Alvin's "quick trip" to Los Angeles ended up lasting quite a bit longer than anybody expected that it would. "It was kind of ridiculous," Alvin says. "Ross and Simon had agreed to let RCA make the first move. Instead of saying right off the bat 'we want to do this', we thought we'd find out where they were coming from first, and then just sort of nudge it into our comfort zone. But none of the meetings I went to ever felt like the last one. They were always nice and everything, and it kept looking like were making progress, but the meetings all ended with 'OK, let's take this and move ahead and meet back in a week or two to see where we are'. So my trip back to New York kept getting delayed. Lucky for me, Ross had this small room in their basement, and he was letting me live there rent-free. But I was there with all this spare time on my hands...and no money, so I couldn't actually do much of anything."
Eventually, Alvin did ask us to send him some money. And I'll admit that I was a little stunned by the request - he wanted it to pay for singing lessons. "I had given it a lot of thought. You had more or less given up your live music career for this RCA deal. So I decided that if this whole shebang failed, it wasn't going to be on account of anything I had done. If they gave me a crappy song to sing, I was at least going to sing it as well as I possibly could. I started some weekly meetings with Andrea, a vocal coach who had worked with some rodents, and soon I was wandering around Ross's place practicing my vowel sounds."
Finally, RCA decided on a plan for the first Chipmunks album for the label - a modern country LP. "On paper, it made total sense," Alvin admits. "That Urban Cowboy movie was a huge hit right about then. And RCA was doing great in the country market at the time, - Dolly Parton and Alabama were both on the label. They even contacted a couple of their of their country acts, and lined up Jerry Reed and Brenda Lee to record with us. There was just one teensy little problem. Namely, none of us three knew a damn thing about country music. But, you know, record labels will be record labels."
It wasn't much of a surprise when Simon chose not to participate. "The recording dates coincided with the tail end of the semester, but I felt no compulsion to cross the country to attempt to perform within an idiom I was unfamiliar with." But I decided to at least try to take part. I rearranged my HalFlat orders so I could take a week off, and I flew out to Los Angeles in early December. Ross let me crash on his couch, and the next day, I went into the studio to play drums and provide backing vocals for "I Love a Rainy Night". But then the sessions ground to a halt.
"I don't even remember what that was all about," says Alvin. "I don't think it was a legal thing. It may have just been another round of meetings or something. But everything was on hold for the rest of the week." Whatever the cause, I couldn't extend my stay - I had HalFlat orders that needed to get done by Christmas. So I spent the next few days visiting Robert and Scooter, and then flew back home, having barely participated in the album sessions at all.
Alvin says once everything was resolved, the album came together pretty quickly. "RCA took forever in the conference room, but the guys in the recording studio were pros. They had good musicians in place, and the songs usually only took two or three takes. They brought in two gophers - Stephen and Jonathan - to handle the background vocals. Back in the sixties, the session rodents that Liberty got to fill in for you guys were decent enough, but never much more than that. But Stephen and Jonathan were really good. They'd ask me 'Does this sound like Theodore? Is this how Simon would sing it?' They actually cared enough to check, which was kind of nice. And of course, I got to sing with Brenda Lee and Jerry Reed! That was a lot of fun."
It was Alvin that gave Ross a more active role in the Chipmunks game. "In one of those interminable meetings, RCA said that they wanted to bring back the whole David Seville 'AL-VIN!' thing, just on a couple of songs. So I told them OK, but if we're gonna have a David Seville, you're gonna have to use Ross. His father was the real Dave, for crying out loud. Ross wasn't sure about it at first - he said it felt a little weird taking his father's place. But he was great at it. To be honest, I think Ross might have been better at being David Seville than the actual David Seville was!"
Alvin recalls one incident that took place while recording the album. "They decided that we were going to do 'Coward of the County'. Made sense from a marketing standpoint - it had been a huge country and pop hit for Kenny Rogers about a year before. But the day before we went in to record it, I said 'wait a second - isn't that the song about a barroom brawl after a gang rape? You sure you want that sort of thing on your kid-friendly record?' And everybody was like 'uhhhh...'. I guess nobody had really considered the lyrics before they selected it. Somebody quickly rewrote some of the lyrics, and had them ready before the recording session. So in the version I sing, Tommy is avenging his best friend who got beat up by some bullies. It at least avoided the whole rape thing, but it was still kind of strange. 'If your friend gets beat up by bullies, you should go beat up the bullies in return.' Great lesson for the kids. And it made no sense at all. They were presenting The Chipmunks as young teenagers, but in that song, I'm supposedly the foster parent to a twenty-year-old. And I sing that my nephew's daddy died in prison. So I guess that'd be one of you, so that means either you or Simon was dead? I guess?"
They named the album Urban Chipmunk, since Urban Cowboy was still fresh in everybody's minds. The cover depicts Alvin aping John Travolta's classic barroom pose from the film, nursing a bottle of root beer. It was my first look at the RCA-era Chipmunks artwork. And honestly, now that I was resigned to once more being in animated form, I kind of liked it. It didn't look much like Alvin, of course, but there was definitely more personality in that one drawing than there had been on most of the later sixties records. Simon and I are nowhere to be seen on the cover, but then again, that pretty well matches the contents of the album.
Alvin's take on the album today? "It's pretty good, actually. It's a little slick even for early '80s country, and you can tell my singing lessons had only just started kicking in. My voice is better but it's a bit too...precise. Not a lot of feeling. But I like it more than most of our sixties stuff. It's a passable bit of early '80s country."
The first single "On the Road Again" didn't really go anywhere, but the Jerry Reed duet made the lower reaches of the country chart. And while the album didn't quite match what Chipmunk Punk had done, it had a healthy chart run, topping out at number fifty-six. It also made the top thirty of the country album chart, and eventually went gold. "I bet that pissed off Waylon Jennings," smirks Alvin.
The album had only been out a week or so when Alvin called to tell me the next move in the Chipmunks masterplan - an animated Christmas special. "We knew that RCA was going to be reaching out to a TV network to get another cartoon version of The Chipmunks off the ground. So Ross and I decided to get proactive about it. We had waited around long enough for RCA to come up with a gameplan for the record - Lord knows how long they'd take to plan the actual cartoon. So Ross started writing a script."
Few people know this, but Alvin initially tried to nudge Ross in a completely different direction. "My idea was to make the Chipmunks adults, or at least older teenagers. We'd be living together in an apartment or house, like the Monkees did on their TV show, or the Banana Splits on that Saturday morning show. And 'our manager David Seville' could live upstairs, or next door. Those shows had done really well with kids, even though they didn't revolve around child-age characters. Ross thought about it, and even tried writing a script or two with that basic premise. But it just never really worked for him. I think he had always had David-Seville-as-surrogate-father in his head, and he had a hard time letting go of it. Besides, they had resurrected the 'AL-VIN!' Dave for the Urban Chipmunk album. So, once more, The Chipmunks were these maybe-children-maybe-teens living with Dave."
Ross submitted a script for a holiday special, and RCA liked it enough to shop it around. NBC must have seen something they liked in it, because they quickly offered a deal. But before Simon and I would sign any contracts, we had Ross send us a copy of the script. We read it, talked it over, and decided to take part. "It was juvenile, to be sure," admits Simon. "But it was not embarrassingly so. Also, the money would prove to be most welcome for an upcoming excursion. Therefore, I gave my assent. It is mildly ironic that the cartoon had an overreaching anti-greed message, as monetary recompense was the main motivation for my involvement." We arranged to fly out during his spring break at Columbia to record the dialogue for the show, and put down vocals for a few songs for the soundtrack.
Luckily, by this point, Grace had gotten the hang of HalFlat, and didn't need much direction from me to keep things moving. She says, "You told me you'd be going out of town during my spring break, which kinda sucked. I was looking to have some fun of my own, you know. But it meant a lot more hours, and a lot more money, so at least there was that. I asked where you were going, and you said, 'oh, you know - got a new Chipmunks cartoon to make'. You winked, though, so I figured you were just kidding."
The dialogue recording for the Christmas special went really smoothly. We had all gotten the script beforehand, and there weren't too many last minute changes, so it was just a matter of pounding through it. The only real snag came right at the beginning. Phil Monroe, the director, thought my voice sounded too similar to Alvin's. In order to make it sound different, he asked if I could kick my voice up a notch. That's right - someone actually asked a chipmunk to raise the pitch of his voice. I gave it a try, and he said it was perfect like that. Unfortunately, that meant a bit more work for me. I had to remember to sort of open my eyes wide, stretch my throat out a bit, and speak in this slightly unnatural register. Sadly, that would be "Theodore Chipmunk" for the next decade or so - the slow, extra-high-pitched, gee-Davey-sounding one.
There was one great surprise for me during the recording. They hired someone special to do the voice of Mrs. Claus - none other than June Foray! I hadn't seen her since the original Alvin Show had wrapped production. After we finished recording that day, we went out for dinner together to catch up on what had been going on in our lives for the last two decades or so. It was a lot of fun getting to see her again.
Simon has one word for the special - "inane" - but Alvin liked a few aspects of it. "Ross at least fleshed out the characters a little. In the sixties, each of the Chipmunks basically had one characteristic - Simon was smart, Theodore was hungry, Alvin was an egomaniac. In this special, Alvin is still kind of self-centered, but he gives up a prized possession right near the start of the show, just to make a sick kid feel better. Ross at least was trying to make the characters more likable."
That prized possession was a Golden Echo harmonica, which was the major plot point of the show. A young boy is sick, his sister says a Golden Echo harmonica will make him feel better, and so Alvin decides that this kid can have his harmonica. (Because, let's face it - nothing heals a sick child faster than a harmonica pre-contaminated with rodent spittle.) Then The Chipmunks get booked to play Carnegie Hall, and Alvin comes up with crazy schemes to raise money to buy a new harmonica. Alvin wryly notes, "Maybe that was a little jab at the music industry. Where you can be booked to play Carnegie Hall but still can't afford a damn harmonica." That said, the animation was significantly better than anything we did in the sixties, and I've met a few people who still hold fond memories of the special.
Doing the soundtrack was pretty simple, too. Most of the songs were holiday numbers that we'd already recorded at some point. Alvin does hasten to point something out. "I can play harmonica, but that's not me playing on 'Silent Night'. Whoever it is did a way better job than I could have done." Those recordings gave RCA their own versions of our holiday hits to put out as a soundtrack album. It got up to number seventy-two on the chart, and after a few holiday seasons, it eventually went gold. That's three gold albums in a row, for those of you keeping score at home.
During the summer of 1981, I had a visitor come stay with me for almost a week - Robert Yokomizo. "I was between marriages," he recalls, "and I hadn't taken a vacation for years. So I came up with the idea of flying out to visit you in New York. I timed my trip for when the Dodgers were in town playing the Mets. We bought tickets to all three games, and I was looking forward to finally watching the Dodgers play with my long-suffering Dodger buddy. But of course, that didn't happen."
A bit before Robert was due to arrive in New York, contract negotiations between the baseball players and the owners fell apart, and the league went on strike. All the games were canceled for the duration of the strike, included the ones we had bought tickets for. I felt really terrible for Robert, even though I obviously couldn't have foreseen anything like that. But I was determined to try to make up for it. I booked a few typical New York excursions for us, took him to a few of my favorite restaurants, and convinced Simon to throw together a semi-last-minute Cemented gig.
"We had placed Cemented on hiatus once Alvin relocated to California," Simon explains. "The Chipmunks tour was brief but it was sufficient to sate my desire for live performances. However, I was pleased to help arrange for Robert to witness what Cemented was capable of." We were stuck playing on Monday, so the crowd wasn't all it could have been. But Kenny, Marcus and Franklin all did great.
Another notable thing happened that summer. Grace was graduating from high school, and I had to figure out what to get her as a gift. The more I thought about it, the more I realized what an integral part of HalFlat she had become over the past year or so. So instead of some little gewgaw, I offered her a share of the HalFlat business. Grace says she had to think that over. "I did like working for you, but I had always thought of it as just something to do until I graduated...or at least until I figured out what I really wanted to do. But then I thought, heck, I may never find another job that I love as much as this one. So I said yes."
It was about six months later that Grace came over to my place along with both of her parents. "You invited us over to watch 'A Chipmunk Christmas', and I thought that was really weird. I mean, it's a kid's show, right? But Dad said, why not, it'll be fun. Thomas was there, too - I hadn't met him before. We sat down, and as you served the eggnog, you started talking in this high squeaky voice. 'Time...to...get...up, Dave!' I was looking at you like you'd lost your mind. Then the show started, and the first thing Theodore says, in exactly the same voice, was 'Time...to...get...up, Dave!' I finally got it. That WAS you on the cartoons. I looked over at you, and you had this stupid grin on your face."
Grace remembers somebody else being even more embarrassed. "Thomas looked kind of miserable. Every time Simon had a line, Thomas looked like he wanted to disappear."
The next morning, when I got my mail, there was a small envelope mixed in with the regular stack of bills. I immediately recognized the scratchy handwriting on the front - it was from Alvin. That was kind of strange, since I had just talked to him on the phone earlier in the week. I sat down on my sofa and tore it open. Inside was a small Christmas card, with a painting of a Christmas tree. It was blank on the inside except for a few words that Alvin had written.
"Brother - Thank you. For everything. - Alvin"
I stared at the card for a while. Then I got up and put it on my mantelpiece, where it stayed until sometime in June.