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“Forbidden Planet” May 28 2020

The First Electronic Filmscore-Forbidden Planet: A Conversation with Bebe Barron

Prior to Forbidden Planet Bebe and Louis Barron had scored experimental films for Ian Hugo and Walter Lewisohm; and later composed Broadway scores for Gore Vidal, John Houseman, Christopher Fry and Cyril Ritchard. This music laid the foundation for American classical studio technique.

A German tape recorder, given to the couple as a wedding gift, in 1947 was perhaps the first such device in this country. Their home studio in New York predated the Columbia-Princeton studio by almost a decade, and John Cage and Edgard Varese created their first works in the new medium with the technical help of Bebe and Louis at their studio. The Barrons also understood the archival value of the new technology; their recorded series of writers Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, and Tennessee Williams reading from their works was released on LP. Over the years, Forbidden Planet’s soundtrack has become a classic and is now on CD. Although Bebe and Louis were later divorced, they continued to collaborate until his death in 1989.

JB: Bebe, the late 40s-50s were a time of extraordinary artistic excitement in New York. You and Louis were inventing methods of working with tape and electronics at a time when there were no models. In Paris, Mssrs. Schaeffer and Henry began experimenting with musique concrete 1948, and later In 1953 Stockhausen began composing for electronics in Cologne, but you had no way of hearing their work. Then Luening and Ussa-chevsky began experimenting with the tape recorder In Otto’s basement in New York in 1952 – but they were recording and processing pre-existing instruments, not building their own.

BB: Everything was just a matter of timing – including the equipment, which was just emerging. We couldn’t wait to get our hands on it. And I think the time we worked with Cage was so wonderful because Cage gave you the feeling that there are no rules. Then, Louis really was a technical genius. We were both musicians, but he was self-taught totally in electronics, and I think because of that he felt free to use electronics in a way that they’d never been used before. He didn’t feel hampered by any formal knowledge. And Varese, who used to hang out in our studio, defined music as organized sound, This had a great deal of meaning for us.

JB: You and Louis were also tremendously influenced by Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics – which he defined as the science of control and communications in the animal and machine.

BB: Cybernetics was so appropriate to what we were doing — it is what we were doing. After working with Cage, and being totally imbued with his ideas on randomness and probability. Cybernetics gave a certain kind of authority to our tendencies regarding probability and randomness. That was the only thing our circuits could do.

JB: It allowed you to rethink the definition of music. It’s difficult to grasp the revolutionary magnitude of this – prior to that time, music always implied performance of specific pitches. Did Cage know about Cybernetics?

BB: No, that was just his own personal philosophy, based on the I Ching and the Oriental philosophies. But there it all was in Cybernetics. For example, probability; Gibbs had just inserted probability into the whole physics realm. Probability not only made random sounds O.K. in our minds, it also increased entropy – which was what we were trying for. Then, in Cybernetics there was also information theory: the more probable something is, the less information it transmits. Clichés, of course, are the least illuminating of all.

JB: That had a crucial influence on the evolution of your musical style. I’ve often thought it historically fascinating that the acceptance of Schoenberg’s idea of non-tonailty was delayed thirty years, until the advent of electronic music – where pitch priority was not an option.

BB: Yes, and then there were the fine points of entropy: all closed systems tend to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness. Our circuits really did just that. Louis would invent a circuit and put it together. Then we would activate the circuit; it would come to life, and we would amplify it and start to tape it. And it would produce a burst of the most glorious kind of energy and electronic activity. That would level out a little bit – go on along a plateau. And then, in a moment of glory, it died — the electronic explanation would be that it overloaded in some way. But you could hear it climaxing, and the thing then would just give out, and run down to zero. At one point, a group of scientists came down to visit us from the Salk Institute. They were working on the origins of life and had heard about what we were doing; so they came down to investigate.

JB: Your circuits behaved like primitive organisms.

BB: That’s right. And we never could get them to start up again after they died — each had a lifespan of its own. Vacuum tubes were our main components. There were also resistors, capacitors, inductors and semiconductors. Semiconductors were very big with us because they were temperature sensitive and we didn’t have air conditioning. So the things were always in a riot of activity. Reverberation was also very big with us. We invented our own since there wasn’t anything else. We used acoustical reverb and plate reverb, When we recorded sound at 15 i.p.s. with acoustical reverberation and slowed it down a couple of generations, the reverb would give it a rhythmic beat — and that was extremely useful. It was one of very few ways we had for getting a regular rhythmic beat.

JB: I also hear quite a number of tape loops in Forbidden Planet. Did you invent the loop earlier?

BB: I think we did. I never heard of anyone else doing it at the time. In 1949, Stancil-Hoffman offered to make us a tape recorder to our specifications so we took advantage of it, I believe it was the first commercial tape recorder ever made. The way the tapes were aligned vertically on the transport, it just kind of looked at you and said “Hey, I’m perfect for a tape loop.” Then we had a voltage generator for varying the capstan speed, so we were able to shift the pitch. This didn’t work with our next deck, a stereo Ampex: we had to build up the capstan with splicing tape in order to vary the speed. Of course, we could play it at half speed also.

JB: Were you able to predict the sound of a circuit based on its design?

BB: We did have a pretty good idea of what kind of activity each circuit would have, whether the sounds were going to be pleasant or harsh, very active or passive and quiet, I was the one who was in charge of translating that into emotion. We relied on my ear for what sounds had possibilities that would make them worth processing. I would listen to the stuff. It came out of the circuits sounding like gibberish — harsh miserable sounds, and I got so that I could somehow hear the possibilities for it.

JB: A critical aspect of the work was identifying the effect these otherworldly sounds would have on human emotions. No one had the experiential references they have when they hear familiar instruments, an oboe or a solo violin.

BB: I had a kind of universal mind I think, because what sounded right to me usually sounded the same way to other people — like a love scene — I could tell what kind of circuit was going to be suitable, or the charge of the Ids/monsters.

JB: So those roaring Id/beasts were not sound effects; those were all your sounds?

BB: Yes, 95% of the sound in that picture was ours—everything except a couple of things like the computer blips. We were doing sound effects and scoring and source music. The author of an article In Keyboard Magazine a few years ago hit on the same thing. I always wondered if that bothered people who were watching the film.

The roaring Id/beast came out of the circuit sounding not remotely like a beast, it was very high pitched, tinkling, with very complicated harmonic sounds, I would go through all the tapes and select things that had the most potential for further processing. When I heard all that high pitched activity, such complicated sounds, I said to Louis, “We’ve got to slow this way down.” We probably lowered the frequencies 60 or 70 times (playing it back at half speed while rerecording at 15i.p.s.). And each time we slowed it down, more of the sound would emerge to the foreground while other parts would disappear. But finally we got to what we thought was the optimum speed — the rhythm was all there. That’s the way the monster sound came about.

JB: You intuitively knew the potential of this complex sound?

BB: More than that, all of our circuits were based on mathematical equations so there was an organic lightness about it. When you listen to the last cut on the soundtrack album, you can hear the monster sounds. They have a unique attack — kind of a lumbering sound. The rhythm was absolutely organic to the circuit. In Forbidden Planet, when Morbius dies in the laboratory — that really was the Id/monster circuit dying at that point. And that worked especially well because Morbius was the monster: it was coming from his subconscious. That was the end of that circuit. It was the best circuit we ever had. We could never duplicate it. And it was one of the more long-lived circuits. It must have gone on for several hours — it was so full of variation, you would never know it all came from the same circuit. Of course, we recorded every second of it.

JB: Tell us about your method of scoring to film.

BB: We had several tape recorders and a little 16mm projector with a belt on it that made it always run the same speed. They were not tied together at all. They didn’t have to be. We had this system of starting multiple tapedecks by hand, and we’d mark the film in such a way that we’d count 1, 2, 3, start. And we worked as one — we really were like a string quartet—fading tracks in and out. But we didn’t have to be synchronized with the film that closely. It was a very time-consuming way of scoring.

We reserved all mixing until the very end. Thank God for fade-outs because we never could work out endings. I’ve never believed in real musical Beethoven-like endings for things. It’s against my principles.

JB: And it was impossible for your circuits. I’m always cognizant of the personal nature of your timbres, your choices. You really established the sound of space music.

BB: I just knew instinctively that that’s what it has to sound like when you’re traveling through space. If our circuits started doing things that even remotely resembled existing instruments, we just tossed it out. We didn’t even want to sound like any existing instrument it was totally out of our realm.

JB: What was it like, working with the MGM music department?

BB: It was wonderful. They thought all the way up to the end that they were going to use Harry Partch’s music for some of the scoring and our stuff for some of it. They liked what we did for samples so much that they decided to let us do the whole score. One of the samples was the love scene in the garden. We came up with something that I thought was so beautiful and romantic. We played it for Johnny Green (head of the music department) and he said, “Oh my God, I didn’t want the end of the Earth, I wanted love.” So obviously, it didn’t sound like love to everybody, but it sure did to me. He was very clever though. He said, “I want you to take it home and add all kinds of sweeteners to it.” We went back to our studio in New York, and at that time I didn’t fly, so I had lots of time to think about it. We added sweeteners. In a conventional score, obviously, it would be like adding violins. But we didn’t have anything like that. I found a little piece of tape that had just a single legato sound, several times at different pitches — I think there were only three of them that I could locate, And we tried adding it at random, and you know the amazing thing? It created a kind of harmonic relationship with the existing material.

JB: Tell us about the score’s reception.

BB: The preview showing was one of our great experiences because they played the music directly off the magnetic tapes. They had synced up the projector and tape and they gave it so much volume it was embarrassing. It was so effective — they played it stereophonically, which they never did in those days. Then there was the landing of the space ship. That was one of the best cues in the picture — and the audience broke into spontaneous applause.

Reproduced by kind permission of Jane Brockman.

First published in “The Score”: the Society of Composers & Lyricists, Vol. VII, No.3,
Fall/Winter 1992 (ISSN1066-5447). This article copyright © 1992 by Jane Brockman, all rights reserved.

“Bikini A-Bomb” March 30 2020

“The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb”

-Diana Vreeland, noted columnist and editor in the field of fashion, 1946

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles! May 06 2019

The Loss of Innocence s May 06 2019

Blow Up May 06 2019

Star Trek May 06 2019

The Lone Ranger May 06 2019

Goldfinger May 06 2019

Brigitte Bardot, Cannes 1953 May 06 2019

American Beauty November 29 2018

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles! February 07 2018

On February 9th, 1964, The Beatles, with their Edwardian suits and mop top haircuts, made their first American television appearance—LIVE—on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Artist Biography
A record setting 73 million people tuned in that evening making it one of the seminal moments in television history. Nearly fifty years later, people still remember exactly where they were the night The Beatles stepped onto Ed Sullivan’s stage.

In the weeks leading up to the performance, several Beatles records had already hit number one on the U.S. charts, and the radio airwaves were saturated with their tunes. The delirium and ground swell of anticipation surrounding The Beatles’ arrival from England had not been seen around since Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. But even that experience could not have prepared the Sullivan staff and the New York City authorities for what was about to happen.

The story of how The Beatles landed on The Ed Sullivan Show began with the group's formation in Liverpool in 1960. They spent their first couple of years playing in small clubs throughout Europe. During late night gigs in the city of Hamburg, Germany, sometimes playing as long as eight hours a night, The Beatles perfected their act. However, it was not until an appearance on the British television show, “Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium” and the 1963 release of their first album, Please Please Me that “Beatlemania” began to spread. That March the album hit number one on the British charts, and by the end of the year, The Beatles’ music permeated UK radio. The “Fab Four” even performed for the royal family. It was only after this burgeoning success at home did The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, choose to launch their American invasion. They decided when they had a #1 song on the U.S. charts, then they would lock in the date of their Ed Sullivan debut.

There are a number of stories regarding exactly how The Beatles came to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. The most popular is that in 1963, while arriving at London’s Heathrow airport, Ed Sullivan and his wife Sylvia encountered thousands of youngsters waiting excitedly in the rain. When Sullivan asked what all the commotion was about, he was told that a British band named The Beatles was returning home from a tour in Sweden. When he got to his hotel room, Sullivan purportedly inquired about booking the group for his show.

However, it was not until later that year that The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein reached an agreement with Ed Sullivan to bring the group to America to perform live for the first time on U.S. television. Following dinner at the Hotel Delmonico in New York City, a handshake between the two men sealed the deal for performances on three shows to air in 1964. In return, The Beatles would receive $10,000 for their three appearances and top billing.

Prior to their debut on the Sullivan show, The Beatles’ record “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was leaked in advance of its planned US release to radio stations across the country. When attorneys for Capitol Records were unable to stop American DJs from spinning the tune, the record label relented and, on December 26, 1963, dropped the album ahead of schedule. The record sold 250,000 copies in the first three days. By January 10, 1964 it had sold over one million units and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was the number one song on the Billboard charts by month’s end. In the weeks leading up to The Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Beatlemania went viral. Radio stations played the band’s music nearly non-stop; teenaged fans sported “Beatle” wigs, and bumper stickers across the country warned, “The Beatles Are Coming.”

The Beatles touched down at New York’s Kennedy Airport on February 7th, 1964. They were met by a throng of reporters and a hoard of three thousand screaming fans. Upon disembarking the plane, The Beatles were whisked to a press conference hosted by Capitol Records in which they playfully answered questions from the media.

When asked “How do you find America?” Ringo Starr jokingly replied, “Turn left at Greenland.”

While The Beatles spent the next two days cooped up at The Plaza Hotel, fans did all they could to get closer to the band. Groups of teenagers set up camp outside The Plaza, some even posing as hotel guests in an attempt to see their favorite group. As the show approached, over 50,000 requests for seats came into CBS. However, The Ed Sullivan Show, which originated from CBS’s TV Studio 50, could only accommodate an audience of 700.

For weeks, celebrities were calling in to get tickets for their kids. Walter Cronkite and Jack Paar scored seats for their girls; composer Leonard Bernstein tried but failed; while Richard Nixon’s 15-year old daughter, Julie, became one of the lucky few to get a seat. Even Sullivan himself had trouble getting extra tickets. On his show the week before The Beatles’ debut, Ed asked his audience, “Coincidentally, if anyone has a ticket for The Beatles on our show next Sunday, could I please borrow it? We need it very badly.”

It should be remembered that while this hullabaloo was happening, there was still an air of gloom in America. Just 77 days prior to The Beatles’ appearance on Sullivan, President Kennedy had been assassinated. By now, the country was ready for some much needed diversion, and it came in the form of four young lads from Liverpool – their sound, their look, their energy and their charisma.

At 8 o’clock on February 9th 1964, America tuned in to CBS and The Ed Sullivan Show. But this night was different. 73 million people gathered in front their TV sets to see The Beatles’ first live performance on U.S. soil. The television rating was a record-setting 45.3, meaning that 45.3% of households with televisions were watching. That figure reflected a total of 23,240,000 American homes. The show garnered a 60 share, meaning 60% of the television’s turned on were tuned in to Ed Sullivan and The Beatles.

Ed opened the show by briefly mentioning a congratulatory telegram to The Beatles from Elvis and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker and then threw to advertisements for Aero Shave and Griffin Shoe Polish. After the brief commercial interruption, Ed began his memorable introduction:

"Now yesterday and today our theater's been jammed with newspapermen and hundreds of photographers from all over the nation, and these veterans agreed with me that this city never has witnessed the excitement stirred by these youngsters from Liverpool who call themselves The Beatles. Now tonight, you're gonna twice be entertained by them. Right now, and again in the second half of our show. Ladies and gentlemen, The Beatles! Let's bring them on."

At last, John, Paul, George and Ringo came onto the stage, opening with “All My Loving” to ear-splitting screeches from teenaged girls in the audience. The Beatles followed that hit with Paul McCartney taking the spotlight to sing, “Till There Was You.” During the song, a camera cut to each member of the band and introduced him to the audience by displaying his first name on screen. When the camera cut to John Lennon, the caption below his name also read “SORRY GIRLS, HE’S MARRIED.” The Beatles then wrapped up the first set with “She Loves You,” and the show went to commercial. Upon return, magician Fred Kaps took the stage to perform a set of sleight-of-hand tricks.

Concerned that The Beatles’ shrieking fans would steal attention from the other acts that evening, Ed Sullivan admonished his audience, “If you don’t keep quiet, I’m going to send for a barber.”

As hard as Ed tried to protect them, the other acts that night suffered from the excitement surrounding The Beatles. Numbered among those performers were impressionist Frank Gorshin, acrobats Wells & the Four Fays, the comedy team of McCall & Brill and Broadway star Georgia Brown joined by the cast of “Oliver!”

The hour-long broadcast concluded with The Beatles singing two more of their hits, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to the delight of the fans in attendance and those watching at home.

The show was a huge television success. As hard as it is to imagine, over 40% of every man, woman and child living in America had watched The Beatles on Sullivan.

A week later, the February 24th issue of Newsweek magazine’s cover featured a picture of The Beatles with the title, “Bugs About Beatles.” Inside, the review of The Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan Show began, “Visually, they are a nightmare: tight, dandified, Edwardian/Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically, they are a near-disaster: guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of “yeah, yeah, yeah!”) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.” The article ended with the following prediction, “…the odds are they will fade away, as most adults confidently predict.”

So much for adult odds makers. But even at that, it was impossible to imagine what a lasting impression the night would leave.

John Moffitt, then Assistant Director of The Ed Sullivan Show recalls, “Nobody realized the impact to come, how momentous it would be. We didn’t talk about making history. It was more like, ‘What are we going to do next week? Not only are we doing this again, we’re on location.’”

That’s because The Beatles’ second appearance on February 16th, 1964, was broadcast from The Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. Moffitt remembers how fans took over the venue, and when it was time for The Beatles to perform, a teaming throng of teenagers blocked the group’s access to the ballroom. As security guards wedged a passageway through the crowd for The Beatles, the show was being broadcast to America. Unaware of the delay, Ed was about to introduce them. Moffitt recalls…

“Ed is saying ‘And now, here are—(a beat)—The Beatles right after this.’ And he went to a commercial. And during the commercial, finally at the end, The Beatles broke through, they came running up the aisle, they got hooked up, and I believe there was one microphone that didn’t get hooked up. But you couldn’t tell because all you could hear was the screaming.”

Audio difficulties aside, the boys plowed through “She Loves You,” “This Boy” and “All My Loving” for their first set, then turned the stage over to the comedy team of Allen and Rossi (“Hello, Dere”), singer/dancer Mitzi Gaynor, acrobats The Nerveless Knocks and monologist Myron Cohen.

The Beatles returned to close the show with performances of “I Saw Her Standing There,” “From Me to You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” After they finished, Ed called them over and congratulated them, passing along word that legendary composer Richard Rodgers was one their “most rabid fans.”

Again, The Beatles on Sullivan proved a huge ratings success, nearly duplicating the record-setting performance of their first appearance. The second show also attracted 40% of the American population.

The Beatles third and—according to their contract—final performance on The Ed Sullivan Show was technically their first. The show was taped prior to their live February 9th debut, but saved for broadcast until February 23rd, 1964. On this show, The Beatles sang “Twist and Shout”, “Please Please Me” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Other guests that night included stand-up comedian Dave Barry, Gordon and Sheila MacRae, and the legendary American jazz singer Cab Calloway.

On September 12th, 1965, The Fab Four returned to the Ed Sullivan stage one last time. They played “I Feel Fine,” “I’m Down,” “Act Naturally,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Yesterday,” and “Help!” This performance was taped in New York on August 14th, 1965, just one day before The Beatles kicked off their North American Tour with a concert at Shea Stadium that set the attendance record for an outdoor show at the time.

The final appearance of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, like those in February 1964 aired in black and white. However, at the end of the evening, Sullivan broke the news that the following week, his show would start broadcasting in color.

So The Beatles were just a week from having their performance captured and preserved forever in color.

These four historic Beatles performances on The Ed Sullivan Show featured 20 Beatles songs—seven of which became Number One hits. Cumulatively, the four shows attracted an audience of a quarter of a BILLION people. In terms of percentage of America’s population, the first two shows remain the highest viewed regularly scheduled television programs of all time.

The Beatles’ success on The Ed Sullivan Show paved the way for future rock ‘n’ roll groups dubbed the British Invasion, including The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, The Searchers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Peter and Gordon, etc.

The genius of The Beatles and the American institution that was The Ed Sullivan Show combined to create one of the most defining and indelible moments in the history of music, television and pop culture. It was a remarkable convergence that came at a special time in America, making an impact on the world that will never be duplicated.

Yeah, yeah, YEAH!

“Blow-Up” (Jane Birkin) January 24 2018

Jane and Serge

Reflection (Lana Del Rey) October 09 2016

Hype can be a funny thing. It can propel you to the heights one minute and then weigh you down so much that you crash and burn the next. Lana Del Rey experienced both sides of that coin with her 2011 song “Video Games.” With her career flailing a bit at the time, she uploaded the song to her YouTube page, where it gained a following, helped her gather a record deal, and eventually became an indie-rock sensation.

Del Rey wrote the song with Justin Parker, who came up with the eerie, seesawing piano chords at the heart of the instrumental backing. When it came to the lyrics, the singer-songwriter looked to a pair of recent relationships, as she told the website Socialstereotype.com. “The verse was about the way things were with one person, and the chorus was the way that I wished things had really been with another person, who I thought about for a long time,” she said.

In the verses, Del Rey paints scenes of domestic tranquility and socializing with friends, 21st-century style. Her days and nights are filled with beer, darts, billiards, and, of course, video games. “This is my idea of fun,” she sings at the end of the verse in a voice somewhere between deadpan and narcotized. These seemingly trivial pursuits are given meaning by the presence of the man in her life. With his strong arms, fast car, and sexy patter, he seems more like an action-movie screenwriter’s construct than a living, breathing human.

The humanity comes in the chorus, when Del Rey snaps out of her monotone and confesses the depth of her feelings with genuine longing in her voice. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you,” she sings, and you can’t help but believe it. As opposed to the detached cool of the verses, Del Rey peppers the refrain with the moony sentiments of a schoolgirl, going so far as to borrow a line from Belinda Carlisle (“Heaven is a place on earth with you”) to get her point across.

There is an undeniable hint of desperation in her voice when she sings the chorus, as if this bliss she’s describing can’t possibly last much longer. The haunting atmosphere in the music seconds that notion, that this love affair, rhapsodized by the lyrics, is actually built on fragile ground and doomed to expire.

In an interview with Q Magazine, Del Rey tried to put a fine point on the appeal of the song. “I know that it’s a beautiful song and I sing it really low, which might set it apart,” she said. “I played it for a lot of people (in the industry) when I first wrote it and no one responded. It’s like a lot of things that have happened in my life during the last seven years, another personal milestone. It’s myself in song form.”

When Del Rey appeared on Saturday Night Live in January of 2012 to perform the song and promote her debut album Born To Die, she found out about the downside of hype. Her shaky performance took a beating on social media, and the possibility that Del Rey would be swallowed up by the backlash seemed very real.

That she rebounded with 2014’s critically-acclaimed Ultraviolence is a testament to Del Rey’s talent and toughness. The hype machine has run its course, and the good news is that “Video Games” now seems like it will more likely be the first act of a long, impressive career rather than the product of a one-hit wonder.

Jim Begivlia