Wouldnt It Be Nice | Page 5

background vocals. It felt fraternal in a way. I thought, who do I know that I could get to do this? So I thought, well, Brian Wilson. Because I think of Brian often."
The finished tape sat on then Warner's president Lenny Waronker's desk for three or four weeks before he listened to it. Then "Lenny called me and said, 'This is fantastic. Do some more.'"
By that time a concept for the album had begun to take shape. "I decided when I was working on the lyrics to 'Orange Crate Art' to put the name of a woman in place, just to bring the song a little closer to the vest, and so I went to Ramona." To a native Californian, the name Ramona carries considerable freight. It refers to both an 1884 novel by Helen Hunt Jackson and the play adapted from it, which Parks summarizes as the story of "a land-grant scion of Spanish nobility falling in love with an Indian girl. It gets this oleo of Roman Catholic cultural collision with this aboriginal reality in old California. It's a beautiful play--I saw it once when I was a kid.
"Once I got Ramona in place, naturally I had to figure out where I was going to go. My first thought was Pomona. But as I was working through the song, this new lyric, I thought, 'No, I'm going to Sonoma.' For no reason other than instinct. It's always a superior governor, rather than logic. Instinct is what leads a lyric on its way. Once I turned to Sonoma, I found the wine in the lyric, and I went from the wine to the grapes, and the wrath of the grapes which gave me a reflection on the Battle Hymn...does this make any sense at all? What I think songwriting is about is a condensate of impressions on an area of experience. I had been to Sonoma, and I knew some people who lost their love, and so I thought, 'This is good, love lost is good.'
"I just involuntarily landed on Ramona as a name which would express a romantic probability in California. I thought Ramona would mean absolutely nothing to anybody else. But suppose a careless observer of this song heard that reference. It would give this song great function, because it would propel that person into other superior thoughts. I'm always paying attention, I'm always trying to put something to bring a gift into the record. So that the work I do that's immediately evident might invite another listening and present another finding."
Placing that first song in Northern California planted a seed which was nurtured by another coincidence: Lenny Waronker, to whom Parks was reporting, was a fan of the orange crate labels that Parks was singing about, had a collection of the original paintings, had even used one for Warner Brothers label art in the 70s. But Waronker thought orange crate art for the album cover was too obvious. In Parks's words, "why hit the tack with a ball-peen hammer? Be subtle. Be subtle. Use the plein-air."
The plein-air style of landscape painting is associated with impressionism and concerned with the effects of light and atmosphere that can only be captured by working out-of-doors. The California school of plein-air includes Alfred Mitchell, one of whose paintings became the front cover art for the album.
Through books like O, California (Vincent, Starr, and Mills, Chronicle Books) and Second Nature (Petersen, Prestel Books), Parks immersed himself in the plein-air style. "I'm not an artist, but I love art, I really do. It means a lot to me. When I saw this stuff I thought, 'This is a sumptuous feast.'"
Some songs, like "Palm Tree and Moon," emerged from the book itself. "I just looked at this guy [in one of Mitchell's paintings] and I got an idea about 'This is so far from China.' Like being somewhere strange, exotic. And this was exotic to him. This Chinese fishing village in 1880 in Monterey."
Others, like "Movies Is Magic," got a change of locale. "I wrote it about a legend in my wife's family about how Elvis Presley, before he became famous, was interested in her sister, who was a debutante." The song was originally set in Memphis, but as the Northern California theme took hold, Parks had a momentary crisis. When he saw a plein-air painting showing the meeting of the Sacramento and the Piedmont, he found a Northern California Delta to match that of the Mississippi. A line about "magnolias can be seen from her door" became "Sacramento river rat a rappin on her door."
Almost imperceptibly the album became about "an idealized Californian state of mind, just within the outer reaches of accessibility."
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Paul Williams, editor of Crawdaddy! and himself a highly vocal Brian Wilson fan, has speculated that there is a process