An Interview with Van Dyke Parks

As he concluded the second show of a two-night stand billed as “The Lost Weekend: Last Piano/Vocal Performances” last month at Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles, seventy-two-year-old Van Dyke Parks bowed and bid farewell to arguably the most conventional aspect of his otherwise unconventional, visionary career. 

For almost half a century, in fact, Parks has achieved singular distinction as a composer, arranger, lyricist, producer, actor, and all-around maverick icon, yet it wasn’t until relatively recent that he inured his chops to the concert stage. “I started touring at the age of sixty-eight for the first time after over forty years in the music business,” Parks told this writer in February 2012, by which point he had begun logging a fair share of live appearances and was gearing up for a fresh batch of new ones across the country. 

For a man who’d earned his living and likewise his legend mostly behind the scenes — his credits include works by the likes of Randy Newman, U2, Fiona Apple, Bruce Springsteen, and Harry Nilsson, not to mention Brian Wilson’s salvaged classic, SMiLE, and his own inimitable solo albums, including Song Cycle and Orange Crate Art — Parks acknowledged the irony in his ambitions.   

“I had never had the opportunity to perform any of the works that I’d done, really, over those years,” he said. “I felt that I should be able to have that opportunity, because it’s a special pleasure that so many of my peers have had. They’ve built lives. They’ve become well-known. I basically have reached an age of anonymity that I wanted when I was young and now it’s part of my stamp, my branding: an anonymous player.” 

At the time of this extensive and wide-ranging conversation, which until now has remained unpublished, Parks had just overseen the release of the retrospective compilation, Arrangements, Volume One, and was in the throes of composing the now out-of-print vinyl collection, 7” Singles Series, the songs from which would surface on his allusively titled studio LP, Songs Cycled, the following year.

Are the audiences that come to your performances now enjoying the new material?

Well, I don’t do too much of the new material. I prefer to explore what it is that I’ve done, but I’m starting to introduce some [new] songs into the set and will continue to do that through this year. I’m going to do some more. I’m going to be an itinerant musician this year. I’m going to hit the road, Jack. I will be putting some new songs in those performances, but I like ranging freely and just regarding what it is that I have done. 

My wife says that a Southern gentleman learns to say two things. The first is, “Yes, Ma’am.” And the second thing is, “Whatever was I thinking?” I kind of feel like that when I investigate work that I did many years ago, but I think it’s worth exploration and I’d like to think that I’m capable of durable goods that stand the test of time. That’s the way I work, every song. Every song is that important. Now I’m working on what I of course consider my best song. 

So, I’m very pleased about the process. I’ll continue to record and I will up until April, then hit the road here in the red states, in the mid states, in this politically vital year, going out and hoping that “the song” will emphasize the humanities and help us find a peaceable, political future for the next four years. 

I live in Florida, which is always a highly politicized environment.

I have many relatives who are Republicans of Florida, but I avoid political conversations with them at the dinner table because my politics are decidedly green. For example, I was just in Jacksonville at a theatre — I did a co-bill with Billy Joe Shaver — to benefit the St. Johns River restoration. I’m very happy that I could even be included in such an event because, as my song lyrics suggest, my politics are green. I think about the integrity of our process, the amount of oil we use, the world we’re leaving behind. Florida with a white python, who’d of thought? What an awful sport to play on an environment. So, we must think about the world we leave behind, and in the end game of my life — in which I am, by the way — I want to do the right thing. So my lyrics, you see… Although I have, I think, a reputation for being of light heart, my songs have become darker, in a way, as I find inevitably that I have to focus on things that matter. Such as my feelings about oil are reflected in a song I did in my series called “The Black Hole.” 

And also “Wall Street.”

“Wall Street” is another song that has to do with another problem and that is the tectonics between Islam and Christianity. In fact, I think “Wall Street” is motivated by concerns about how the First World is being viewed by those who have less. Neil Young, a famous songwriter, he decided to belch the title song, “Let’s Roll,” after 9/11, as somewhat retaliatory. I have no such kind of machismo or bravado. My questions are greater than the answers that I found. That is, why did it happen? How can we prevent it from happening again? What can we do to bring peace to this world without surrendering a damn thing and without creating trillions of dollars of war debt in wars that are misdirected? All of that stuff, you see, those social pressures, those social concerns, are all a challenge to wrap up in a short form like a record without hitting the casual observer in the face, without insulting, without having a heavy hand. They become a nuanced ingredient in everything I do. I think the best world that I can paint is one of an informed optimism, but it must be informed. 

You have to be grounded in the world you live in.

Well, I believe so. There’s an expression for it which is quite beautiful: “Bloom where you’re planted.” So I look at the world from this position I’m in, and I work harder and harder. All of this stuff has to do with the fact that I find myself — in my seventieth year — totally obsessed with the song form. I love it. I always have. … There’s nothing really precious or inaccessible about the 45 [RPM] records I’m doing. I allow that they are on the Internet. You can download them, but that is in digital form. The world that I love is the vinyl world because of the quality of sound. It’s hi-fi, high fidelity, lost on those who have surrendered to just the torpor, that digital ditch, that place that they all sit. There is better sound and so I’m making it and I’m going out with a big oink. 

It’s ironic that people will invest thousands of dollars on home theater systems to watch movies yet they listen to music on cheap little ear buds.

It’s phenomenal what people will tolerate if they’re told. They say in Japan, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” I kind of find that I am still sticking out — this rusty old nail — and highly individual in my pursuits, I think, but I don’t think that it is less than encouraging to other people to see a maverick behavior. I find more and more that I’m listening to a new generation of songwriters who make me look like the Rock of Gibraltar. They have such wild ideas. The song form has taken new dimension in works by people like Rufus Wainwright and Joanna Newsom, for whom I’ve worked, but [also] so many others. So I’m looking ahead. I’m looking through the windshield, but I also have a rearview capability, and the work that I listen to of others that I like best somehow combines both those perspectives. 

As an arranger, as a composer, is your loyalty to the song at hand or, if you’re collaborating with another artist, to that artist and his/her aesthetic?

Truly, with both Rufus and Joanna, there was no collaboration, that is if you consider a collaboration a knock-down, drag-out, face-to-face [endeavor]. The jobs in both those cases are semi-overlapping, still contiguous, still punching each other, but they are overlapping so that their work is done when I receive the challenge of arranging, if you speak certainly of arranging. So arranging, to me, is anything but collaborative. It has to just be absolutely monastic. It has to be alone, and it has to be quite dutiful and obedient in many cases to everything that’s already there in place. Collaboration, to me, is something that songwriters can do together, for example. Collaboration, to me, is extemporaneous music in a studio. I love it. I love what’s off-the-cuff and off-the-page. I love that as much... It’s a thrill. Those are two different processes. But in terms of arranging, the thing that got my kids, three of our sprouts, through colleges — the thing that paid those tuitions — was arranging, and that was monastic. That’s basically what happened.

So we have a Volume One of arrangements I’ve done; we’re coming out with a Volume Two of arrangements I’ve done. This is not for any reason of self-reference. It’s just that I think that I might be able to offer something by showing the arc of my achievement such as it is, to reveal what it is that I learned and what somebody might learn again and maybe not have to make so many mistakes as I did. 

I’ve been listening a lot to the George Washington Brown track (“Donovan’s Colours”) on Volume One. 

You see, it’s a do-re-mi song. “Donovan’s Colours” is do-re-me. That’s what they call them in Trinidad. It’s diatonic and a very simple song and it’s so classically Celtic that I decided to take it on, and also to give an affectionate nod to this fellow who was trying to do folk music that was authored such as what Donovan wrote with “Colours.” I enjoyed the song and I got to work on a three-track machine. I went three to three, and then the four-track came out, so I put it in four. Then I had two four-tracks, and I put that all together. Very interesting, isn’t it? It was an interesting process. 

You hear marimbas in there. I played them. They move right along, but I must confess that I recorded them at half speed. By recording the marimbas at half speed I recorded it from 7 ½ IPS to 15 inches-per-second, I discovered by doubling the tape speed that I had reached an octave, and that absolutely fascinated me because no one told me that. Les Paul didn’t tell me that; I’m sure he’d found it out in 1953. People had found out about it, but you had to learn when I started recording, when I started doing singles. “Donovan’s Colours,” I would think, was when I was probably twenty two years old. It’s also a study — a short study — in variations on a theme all within a single [format]. In fact, “Donovan’s Colours” really established me with an artist contract at Warner Brothers. I did not want to be an artist. I just wanted to learn something in the studio. I wasn’t interested in fame, or I didn’t even think about that I might someday need some rent money. It had nothing to do with money or recognition, but to learn. 

I think that that is why some of that work is still a matter of curiosity. You can tell stuff is happening. People are learning something. There’s a residue of a process of discovery, of discovering a lot of stuff. That was in the golden age of analog, you see, certainly from 1964 when I got my first contract at MGM to 1974, in that decade that they called the Sixties. Music recording reached incredible heights and evolved so beautifully to the point of automatic mixing, for example; knobs stopped turning and bars started floating up and down automatically in a mix. It’s all very interesting, every bit of it, even the Moog synthesizer work I did in 1967, stepping up to a synthesizer where there was no noise. We had no keyboards. We had, simply, a phalanx of phone cords sticking in a great patch bay with what sounded like a hurricane passing, what’s called white noise. 

It shows a lot of resourcefulness.

Oh, it was a very difficult discipline. It’s just kind of like I’ve reached a point now... I realize that all of the works that I’m talking about, the arrangements I’ve done, these works are all in the vaults. They have three record companies, and now they’re trying to turn it into two. So much music is in the vaults ignominiously, unavailable. I just argued; that just made me mad as hell. I don’t care what happens after I’m dead. They can’t snuff me out quickly, graveside, but while I’m here my work should be available for study and enjoyment and consolation and agitation and everything that it was intended to be. That’s why I decided to turn to this cottage industry. That’s why I decided to finally get out and be able to discover America, for example. It’s a wonderful, novel opportunity.

When you have a chance to reflect upon such things, are you ever intrigued or struck curious by the level or artistry you brought to music at such a young age?

There are two things: Society has instructed me, in the insults that I’ve received for my explorations, to just generally emphasize that thing that the Southern gentleman is supposed to learn how to say to a lady, “Whatever was I thinking?” That happens to me and I look back in horror, but at the same time, secretly, I’m very satisfied with the level of craft that’s in the work. I mean that, really. I worked so hard, and I know that. If I were a great musician, which I’m not, I might be less easy with it, but the fact that I know that I did my best and I worked so hard to get there, it just gives me feelings of great, great comfort.

There’s a lot of wherewithal that is evident in your work, but to have done it in your twenties and thirties and to have it still resonate so profoundly all these years later must be gratifying. 

My heart is in the work, and I think that that — I hope — is some benefit to somebody else. I didn’t make that expression up, by the way. That was the motto of Andrew Carnegie: “My heart is in the work.” Although for many years, for most of his life, he was recognized as the man he was, a robber and a son of a bitch. In the final hours of his life he gave it all away. I’d like to do that while I’m alive. I want to give it all away. I’m giving it up. I always have done that. I’ve always had an overriding concern that everything that I’m going to do, when I tackle a musical job, is a life-defining opportunity no matter how small. Even if it is built to, as it were, pad the gun shocks and horse hooves, being felt and not heard, even in a movie score, learning how to stay out of the way musically; or make two lovers look like they want to kiss when, in fact, they don’t—stuff like that. 

All of these aspects of music are interesting to me, but of them all the most epic, the most defining for me — the one that I’m pursuing as I bop ‘til I drop, the one that I’m pursuing now — is the song. And you’ve caught me midstream. You’ve caught me in the middle of that. 

Because of your craftsmanship — and knowhow and experience — have you ever felt compelled to write music exclusively for commercial success? Did you ever feel compelled to go in that direction for a minute?

No, I didn’t. I’ve never done that, and I should have. When I wanted to go commercial, I did a commercial. I mean, that’s why I got involved with Moog synthesizers. I proved that I could be “commercial.” But in terms of a song? Never, never, never, never. It takes time to do a song, it takes work. As Ted Turner says, “It only looks easy.” It takes work. Irving Berlin wrote a song called “Always” — it took him a year to come up with “not for just a day, not for just an hour, but always.” It took him a year to come up with his coda. It takes time to do a song and in that time two things happen: the songwriter stays in his or her own ball garden, isolated dreamscape and, also, has moments coming back in the harsh light of day after a late night or waking up in the morning and finding sixteen bars that have to be destroyed. I mean, it happens. I think always there is the desire to communicate something. I have that. So it’s not to say that I’m just a take-it-or-leave-it type of guy. I try to accommodate the casual observer. All my work as an arranger is drawn into that effort, by the way. 

While you’re arranging you have an audience in mind?

Always. I always want to appeal to… I wouldn’t think of it as necessarily a human being, but an observer, to make something beautiful, to bring beauty to life. It’s called “cosmetics,” to make the cosmos most beautiful. That’s what I try to do in my music, is to try somehow in some peculiar way to leave a more beautiful world than the one I stepped into through my own effort. Cool?

For more information, please visit Van Dyke Parks online at Bananastan.com. 

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An Interview with Jimmy Webb

The songs of Jimmy Webb occupy an indelible place in popular music. From the ones that everybody knows — “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” and “MacArthur Park” among them — to such standout performances as “Up, Up And Away” (The Fifth Dimension), “The Worst That Could Happen” (The Brooklyn Bridge), “All I Know” (Art Garfunkel), and “The Highwayman” (The Highwaymen), they've traversed genres and generations for nearly the past half century. 

“There are these curious twists and turns to my repertoire,” adds Mr. Webb, “and the ways it’s interacted with both the kind of traditional world of songwriting where I was very well recorded by the likes of Mr. Sinatra, Mr. Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli — the traditional warhorses of pop music — but I’m equally well represented by Maynard Ferguson and Stan Kenton and Pat Metheny and a whole group of jazz musicians.”

In addition to his achievements as a songwriter, Mr. Webb has maintained a respectable career as a recording artist in his own right, with albums like Letters, Suspending Disbelief, and Ten Easy Pieces revealing yet another dimension of his talent. On his latest, Just Across The River, he collaborates with guests including Billy Joel, Lucinda Williams, and Mark Knopfler while revisiting selections from his own back catalog.

The only artist in history to have won GRAMMY® awards for music, lyrics, and orchestration, Mr. Webb resides on the Board of Directors for ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) as well as the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.

What originally drew you to the craft of songwriting? There’s always been a serious aesthetic underscoring your work.

I always took it pretty seriously. I think that, first of all, you’ve got to be a fan. If you love it and if you love hearing the things that other people are doing… We learn by imitating. I was a great fan of John Gardner, who wrote the book The Art of Fiction. It was actually a book written for prose writers. One of the great quotes in it was, “In a sense, all great writing is an imitation of great writing.” I really got my blood up as a teenager — thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old — listening to Burt Bacharach and Hal David, some of the more semi-serious composers like Rodgers and Hart — Larry Hart was a great favorite of mine — Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King. All of the Brill Building writers I knew intimately. I knew well. I knew their work note for note, word for word. I had a lot of piano lessons when I was a kid, but I could always play by ear. When I say “intimate,” I mean that I actually felt like I was part of those songs. I felt like I knew something about the origins of those songs… I used to listen to Teddy Randazzo’s wonderful records that he did with Little Anthony & The Imperials: “Hurts So Bad,” “Goin’ Out of My Head.” Tony Hatch, all his stuff with Petula Clark, “Downtown,” and [with] Dusty Springfield. These were all the legit writers — that’s the expression I would use anyway — and they were pure writers. They just wrote songs; they didn’t perform.

Then on the other hand the performers, the singers, were not in any sense songwriters. They were just talent, not just talent in the diminutive, but they were discreetly talent as opposed to writers. That’s the sort of ancient music business that I grew up in, where the roles were very clearly defined. Then you had singer/songwriters like Woody Guthrie and then his disciples like Bob Dylan, who is clearly a singer/songwriter, but the singer/songwriter as performer didn’t really come to the fore and come into its golden age until Lennon and McCartney. At that point, it was clear that everybody would have to write and sing and perform. And so the stage was kind of set for the ‘70s and the whole singer/songwriter phenomenon.

Songwriters were at first a little bit bewildered by this; then, secondly, terrified. There was a lot of adverse reaction to it, but I was young enough that I kind of caught the coattail; I caught a whiff of what was going on. When Carole King released the Tapestry album I listened to it very carefully because I knew [producer] Lou Adler. I’d done records with him for Johnny Rivers. So I was more than casually interested — she was one of my old favorites from the Brill Building — and so I was an avid listener. I listened very carefully. And my conclusion was that a new age was upon us and that you would either adapt or you would essentially be back-burnered. You would recede in importance unless you at least made the attempt to get on the train and become a singer/songwriter. I wasn’t very successful at it, but I sure as hell gave it a good try.

Going back to when you first started writing songs that were getting covered by other artists, did you know at the time that you were challenging the conventions of how a pop song could sound and take shape? 

First of all, you had Bacharach, you had Randazzo, and you had George Martin. You had all of these people very much at the forefront of the music business between ’64 and ’67, all very active. All, even though they were in different genres as it were, bringing classical influences to bear on this teenage symbology and this sort of codified, teenage lyric that was as incomprehensible to our parents as a lot of rap music is incomprehensible to us today.

Are you able to listen to music that at first doesn’t appeal to you or that you don’t understand and distinguish your tastes from what’s good or bad? Can you tell, “Well, I just don’t like that, but it’s good?” 

I think it’s important, just in terms of musical health, to really try to listen to things that don’t particularly appeal to you maybe the first time you hear them, but it’s like taking vitamins; it’s good for you. It’s good for you to listen to things that you don’t understand. Otherwise ossification sets in and you become fossilized. You can’t be an artist and you’re no longer a part of society. You just become sidelined; you become an observer. So I think at least you have to be listening.

I was asked at one point to write an article for the L.A. Times about Eminem — this has been ten years ago — because he was getting a GRAMMY® award and everybody was kind of all upset about it. My point of view was basically at that moment in time anti-Eminem because Marshall [Mathers] had written a bunch of lyrics about bashing gays and about domestic violence being okay, and some stuff that I really didn’t agree with. I didn’t particularly think that the GRAMMY® Awards should dignify some of this stuff with an award. That was my position, but I was certainly aware that he was among the best if not the best rapper ever; that even black rap artists were looking at this kid and going, “Where did this guy come from?” You have to be really stupid not to know that this guy can handle the language, and that’s something that I respect. I was a little bit up on my high horse about some of the subject matter….

I can’t say that I listen to hip/hop music around the house, but it doesn’t turn me off to hear it. It’s been interesting to me lately to listen to hip/hop artists reintroducing musical elements into rap, which I felt was inevitable, frankly. From an artistic standpoint I just felt they could only go so far in a certain direction without resorting to a little more elaborate chord structure and, at least, song fragments and pieces of melody. I see that they’re reintroducing it. I think it’ll be very surprising to see where that whole movement ends up. In fifteen to twenty years from now, I don’t know that hip/hop will be recognizable in its present form. That’s the nature of music and it’s always been the nature of music. If it’s any good, if it’s valid, then it’s moving on; it’s reshaping itself.

I don’t think anybody could have predicted the advent of the four mop-top lads from Liverpool. I was playing jazz at the time and I remember some guys coming in to the rehearsal saying, “Oh man, did you see these guys on Ed Sullivan last night? They had long hair like girls!” They were all hung up on that they had hair like girls. I was just preoccupied with the score and writing something down and said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. That’s nothing of any consequence.” Then, in collaboration with George Martin, Paul [McCartney] and John [Lennon] really became seminal influences of mine because they were willing to step outside the ordinary shape of things.

In a way, I think for one brief moment there I really took the momentum away from them. I think I surprised the shit out of them with “MacArthur Park.” I remember years later George Martin telling me that because “MacArthur Park” was seven-minutes, twenty-seconds long, that they all stood by the console when they were mastering “Hey Jude” and they made sure the fade lasted seven-minutes, twenty-one-seconds long. I checked it out one time to see if it was true and it is true. “Hey Jude” is one second longer than “MacArthur Park.”

It was a great period of cross pollination, of advancement, really, where the Beatles definitely heard [the Beach Boys’] Pet Sounds loud and clear. They had already made a couple of very aggressive albums. Rubber Soul and Revolver were clearly proactive albums. And then here’s Pet Sounds to deal with. George also told me that the Beatles specifically went in to make an album better than Pet Sounds. That album turned out to be Sgt. Pepper, which George said may or may not have been better. He wasn’t sure that it was better.

It was more influential.

Well, it changed the world. The things they were doing musically were much more important than the things they were doing in terms of mass appeal. I don’t think a lot of their audience understood what they were doing musically. I really don’t. I just don’t. What they were doing musically may not have been that connected to what was going on as the Beatles as sociological phenomena and sexual outlet for millions and millions of very young girls. I don’t think they set out to change the world. Something like that you can’t plan. You can’t even plan to be Lady Gaga. If you planned to do it, it wouldn’t work. There were no flies on them, particularly on Paul and John, who were very, very much ready for that moment. And they brought a lot of poise to the party. They were very fortunate that they had some people like [engineer] Geoff Emerick and George Martin, in a way this whole traditional-studio establishment that was there at Abbey Road.

They had a lot of technical backing there when they were trying to do some things that had simply never been done before. I mean, Geoff Emerick was constantly rewiring the console at EMI, which was definitely against the rules. It would get you fired, tampering with the console, changing the pre-amps around. The pre-amps were supposed to be set at a certain level. And a guy in a white coat would go by every morning and would check that and make sure it was in its proper place. And here’s Geoff Emerick at night, cranking them all the way up because John is not satisfied with the guitar sound.

As far as your own songwriting, does hearing your songs covered by other artists yield new insights or appreciation about them to you?

It definitely gives me a new pair of ears to listen with. A couple years ago James Taylor recorded “Wichita Lineman” and won the GRAMMY® for Best Male Pop Vocal performance. It was well deserved because it was just one hell of a performance. When you get something recorded by a fantasy figure like that, you definitely get to hear the song again. It’s completely outfitted in a different set of clothes. It rejuvenates the material. It revitalizes it, makes it new again in a way. Something like that has such a positive effect on someone like me at my age to hear something that I always knew was pretty good, but to have that reaffirmed by someone of James Taylor’s stature, and to have the record come out sounding not just good but truly great, it’s a little surprising.

I wrote “Wichita Lineman” in about three hours. I sent it over to Glen [Campbell] and [producer/arranger] Al De Lory at a recording session because I knew they were in a hurry for it. They called me a couple of times and said, “Are you done yet?” And I said, “No, not really.” I was having kind of a rough day because someone had spray painted the piano in my music room in Palmero where I lived with a bunch of idiots in the classic ‘60s commune, about thirty people who lived in this big, former Philippine consulate. They got into my music room with a can of green spray paint and spray painted my piano green. And the paint was still wet. So I was trying to write a song on a green, spray-painted piano. By that time, in spite of my best efforts, I was pretty much covered with green paint. And after about two or three hours I called them and said, “I’m going to send it over.” And I think in small letters I said, “It’s not finished, but it’s better that you guys listen to it and decide if you really like it or not.”

A couple of weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything. So I thought, Well, I guess they didn’t care for it, because they didn’t call with suggestions. Finally, one day I called over there. I said, “Glen, what ever happened to ‘Wichita Lineman?'” And he says, “Ah, ‘Wichita Lineman,’ we love that; we cut that.” I said, “Well, that song wasn’t finished.” And he said, “It is now!” There’s that big hole there which would have been my third verse. They ended up putting that big, Duane Eddy-like guitar solo, this flat-key kind of guitar solo, which is famous. Glen had good instincts, always had good instincts.

What were your first impressions when you heard Isaac Hayes do “By The Time I Get To Phoenix?”

Honestly, I thought it was kind of funny, the whole pre-discourse where he’s kind of riffing with the drummer. And he says, “So I opened the door.” BAM! “And I saw my woman.” BAM! “And I saw my woman with another man.” BAM BAM! I thought that was pretty funny. It was kind of a James Brown thing. I actually got up and checked the record. I said, “Wait a minute. This is supposed to be ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix.’” [Laughs] I just went to check and, sure enough, it was cut five or whatever. So I listened on into the track for a while and finally, right at the end of the cut, he sings the song. It takes a long, long time. I loved Isaac. He was a smart guy. He was an innovator. He was a good fella. He was a good singer. I can’t say it’s my favorite version of “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” but it beats the hell out of Telly Savalas’ version. I’m always amazed at the records that come to the surface.

An especially great one is Ray Charles’ version of “I Keep It Hid.” It's a wrenching, powerful performance.

I haven’t heard that in years. I remember looking forward to it. I remember it was going to really be a high point for me because this is truly one of the demigods. I had grown up… I mean, one of my favorite albums was Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music that he did with Marty Paich, which I thought was virtually as important an album as Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds. You know, here’s a black man singing basically redneck music with an orchestral accompaniment. All of it together was awesome. Wow! “Born To Lose” and “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You;” there were really some heart-stoppers on there, some beautiful writing by Marty Paich, who was a mentor of mine and really one of the most generous of all these Hollywood arranging figures in terms of relating to younger people and saying, “Hey, kid, here’s how you do this. Here’s an easy way to do a horn chart.” Just giving so selflessly and giving away secrets, because every arranger had a bag of secrets. And Marty was so generous with his, [like], “You can make these strings sound more like violins.” Some of these things have fallen out of my repertoire because I just don’t remember everything that he taught me, but I soaked it up like a sponge.

I’d never been trained in any of these disciplines. I was learning them literally on the spot. I was learning on the job and [was] grateful for any help that I could get. I was always embarrassed when some vacuum was discovered in what I knew because I was pretending to know a lot. And in many cases there were these little pockets of absolute vacuum where I did not have a clue.... Talk about a kid being thrown into the frying pan, and really not being ready. But when it happens, it doesn’t matter whether you are ready or not. You have to go with it. It starts running away with you like it did, I’m sure, with the Beatles. Many people have had the same feeling: “Oh, my God, I don’t know what I’m doing now. I wish somebody would tell me what’s going on.” [Laughs] I don’t regret any of it. It was exciting as hell. It’s still exciting.

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