Happy Birthday, Danny Elfman!
05.29.07By Collin DavidI probably wasn’t the only kid to watch Edward Scissorhands for the first time and shed a single tear, thinking, ‘Man, I’m just like that Scissorhands guy… except my scissors are in my SOUL.’ I didn’t have a hilltop castle to retreat to, nor a Winona Ryder to awkwardly grope on (even though a surprisingly reasonable facsimile was found in my girlfriend at the time), so I’d retreat to my own inner sanctum and blast the Scissorhands soundtrack, safe from the angry and ignorant townsfolk.
The soundtrack, of course, is by Danny Elfman - one of the more distinctive names in modern cinematic composing, noted for scoring pretty much every Tim Burton film ever made, as well as Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, and countless other films both dark and light. Around the same time that I was falling in love with his eerie angelic choirs and carnival melodies, I was equally appreciative of his non-soundtrack work with his band Boingo, previously Oingo Boingo, previously Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Sure, there probably isn’t anything in the world better than The Breakfast Machine from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, but it was all pretty good stuff.
I had a few musical collections as I was growing up, all of which were fun to complete in those scary pre-internet days when you actually had to go to the store and talk to people, digging through the alphabetical tape and CD racks until you found an album that you didn’t even know existed. Among my complete collections of The Beatles, DEVO and Jethro Tull, there was my growing Elfman collection. Oingo Boingo was primarily a West Coast phenomenon, with a majority of their eclectic fanbase living on the opposite coast from myself, so I often resorted to the Oingo Boingo Secret Society Underground Newsletter for my information and to become acquainted with my more well-informed Boingo-friends, but locating albums usually required a trip into SoHo and a lot of luck. For the record, ‘Boi-ngo’ and ‘Dark at the End of the Tunnel’ were pretty instrumental (no pun intended) during my teenage years, because I really found very little appeal in whatever was on the radio in those days.
And I gave up on Jethro Tull the day they named an album ‘J-Tull.com’. Seriously guys, pretty goofy. Way to sell out.
The Elfman love that I was exposed to through the Secret Society was pretty enormous, and I’ve remained in contact with a few people from the SS all these years. We communicated in odd video clips of Elfman interviews and obviously lip-synced Boingo telethon performances, candid photos and weird demo tapes. I was exposed to the cinematic bludgeoning that is ‘Forbidden Zone’, a black and white exploration into nonsensical perversity written and directed by Danny’s brother Richard Elfman (also father of the more well-known Jenna Elfman), in which Danny Elfman plays the Devil and performs a Cab Calloway musical number amid topless women, ending in a charming decapitation. The odd Elfman preoccupation with Day of the Dead themes found its way into my own collections, eventually inspiring my own accumulation of skulls and other such items.
Boingo filmed their last performance on Halloween in 1995, and recorded the whole thing on both video and audio for posterity, marking the end of my Boingo collecting days. Elfman himself has recently stated that he has no interest in bringing the band back together due to the hearing loss that he suffered while performing. A few odds, ends and unreleased things trickle in, but this was a case of a collection choosing to end itself after ten albums (and countless compilation and ‘greatest hits’ collections that I avoided), since my interests in Danny Elfman never really extended into looking at his unusual face for hours at a time and dreaming of what could be. My interests is purely musical.
Elfman’s most recent project is the Serenada Schizophrana, an orchestral exploration unassociated with any film, though two ‘Music For a Darkened Theater’ compilations of selections from Elfman’s soundtracks have also been released and are still very available. All of this is quite an accomplishment for a music who calls himself ‘self-taught’. So, happy birthday, Mr. Elfman. You weird creep.
