THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 15, 1994 TAG: 9409150075
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SUE SMALLWOOD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
IT AIN'T EASY being pop band leader, film scorer and now screenwriter Danny Elfman, a flame-haired flurry of creative impulse with a very short attention span.
``I get bored real easy, everything I do is basically to try to fight boredom,'' Elfman confessed in a telephone interview from Dallas just days into a concert tour with his longtime band, Oingo Boingo. They'll play The Boathouse in Norfolk tonight. ``If I get bored writing songs, I'll just go write a screenplay or I'll work on a film score.''
Which accounts for the four-year gap between his group's last studio album, ``Dark at the End of the Tunnel,'' and the brand new ``Boingo.'' Elfman was busy completing the score for last year's Tim Burton film ``Nightmare Before Christmas'' - just one of many gorgeous Elfman scores like the Grammy-nabbing ``Batman,'' ``Edward Scissorhands,'' ``Dick Tracy'' and ``Beetlejuice'' - and had virtually dissolved the band.
``There was a point a couple years back when I basically wasn't very interested, hadn't formally broken it up but probably informally had,'' he recalled. `` That's the second or third time that that's happened. Then suddenly I just had this new material. I wrote `Insanity,' played it for Steve (Bartek, Boingo guitarist/orchestrator) and a couple of the guys and was like, hmm, maybe we should be going back into the studio. That kind of initiated pulling ourselves back together and starting this new deal.''
That includes a new label, Giant, a shortened band moniker (just Boingo these days) and a retooled sound. Elfman chucked the horns and toughened up the guitars, perhaps due to his teenage daughter who, he says, turned him on to Alice In Chains and Jane's Addiction. Gone is the quirky, shiny Oingo Boingo of new-wave yore - ``which I hate so much,'' Elfman confided, ``I can't stand my early recordings.'' He's replaced it with a darker, delicate and more brooding sound vaguely akin to Elfman film scores.
``I've never been fond of rock and roll that was trying to be something other than it was,'' Elfman said. ``Sometimes I'll hear real complicated arrangements and I'll get the feeling someone in the band, whoever writes the stuff, is a frustrated composer.
``I've always felt that (film and Boingo projects) were just two completely separate things and I should keep them apart. On this album I allowed them to kind of converge a bit, but I tried to make sure the orchestra was extremely simple and subservient to the guitars, bass and drums.''
As always, Elfman sings with a manic intensity and a divine sense of irony about the evils lurking among and within us. Aren't you glad we got smart bombs/It's a damn good thing our bombs are clever/It's a shame that our kids are dumb, he seethes on ``War Again.''
``Obviously I wrote it during the Gulf War,'' Elfman said. ``I was really outraged by the whole attitude everybody had of turning it into a big Monday Night Football game. It's really easy when you're safe at home to kind of cheer on missiles that supposedly meet their targets.''
``Boingo'' also boasts a strong Beatles influence with a crackling cover of ``I Am the Walrus'' and a swirling montage of musical motifs, cocktail chatter and otherworldly yodeling called ``Change,'' which Elfman jokingly calls his ``tribute to `Revolution No. 9.' ''
`` `Change' was the most fun I had on the album, definitely,'' he mused. ``It was the only song that was (originally) under four minutes and relatively simple. I wanted to turn it into an experiment in elasticity, just to see how far it would stretch and let it go anywhere it wanted to go. It was a series of surprises.
``I wanted it to feel like a movie where you're watching something and this little bit of a dream or some alternate reality keeps popping in and moving out and then slowly it kind of takes over and then you forget the story you were originally watching, then suddenly you're back again. I just thought of overlaying images.''
Elfman may have used a cinematic approach when penning ``Change,'' but any similarities between his film composition and songwriting end there, he confirms.
``Writing songs, I just basically wait around for some idea to grab me,'' he said. ``For film, it's very disciplined, there's a movie right there in front of me and I have X number of days, X number of weeks to do it in, top to bottom. I have to write so many minutes of music a day, period. I have to.''
Elfman launched the film scoring aspect of his career with ``Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.'' He had not intended to become a film composer, he says, but ``by the time I was done with that film, I had really enjoyed the process. When the film came out and I realized I hadn't destroyed the movie with the music,'' Elfman was hooked.
Now he can't get film out of his system. The stop-action animation video for ``Insanity'' marks Elfman's directorial debut with Fred Stuhr, creator of the groundbreaking Tool videos. Now, he craves an even larger role in filmmaking.
``I've written a script that I hope to direct,'' he said. ``I've got three scripts out there, two that I'm writer/producer and a third that I'd like to end up being director as well.''
But he's not ready to relegate Boingo to the back burner quite yet.
``If I have my druthers, I'm going to go into the studio and start recording again this year,'' he said. ``We already have a lot of new material which we're doing onstage, plus I've got newer stuff than that. Once I really got up and running there was definitely a lot of spillover, and we had to stop ourselves from recording because only so much can fit on an album.
``I just kind of kept going even after we finished.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
CONCERT FACTS
Who: OINGO BOINGO
When: 9 tonight
Where: The Boathouse, in Norfolk
How much: $13.50; to order, call 671-8100
by CNB