Olden Life: Who were the Chipmunks?

Nigel Summerley

Forty singles and more than fifty albums is a pretty impressive total for a band – and particularly for a band that never really existed.

They didn’t even have a name when their sound burst upon the world sixty years ago. In the beginning were just the voices. High, inhuman voices, a bit like those of the slightly dodgylooking, and even dodgier-sounding, Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. But even more insidious. Because they sang rock ’n’ roll and pop songs, in relentless three-part harmony.

They were the brainchild – if that’s the right word for it – of Californian musician and producer Ross Bagdasarian. And he is said to have finally found a name for his creation when he was driving through woods and a chipmunk crossed his path.

Before that he had already recorded – under the other name he had found for himself, David Seville – the 1958 hit Witch Doctor. The high-pitched refrain of the song (and the magic formula to ensure that a woman would find a man irresistible) was ‘Ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang / Walla walla, bing bang’. Ross was obviously something of a wordsmith, as well as a dab hand at recording voices at slow speed and then accelerating them. To be fair, he was largely pioneering the technique and it was not easy – in those pre-digital, pre-auto-tune days – to record your own voice several times at differing speeds and then change the speed of the playbacks so that they sounded like three woodland creatures singing in harmony with each other and with a normal-speed backing track.

But who on Earth would want to listen to a trio of squeaky-voiced pseudosquirrels (called Alvin, Theodore and Simon) singing mind-numbing novelty numbers and desecrations of otherwise decent songs? The answer should be obvious: Americans.

Now he had the voices and the band name, Bagdasarian’s quick follow-up to Witch Doctor was The Chipmunk Song, which sold more than four million copies for the Chipmunks and set them on the path to having their own TV cartoon show. Despite a fair bit of radio play in the UK, their only really big hit here was Ragtime Cowboy Joe (1959). For most people of a mildly discerning nature, once was enough.

Or maybe not? A ‘Chipmunk vocal’ appeared on the truly dreadful single The Laughing Gnome (1967) by David Bowie (when he had few thoughts of being a Thin White Duke, and more of being the next Tony Newley), and the only marginally better Bridget the Midget (1971) by Ray Stevens.

Bagdasarian’s death in 1972 didn’t slow the Chipmunks down, as his son took over the business. The records and TV shows went on and on. And a series of Alvin and the Chipmunks movies from 2007 to 2015 went down well at the box office – if not with the critics.

‘Chipmunk vocals’ were occasionally employed anarchically in the late Sixties by Frank Zappa, and in more recent times have been used to spice up hip-hop and electronic dance music. But these days Bagdasarian’s ingenuity with slow and fast tape speeds has been made redundant. You can – if you really need to – do it with the push of a button.