Elfman Is Singing a New Toon

“I am the Pumpkin King!” crows Danny Elfman in a climactic moment of Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” the animated musical film fantasy that finds the Los Angeles rocker singing the role of Jack Skellington, skeletal first citizen of the Town of Halloween.

It’s a boast that Elfman can make in fact as well as fantasy--at least so far as Oingo Boingo’s legion of Southern California fans is concerned.

Led by the impish, red-headed Elfman, Oingo Boingo customarily has thrown huge concert bashes at Irvine Meadows each Halloween season. After withholding that annual treat in 1992 (Elfman broke a six-year streak, saying he didn’t want to be a slave to expectations and traditions), Boingo is back for Halloween concerts in Irvine Friday and Saturday.

As always, Elfman and band will reign over pumpkin season with an apt repertoire of songs that lean musically toward the peppy and the catchy (good for a party), and lyrically toward the darkly sardonic and the humorously macabre (ideal for Halloween).

Writing soundtrack songs in a style reminiscent of the Broadway theater, as he did for “Nightmare,” is a new departure for Elfman, who since 1985 has kept a high profile as a film composer. (His credits include “Beetlejuice,” “Edward Scissorhands” and the two “Batman” movies; he also wrote the theme music for “The Simpsons.”) Singing the part of a character is something different, too.

“I didn’t know I would be doing it” when work started on “Nightmare,” Elfman, 40, said over the phone recently from his home in Los Angeles.

“We were creating this eccentric character, and while writing the songs and fleshing it out, I became very attached to him. I said to Tim (the film’s creator-producer), ‘There are better singers than I am, but nobody is going to do Jack’s character better than I can.”

In the movie, Skellington gets bored with his annual task of bringing Halloween to the world, and decides to move in on Santa Claus’s turf. Not the malevolent sort, Jack eventually sees that his well-intended effort to remake Christmas in his own spooky image isn’t quite working out; so he restores Santa to the joy-to-the-world gig and rededicates himself to conjuring bigger and better Halloween frights.

Jack’s defining trait is “an overabundance of enthusiasm that is occasionally misguided,” Elfman said. “I enjoy that he goes from so high to so low so quickly, and that he can talk himself into anything.” It’s a quality Elfman says he has seen in himself as he works his way through a film-scoring project.

“In the beginning I get myself worked up. I have the gist (of the music) in my head, and I’m so enthusiastic. But halfway through, I feel it’s impossible. Then, two-thirds of the way through, I feel I want to die. It’s something you just have to keep chipping away at.”

Elfman says that it helps, during those labors over a piano keyboard in his home studio, to know that finishing will leave him free to rock out again.

“In the middle of (slaving over a film score) is when I yearn to get back on stage with Oingo Boingo. It seems so pure. The idea of sweating on stage seems so incredibly appealing. It’s like a great physical release. It doesn’t involve focusing every brain cell, including a few I don’t have.

“Of course, in the middle of multiple shows, it’s the other way around: ‘Oh God, I have no voice tonight. How lovely to go down to my studio and write notes on paper and not have to worry if I’m going to find my voice tonight.’ I guess what keeps me going is bouncing between those two worlds.”

As if two careers were not enough, Elfman is trying to develop a third as a screenwriter.

In the works are two live-action musicals he has conceived, “Little Demons” and “The World of Jimmy Callicut.” The first is “very dark--surprise, surprise. I would definitely say it’s not a kids’ thing.” Elfman said he wrote the story and is getting help with the script.

“Jimmy Callicut,” for which he has written both story and script, is “my version of growing up, done as a fantasy musical. It’s my own take on ‘Pinocchio,’ done in a contemporary setting. It’s rather dark, but not too dark for kids. It has to do with growing up as a survival concept. A lot of adults tend to think of growing up as this wonderful, glowing part of life,” something Elfman’s story aims to dispel. Elfman said he already has written five songs for each of these two musicals-in-the-making.

A third project, “Julian,” is a drama that Elfman has written and hopes to direct.

“It’s hard to explain, other than it’s just a twisted little tale. It also revolves around children, and it will have a few scary moments in it. It’s a ghost story that doesn’t revolve around how the next person is going to get killed. It’s scary, but it’s also a love story and it revolves around awakening sexuality in a kid.”

Elfman said he had not written screenplays, or done any other narrative writing, until about 2 1/2 years ago, when he began setting down the story to “Julian.”

“I’m enjoying it a lot,” he said. “My most fun the last year and a half has been doing that. I love doing something where I’m not chained to a piano. But the only way I can write my stories is to leave town” and escape musical demands. “Every six months I’ll organize a trip, go to Italy or Mexico and write.”

Elfman said his girlfriend, screenwriter Caroline Thompson, “gave me the courage to put my first story on paper,” and has since served as a sounding board for his writing.

The rocker, who has been separated from his wife for almost three years, met Thompson when they were both working on “Edward Scissorhands.” Thompson also scripted “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” and is directing a remake of the children’s classic “Black Beauty.”

“A good chunk of it is just believing in my own instincts,” Elfman said of his plunge into writing. “If three people read it and they all hate it, I’ll think twice about (changing what they don’t like). It’s the same in the band. If the other members tell me a chorus is wrong, I’ll listen to them.”

So Elfman’s agenda now encompasses writing movie music, writing movie stories and scripts, and running a rock band (he says the rest of his creative time in 1993 will be devoted to Oingo Boingo, which will be finishing work on its first album of new material since 1990).

He also is the father of two daughters, ages 9 and 14. It would seemingly require the most organized person in show biz to orchestrate all of those responsibilities without severe strain. And Elfman freely acknowledges that he is not that person.

“I get very unhappy about it,” he said of the various pressures on his time. “I’m not real organized. I go through periods when I have so much going on I can’t do anything, and I become paralyzed.”

Speaking in his characteristically cheerful, easy-flowing way, Elfman likened his world to “an extremely chaotic part of the cosmos, where whatever gravitational force is pulling the strongest” will draw his attention. “There’s always a juggling act. But whatever task I have to accomplish, I seem to accomplish.”

Elfman said that he gets some creative help from his daughters. In writing the songs for “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” he drew upon such musical influences as Kurt Weill, Cab Calloway and George Gershwin, relied heavily on the cadences and rhyming style of Dr. Seuss in developing the lyrics, and counted on his 9-year-old, Mali, as a focus group of one to tell him how it was all hanging together.

“She should have an executive music producer (credit) on ‘Nightmare,’ ” Elfman said. “She’s the one I bounced the songs off of before they went in the movie, and her reactions were absolutely critical. I could see whether what I was doing was too complex.”

Elfman credits his older daughter, Lola, with turning him on to rock music, both new and old, that has influenced the recent direction of Oingo Boingo.

“My daughter got me back into listening to some Beatles,” which Elfman said helped persuade him to break a long-standing rule against using orchestral colorings on Oingo Boingo recordings.

“This is the first album I didn’t resist the temptation to put an orchestra on. There had been a conscious effort not to do it” because he didn’t want any overlap between his rock career and his work as a film composer.

But, after listening to the Beatles again, with their frequent use of orchestral backing, Elfman decided that some of his own new material cried out for similar treatment. “I decided to let the songs be the (deciding factor), and not make that a rule any more.”

As for the newer stuff his daughter has shared with him (Elfman didn’t go into specifics), he said it hasn’t influenced Boingo’s sound so much as encouraged him with signs that the current musical climate, with its emphasis on the “alternative,” allows room for experimentation.

“There’s a real looseness I love. I’m happy that things shifted away from dance,” noted the singer whose band during the early ‘80s had been a particularly frenetic example of the dance-rock phenomenon.

“You’re not going to hear us trying to be a grunge band. There are things we do and don’t do. But it’s getting back to our own roots, with a lot more percussion-driven tunes, and losing sequencers and getting back to more live playing.”

Instead of relying on canned tracks on stage to augment Boingo’s polyrhythmic grooves, the band has expanded from eight members to 12 for its live shows. (The seven core members, in addition to Elfman, are guitarist Steve Bartek, drummer Johnny (Vatos) Hernandez, bassist John Avila, and the horn section of Dale Turner, Leon Schneiderman and Sam Phipps. The additional recruits include two percussionists, an accordionist, a keyboards player, and, on guitar, Warren Fitzgerald, who is moonlighting from the Orange County alternative hard-rock band, Xtra Large.)

“It makes us looser,” Elfman said of the switch from prerecorded rhythm elements to all-live playing. “We’re not tied to a tempo. The songs can breathe. If you want to stretch out an instrumental, you’re not limited” to pre-programmed rhythm patterns. “I don’t know whether it’s radically different for the audience, but it’s more pleasurable for us, and maybe because of that it communicates something to the audience.”

Elfman said that the Irvine shows could include as many as eight songs from Boingo’s as-yet untitled album in progress.

“I’m real excited about this next album and where it’s going. I feel I’ve got more freedom to be more eclectic than I did five years ago in terms of (the musical) climate and receptability.”

Elfman said that the band thought of giving up after it left MCA Records after the release of its 1990 album, “Dark at the End of the Tunnel.” He cites “Insanity,” one of the new songs he subsequently wrote during that down period, as a key development that “kind of rejuvenated us.”

Oingo Boingo signed with Giant Records about a year ago, but progress on a new album was held up by Elfman’s commitment to scoring “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

He isn’t making any predictions as to whether the band’s next album, due early next year, will be the one to turn Boingo fever, a condition local to Southern California and a few other pockets of popularity, into an epidemic. Since Elfman can’t stand the night-after-night repetition of touring for more than a month or two at a time, it’s unlikely that Oingo Boingo will ever break big, as many other bands do, on the strength of extended roadwork.

“For this moment, it’s exciting and it’s fun and I like where we’re going,” Elfman said of the band’s upcoming album. “It’s a chance to be a little crazier and enjoy it. I have no idea how that will be perceived in the real world, but that stopped being my concern long ago.”

* Oingo Boingo plays Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at Irvine Meadows, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine. $28.25 and $24.25. (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster) or (714) 855-6111 (amphitheater information).