William Burroughs
knew what was happening before it happened. He sensed the
fragmentation, the fissures spreading from some cultural San Andreas
Fault, and he did his best to express it with the tools he had -
typewriter and scissors. Teens hearing God in rock n' roll didn't wait for salvation, they punched the car radio buttons, cutting up the narrative - we want the world and we want it now. TV remotes enabled the visual equivalent, an optic restlessness mirrored in avant-garde film editing. The phenomenon coincided with the fractured vision of LSD. The confluence, the crucible, the fractal fringe of the fun zone®, was LA pop culture, an alchemical fusion of art and commerce not seen before or since. Maybe the people would be the times.
Three albums reflected and created the times; Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, Brian Wilson's SMiLE, and Zappa's Lumpy Gravy. Recorded simultaneously, each explored new studio techniques to break the flow, to shuffle and reshuffle the familiar into the unexpected, the bizarre, and the beautiful. And the funny. That's something often forgotten. Jokes are the first to the wall in the kultural putsch - you can see it happening now - woke is no joke. Smile is not a frown. Song Cycle's best gag is that it contains no songs at all. Lumpy Gravy is both a broken mirror reflecting LA, and an extended pants-down snork at its pretensions.
It's also worth noting that none of these albums was inspired by, or referred to, or needed, the "British Invasion," and that the over-regarded Beatles were already several steps behind the West Coast. Pepper, played after these, sounds like what it is, a Hallmark greeting card from a week in Hashbury. A little patchouli scenting the toytown vaudeville, but essentially business as usual. These three revolutionary albums blew the business model apart, a new American Gothic, a stained glass window constantly shattering into multi-colored shards.
Song Cycle was originally to be called Looney Tunes, a title that reflects its cartoonish playfulness, and I've given it a cover which combines LA's high society with its low humor.
Mono and stereo Song Cycle re-upped by request.
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