Wouldnt It Be Nice | Page 5

the freedom to make idiosyncratic personal records at his own pace.
"I had the permission to record an album, but I had no idea of what I
was going to do, I never do. So I made up this song, I went into this
studio, I sang it, and then I realized that I would rather have some
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