Tuesday, August 28, 2012

“There goes the neighbourhood”

From Danny Eccleston’s profile of Van Dyke Parks, in the September 2012 issue of Mojo:

For years, his mother displayed a yellowed cutting from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner on the refrigerator — her only evidence of her son’s status as a showbiz personage.

“It was 1980,” relates Parks. “I was just back from Malta, playing piano with Kinky Friedman in a place in North Hollywood, and we’d been collared by a reporter. The piece ran, ‘Van Dyke Parks, when asked what he felt about Bob Dylan becoming a Born Again Christian, said, “Well, there goes the neighbourhood.”’”
Read it all at Bananastan Records.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (via Pinboard)

[Malta: That would have been Popeye. I think he must’ve said neighborhood.]

comments: 2

Elaine said...

Hey! I bought a KINKY FRIEDMAN for GOVERNOR tee for my husband!

Sadly, he did not win election.

Michael Leddy said...

I’d have voted for him. He’d be an improvement over any recent Illinois governor.