I'm assuming no teenager actually looks forward to going back to school after the summer break. But in September 1960, I was a chipmunk musician who had to drag his tail back to start his senior year of high school...all while my partner got to stay home and work on music all day without me. On my first day, after suffering through geometry class first thing in the morning, I blearily made my way to physics class, cursing myself for getting all the heavy-thinking subjects at the start of the day. Using my new geometry book as a booster seat, I settled in to a seat near the back, pulled out paper and pencil, and attempted to get my brain in gear.
I took a second to look around, and noticed the guy next to me was staring. This wasn't any surprise, really. Most students sort of gaped at us, at least until they got used to us scurrying around a bit under their line of sight. For most of my school years, I used to shrink from those looks. But after a couple of years of being a successful musician (as well as many more years being a brother to Alvin Chipmunk) I started responding to them. Not in an angry way, but just in a "yeah, I'm a chipmunk in your school, deal with it" sort of way. I'd usually just try to engage them in meaningless conversation. This would sort of nudge people into dealing with me as...well, as something like a person, not as some sort of freak.
So I looked directly at this guy staring at me, and said the first vaguely conversational thing that entered my mind. "So, think the Dodgers are gonna catch the Pirates this year?"
The guy blinked at me and said "...what?"
I sighed. Even with all my elocution classes, some people still had trouble understanding us when we first spoke to them . They needed to "adjust their ears", or so we were taught. So I repeated, "The Dodgers. You think they're gonna catch the Pirates this year?"
The guy blinked again. "...you a Dodger fan?"
This time, I blinked back. I wasn't expecting that sort of response. "You bet'" I finally answered. "Any team that moves three thousand miles to play in my town is all right with me."
For the third time, the guy blinked, then reached out his hand. I tentatively shook it (I never had much practice doing that, since hardly anybody shook hands with us) as he introduced himself as Robert Yokomizo.
"We had just moved to town from San Diego," Robert recalls. "And I mean just. We had spent the previous day unpacking, and the next morning, I was trying to navigate a brand new high school. I wasn't expecting to make any friends anytime soon, since Japanese-Americans weren't all that welcome at most American high schools at the time. But then here's this chipmunk, and he's asking me about the Dodgers. And I thought, well, if he's a Dodger fan, he's gotta be OK.
"I've been through quite a bit over the last fifty-odd years," he adds reflectively. "College. Medical school. My internship. Setting up a practice not once but twice. Two marriages. Four children. And now retirement. And through it all, there was the Los Angeles Dodgers...and Theodore Chipmunk."
It's kind of strange, looking back on it. It was only for that one school year that we spent much time together. And during that year, I was busy with my recording, and he had to work at his uncle's restaurant. So it wasn't like we hung out together all that often. But I vividly remember sitting on the lawn outside of school with Robert, talking about Duke Snider and Norm Larker and the rest of the Dodgers roster. And I guess a strong bond formed during that time.
A year later, when Robert went off to live in the dorms of USC, we promised each other that we'd stay in touch. And somehow, we actually did. We wrote to each other every month or so. And after a year or two, the letters began falling into a pattern. First section - react to previous letter's news. "Glad to hear you aced your organic chemistry midterm!" Second section was relating your own current news. And the third section was for the Dodgers. If the season was ongoing, we'd write about that. If it wasn't, we'd rehash what happened last season, or talk about our hopes for the next. And just above our signature, we wouldn't write "sincerely" or "best to the wife and kids". We'd write "Go Dodgers!" Maybe with a few extra exclamation points during the good seasons, or with "(please?)" added when the team was mired in last place. But always - "Go Dodgers!"
The 1961 baseball season ended with the Dodgers still behind the Pirates, and October gave way to November. Simon and I weren't quite done with the second Nutty Squirrels album, and Columbia asked if we might record a couple of Christmas songs that they could put out as a holiday single. They figured since the biggest selling Chipmunks single to date had been the Christmas one, maybe rodents plus yuletide cheer spelled instant sales. Once again, Simon went along with their idea. "Since nothing had been released by Columbia at that point, I felt it imperative to assure the label that we were still willing and eager to work with them. That enthusiasm led directly to them allowing us to pen both sides of the single ourselves."
We cranked out the first of the two holiday numbers in less than an hour. "Nutty Noel" was just a simple happy holidays-type ditty. "Doo doo dit dah, nutty noel to you". We spent a lot longer - several days, in fact - on the second song. We came up with the idea of singing as if we were regular dumb chipmunks (or squirrels, I guess) living in the wild. The lyrics asked everybody not to chop down the tree where we had built our home. "You just want it for Christmas, but we need it all year long." It was a rather depressing song if you gave it much thought. We interpolated both "Deck the Halls" and "O Tannenbaum" into the arrangement, and made sure there was some "doo-wah"s in there as well. This was going to be our first song with actual lyrics, after all, so we wanted something to link it back to "Uh-Oh" and our first album.
We recorded both songs like we did the first album, as a trio with Jack playing bass. I thought they both sounded fine. I didn't think we had a multi-million seller on our paws or anything, but I thought both songs would make for a pleasant and fun addition to the holiday canon.
When we played the songs for the folks at Columbia, they sat listening with frozen smiles on their faces. It was clear that, whatever it was they were expecting, this wasn't it. After both songs finished, they said the songs were "very nice". And I had already learned in my dealings with Liberty that "very nice" meant "will not suit our needs".
Simon sets his teeth when talking about that meeting. "The people at Columbia said they enjoyed the songs, but felt they were perhaps a little 'thin'. Might they take the master tapes and 'beef them up a little'? I envisioned them adding jingle bells, or perhaps some strings in a few isolated places." We gave our consent - I mean, how bad could it get, right?
I honestly don't know how they ended up with the versions they released. It sounds like they isolated a few parts of our vocal takes, and tossed those on top of completely new recordings. Our songs were now swamped with tons of syrupy strings and horns, as well as one of those easy-listening choirs that were so prevalent in the sixties. And when I say "a few parts", I'm not kidding - there are stretches of both songs where our only presence is an occasional "doo wah" in the background. The chorale ended up taking most of the lead on both songs. It sounded like the Nutty Squirrels were guest-starring on a couple of Percy Faith holiday songs.
And much like the cartoon, the Nutty Squirrels single inspired a Chipmunks one. We had mentioned that we were recording sone Nutty Squirrels holiday songs to Dave on one of our Sunday drives to the studio. I can't say for certain if that's what led to a Chipmunks holiday recording session a couple of weeks later, but let's just say I have my suspicions.
Dave worked up an arrangement of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" that featured Rudolph himself singing a few of the lines. This was a little weird, since there aren't exactly a ton of lyrics in the song to begin with. A guy named Johnny Marks sang Rudolph's lines. He pitched his voice somewhere between Jimmy Boyd (the kid who sang "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus") and Mortimer Snerd (Edgar Bergen's slow-thinking puppet). He ended up sounding like a dunce with a bad head cold.
They decided to make the song the latest in the series of "globetrotting Chipmunks" numbers, with Dave complaining about having to trudge around the North Pole. (I think the original idea was to use it for the cartoon, but they never did animate it.) Dave was massively sick with the flu the day we recorded this song, and you can totally hear it in the recording. I think they were hoping that Dave would sound completely worn out, like he actually had been wandering around the Arctic hinterland for several days. Actually, if you ask me, Dave just sounds incredibly bored.
It's a bit surprising that they didn't have us record another holiday song for the B-side. Either they wanted a self-penned number on the flip to maximize their profits, or else they just didn't have time to record a second song. Whatever the reason, the single came out with "Spain" on the B-side. It was the last release to feature the old-school style Chipmunks artwork. It had us three bundled up in fur coats (how redundant) standing next to an incredibly dopey-looking Rudolph. I'm pretty sure they used the same artist who drew the last album, because once more, he drew us surprisingly well. In other words, now that we finally had someone drawing us correctly, that was all going to be thrown out the window.
The single was a pretty big hit, getting up to number twenty-one. And it was already December when the record finally shipped out. Had they gotten it out earlier, it may have done even better. "Rudolph" would also return to the pop charts the following two Christmases, joining "The Chipmunk Song" and "Alvin's Harmonica" as a holiday mainstay. This may have been what finally pushed Liberty into having us record a holiday album the following year.
Unbeknownst to anybody, though, the Chipmunks were done as a pop singles threat. "Rudolph" was the last Chipmunks single to make the Hot 100 chart for the next forty-five years. Meanwhile, the Nutty Squirrels holiday single vanished without a trace. I've met people who were fans of the Squirrels who didn't even know it existed. That's probably just as well.