alvin!!!!! (4CE reprint dec 2009)

ALLLLLLVIIIIIN !!!

Once upon a time in the 1950's there were 3 executives at Liberty Records named Al, Ted, and Sy, which is to say Alvin Bennett, Theodore Keep and Simon Waronker. They're gone now, but their names live on of course as the Chipmunks. This month, everything you didn't know you wanted to know about the rodents and their Baby Boomer Christmas perennial "The Chipmunk Song."

First, though, why that title? After all, the hundreds of recordings that came after were all "chipmunk songs", right? Well, Ross Bagdasarian, a.k.a. David Seville, didn't know the record would give birth to a franchise that's still going strong today. As far as he was concerned, this could’ve been the first and last chipmunk song. But it went to #1 in 1958, and when re-released in 1959 and thereafter, it was subtitled "Christmas Don't Be Late", and had a new B-side, the follow-up hit "Alvin's Harmonica." The original 1958 flip was a non-Chipmunk instrumental called "Almost Good", which is actually pretty good.

Ross Bagdasarian, born in Fresno, California, was an aspiring actor, musician, composer and dialect comedian. With his cousin, playwright William Saroyan, he recorded "Come On-a My House" in 1951, a song they had written together in 1939. His then wife Kay Armen also recorded a version with the Ray Charles Singers (see last month's column!), but it was Rosemary Clooney's smash version that convinced Ross maybe he did have a future in music. Moderate chart success came in 1955 with "The Trouble With Harry" by Alfi & Harry. He was Alfi, Harry was Mark McIntyre, another Liberty Records exec, and father of the singing duo Patience and Prudence. (Ross is sometimes incorrectly credited with being their dad.) On this single, Harry is a wayward piano-player, and Alfi provides the narration, becoming exasperated with Harry's antics, a routine that would be re-cycled for the Chipmunks phenomenon: ALLLLLLLVIIIIIIN!!!!

But further Alfi & Harry singles tanked, as did a "David Seville" album. (Ross was stationed in Seville, Spain during WWII.) The song "Witch Doctor" was a last-gasp effort, and it scored big, #1 in Billboard, thanks I believe more to the catchy "oo-ee-oo-ah-ah" chorus than the squeaky high voice; the voice gimmick was tried again, but wasn't enough to save the lack-luster follow-up "The Bird on My Head." Still, Ross figured if one squeaky voice is good, 3 must be better. And boy was he right.

Speed manipulation had been used before. Remember "The Wizard of Oz"? Some early 50's records used fast adult voices to simulate a children's chorus. From the invention of tape recorders in the 1930s, they generally had several speeds. In fact, an early application which apparently fizzled out fast was called "speed telephoning"...playing a recorded message over the phone at fast-speed, then slowing it down for playback. But the speeded voice was difficult to understand; that's why Disney's Chip 'n' Dale spoke in such short, clipped phrases. You could only double or halve the speed, nothing in between. Variable speed recorders were complicated and expensive, but Ross bought one for the price of a decent used car, and fine-tuned the technique to make the voices intelligible. But the real innovation was the use of multi-track recording, pioneered by Les Paul, who BTW claimed he gave Ross the key idea.

And that idea was to take a pre-recorded music track, slow it down, sing along with it, then speed it up again. The slowed down music would be back to sounding normal, but the normal voice would now be squeaky. Contrast that with Danny Kaye's 1942 record "The Babbitt and the Bromide", where 2 stuffy society gents trade pleasantries, and when they arrive in heaven, the chorus is speeded up, voices, music and all. One of the first things I did when I came to work at WSLB in Ogdensburg was to try the technique with another DJ as the Singing Squirrels, Monty & Raoul. You can hear our primitive effort on Dec. 18's Zillion Dollar Friday on WGIX 95.3...at 7am we'll do a Chipmunks special.

But the innovation didn't end there. Each of the voices on "The Chipmunk Song" had to be recorded, along with the slowed down music, separately. With only 2 tracks on recording tape, that would have meant a lot of re-recording (called in the business "bouncing") and a subsequent loss of fidelity. So Ross used 4 tape recorders, one for each voice! And how did he synch them all up perfectly? By recording on 35mm film stock, which was easy to synchronize, since a movie's picture and soundtrack obviously have to be precisely aligned.

(As a curious sidelight, cigarettes were instrumental in the development of the modern tape-recorder. Up thru the 1920s, magnetic recording was done on steel wire or thin steel strips, which were expensive and impractical: for edits or repairs, they had to be welded! Meanwhile, a German tobacco company wanted to replace the thin bands of gold on the tips of their high-end smokes with something less expensive. Austrian inventor Fritz Pfleumer came up with a way to bond thin strips of bronze onto paper, and while bronze isn't magnetic, it occurred to him the same method would work with an iron alloy that was. Thus, the tape came first, with the modern recorder being redesigned around it, the paper backing eventually replaced by flexible plastic.)


Released in late 1958, "The Chipmunk Song" sold 4 million copies in 7 weeks. A month after that Christmas, Ross turned 40, hardly an overnight success. The single came in a picture sleeve illustrating the chipmunks as ugly cartoon rodents, identical except for the initial on their sweaters. On the "Ed Sullivan Show", they were hand puppets. Eventually they became more like little boys on the animated "Alvin Show" which began in 1961. Interestingly, on that show the Chipmunks want to sing "Witch Doctor." Dave says: "I already made that record." Alvin replies: "Not with us you didn't!" And so they do.


What followed was an avalanche of squeaky voice imitators, all manner of insects, birds, creatures and critters. Artists like the Coasters ("Charlie Brown" and "Little Egypt") and Sheb Wooley ("Purple People Eater" and "Luke the Spook") jumped on the bandwagon. One of the strangest was Jesse Lee Turner's "Little Space Girl." She wants to marry him, but he demurs, because she has multiple arms, lips, eyes, etc. Well, Ok, he finally gives in. And on thru the 60's & 70's...Ray Stevens ("Bridget the Midget"), David Bowie ("The Laughing Gnome"), the Cowsills ("Gotta Get Away"), a CB radio take-off with Shirley & Squirrelly, and coming full circle when Chip 'n' Dale recorded "The Chipmunk Song" in 1981.

Then there's the version of "The Chipmunk Song" the Chipmunks recorded in 1968 with Canned Heat of all people..."Hey you mice, get out of our recording studio!" Ross Bagdasarian died in 1972, but his son Ross Jr. took over, and recently turned 60, making him 9 years older than his 3 little brothers. Till next time, hope you get that hula hoop...(how do you wrap a hula hoop?)...and rock on!