Table of Contents

Introduction 1. I Came Unto West Hollywood 2. Dreams Are Stillborn in Hollywood 3. Let's Assume That We Form a Company 4. Song Cycle 5. Enveloped 6. To Market To Buy 7. Constant Commentary By the Wayside 8. What Is Up the Canyon Will Eventually Come Down 9. Time Is Not the Main Thought 10. That Brought Us Coots to Hoot Bibliography

Promotional Information

An intelligent take on a classic left-field album from the late 1960s, including original interviews with all the key players including Van Dyke Parks.

About the Author

Richard Henderson is a writer, music editor and occasional music supervisor for feature films. Born in Detroit, he leads a nomadic existence in California. His film credits include Brüno, Borat, Into The Wild and The Life Aquatic; his writing has appeared in The Wire, Billboard, The Beat and Murder Dog.

Reviews

Perhaps now is the best time, if you have not already gone for Van Dyke Parks' solo opus, to fully delve into 'Song Cycle' the album... and the book.
*The New York Examiner*

A work of quality, and its fascinating story, as presented here, is well worth reading.
*The Wire*

Like The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross' ability to make dense topics accessible, Richard Henderson excels at embracing the technical innards of music in a universally fascinating manner.
*Crawdaddy!*

Song Cycle is an animated mash-up of parlor pop, calypso folk, movie scores, and anything else that struck Parks’s fancy, and Richard Henderson admits its manic nature makes the collection a hard sell for the uninitiated. But he makes a persuasive case, not only detailing Song Cycle’s creation (it was rumored to be the most expensive pop album of its time—which made it the biggest commercial failure of its time) but arguing for it as an unheralded artifact of the psychedelic era.
*Pitchfork*