1 Born With A Smile on His Face – Did You Ever Hear Your Mommy Scream ‘Noise Annoys?’
Sunday morning cartoons may not be the most obvious channel for discovering sound art, yet the recent UK TV residency of mid-twentieth century folk hero Gerald McBoing Boing is as good a starting point as any. As immortalised by Dr Seuss by way of an Oscar winning cartoon, three sequels and a slew of offshoots that have trickled down the decades, after all, Gerald McBoing Boing is the archetypal perma-smiling all American kid whose life took a detour when he found aged two that he couldn’t communicate in words, but in noises that could have been lifted straight from a sound effects record of the period. Where other babies’ first word might have been the initially meaningless ‘Da-da!,’ Gerald’s was the even more onomatopoeically evocative ‘Boing!-Boing!’
The current re-runs of the Canadian produced Gerald McBoing Boing cartoons date from between 2005-2007, and are educational in intent, with assorted guess-the-sound ‘soundchecks’ that resemble a Sesame Street for the ears rather than the words and magic-number street-smarts of Jim Henson’s Muppet-led creation overseen by the Children’s Television Workshop. This is third generation McBoing Boing, however, that came almost thirty years after the late 1950s half-hour programme, The Gerald McBoing Boing Show. This in turn was inspired by the four stand-alone vignettes that define the original ‘noise making boy’.
The first film, the eponymous Gerald McBoing Boing, was directed, like its trio of sequels, by Robert Cannon in 1950. This was the same year that another all-American social misfit appeared. Born of the pen and imagination of Charles M Schultz, Charlie Brown was the existentialist outsider hero of Schultz’s much-loved comic strip, Peanuts, originally known as Li’l Folks before the Peanuts name was imposed on Schultz by the newspapers.
Where Charlie Brown’s voice was muted by epiphets of the ‘Good Grief!’ variety, Gerald McBoing Boing tells through Seussian rhyming couplets narrated by Marvin Miller the story of one Gerald McCloy, who learns to speak, not in words, but in dramatic blasts of sound. From his initial ‘Boing!-Boing!’, Gerald’s vocabulary extends in range as well as volume to train-whistles, clanging sirens, honking klaxons and the loudest of explosions. Isolated by other children who deem him a freak, as well as his concerned parents who can’t cope with their singular offspring, Gerald runs away, only to be discovered by a radio executive who hires him as the station’s Foley artist, providing sound effects for western dramas broadcast before a live audience. Gerald becomes rich and famous, making his parents proud of their son’s unique attributes at last.
Gerald McBoing Boing was produced by United Productions of America, a company made up of defectors from the Walt Disney organisation’s insistence on on-screen realism in the likes of the appositely named Fantasia, which in 1940 applied a lush literalism to its animated interpretations of classical music. UPA’s visual palette was more impressionistic, and looked to Klee, Kandinsky, Miro and Matisse for colouring and style. Not that the company’s most famous export, the near-sighted Mr Magoo, would notice, although it’s significant that UPA looked to sight as well as sound for inspiration. If senses were working overtime at UPA, then Gerald McBoing Boing at least was a populist sleight-of-hand of form and content. Pulsed along by Gail Kubik’s urgently dissonant orchestral score, Gerald McBoing Boing was a fusion of twentieth century modernist artforms gathered together in a narrative lasting just six minutes and fifty-six seconds.
Gerald’s involuntary vocal affliction itself looked backwards to Italian Futurist Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s sound poem, Zang Tumb Tuuum. Published between 1912-1914, and utilising a scattershot of typefaces, Zang Tumb Tuuum used gunfire and explosions in its account of the Battle of Adrianople, which Marinetti had witnessed as a frontline reporter. Marinetti had already published his Futurist manifesto in 1908, born of a car crash he’d been involved with, and which looked forward to a noisily industrial Bang!-Crash!-Wallop! of a future.
Gerald’s appearance looked forward as well to sampling, the now mainstream form of musical collaging that co-opted novelists William Burroughs and Brion Gyson’s notion of the literary and tape-recorded cut-up for the dance-floor in a way that Jamaican Dub reggae auteurs such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and King Tubby had explored by adding their own noises off to existing rhythm tracks. Such tactics were later picked up by the likes of producer/remixer Adrian Sherwood to startling effect.
2 Symphony in Boo! – Shake! Rattle! and Boing!
Gerald’s ahead-of-his-timeness could be seen most in the second McBoing Boing film, Gerald McBoing Boing’s Symphony. Arriving two years after the first film won the 1950 Oscar for Best Short Film in the cartoon section, Gerald McBoing Boing’s Symphony finds Gerald established at the radio station, providing regular sound effects for dramas as Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop might have done at their experimental peak. A crisis is looming, however, as the scheduled orchestra due to broadcast live have failed to appear. The station boss who first hired Gerald turns to him once more for help, and with only minutes to spare, Gerald prepares himself in a studio full of empty music stands which the orchestra should have been using.
The crisis seemingly averted, Gerald launches into the symphony, with a score here provided by Ernest Gold. So lost in his performance does Gerald become, however, that he drops his manuscript, which subsequently gets mixed up with his drama script. This results in moments of orchestral grace and beauty being rudely intruded upon by an assortment of Gerald’s trademark honks, whistles and bangs. The resultant mash-up sounds like something between a Charles Ives march and an extended collage that might appear today on sound-art radio station, Resonance FM.
Appalled by such an unholy discordant din, the station owner fires Gerald on the spot. The listeners’ response, however, begs to differ, and hails this new music as a triumph. Gerald’s place at the station is restored, as an entire nation is presumably switched-on to industrial futurist soundscapes.
Gerald isn’t the only cartoon character to be used as a channel for sound art. Far more primitive is Klunk, Vulture Squad’s heavily-fringed flying inventor in the William Hanna and Joseph Barbera-produced Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, which ran to seventeen episodes made between 1969 and 1971. With its World War One premise of the Dastardly and Muttley-led Vulture Squad’s attempts to apprehend patriotic bugle-blowing messenger bird Yankee Doodle Pigeon via a series of customised bi-planes, Klunk’s explanations of his outlandishly bespoke creations were expressed via a series of whistles, pops, clicks and face-contorting growls that suggested a wordless form of pronounced Tourette’s Syndrome running parallel with the physical side-effects of anti-depressive medication.
Unlike Gerald McBoing Boing, however, whose repertoire sounds wholly mechanical, Klunk’s monologues are peppered with words, while the noises he makes are human and entirely possible for the trained ear and versatile larynx to replicate if not always understand. In Dastardly and Muttley, only fellow pilot the cowardly and clearly shellshocked Zilly is close enough to Klunk to be able to translate his eccentric extrapolations for Dick Dastardly.
In this way, Klunk is more akin to the pioneering sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters and Henry Chopin, moving through to late twentieth century British stalwarts such as Bob Cobbing, as well as contemporary veteran sound artists such as Trevor Wishart, and the slapstick slobber of Edinburgh duo Usurper.
If Gerald’s vocabulary was picked up from Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuum, Klunk’s was sired on Schwitters’ Ursonate, a sound poetry piece composed, extended and performed by its author between 1922 and 1932. Translating as ‘Primal Sonata,’ even heard on archive recordings in its original German it’s easy to recognise how Schwitters bends regular words out of shape in much the same way as Chopin did with voice and tape-recorders on recordings made by himself and the likes of William Burroughs, Brion Gyson and Ian Hamilton Finlay for his audio-visual magazines, Cinquieme Saison and OU between 1958 and 1974.
If Cobbing was the best-known British sound poet up until his death in 2002, and whose performances moved between the feral and a deep-throated fairground barker voiding his rheum and purging his soul, Wishart’s work provides some kind of umbilical bridge between Klunk and Gerald, especially with his fifty-minute epic, Journey into Space. Originally released on cassette in 1973, Wishart spent three years creating this sprawling collage of gymnastic vocal gurgling, belching and yawning punctuated by electro-acoustic composition for as many as forty-eight musicians, including doyens of the British improv scene Steve Beresford and Jonty Harrison. Sampled traffic noises, rocket launches and NASA transmissions from the universe busting trips to the Moon on assorted Apollo expeditions brought up the rear.
With roots in avant-rock and metal via their previous band, Giant Tank, Usurper’s partnership of Alastair Robertson and Malcy Duff – the latter a serious cartoonist of note who has published and exhibited widely - grew out of a wave of so-called ‘Noise’ artists whose use of contact microphones is an essential part of what sounds like amplified verbal ectoplasm. While their sets include a junkyard array of ‘disabled’ instruments and found domestic detritus, Usurper have increasingly concentrated on the voice, lending a comic, raspberry-blowing and, yes, cartoonish aesthetic to live shows that only partially translates to record.
3 Reversing The Charge – Well, Goodness! Gracious! Boing!
Despite Gerald McBoing Boing’s success in taking the avant-garde to the masses in a novel way on a par with Usurper, the third film in the original McBoing Boing series, How Now Boing Boing, made in 1952, looks to normalising Gerald’s abilities even more. To a background soundtrack by George Bruns, who would later go on to score Disney’s jumping jive musical animation of The Jungle Book, Gerald’s parents took their son to a speech therapist, determined to get him to talk like everybody else.
After initial failure, the therapist eventually surmises that Gerald’s larynx is the wrong way round, and sets up an elaborate long-distance telephone tree whereby the soundwaves of Gerald’s voice bounce back from the other side of the world the right way round. With such a telephone system installed into their home, Gerald’s parents can at last communicate with him without being subject to a panoply of rude intrusions.
The path of wordless vocalisation is well-trodden beyond pure sound art, be it through composer Meredith Monk’s extended vocal techniques or the scarifying three and a half octave vocal range of composer/singer Diamanda Galas first heard on her self-explanatory 1982 record, The Litanies of Satan. In Britain, a male equivalent of this might be Phil Minton, whose free-form range of burps, retches, sobs and what can sound like someone choking on their own vomit one could easily imagine as the involuntary outpourings of a solitary Klunk after his medication has run out.
As another stalwart of British improv, Maggie Nicols’ move from mainstream jazz to work with John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the 1970s led to a four-way collaboration with Minton, Julie Tippetts and Brian Ely as the group, Voice. Nicols’ move into such territory might have been influenced during her jazz days by Scat singing, in which vocalists riff on a theme, going off on tangents more rhythmic than the more left-field improvisers, but arguably even more creative in its use of nonsense words.
Ella Fitzgerald’s Scat vocals, for instance, were compared to the Roadrunner cartoons, in which Wile E Coyote would attempt to thwart the path of the meep-meeping Roadrunner in ways even more outlandish than those employed by Dastardly, Muttley, Zilly and Klunk when they tried to stop Yankee Doodle Pigeon. The formula was familiar, but it stretched things in innovative ways.
As did too The Shout, Polish film director Jerzy Skolimowsky’s 1978 film starring Alan Bates, John Hurt and Susannah York. Adapted from a Robert Graves short story and set in secluded Devon, post-war technology rubs up against ancient primalism in the ultimate late twentieth century sound-clash.
Hurt plays an experimental electronic composer exploring the possibilities of sound effects in his isolated studio. He and York’s character befriend Bates’ traveller, who eventually claims that he has learnt an ancient Aboriginal terror shout that can kill anyone who hears it unprotected. A soundtrack provided by Tony Banks of Genesis is an interesting oddity in a culture clash which, as with the differences between Gerald and Klunk, perhaps reflects the current rejection of flick-of-a-switch laptop culture in favour of something more primal and more guttural.
A modern form of Scat is arguably the novelty of human beatboxers, young artists so knee-deep in rap and hip-hop idioms that just as the original DJ’s cut and spliced the best, most dance-floor friendly parts of a record with little need of the whole thing, beatboxers no longer even need turntables as tools. Rather, they get into the groove solely through lip-smacking bursts of close-microphoned vocal impressions that sound as authentic – if that’s the right word – as anything twin decks can dizzy up.
One should mention too the involuntary guttural ejaculations of pianist Keith Jarrett during his intense solo improvised work on his 1975 album, The Koln Concert. Then there are the sublime nonsense lyrics of The Cocteau Twins, chosen for sound and effect rather than literal meaning, and given heavenly voice by Elizabeth Fraser. Even Fraser, however, started singing real words towards the end of the band’s lifespan, although even they couldn’t demystify the band's ethereal allure.
More recently, Icelandic band Sigur Ros have created similarly epic soundtracks, with vocalist Jon Por Birgisson, aka Jonsi’s keening falsetto at the fore. Jonsi sings in Vonlenska or Hopelandic, an invented nonsense language taken from Icelandic phonology which the band themselves described as gibberish designed to fit the melody, rhythm and emotion of a song.
For a child to create such a unique sonic worldview as Gerald isn’t necessarily exclusive to cartoons, even if Mark Mothersbaugh of American conceptualist band Devo did provide an appropriately quirky soundtrack for baby’s-eye-view cartoon Rugrats between 1991 and 2004. Anyone who’s ever witnessed pre-speech age twins communicate via a series of aural tics known only to each other will recognise such a scenario, and the gang mentality that fuels the likes of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies are awash with passwords and secret codes. Anthony Burgess’ novella, A Clockwork Orange, even has its own language, Nadsat, as relayed by its juvenile delinquent narrator, Alex.
Nadsat, while derived from Russian, is akin to any jive-talking patois that set teenage tribes apart from both their elders and their enemies in other tribes. This is the case both with Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange, and with Joe Hawkins, the street-smart anti-hero of the Skinhead series of early 1970s yoof-sploitation pulp novels written by Canadian hack writer James Moffat and published by New English Library under Moffat’s Richard Allen pseudonym. Here, however, the lingua franca was laced through with reactionary tabloid outrage and a low-rent pornographic approach.
In terms of real-life examples of private languages, one could go right back to the Bible and its legacy of speaking in tongues, whereby fundamentalist Christians enter some kind of enraptured state as they babble an apparently spontaneous prayer using words and noises not of any common lexicon.
There is the example too of June and Jennifer Gibbons, the so-called ‘silent twins’ who, when faced with racist bullying at school, transformed shared early childhood speech impediments into a private refusal to engage with absolutely anyone outside of each other. Creatively the girls’ imaginations ran riot, and they each penned a stream of novels before a destructive act of arson saw them committed to high-security psychiatric hospital, Broadmoor.
Where all these represent a form of peer-group collectivist strength in numbers as they create, if not a world of their own as with the silent twins, then at least some fragile factionalist impression of a community, Gerald stands alone from the crowd. He is unable to communicate in any way other than the way he knows how. Equally he is unable to compromise, so becomes a mixture of outsider artist and eager-to-please mainstream novelty act.
Gerald might well have ‘played’ Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim in UPA’s 1962 seasonal special, Mr Magoo’s Christmas Carol, in which he was given a rare talking role that suggested a post-modern meta-narrative in which ‘Gerald McBoing Boing’ was just another part for an animated actor who was but a mouthpiece for a real live Foley artist. In truth, however, Gerald, or ‘Gerald’ was more in tune with the corkscrew-haired falsetto/castrato singer and ukulele player Herbert B Khaury.
Having taken on the Tiny Tim name after a childhood fascination with early twentieth century song as heard on 78rpm records through a wind-up gramophone, Lebanese-Polish New Yorker Khaury became an expert on popular song, Tiny Tim remains best known, however, for his1968 global smash-hit rendition of Tiptoe Through The Tulips, a song by composer Joe Burke and lyricist Al Dubin that was originally a hit for ‘Crooning Toubadour’ Nick Lucas in 1929.
Khaury may have played extended sell-out seasons in Las Vegas, but he was also lionised by the hippy movement, playing the 1970 Isle of Wight festival headlined by Jimi Hendrix. In later years Tiny Tim was equally feted by post- punk related acts, appearing in a video by New York band, Ism.
As documented in David Keenan’s selective history of the UK esoteric underground, England's Hidden Reverse, Khaury was also idolised by David Tibet of avant explorers Current 93. Tibet released the Tiny Tim Live in London album as well as ‘Just What Do You Mean By ‘Antichrist’?,’ a 1995 collaboration between Tiny Tim, Current 93 and fellow travellers Nurse With Wound. The track’s starting point was several recorded telephone conversations with Khaury, which, under Tibet and NWW mainstay Steven Stapleton’s watch, was sampled into a deranged eleven-minute epic.
Gerald’s singularity, however, is much more on a par with someone like Moondog, the composer and inventor of musical instruments who for many years lived on the streets of New York. Born Louis Thomas Hardin in 1916, Moondog was blinder than Mr Magoo and named himself after a mutt who howled with wordless abandon at the then unconquered planet. Throughout a huge body of work, Moondog combined jazz, classical and Native American idioms with the sounds of rush-hour traffic and babies crying. Even Moondog, however, couldn’t stay on the streets forever, and moved to the relative comforts of Germany in 1974 where he composed in peace until his death in 1999.
4 Calling Planet Earth – In Space No-One Can Hear You Boing. . .
As with Moondog and Tiny Tim’s rehabilitation by a mainstream their work was never fully a part of, Gerald McBoing Boing can now be viewed as a pioneer. In the fourth and final first generation film, Gerald McBoing! Boing! On Planet Moo, the newly exclamation-marked Gerald is kidnapped by aliens. With Marvin Miller’s rhyming narration significantly dropped in favour of more naturalistic dialogue, but with Ernest Gold back providing the soundtrack, the aliens speak English with a decidedly hipsterish bent. Believing Gerald to be speaking in the most dominant of Earth languages, they try to communicate with him on his own terms, the King bluffing his way through a series of ‘Boinga-boinga!’ noises he doesn’t comprehend.
While the emperor’s speech patterns, if not his clothes, are left exposed, on transporting Gerald back to Earth, the King greets the welcoming party with a similarly styled patois. The welcoming party in turn presume this to be the native language of Planet Moo, and, equally uncomprehending, respond with their own array of ‘Boinga!-boinga!’ noises. At the end of the film, both planets decree to learn what they presume to be the other’s language.
Crucial to the plot of Gerald McBoing! Boing! On Planet Moo is the function of what the King of the aliens calls his ‘King’s Hat’. This both defines his status and nearly brings about his downfall after he sells it off to finance Moo’s ongoing expedition to Earth. With the King stopped by a space traffic cop who fails to recognise him without his hat, only Gerald’s quick-thinking saves the day.
This fictionalised may well be a pre-cognitive premonition of King’s Lead Hat, Brian Eno’s anagrammatic tribute to American band Talking Heads on Eno’s art-punk inspired 1977 album, Before and After Science. Between 1978 and 1980, Eno would go on to produce three albums by Talking Heads, More Songs About Building and Food, Fear of Music and Remain In Light. Inbetween the former two, Eno would also collaborate with Talking Heads writer and vocalist David Byrne on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. This album fused rhythm-based world music and heavy-duty sampling from the speeches of hellfire preachers and other sources to create dance-floor friendly pop collages in the spirit of Burroughs and Gysin.
Gerald’s accidental status as inter-galactic peace envoy may well be the effect Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi was aspiring to when he talked of an ‘invisible insurrection of a million minds’ by way of Project Sigma, his idea of an international ‘spontaneous university’ first proselytised in 1962 in the New Saltire journal, and which later caught the imagination of the 1960s counter-cultural elite. It certainly relates to the championing of Esperanto, the international language constructed in the 1870s by Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof to foster harmony between people of different nations who would otherwise be unable to communicate.
The linguistic mix-up caused by Gerald relates too to the statement by Burroughs – another prime mover with Project Sigma whose use of cut-ups in both printed and recorded form took directly from Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists, - that ‘Language is a virus from outer space’. This was a mantra later picked up by performance artist Laurie Anderson, whose own vocal manipulations owe much to state-of-art technology. Her song, ‘Language is a Virus,’ was released as a single in 1986 in a version produced by Chic’s Nile Rogers, and was notable for the narrative’s playful Seussian rhyming scheme.
Perhaps the final film’s setting of Planet Moo is a future-glimpse too of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s sprawling counter-cultural conspiracy theory novels that first appeared in 1975, and were adapted for the stage by Ken Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool a year later. In the books, the all-controlling political organization the Illuminati dub a group of infiltrators who feed them false information - just as Gerald inadvertently did to his kidnappers - the Justified Ancients of Mummu.
Towards the end of the 1970s, an all-female band appeared called The Androids of Mu. The Androids had connections with free festival hippy/punk bands Here and Now and Planet Gong, and released an album, Blood Robots, on the DIY label, Fuck Off records.
More significantly, in 1987, another band appeared called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. The JAMs were fronted by King Boy D and Rockman Rock, which were the nom de plumes of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, who, as the KLF, would take Situationism, sampling and self-destruction to the top of the pop charts, terrorising the music industry that spawned them en route. As the K Foundation, they would do likewise to the art establishment, announcing the K Foundation award for the worst artist of the year moments after Rachel Whiteread was announced as the winner of the 1993 Turner Prize. Drummond and Cauty also famously burnt a million pounds, with a filmed record acting as an installation that toured the UK.
Long before he became King Boy D - presumably without any king’s hat, lead or otherwise - Drummond had been a stage-hand for Campbell’s Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool production of The Illuminatus! As The JAMS, Drummond and Cauty used a then revolutionary digital sampler to cut and paste pop history sound collages with basic hip hop beats and the rantings of the middle-aged avant-provocateur Drummond was on the verge of becoming. The debut JAMS album, 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?), steered a tipping point of sampling culture, breaching multiple copyright laws that included a legal battle with ABBA. This was the sound, not of silence, but of pop eating itself in an orgy of pick n’ mix delights from the last half century that the likes of mash-up artist Richard X and Girls Aloud songwriting and production magpies Xenomania would gorge on.
Much later, Bill Drummond formed The 17, an ad hoc choir made up of an audience of seventeen members who, at Drummond’s behest, would sing wordless vocal harmonies to billboard-styled ‘scores’ of instructions set down by Drummond himself. As documented in Drummond’s book of the same name, each ‘performance’ would be recorded, played once and once only to The 17’s participants, then deleted forever, forsaking immortality and the relatively recent phenomenon of recorded music being sold off to the highest bidder for the purity of shared experience.
Plunderphonics was a term first used by John Oswald in 1985, and applied itself to sound collages that reappropriated radio shows and educational films to create something new. Usually oppositionist in intent although leavened with knowing humour, Plunderphonics became a high-concept form of sonic vandalism that consciously stole from its sources. The best-known and most prolific operators of such subversive pursuits are Negativland, who manipulate spoken-word samples to make political points. Most famous of all Negativland’s releases is The Letter U and The Numeral 2, which resulted in a lawsuit by U2’s record label.
Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us, is even more humorous in approach, citing comic provocateur Chris Morris as an influence on her dizzying array of cut-up soundworks. Also having fun are the magnificently named Stock, Hausen and Walkman, who reference the twin peaks of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen married to an archetypal pre-iplayer portable cassette machine and the 1980s ‘Hit Factory’ production team of Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman, who put early gloss on the likes of Kylie Minogue, Dead or Alive and Rick Astley.
Under the umbrella company of PWL, Stock, Aitken and Waterman took one-hit-wonder cut-up crossover collaborators M/A/R/R/S to court for what Waterman saw as the ‘wholesale theft’ of an unauthorised sample from one of their productions on M/A/R/R/S’ 1987 number one hit, Pump Up The Volume, which was primarily constructed from samples. Perhaps this was what the JAMS’ meant the same year when they asked what the fuck was going on before morphing into the even more anarchic KLF, or Kopyright Liberation Front.
Somewhere in the middle of all this subversive rewriting of the rules, Gerald McCloy, aka Gerald McBoing Boing, the noise making boy, might just have saved the world, if not the universe, invented Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the Global Village en route and become Justified and Ancient in the process. Either way, from Dada to Usurper, McBoing Boing’s place in the pantheon of what we now call sound art is assured. So let’s hear it for the Boing! Let’s hear it for a guy called Gerald.
Line Magazine 3 - Sound Edition - October 2010
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