Simon and I boarded our flight back to New York, and I snuggled deeper into my seat - you can sort of do that when you're a chipmunk. While I waited for the flight attendant to start handing out the peanuts, I thought back over the previous two weeks. The entire season was in the can, as far as we were concerned. We had nothing to do but wait until September for them to finish the animation, and for the cartoon to premiere.
"That was fun," I told Simon.
Simon thought for a few seconds, then nodded. "Once more, we are voicing adolescents and singing songs written by others. But you are correct. I enjoyed myself more than I anticipated."
I frowned a bit. "Why do you think that is?"
"A variety of reasons. The scripts are somewhat stronger, and the songs more up-to-date. Also, we were consulted at each step of the process. It was not the same as before, where scripts and songs were simply placed in front of us." Simon paused, then added, "And there is the biggest difference of all."
"Which is?"
"We three. We are not the same chipmunks that recorded for Liberty."
I was about to ask what he meant, but the peanuts arrived at that moment, and I got a bit distracted. (Theodore will be Theodore.) But a few minutes later, as I sat back in my seat, I thought about what Simon had said. We really weren't the same chipmunks anymore, were we? We were twenty-five years older, with many life experiences under our belts. We had had our ups and downs, our falling-outs and our getting-back-togethers. And despite one of us living three thousand miles away, I don't think we'd ever been closer. We knew each other better, understood each other more...and probably even loved each other more. Life was going pretty well right then. There was only one thing in my life that I was truly missing. I turned back to Simon, who was leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed.
"...Brother? Would you be interested in restarting Cemented?"
Simon didn't answer right away, and I wondered if he had fallen asleep. But finally, he said, "With my classes, my research, my mentoring...I do not believe I have sufficient time and mental energy to devote to a weekly musical gig."
I was heartbroken, even if his answer made perfect sense. "Oh. OK."
"...but a monthly musical gig? That I could find time for." He opened his eyes and grinned.
Finding a location for a monthly Cemented gig wasn't easy. Riley's had been sold to new owners, and they were already booked every night for a few months ahead. So I went around to some other clubs nearby, and talked to the booking agents. While doing so, it slowly dawned on me how difficult it was to explain the whole Cemented concept to people who had never seen it. "See, I play drums, and my brother plays bass, and then there's these other musicians..."
I did finally get us a regular night, on the third Wednesday of the month. It wasn't at a club, though - it was at an art space. "The Higher Plane Collective," sighs Simon. "It was overseen by a man named William. He was very agreeable but he was...misguided, shall we say. He considered himself a catalyst and nurturer for artistic endeavors. Which he may have been for others. But to be blunt, Cemented was not in need of nurturing. In retrospect, I am uncertain as to whether William ever truly comprehended the entire Cemented concept. He was relentless in attempting to turn every Cemented performance into an 'open mic night', where we would back up any musician that wanted us to play behind them. He also provided what he called 'feedback notes' at the end of each performance, all of which were singularly unhelpful.
"During our residency at The Higher Plane Collective, William performed the first two songs with us," Simon continues. "And despite our suggestion that we perform compositions that he was already familiar with, he always requested that we improvise. Unfortunately, William appeared to know only three chord progressions, and thus we were always greeted with one of those. He was not a terrible guitarist, but he was not an ideal Cemented guest." Once he was done, though, we were allowed to play with a few of our old Cemented regulars. We also found a new favorite one at the collective - a woman named Sandra who played the theremin. Our performances with her often sounded like they could come straight from a 1950s UFO-invasion movie.
It was Sandra who helped us find a new venue. She sensed that we weren't that thrilled playing at the collective, and she recommended that we talk to the owner of a small club just down the street. The Beacon was smaller than Riley's, but it was casual and friendly, and they made some great fried chicken. We talked to the owner, and soon afterwards, we began holding Cemented gigs there on the first Thursday of the month.
Just like we had done for "A Chipmunk Christmas", we held a little premiere party for the new cartoon over at my place. A bunch of our friends came over - Kenny, Rusty, Grace, a few of Simon's colleagues. Since it was Saturday morning, I made French toast and bacon, and just before 10:30, we turned on NBC and watched the first episode.
"It was so strange," remembers Kenny. "Because Theodore on the cartoon was so clueless. I remember the very first line you said on that show. Alvin was looking for something to bring to school for show-and-tell, and Theodore said 'you could bring my apple'. I looked over at you and actually said, 'Are you stupid?!' I mean, hearing you say something so dumb just blew my mind, even if it was just for a TV show."
The cartoon didn't look quite as good as the earlier Christmas special, but it was certainly better animated than the sixties cartoon was. It was sort of fun to watch when I got up on Saturday mornings, and I thought the show would be a fun little footnote to the whole story of the Chipmunks.
...except that it wasn't. The cartoon was a huge hit, and less than a month after the premiere, NBC contacted Ross and said they were renewing the show for the next season. We all decided we liked the show (and money) enough to do another year, so Simon and I arranged to fly back out to California to record the second season's dialogue and songs. By the end of October, Simon and I were receiving scripts and song arrangements in the mail.
"It is a television axiom not to deviate from a successful formula," states Simon, "and they did not. Ross and Janice did somewhat less writing for the second season, but otherwise, the program remained much the same. Once more, we recorded our dialogue for two episodes, then vocals for the songs, and then on to the next two episodes. They included one episode that season in which the Chipmunks masqueraded as elderly men in order to avoid paying for a gymnasium membership. It was always my assumption that that was a quiet nod to the forty-something chipmunks providing the voices."
Alvin remembers, "Starting that season, we did more 'oldies', as they were called back then. 'Breaking Up Is Hard to Do', 'Secret Agent Man'. They even had us do 'It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing'. I think that was because they needed a song tthat somehow related to golf." The rather depressing thought was that some of these "oldies" had originally become hits hits a full decade after I really got into popular music.
But aside from that, I don't remember any of us complaining about the song selections. In fact, although we may have smirked at a dumb line or plot development once in a while, we never raised an objection about anything at all during the course of the NBC cartoon run. Simon suggests that there's more than one reason for that. "If one were to advance the hypothesis that we never raised an objection with the network due to financial reasons, I for one would not agree...although it would be churlish of me to suggest that money was never a factor. The primary reason for the lack of friction, in fact, was Ross. He is about our age, and he has proven time and again that he understood our mindsets. Ross would have never given us songs such as 'Down By The Old Mill Stream' or 'Japanese Banana' to perform, as his father had years before. Any such number that might have been suggested would have been vetoed by Ross before we ever reached California.
"Also, it bears repeating - we were different chipmunks by then. All three of us appeared to have divorced ourselves completely from the cartoon roles. When Theodore was given an inane bit of dialogue, you simply accepted it as part of the mechanics of the production of a children's animated program. In addition, there was no longer a real-life Chipmunks band. The songs we were given to record no longer conflicted with a perceived musical vision for ourselves. As such, our trips to California were busy but generally pleasant affairs."
The cartoon continued to be a ratings powerhouse all through the eighties. Each fall, NBC would see the ratings for the first few episodes, and immediately renew it again. What started as a one-off trip became a yearly sojourn to California, and something we all looked forward ro.
"It's kind of funny," says Alvin, "A lot of people sort of associate The Chipmunks with Christmas, but the holiday season didn't really mean anything to me once we left Mrs. Gorman's house. I didn't buy anybody gifts, or put up a tree or anything. But the 80s cartoon changed that. The holidays meant my two brothers were coming back to town. I started looking forward to December for the first time in many years...which actually even made me start liking 'Christmas Don't Be Late' again."
"The animated show was exceptionally popular," Simon says, still sounding a bit incredulous about it. "If memory serves, it was the highest-rated Saturday morning program of the entire decade. And honestly I am unsure as to the reason why. The show was pleasant, and it did have a good amount of heart, but it never struck me as exceptional. But perhaps that was all it took."
The cartoon was so successful that the entire "Chipmunks empire" was more or less relaunched. Our cartoon likenesses began showing up in toy stores, on comic books, in coloring books, and on boxes of breakfast cereal. There was even a stage show that toured around the country in 1985 called Alvin & The Chipmunks And The Amazing Computer. None of us had any direct involvement with it. Somebody approached Ross and Janice about it, we gave it a thumbs-up, and we all got a royalty check. I honestly don't know the first thing about the show, but I was told that the entire run sold out in Pittsburgh (ironically). If you were traumatized at an early age by adult men dressing up in large Chipmunks suits on stage, please accept an apology from the real Theodore Chipmunk.