Alice in Audioland, Part One

Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland" (2010) is the latest in a long line of screen adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s books. There have been versions from the silent era of film (Cecil Hepworth’s of 1903 and W. W. Young’s of 1915); a star-studded MGM film from 1933; the 1951 Walt Disney animated film; Jonathan Miller’s trippy 1966 BBC television adaptation, which features British comedy icons like Peter Cook and Peter Sellers and the music of Ravi Shankar; an X-rated “musical fantasy” version from 1976; and a wonderfully dark and surreal 1988 offering by animator Jan Svankmajer. All of these films illustrate the pros and cons of adapting Carroll’s singular works. On the one hand, the Alice stories allow filmmakers to showcase the latest in cinematic special effects as the heroine falls down the rabbit-hole, grows and shrinks, or encounters the Cheshire cat’s lingering grin. On the other hand, Carroll’s intricate verbal humor, circuitous plots, fantastic creatures and events, when coupled with the iconic status of John Tenniel’s illustrations, make the books difficult to visualize. The result tends to be films with some isolated stunning moments, but that disappoint adult fans and either bore or terrify the children that they were ostensibly meant to entertain.

Might Carroll’s surreal wordplay and flashing leaps of the imagination be easier to adapt in a sound-only medium? In the next few blog entries, I will post excerpts from some of the audio adaptations of Alice’s adventures. For my first installment, I offer a December 1937 radio broadcast of CBS’s prestigious “Columbia Workshop.” This show was directed by William N. Robeson, and featured an “experimental musical score” meant to determine the extent to which orchestra instruments could provide a radio drama’s sound effects. Listen below to how the show dramatizes a scene from Carroll’s "Through the Looking Glass" (1871) that is not typically found in the films: Alice’s ride on the Wonderland train and her conversation with the gnat. The scene highlights how the broadcast uses musical instruments as sound effects, and also reminds us that Carroll’s prose is populated by a wild cacophony of voices: we hear Alice’s long-suffering politeness, as well as uncanny disembodied voices that speak and think in chorus; the murmurs of overheard speech from the other passengers in the coach; a train announcement that morphs into the whinny of a horse; and the piping of a gnat in Alice’s ear.

I've Told Every Little Pumpkin

The fact that I am in the process of finishing a semester teaching a class on the work of David Lynch, and am also a long-time fan of mashup mixes, must make me the ideal demographic for the Mashed in Plastic project: a collection of mashups featuring music from Lynch’s films and television shows (www.mashedinplastic.co.uk). Though all the tracks will be of interest to hardcore Lynch fans, Totom’s “I’ve Told Every Little Pumpkin” has an immediacy and power that ranks it with my favorite mashups. Totom has combined the vocals from Linda Scott’s recording of “I’ve Told Every Little Star” (1961) – which was featured in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) – with the backing track and chorus vocals of Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” (1996).



The term “mashup” has gained widespread usage in the past five years or so, but it is often used in a broad sense to mean the same thing as a “re-mix.” In the strictest terms, a mashup is not simply a re-mix of multiple recordings, but a special category of re-mix that combines two discrete tracks (usually the vocals from one track and the instruments from another) in order to produce a new song. The technical simplicity of that maneuver is significant: mashups are not about virtuosic editing technique, but about “high concept” ideas and a certain DIY Punk attitude. Also like Punk, the best mashups work simultaneously as both pop music and pop music criticism: for example, when Destiny’s Child sing over a Nirvana track we are prompted to think about the segregation of white and black musical genres since the 1990s on radio formats and charts; or when we hear Christina Aguilera front the Strokes we confront the different approaches taken to romance in various genres of pop music, or how the division of labor between writing lyrics, melodies, and instrumentation tends to work in contemporary songwriting.

Another test of a classic mashup is whether or not it transcends its sources, and for me, Totom’s track passes with distinction. After hearing “Every Little Pumpkin,” Linda Scott’s 1961 record sounds too slow, and more importantly, its showtune chord structures create a harmonic landscape that doesn’t seem to encompass the full emotional range of the lyrical references to painful secrets, longing and loneliness. By contrast, the heavy, open guitar chords of the Pumpkins track lend both an emotional weight and a productive ambiguity to the lyrics. The bright, candy-coating of the 1961 track can, of course, be seen in a positive light, and must have been part of its allure for Lynch, who we should note, has been doing his own cinematic mashups since re-working Bobby Vinton and Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet (1986).

It is the Smashing Pumpkins track that fares the worse by comparison with the mashup, however. Listen to how flat and lifeless the verse melody to “1979” sounds after we’re used to hearing Scott’s vocals over the guitar riff. Billy Corgan’s anonymous delivery on the verses of “1979” helps the slight melody to fade into the background so that the track feels like an empty stage setting without any featured actors. Ironically, Scott’s vocal performance brings the Pumpkins backing track to life, fusing with the rhythm track in a more “organic” way than Corgan’s: listen for example, to how her phrasing weaves in and out of the kick drum pattern. When Corgan moves to a higher register on the chorus, “1979” finally switches into high gear, but now I can’t hear this section of the song without missing Scott’s urgent counterpoint in the background (“dum-da-dum…”); another example of how vocal performances work as instruments of rhythm as much as melody.

The chorus of “Every Little Pumpkin” creates a duet in which Scott’s brassy, full-voiced style coexists with Corgan’s alt-rock whispers and rasps. Mashups are, after all, inherently utopian, since they make us imagine a world where we can have it all; where we don’t have to choose between perky melodies and heavy tracks; between early sixties optimism and mid-nineties irony; between pop and rock. The fact that these utopian musical moments are “impossible” only adds to their bittersweet charm. It is on this point that we should recall “Every Little Pumpkin’s” connection to Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. After all, in her remarkable starring role in that film, Naomi Watts performs her own kind of actorly mashup, embodying both the perversely perky “Betty” and the dark, psychotic Diane Selwyn. Watts' performance gets folded into those of Scott and Corgan in the brilliant video mashup of the Totom track:

Pastor Gary Greenwald on Backmasking

Of all the ink that’s been spilled describing what has been lost with the passing of the vinyl record, little attention has been paid to debates about the existence of “backmasking”: a process whereby messages were thought to be placed in popular recordings such that their meaning could only be discovered when the record was played in reverse. Some of my most vivid memories of interacting with vinyl and turntable are of methodically spinning discs counter-clockwise on my parent’s old record player, straining to find the eerie secret messages supposedly hidden in the Beatles’ “Revolution #9,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” or Prince’s “Darling Nikki.” Now, in the cold laser light of the digital age, those rites and secrets seem as esoteric as table rapping, but they have something besides nostalgia to offer those interested in media history. I didn’t think about it at the time, but my basement explorations of backmasking were enactments of what William Boddy refers to as a “vernacular theory of electronic communication.” The vernacular theory of backmasking was made known to the public through the lectures of anti-rock activists who claimed to have discovered an uncanny power in popular recordings. Consider these excerpts from a 1982 lecture by Pastor Gary Greenwald:



It will not come as a shock that Greenwald’s “neurological explanation” for backmasking has not held up under scrutiny. Psychological studies have produced no evidence that listeners are influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the content of backward messages. To decode reversed messages, the unconscious brain would have to be simultaneously hearing language forward and backward, all the while identifying and deciphering an intended message from the chaos of reversed sound. Studies have shown that the forward meaning of backward statements do not “leak” through, even when the backward statements themselves are coherent and memorable, let alone if they are something as esoteric as “turn me on, dead man.”
It is easy to point out what the backmasking theorists got wrong in their hodgepodge of haunted media, media effects panic, subliminal advertising anxiety and cultural xenophobia, but what I find more compelling is what they got right. That is, backmasking theory was remarkably productive in record culture. First, it provided otherwise “faceless” rock bands like ELO and Styx with a certain transgressive edge and a compelling marketing strategy at just the moment when the industry was in a prolonged sales slump, rock promotion was becoming thoroughly routinized, and the baby boom generation that had driven its massive expansion was aging out of the key record-buying demographic. In the longer term, backmasking crusaders helped to create their own worst nightmare in the form of the overtly satanic rock of bands like Venom, Grim Reaper, and Slayer, all of whom surely grew up playing their Led Zeppelin records backwards and contemplating the details of Jimmy Page’s pact with the devil. At the same time, kids like me who scoured the grooves of their LPs for hidden messages put the theory of backmasking to action, and in the process, rediscovered a sense of wonder at the familiar medium of sound recording. Backmasking theory was most influential then, not as a critique of record producers, but as a stimulus for new types of record consumption. In other words, the performances of showmen like Gary Greenwald renewed rock and re-enchanted the old medium of recorded sound.

Tippy Toe Bubble Book

In 1914, Ralph Mayhew was working for Harper & Brothers on a children’s book of verse in which he planned to have “a child sitting blowing bubbles which ascended and burst into the little pictures and nursery rhymes.” Mayhew struck upon the idea of incorporating small phonograph records in his Bubble Book, and was eventually able to convince Harper & Brothers and Columbia Records to back him, with the first edition of the Bubble Books pressed in 1917. The first Bubble Book – which contained three single-sided 5 ½-inch records featuring musical versions of traditional children’s verses and an accompanying package with illustrations – met with immediate success, and subsequent editions were released through the early 1930s. The Bubble Books were the first book and record hybrids marketed to children, and so represent a pioneering instance of cross-media synergy between book publishing and the record industry. As we can hear on this example, the Bubble Books consisted of a repackaged oral tradition of children’s nursery rhymes and songs.



Forms of children’s entertainment like nursery rhymes were well-suited to the time limitations of early records: with only approximately four minutes of recording time per side, it was difficult to develop longer narrative forms. But nursery rhymes also helped to associate these mass-produced records with oral traditions of parenting. In fact, the rhetoric of Columbia’s ad campaigns connected Bubble Books to a timeless matrilineal oral tradition, and at the same time attempted to upstage that tradition by arguing for the supremacy of the modern media: records could stockpile and reproduce all the old familiar rhymes, and with accompanying pictures lovelier than anything available in the past. Further, while mothers were portrayed as the vehicle of a beloved tradition, ads imagined a future in which her role was replaced by the phonograph. Note how a 1918 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal presents “Tom the piper’s son,” who asked mothers, “Let me sing to your child…I’ve always wanted to tell those children of yours my story, and to sing them a song – and now at last I can do it.”
We find here the substitution of the phonograph for the mother’s voice and a tradition of oral nursery rhymes. Bubble Book ads were aimed at mothers as the “middle term” in the chain of family consumption, but implied that the phonograph could “cut out the middleman” between oral tradition and the child; the middleman being the mother, who was reminded of her parental responsibilities even as her role was threatened. Bubble Book ads took part in a larger tendency of advertising copy of this era to address feelings of regret at the loss of earlier traditions, and to offer consumer goods to assuage anxieties about the passage to a culture of mass consumption. Such ads suggested that the modern consumer could simultaneously enjoy both the modern and the traditional via the product, and so, in Roland Marchand’s words, civilization could be “redeemed.” Bubble Book ads claiming that traditional characters like “Tom the piper’s son” wanted to speak directly to children may have made their media products more innocuous to parents, but that rhetoric also reveals some of the underlying anxieties that parents were feeling concerning their children’s consumption of mass produced media. It was of course, the record companies and Harper & Brothers, not “Tom the piper’s son,” who were looking for new ways to speak directly to children.

The Clyde Beatty Show

Clyde Beatty was the most famous circus lion tamer of the 1930s. Beatty’s act showcased a particularly American style of animal training, one that depicted a suspenseful struggle between man and beast, and featured snarling animals, cracking whips, and pistols ablaze with blank cartridges. Beatty began his career with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, but it was national press coverage of his recovery from a lion bite in 1932 that elevated him to a new level of renown. By 1933 Beatty was famous enough to publish his memoirs and have them made into a Hollywood film entitled, The Big Cage, the success of which helped him to achieve a remarkable degree of celebrity: he graced the cover of Time Magazine in March 1937, and formed his own organization, the Cole Bros. – Clyde Beatty Circus, which opened the 1937 season at Madison Square Garden, something that the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus had done every year since 1909. Even during the declining years of the American circus, Beatty maintained a long career that straddled the circus and the modern media: he appeared in feature films, film serials, and a radio drama series, “The Clyde Beatty Show” (1949-1950). Below you can here some excerpts from an episode of “The Clyde Beatty Show” called “Crisis on the Set,” which dramatizes Beatty’s trip to Hollywood to make a film of his act.



At several points in the narrative, the episode makes reference to problems faced by early twentieth century lion tamers who sought to make the transition from circus big cage to film studio: animals had trouble interacting with large film crews; it took hours to get the animals in position for the cameras; the glare of the lights and sudden flashes had the potential to disorient and agitate the animals; and early motion picture studios often had limited space. In addition to those challenges, there was a long-standing belief that animal training and acting were inherently incompatible since, if the trainer took on a role or outwardly changed his persona for even a moment, the animals might not recognize or obey him. This sonic depiction of Beatty’s act found here also indicates how the spectacle of the big cat act was equally balanced between sound and image: we hear the snarling of the animals, the crack of the whip, Beatty’s sharp commands, and the explosion of blank cartridges. In fact, the lion became a kind of quintessential test subject in the linking of sound and image in the form of one of the most iconic images in the history of film: the roaring lion on the MGM trademark. That iconic logo also stands as a succinct reminder of the extent to which the cinema “remediated” the spectacle and thrills of nineteenth century entertainments like the circus lion tamer.

Uncle Josh Buys a Victrola

In his phonographic “descriptive specialties,” Cal Stewart played the role of a gullible Yankee rube named Uncle Josh Weathersby from the fictional town of Pumpkin Center. Alongside Uncle Josh’s comical encounters with modernity in New York City, Stewart’s records also featured descriptions of everyday life in Pumpkin Center: a rural, northeastern town populated by a recurring cast of rustic characters. Stewart’s Pumpkin Center stories illustrate what Raymond Williams calls a knowable community: “a whole community, wholly knowable.” Williams argued that in literature, such a community was often set in the past, in a country village that was held up as an epitome of “direct relationships,” as opposed to the opacity of the city. When placed in their turn of the century context, we might say that Uncle Josh records addressed what Richard Terdiman has called the “memory crisis” of the modern era: listeners got a lesson in how to navigate the “newly disquieting lack of transparency” in a New York City bus or department store; and at the same time, were provided with a reassuring representation of a traditional society in which people carried “their pasts and meanings openly,” a past still tantalizingly knowable through the community of Pumpkin Center. Uncle Josh records are keyed at exactly the spot where past and present; modern and traditional; rural and urban intersect; and Stewart’s performances function to define those distinctions through the voice of the Yankee rube. Stewart’s records were pioneering responses to a crisis in memory caused by the dislocations of modernity, responses that took the form of products of the emerging memory industry. On “Uncle Josh buys a Victrola” (Victor 1919), our Yankee protagonist brings a new phonograph player to Pumpkin Center and “in less than no time” the entire town has gathered in his house to listen to it. Uncle Josh plays religious records for Deacon Witherspoon, opera for Hank Weaver, “Silver Threads Among the Gold” has “the womenfolk pretty nigh crying,” and later they play jazz records over the telephone to neighboring Hickory Corners. At one point, Uncle Josh plays a rather strange record to the assembled villagers.



This depiction of Pumpkin Center convened around the phonograph, listening to records about themselves, is a striking moment of media reflexivity, as well as an early instance of product placement, but it is also emblematic of the modern media’s emergence as a central force in the forging of collective memory and identity. The knowable community of Pumpkin Center that had served as a reassuring embodiment of the past, now consumes itself in the form of a product of the “memory industries.”

New Years at Old Trinity

[Taken from a forthcoming article co-written with Patrick Feaster]

Film scholars have typically taken film editing as the primary gauge of measuring narrative expression in early cinema. Dramatic routines heard on early phonograph records reveal sonic analogues to some much-discussed cinematic editing techniques. In the case of the Haydn Quartet’s New Years at Old Trinity (Victor 1904), a group of young men are heard to gather outside a church in downtown New York City in the moments before midnight on New Year’s Eve. One of the men addresses the group: “Say boys, I’ve got a good story to tell you,” he says, “you know that Jones girl with the black eyes?” He is interrupted by one of his friends, who jokes, “who gave ’em to her?” The group laughs, and the conversation stops as we hear the sounds of revellers in the background. After a moment, a voice announces, “Hold on boys, the chimes are going to play.” We hear the sound of the church chimes, and the young man returns to his story. Before long, he is interrupted again, this time by an Irish policeman who says, “Move along there, don’t block up the sidewalk.” Later the men are narrowly missed by a passing car that hits a dog, and then by Columbia University students singing their school song. “Say, will you ever finish that story?” one of the men asks. The answer is no, as after the group sings “Auld Land Syne,” the record ends with the sound of the church clock striking twelve and the eruption of noisy celebration at the arrival of the New Year.



The young man’s never-finished story becomes a unifying narrative theme joining together disparate bits of ethnic humor and scenic interest, but note how the shifting back and forth between multiple scenes can be heard as a sonic analogue to crosscutting or parallel editing: editing which moves between simultaneous events in separated locales. The impression created by the intercalation of the young man’s storytelling and the various events surrounding and interrupting it is not so much that these events are unfolding in linear time as that they are different, virtually simultaneous events taking place in a larger contiguous space. Like crosscutting, the sonic narrative technique heard here provides a heightened sense of suspense, since it builds the listeners anticipation of hearing the end of the young man’s story, as well as the arrival of midnight. The richness and diversity of audio story-telling techniques heard on early recordings captured in a “single shot” suggests an over-reliance on editing as the guiding consideration for narrative development in the modern media. Phonograph records such as New Years at Old Trinity, Night Trip to Buffalo, Trip to the County Fair, and Muggsy’s Dream were developing their own complex and compelling narrative language for depicting multiple times and spaces, as well as various subjective states.