Van Dyke Parks And B’rer Rabbit

Update The Lost Art Of The Minstrelsy.

by Timothy White

“Hey Parks, where the hell have you been for the last nine years?”

The bearded, grinning little man at the piano pauses and smooths out the wrinkles in his white tropical suit. Then he peers into the darkness beyond the lip of the stage, scanning the audience for the anonymous heckler.

“If that’s a medic out there,” Van Dyke Parks answers, “then I’m your man!”

Delighted applause and shouts of approval from the overflow crowd in McCabe’s, a cozy little concert venue in Santa Monica, signal the presence of a turnout of Parks devotees. They are a motley crew, ranging from careworn hippie holdouts and fresh-faced young professionals to keen-eyed college kids and dapper showbiz denizens. Young West Indians rub shoulders with thirty-ish preppy housewives from Westwood. They are united only in their generous curiosity and great anticipation.

A brief tinkling of last-minute tuning heralds Parks’ seating himself at the piano. Its gentle cacophony summons the chiming brio of the minstrelsy--that unique form of entertainment, dating to pre-Civil War days, that evoked plantation life in the songs, dances and comedy of white (and later black) men working in blackface. The band, numbering nearly a dozen pieces, includes banjo, mandocello, cymbalom (a Hungarian instrument akin to the hammered dulcimer), harp and steel pan. As they launch into a sweeping overture for the evening’s entertainment, Parks lifts a glass of red wine to the crowd. “Loyalties die hard,” he quips, “and you’re here to prove it!”

The Hattiesburg, Mississippi-born composer/singer is perhaps best known for his rococo songwriting collaborations in the late 1960s with Beach Boy Brian Wilson (“Surf’s Up”, “Heroes and Villains”, “Wonderful”, “She’s Goin’ Bald”, “Vegetables” and “Cabinessence”) and Song Cycle, an impressionist 1968 LP that wove Stephen Foster, Cole Porter, psychedelic studio craft and the vernaculars of great Hollywood movie scorers into one of the most critically acclaimed LPs of the last fifteen years. Regarded by many to be on a par with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Blonde on Blonde, Song Cycle was a brilliant bridge between the loftiest reaches of pop invention and the realm of serious musical composition. It also sold so poorly that Warner Bros. at one juncture offered it at the “introductory” mail-order price of two albums for a penny. (You were instructed to send in a “worn” copy and pass the second new record on to a “poor but open friend”.)

It was not exactly the conventional path to rock stardom and riches. With royalties from his Beaxch Boys efforts less than $1,000 per annum, Parks pressed on to release two more highly regarded but sparse-selling LPs employing calypso and steel pan: Discover America (1972) and Clang Of The Yankee Reaper (1975). Then he virtually dropped from sight for nine years. On this early spring evening he is presenting the live debut of Jump!, a shimmering, tuneful evocation of Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit, the time-honored distillations of black folk myth adapted by the nineteenth-century Atlanta Constitution journalist Joel Chandler Harris.

The subject may seem more than a trifle obscure, even for a quasi-”art-rock” artist noted for an unusually esoteric output. But as a child of the deep South, growing up musically precocious and culturally inquisitive, with the Remus stories, the cakewalk and ragtime for psychic wallpaper, Parks has been building for ten years to a peculiarly wonderful reclamation project: a modern recasting of the popular entertainment in the United States between 1845 and 1900--the minstrelsy.

Why? As Parks sees it, a huge chunk of American popular music --what he calls “the reigning rock ‘n’ roll of the nineteenth century”--has been unjustly maligned, thoroughly miscomprehended and foolishly discredited. For instance, scholars and sociologists investigating the minstrel show concur that it thrived not when it burlesqued black experience, but when its racial authenticity was most in evidence. The nation got to know itself through the minstrelsy, esteeming the culture of the American black. In short, a crucial link has long been shunned in the bloodlines that lead from the ring songs of African slaves to spirited field hollers and camp-meeting tunes, and on through the blues to rock ‘n’ roll forms.

Parks has been striving since he was a student composer, and against considerable odds, to restore the minstrelsy to its proper place in this country’s musical-historical mosaic. Intriguing enough--but that he’s had to sacrifice financial well-being and suffer considerable mental anguish to realize this goal even remotely is genuinely disquieting. The corporate rigidity of the record industry and the casual callousness of its strictly circumscribed marketplace have conspired to impede Parks with the left hand even as they sought to help him with the right. Such are the awesome hardships that befall an original thinker in the music business--in this case a fascinating visionary appreciated principally for session work and bread-and-butter guest shots.

Like Parks’ previous works, Jump! received lavish critical praise. And this time, though, Parks is determined not to let it follow the others into a commercial void. Tonight’s concert is the first step in a year-long campaign to turn the album into a full-scale Broadway production. Following the overture, a swirling, sprightly mesh of minstrel-show bravura and Disneyish zest, Parks offers a richly-rendered love song. A quick-strum banjo announces a cakewalk strut tempo, and the melody glides on a bed of horns, keyboards and harmonica. The audience of fans grows positively giddy and glassy-eyed with emotion.

One wonders what it must have been like when W.C. Handy held forth on his cornet in 1896 as the band leader of Mahara’s Minstrels. The man often referred to as the “Father of the Blues” would strike up an entry march like Dan D. Emmett’s “I Wish I Was In Dixie Land” while the performers appeared and pranced through the opening “walkabout” before arranging themselves in the traditional semi-circle for the minstrel show. And the imagination strays to the saucy sashay of Bessie Smith as she worked the front rows as a member of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels.

Such specialty star-turns, taking place in the “olio” segment of the show, would follow exchanges of patter and playful putdowns between the Interlocutor, sitting in the center of the action, and Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, the protagonists (named after the everpresent tabourine and bone-clappers) who served as the two “endmen” in the configuration. The finale of each minstrel show was a dramatization, sometimes a parody playlet or whimsical melodrama set to music--a forerunner of the Broadway musical.

THE OLIO

“To do my little olio in the minstrel sense,” Parks says, “to trot out my strengths and let the front rows render a verdict, is to go back into my background and relive the childhood experiences that led me to the music racket in the first place.”

He is fiddling in his Hollywood living room with some green beans and a well-done steak his tall, willowy wife Sally has set before him. Parks’ home is a pleasant, rambling cottage filled with memorabilia (film posters, vintage photos, sheet music) and the squeals of two pre-school-age children. But his droll volubility eclipses any potential distractions with the greatest of ease.

At forty-one, Parks’ skin is still as smooth as an adolescent’s. He has quick eyes and a quicker brain. There are two more performances of Jump! to be given in Santa Monica before the show goes to New York’s Bottom Line club--on a shoestring budget--to look for backers. Parks lays down his silverware, too wound up to eat.

“Take my interest in calypso and steel pan. It was my Uncle Foss, the advisor to F.D.R., who got me interested in Trinidad when I was seven years old. He advised F.D.R. about the strategic importance of Trinidad’s oil-and asphalt-producing status for the war effort, as well as monitoring the Nazi reconnaissance subs sighted in the Gulf of Paria between Venezuela and Trinidad. Hence, the presence of ‘F.D.R. in Trinidad’ on Discover America or my producing the Mighty Sparrow’s Hot and Sweet album for Warner Bros. in the early 70s. Heck, in 1972 I produced a single by Goldie Hawn--yes!--of an old Ernie Smith ska thing called ‘Pitta Patta’ and it went over pretty damned good with the cognoscenti.

“Repeatedly visiting Trinidad, I became interested in calypso because I saw the age of the troubadour, and of ‘All The News That’s Fit To Sing’, becoming vestigal. I ranked Lord Kitchener and the Mighty Sparrw in the same dynasty of song authorship as I would Hugo Wolf, Schubert, Schumann. I thought this was great music that melodically had all the starch, the marrow, of a truly occidental experience, but was fancified and beveled by the friendly persuasions of ancient African rhythms. Ditto the staccato tremolando activity of the steel drums. There was such placidity in this ocean of emotion!”

He rises, sauntering about the room, then pacing and hastily lighting a cigarette.

“Minstrel shows weren’t the nigrification of the black experience in America. They were simply, I think, a bilateral agreement, an unavoidable scenario in the longed-for unification of racial interests. And they brought two social elements, black and white, to harmonious display. They made great entertainment in the course of the experiment.

“In developing Jump! I felt that this was something I wanted to restore to the American musical theatre in the way of melody, and sentiment, and the socio-political force that is the very reason for musical theatre!”

Parks’ florid rhapsodizing is heartfelt, but his high hopes are tinged with a pain he cannot conceal. The New York performances of Jump! prompted a Village Voice reviewer to reflect on Parks’ roller-coaster career: “What would have happened if he hadn’t been out on the Coast coddled by big record and movie money--if, some years ago, he’d taken his royalties and producer’s fees and plowed them into his own off-Broadway show, challenging Stephen Sondheim as the theater’s resident hip intellect?”

The writer’s ignorance was as appalling as it was cruel. Parks has lived virtually hand-to-mouth for the last twenty years. He is coddled by no one, and has never received any fat advances or residuals. He barely scrapes by, arranging making transpositions and writing charts for sessions, while seeking patrons for his art. He had to borrow $10,000 to pay for the sheet music and substitute musicians required for the Bottom Line dates. It says something about the way this country treats its truly gifted that Parks has never won a major grant or a fellowship.

“Few people in the business out here can imagine how much Van has suffered,” says a Los Angeles-based Warner Bros. producer. “in terms of prowess, he’s the equal of a Quincy Jones or an Eddie Van Halen, but his peers haven’t paid attention. That he still has a sense of humor, let alone a dream, is flat-out astonishing.”

It is commonly assumed that minstrel shows were racist displays of white song-and-dance men in burnt cork and clownish glad rags ridiculing the music, rural dialects and folkways of blacks in the deep South. The truth is far more complex. The minstrelsy emerged during the turbulent years of Jacksonian democracy, and was rapidly fueled by growing sympathies for Abolitionist movement. After the Civil War, integrated and all-black minstrel companies flourished. Jelly Roll Morton, Bunk Johnson, Hot Lips Page and even Lester Young are some of the many black jazz greats who got their start in the minstrelsy’s rhythmically intricate music.

The Uncle Remus stories Parks has chosen for subject matter have their own complicated capillaries, and have also been misunderstood. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, a collection of black folktales, proverbs, songs and character sketches, was first published in November 1880. It was a labor of love for Joel Chandler Harris, who continued to gather fables told by former slaves; he issued ten Uncle Remus books in all, and was candid in asserting that “not one [tale] nor any part of one is an invention of mine. It may be said that each legend comes fresh and direct from the Negroes.”

Harris saw himself as a folklorist, taking credit only for the creation of the yarn-spinning Uncle Remus. Studies have shown that over half of Harris’ two hundred and twenty animal stories are clearly African in origin; they offer fascinating insights into the intellectual survival systems of a captive people, as well as being universal allegories for triumph over adversity and the ultimate dignity of the individual.

Considering his own troubled passage, Parks’ use of the Br’er Rabbit stories is entirely appropriate. His involvement with the Beach Boys and other pop acts, while indicative of a canny enthusiasm, were only sidetrips for one of the most adroit, eccentric and misunderstood musical talents of an entire generation.

Encompassing a much misapprehended cross-section of American music, the early history of one of the country’s pre-eminent record companies, a strangely peregrine Southern genealogy, and the curious pitfalls created when Art collides with Commerce. Parks’ saga has all the elements of a sweeping Br’er Rabbit tale...or a minstrel show of epic proportions.

THE WALKABOUT

He was born on January 3, 1943, youngest son of Richard Hall Parks III and his wife, the former Mary Joy Alter. His late dad had been a member of John Philip Sousa’s Sixty Silver Trumpets and piloted a dance band to pay his way through medical school. Richard Parks became a distinguished neurosurgeon, neurologist and psychologist, the first to admit black patients to a white Southern hospital, South Florida State. Van Dyke’s mother is a Hebraic scholar.

A clarinetist and coloratura singer (“I had a wider range than Yma Sumac”) in junior high school in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Parks went on to attend the Columbus Boychoir School--now the American Boychoir School--in Princeton, New Jersey for six years, had a contract with the Metropolitan Opera, and sang under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. In 1955, after some television and stage acting, he appeared in Grace Kelly’s last film, The Swan, with Alec Guinness and Louis Jourdan. Parks also appeared in a “completely lackluster” German TV series of Heidi in 1957.

By the time Parks was fourteen, his father was practicing medicine in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Young Van Dyke studied piano at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in quest of a fine-arts degree. He dropped out after two and a half years to take a job (it fell through) playing clarinet in the studio band for Art Linkletter’s House Party. Remaining in the West, Parks traveled up and down the California coast with eldest brother Carson; he boned up on Mexican music and the two played for their supper. He became proficient enough on raquinto guitar to do a guest shot with Los Tres Ases in the Mexican pavillion at the 1964 World’s Fair.

In pursuit of supplementary income Parks became acquainted with songwriter Terry Gilkyson (“Memories Are Made Of This”), and through him got to play and arrange on the soundtracks of several Disney movies (Savage Sam, The Moon-Spinners, The Jungle Book).

He was briefly in Gilkyson’s Easy Riders group, toured New England with the Brandywine Singers, and returned to Los Angeles with a song, “Come To The Sunshine”, that MGM released; it reached number sixteen in Phoenix, Arizona. The hastily assembled Van Dyke Parks Band included Steven Stills on guitar and lasted one live date--in Phoenix.

There was a demand in mid-1960s Hollywood for session pianists, so the scuffling Van Dyke set aside his Mexican guitar and took any keyboard studio dates he could get. He sat in with Paul Revere & the Raiders and played with the Byrds on their Fifth Dimension LP. In 1965 Parks met Brian Wilson on the front lawn of Terry Melcher’s Cielo Drive home in L.A. (where the Charles Manson murder of Sharon Tate would later take place), and the two began work on the Beach Boys’ abortive Smile album. The rest of the group dismissed Parks when he couldn’t give them a cogent explanation of his elliptical Edith Sitwell-on-sensimilla lyrics, but his contributions made it onto the revamped Smiley Smile, as well as 20/20, Surf’s Up and Holland.

In the spring of 1966, future Warner Bros. president Lenny Waronker left his post as a song plugger for the Metric Music division of his father’s Liberty Records label and joined the Warners A&R staff. Waronker had admired “Come To The Sunshine” and was equally excited when Parks played him a song called “High Coin”. Warners was then juggling a host of psychedelic Bay Area acts they’d acquired through the purchase of Autumn Records from DJ Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue and partner Bob Mitchell. Parks was asked to groom a band called the Tikis.

He suggested the band be called Harper’s Bizarre, “so that I could weed out my love of Cole Porter, Depression-era songwriting. I was so smitten with that music because in terms of orchestration and general songwriting craft, there was so much more effort applied to it than to the songwriting coming out of, say, San Francisco at the time. I thought the Beatles were doing a good job and I was even more impressed with their record production, but apart from Pet Sounds I didn’t find anything striking coming out of the United States. So I thought there was nothing wrong with doing something period, or regressive.”

Parks produced and arranged the group’s 1967 Anything Goes album for Warners. They had a modest hit with the title track and also recorded “High Coin”--as did Bobby Vee, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and the Charlatans. Parks next worked with another ex-Autumn Records group, the Mojo Men, producing a top forty hit with their rendition of Stephen Stills’ “Sit Down, I Think I Love You”.

Late in 1966, Parks signed to Warners as a solo artist. His first release was an atmospheric cover of Donovan’s “Colours” under the pseudonym of George Washington Brown. The label was impressed when a Village Voice writer who discovered it in a Greenwich Village juke box gave it a good review. Parks got $12,500 in seed money to develop Looney Tunes (Song Cycle’s original title) and drove out to Palm Desert in a Volvo purchased by Brian Wilson to write the material.

“With Song Cycle, I wanted something that perfunctorily covered some autobiographical points, and expressed an American experience which would be uniquely disassociable from the Beatles/British pop viewpoint, which was then dominating the market. I think that because I was a rustic and because I was interested in things American, albeit eclectic, that I somehow became the only spokesman for a proud, even though remote, point of view.”

Song Cycle is an awesomely lovely pastiche: antic, affecting, lullingly surreal--the aural equivalent of Groucho Marx in Charles Ives’ pajamas. The record melds the heart-tugging delicacy of minstrel balladry and the melodic grandeur of Gershwin with the intoxicating stylistic vocabulary of Hollywood film composers like Alfred Newman and Erich Korngold--all the while detailing Parks’ picaresque journey through the pop wilderness. It became the most acclaimed record in pop history. Song Cycle is presently out of print.

“The record was produced without any idea of how it could be marketed,” Parks says with a world-weary wink. “It did not enjoy a classification, which also may have had something to do with the free-form creative juggernaut that was Warner Bros. Records at that crossroads of its existence. A one-man Trojan Horse, I occupied a perplexing position in this field of forfeit.”

MR. TAMBO

“I’m sure there were fifty or a hundred albums that came out the same year Van Dyke’s Song Cycle did,” Stan Cornyn says. "I remember that one, Randy Newman’s first album, wich Van Dyke co-produced with Lenny Waronker, and not too much more.” Cornyn started at Warner Bros. in 1959. Presently he is senior vice president for the Record Group at Warner Communications.

“He was the spiritual conscience of the king, the Fool who was not a fool. I think that was the role that Van Dyke played in addition to the musical role, which was largely so far ahead of the rest of the pack that that it made it difficult to put his records in the right bin in a record store.”

From 1966 to 1975 Warner Bros. Records grew from a ragged offshoot of the parent film company into one of the largest and most influential multi-subsidiary labels in the nation. Its roster was a mixed bag, but many artists (particularly Ry Cooder, Randy Newman, Little Feat, Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell) shared an affection for American root music and a capacity for often offbeat reinterpretation. Their vision, like Parks’, defied handy categorization and commercial outreach. In other words, their records weren’t selling worth a damn. That’s where Cornyn came in.

“I had become a minor expert in the whole counter-culture and read the funny newspapers they were selling on the Sunset Strip,” the silver-haired, soft-spoken Cornyn reflects, lifting his Gucci loafers onto the chrome coffee table in his plush Burbank office.

“Having read those philosophies, I knew they were different from those at the accounting department of Warner Bros. Records. I tried to be a little bit honest and self-effacing about the whole thing, and therefore did tell the truth, saying in the ad copy, ‘We can’t sell it, we can’t get it into the stores, but we think you should hear it.’”

It was one thing to think out loud about a clutch of fledgling hardsells who hadn’t yet enjoyed the impact they merited. It was quite another to announce the complete commercial failure of the most distinguished new face on the block.

That’s what happened to Van Dyke.

Cornyn confesses the “chagrin” (i.e. mounting insecurity) Warner Bros. felt about Song Cycle. “I elected to write an ad whose headline was, ‘How We Lost $35,509.50 on the “ALBUM OF THE YEAR” (DAMMIT).’” The text went so far as to reveal the studio costs for the record--$48,302--and the number of records “moved” --10,000.

By all accounts, the ads broke Parks’ heart. Soon afterward another ad appeared nationally. It read, “TWO WEEKS LATER, AND IT STILL LOOKS BLACK FOR ‘THE ALBUM OF THE YEAR.’” Parks was cast as the Leper Nonpareil. No comparable malady-mongering has ever befallen a recording artist, before or since.

“If someone has put their entire soul into something, as Van has with that album,” Cornyn summarizes haltingly, “I suppose some smartass ad writer doesn’t help if he points that out. So my insensitivity was exposed. But it was a terrific ad nonetheless; those ads changed attitudes and perceptions for the long run. Yet, sales-wise, it’s hard to gauge their effectiveness. I think at that point Van was convinced I killed his career.”

Anguished by what was happening to him, Parks hit upon a better idea than costly touring to communicate with potential fans: Warner Bros. Records Television Films Company. In August 1970 he became Director of Audiovisual Services for the label. His objective was to produce ten-minute promotional films on Warner Bros. groups. The shorts could be shown in first-run movie theaters or late-night television, here or abroad. As documentaries, they could conceivably be bought with federal funds by music or film schools. Parks sought out some of the best commercial directors and camera crews in the business for 16mm promos for Ry Cooder, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, Little Feat, Randy Newman, the Esso Trinidad Steel Band, and Earth, Wind & Fire. This was probably the first series of music “videos” produced in this country.

Roughly a year after assuming his post, Parks entered Mo Ostin’s office and heard that his films could not justify the the bottom line of reportedly half a million dollars. Warners had no cable network then, and could not find enough outlets for the films. The Audiovisual Services department was summarily dissolved, and Parks, as Cornyn puts it, was “orphaned”.

Cornyn now functions as part of a “think tank” representing the mutual interests of the companies in the Warners group of labels. “Artistically, Van is still a giant as far as I’m concerned, as evidenced by Jump! If we can do it at an appropriate price, we take a religious rather than a financial attitude towards this sort of thing. Although Warners has been in the position of loving to be able to tolerate eccentric and adventurous music, it does so at commercial expense. This has been the Van Dyke Parks story.”

MR. BONES

Or has it? Is the Van Dyke Parks tale that of a savant undermined by lack of commercial savvy? This would imply Parks is a dabbler who has yet to stumble on the right “hook”. For better or worse, he has actually been one of the most consistent and focused talents of his day. Unfortunately, as with Ry Cooder, who bristles each time someone labels him a “musicologist” or an “archivist”, Parks’ art has long been obscured by “Where’s the hit?” expectations.

“Van and I understand each other,” Cooder says, “because we remember a time when historical continuity in music was still a viable thing. Yet both of us have always lived and played very much in the present. There’s no paradox in that!

“In 1969, when I signed at Warner Bros., things were a lot less structured. Randy, Arlo, Van, Lenny and I could do whatever we wanted in the studio, without Dun & Bradstreet clearance. I felt sheltered, protected, and thought record companies were fun places. Warners did make a nice transition from No Label to Big Label. But, more than anything, there was continuity in what we were doing, in our own musical treasure hunting.

“A lot of bodies have fallen off the train since--I think of Van Morrison and Bonnie Raitt and others being recently dropped-- and I realize how rosy it was back then. Now we have irony and superficial postures integrated into teen culture and popular music. It’s so overt that it’s all become one big comic strip.”

THE INTERLOCUTOR

Louis-Moreau Gottschalk is not a name on everyone’s lips these days. But the nineteenth-century composer/pianist, whose “indecorous” works Parks’ Carnegie Tech instructors barred him from playing, inspired young Van Dyke Parks; to understand why is to uncover the essence of what Parks has been up to philosophically ever since Song Cycle.

Born in the French Quarter of New Orleans on May 8,1829, Gottschalk was one of the finest pianists of his time. His father was of German-English and half-Jewish ancestry; his French mother was an offspring of titled Santa Domingan refugees. He was in his early teens when he drew the praise of Chopin, Liszt and Berlioz. In 1842 the director of piano classes at the Paris Conservatoire rejected him without an audition because he was an American, the product of “only a land of steam engines...the country of railroads but not of musicians.”

Gottschalk’s prodigious talent demolished such prejudices, and he fell in with the Parisian haut monde. The source of his celebrity was his compositions, faithful arrangements of creole melodies and slave chants he heard while coming of age in Le Vieux Carre.

The minstrelsy was well under way when Gottschalk began performing, but he was a “serious” musician dedicated to writing in the folk idioms of his youth. He was also a tireless popularizer, touring mining camps, jerkwater town halls and the fringes of Civil War battlefields. His death, prematurely at age forty, unleashed mass mourning for a compassionate and magnanimous friend of the common man.

THE FINALE

It’s late afternoon at Parks’ place. Ry Cooder’s phoning, talking about getting a small tour together with some mutual musical chums. New York producer Joseph Papp’s office is on the horn, looking for copies of Jump! Timothy S. Mayer, author of the book for the Tony-winning Broadway musical, My One and Only, and translator/director of the recent, rave-reviewed Boston production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is phoning long-distance; Parks composed the score for Mother Courage, and he and Mayer have two more projects in the works. The little guy barely has time to take the calls, shower, dress and get himself to tonight’s gig on time. But he pauses in the center of the room, his striped shirt half-off, gesturing maestro-like with a green bean as he makes a last point.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” he says, “but my fear is that the way the music business is going, we are finding ourselves facing the possibility of a generation, perhaps yet unborn, with millions of musical hopefuls who would reduce the performance of music to nothing but synthetic hardware. And it seems to me there’s something insane about this. I’m not anti-technology. As far back as 1968, I was playing electric keyboards for Judy Collins’ Who Knows Where The Time Goes.

“See, I could have taken all the money I got to make Jump!, hired no acoustic help, done the whole thing as an electronic trick, and used the rest as a down payment on a crackerbox somewhere in crackerland. But I’m not in the music racket for that. “Twentieth-century art represents nothing so much as confrontation with industry and the military. Fine, but why must art only reflect angst? Why not have art serve some other Gottschalk-like purpose that is illuminating but not debilitating, that offers the psyche solace and serves as a restorative?”

Four months later, plans for staging Jump! are taking shape. Mayer has spent the summer collaborating with former Saturday Night Live writer Michael O’Donoghue on the book. Negotiatons with Joseph Papp and Annie producer Lewis M. Allen continue. Peter Sellars, artistic director of the American National Theater company will present Jump! in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, Jump! is in the top five in Holland and about to be released in England. Label representatives are asking about a tour. On other fronts, Parks contributed two songs to an upcoming Sesame Street movie, R.E.M. has approached him about producing their next record, and he’s doing the Carribean-flavored score for the forth-coming Bill Murray/John Cleese film comedy, Club Paradise.

Parks, as always, is philosphical about the future... and the past.

“I’m still reeling with this challenge,” he says, “to keep my hopes pinned to music which feels like it has aspirations, which feels like it has tensile strength, is on the cutting edge, does have something incisive to offer. I want to ensure that it is discerning, that it is anxious, that it flies nervously and not with its grip on the joystick of preordained method. That it remains excited, driven by passion, does not become an oligarchic swill of self-insistence, that it nourishes and flatters our personal dimension and all that’s gone into it.

“I wanna be new-fashioned and novel, too, just like this latest song I’m polishing up.”

What’s the title?

A short pause. “’I’m History’.”

Tranbscribed for this website by Paul Sineath.