Most people know him as the guy who did the theme song to The Simpsons and the score to about every other comic book-cartoon movie made in the last 20 years. He’ll always be the lead singer of Oingo Boingo to me; one of the coolest bands from the LA area to grace the Eighties. It’s a shame Danny was never as famous with his band. I guess people thought the bulk of the material was too weird: songs about insects, hypocritical music critics and a lot of undead monsters. Thankfully, he is only related to the annoying Jenna Elfman by marriage, she’s his niece.
My brother was a huge Oingo Boingo/Danny Elfman fan. I’ll have to ask him in his own words why he lost interest. I know it was sometime after he graduated from college because he didn’t seem very enthused when I finally saw them in 1994. My immediate guess would be the rather weak albums after 1988.
When he was their biggest fan in Central Illinois, his favorite gift from me was this huge promo poster for Dead Man’s Party that I scored at a record swap in Milwaukee. This band was about the only thing we had in common with our cousin Jason too. The rest of Jason’s tastes in music, or anything else on the planet (he’s one of the black sheep of the Maggi clan) were best avoided.
Lastly, Danny has a special place in my memory from WMUR (Marquette’s “radio” station). The station received a press kit of Beetlejuice which was one of his early scores, his second for Tim Burton I think. There was a cassette tape of canned answers from Burton, Elfman and Geena Davis included, maybe Alec Baldwin too because he wasn’t as famous yet. So I transferred Danny’s three canned responses to a CART and wrote questions around them as a gag on the show I shared with Sheila. I set the first one up to sound like he didn’t answer the question, thus my follow-up mentioned that he didn’t reply adequately, and he was standing on my foot. I did it because the second sound bite began with him saying, “Oh sorry! (laughter)” and then something closer to a satisfactory answer. Pretty weak stuff as I look back. It went over well at the station then and this was over a decade before affordable and effective digital stuff became more available.
Happy 54th birthday to the red-headed composer, the singing voice of Jack Skellington and Bridget Fonda’s husband, much to Craig Kilbourn’s disappointment.
Steve and Somara Dating Fact: When we met up for the first time in person, Steve mentioned that he was surprised that I knew who Danny Elfman was (this had come up while compairing our musical interests over the phone). Little did he know that I not only had every Oingo Boingo album, but I also had Elfman’s solo album and several of his soundtracks. While Danny Elfman may not be the greatest composer ever… he’s on my top 10 list.