Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks Duet Album Orange Crate Art’ Sees Expanded 25th Anniversary Reissue (ALBUM REVIEW)

You may know the collaborative album, SMILE, from Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks but may have missed their reprised duet, Orange Crate Art, which Omnivore Records is celebrating with a 25th Anniversary. The packages are a double CD  and LP set that includes bonus tracks and liner notes from both Wilson and Parks. It’s the first ever vinyl release for these sessions. The fist CD/LP includes three previously unissued outtakes and the CD set also includes an entire second disc of previously unissued instrumentals.

It’s fair to say that very few, if any collaborations in pop music, considering both SMILE and Orange Crate Art are as harmonically and orchestratedly rich as these two. The history itself is rather fascinating. In 1966, when Brian Wilson prepared the follow-up to his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, he employed the versatile music man Van Dyke Parks as lyricist for The Beach Boys next album, SMILE. As we know, it became the most famous unreleased album in pop history, not releasing until 2011 as a box set, winning a Grammy.  The original intention of that album was to incorporate many different elements of American music in an avant-garde fashion, way forward of anything that existed at the time.

Somehow Wilson and Van Parks went on their separate ways, reuniting briefly in 1972 for The Beach Boys’ Sail On Sailor. Yet, the two eventually reunited in 1994 for this effort, an ode to California, as one might glean from its title. The album has been gloriously re-mastered by Grammy winner Michael Graves. Songs such as “My Hobo Heart,” “Palm Tree and Moon,” “Summer in Monterey, ” and the rocking “San Francisco” are just terrific. Heck, almost everything on Disc 1 falls into that category. Van Dyke Parks is responsible for the arrangements and Wilson was happy to just be able to sing. 

Here’s Wilson on Parks, “Van Dyke wrote all the melodies and vocal arrangements too. I’d come in and he’d teach me all the harmonies and the leads. It was a fun way to work, it’s relaxing to just be the singer. Takes a lot of weight off my shoulders. I didn’t do all the singing, but I did a lot of it, singing each part after the other. That’s quite an experience doing it like that.

The bonus tracks added are a sublime version of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” (where you hear a different kind of Brian Wilson voice),  Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and “Love Is Here to Stay,” mostly in tribute to Warner Bros. Records chairman Mo Ostin and his wife Evelyn. Ostin passed a month before the original launch.

Here’s Van Parks excerpted from the liners, “ Orange Crate Art is a continuum of that which stood, freeze-frame, at the release of SMILE….We’d taken over two years to complete the recording-virtuosos who’d defined our musical lives all gathered to celebrate Brian’s return to the studio. Tommy Morgan on harmonica brought the whole project close to the vest. Friend Fred Myrow, composer in-residence for the New York Philharmonic brought a 50-piece orchestra to its into on “Movies Is Magic,” conceivably the most expensive minute I’ve ever spent…an I’ve had surgery in Beverly Hills.”

Surely Wilson is the more famous name of the two but this, as much as anything else, is a testament to the talents of Van Parks , who with the exception of co-writers on just a few songs, was responsible for all compositions, arrangements, and production. This sounds like nothing else in music, even 25 years later. Surely, there are classical and film score elements, but taken in its entirety, with Wilson’s terrific vocal leads and harmonies, there is nothing comparable.