The Town Crier of Weird

By JAY COCKS

A Yankee abroad in Tokyo sends in this musical report: "I spoke of my love for MacArthur/ The man not the park in L.A./ 'But you're so much older!' she covered her shoulder/ And I heard her say with a sigh/ 'A soldier may never say die!' "

That lyric, with its cross-cultural elisions and unsprung rhythms stashed inside orchestrations belonging more to Sondheim than Springsteen, is from Tokyo Rose, an elfin but savage ten-song essay on the growing misalliance of Japan and America. The record is not only big themed, it is big fun. That combination of intellectual ambition and musical serendipity can be recognized as the work of Van Dyke Parks by his legion of . . . oh, say, 782 fans. We're not talking Milli Vanilli here. But we are on the subject of someone rather terrific.

Parks, 47, has the salt-and-pepper hair and gentle, distracted manner of a day player in To Kill a Mockingbird. He was born in Hattiesburg, Miss., during the waning days of World War II. His father was the founder of Dick Parks and the White Swan Serenaders, and when not being what his son calls "an avocational musician," he pursued psychiatry as a colleague of Karl Menninger's. Young Van Dyke landed his first professional job with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1951 ("in the boys' choir") and has been doing unexpected things ever since. He acted with Grace Kelly in The Swan in 1955. A decade later he was lodged at Warner Bros. Records as a cultural curiosity and house genius, collaborating with such hothouse talents as Ry Cooder and Lowell George. In 1968 he turned out his first solo album, Song Cycle, a heavily layered and intricately rhymed portrait of Los Angeles that is like Thomas Pynchon on vinyl.

"The work I do takes on a tremendously individual tone, nonclassifiable as it is, because of my interest in things of no great popular interest," says Parks, sounding out and savoring each word as if he were sizing it for a verbal nutcracker. "This," he adds, "has meant commercial embarrassment to me." Tokyo Rose is only his fifth album since Song Cycle so, clearly, Parks is not likely to give Billy Joel a run for the heavy money; but the album is both witty and topical enough to tempt the wide audience that has so far eluded him.

The album's songs are all variations on the theme of East-West collision, which, as rendered by Parks, sounds like a rush-hour pileup on the Golden State Freeway. Not that the music is jarring; far from it. Melodies waft about like tropical breezes, blowing a little irony in all directions. Tokyo Rose begins with a typically peppy but odd Parks arrangement of America -- jukebox Charles Ives -- and ends with a tune about baseball (One Home Run) sung in English and Japanese. In between is a chronicle of misunderstanding. Manzanar is about the internment camps of World War II; White Chrysanthemum is the % poignant evocation of the death of a G.I. who spent his waning days building Nissans down South.

With its combination of musical whimsy and homicidal lyrical glee, Tokyo Rose becomes an unlikely, indeed unwitting, rejoinder to The Japan That Can Say No, the Japanese best seller written by Sony's chairman, Akio Morita, and Shintaro Ishihara that has stirred such debate with its pointed challenges to America. Tokyo Rose is, in fact, an improvement on it. You can dance to Parks if you have some appropriately eccentric moves. And while he's riling you, he can always make you smile.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York