...

Rock music is finally becoming composed music, growing from Phil Spector and Burt Bacharach. Bacharach contributed a purely popular legacy while Spector with Jack Nitzsche remained in the rock mainstream; out of them grew the Beach Boys, with Pet Sounds remaining the greatest romantic statement in rock writing. The Beatles have never essentially participated in this field, theirs being ad hoc...

It's hard to imagine anything more out of fashion than Van Dyke Parks' lavishly orchestrated, childlike, psychedelic panoramas. Parks was one of the odd geniuses staunchly supported by Warner Bros. executives in the late Sixties; others included Randy Newman and Ry Cooder. But after his debut album, the weirdo masterpiece Song Cycle, Parks just got stranger, recording albums of Caribbean songs...

Van Dyke Parks' first album, Song Cycle, released in 1968, was a dizzyingly eclexoteric work that had the critics alternately gushing, "The emergence of a super-genius!" and hissing, "Insufferable pretentiousness!" and so dumbfounded the thirty or so civilians who bought it (probably under the mistaken impression that Van Dyke Parks was a Flemish psychedelic group) that no distinct lay impression...