Van Dyke Parks: Discover America

VAN DYKE PARKS' first album, Song Cycle, released in 1968, was a dizzyingly eclexoteric work that had the critics alternately gushing, "The emergence of a super-genius!" and hissing, "Insufferable pretentiousness!" and so dumbfounded the thirty or so civilians who bought it (probably under the mistaken impression that Van Dyke Parks was a Flemish psychedelic group) that no distinct lay impression ever became visible.