“Impossible”: The reason Van Dyke Parks fired himself from The Beach Boys

Posted On December 15, 2024December 15, 2024

It’s hard to imagine writing an album as flawless as Pet Sounds and thinking you could somehow improve upon it. Flawless might be stretching a bit – it does have a pretty dreadful rendition of the Bahamian folk song ‘Sloop John B’ slapped right in the middle, but other than that, it’s very nearly flawless. The twelve original compositions by Brian Wilson that sit either side of the shoddy sea shanty rank among the greatest contributions to pop ever conceived and are the work of a genius preoccupied with polishing the finer details to perfection.

This quest for perfection, however, was ultimately the biggest stumbling block that Wilson faced as a songwriter, and no matter the lengths he would go to in order to best his magnum opus, he would ultimately never finish the main project proposed as The Beach Boys’ record that would topple Pet Sounds. The sessions for Smile were marred by Wilson’s declining mental health and his bandmates not being entirely on board with the increasingly whimsical style that he was pushing towards.

In his attempts to reach for excellence, Wilson recruited the services of Van Dyke Parks as a lyricist and arranger, having been introduced to him by a mutual friend the year before. Unsatisfied with the lyrics that Pet Sounds collaborator Tony Asher had written for Smile’s centrepiece, ‘Good Vibrations’, Wilson was far more impressed with what Parks had to offer for the track and asked him if he’d be willing to assist on the larger project. However, despite having found the ideal mind to bounce his ideas off for the album, it wouldn’t take long for the wheels to start falling off.

Parks had relocated to Los Angeles earlier in the decade and was largely critical of the 1960s in retrospect, calling it a “decade filled with darkness,” although he does acknowledge that he still holds an immense amount of pride in the work he created at the time. “I was turned upside-down,” he told The Independent in 1999, and that was most true for him during his time working with the Beach Boys.

As noted, Wilson’s fragile mental state was worsening at an alarming rate, and a large contributing factor towards that would have been the ungodly quantities of marijuana he purchased prior to hunkering down in the studio to write and record Smile. With Wilson constantly in a hash-induced haze and having God-fearing delusions on a regular basis, Parks felt helpless and unable to contribute in the ways that Wilson demanded of him, becoming increasingly detached from the goals of the ailing songwriter.

“I found that my working with Brian at that time was impossible,” Parks attested. Knowing that it wouldn’t be healthy for his working relationship with Wilson, he sought a way out of the situation. “I had a feeling I was redundant, so I fired myself,” he confirmed, and after mere months working on the record with Wilson, he was freed from the frustrating situation.

However, despite the botched outcome of the project, Smile still has a legacy due to the various alternate and unfinished versions of the album that have been released in the years since. As far as Parks was concerned, there was a huge amount of potential in what he and Wilson had produced together. “What we had taken on could have been a wonderful thing,” he stated. “It’s the most under-achieved event in pop music history.”

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