“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.]