Carl Stalling

Warner Brothers cartoons are my absolute favorites. I’ll take Looney Tunes over Disney any day of the week, In fact, the only Disney character I ever really enjoyed was Goofy, and that’s because he is the most exuberantly wacky and slapsticky character – much more in the Warner Brother’s mold than any of the other watered down wusses that animated Disney. Mickey Mouse? Puh-leese. Donald Duck? Spare me. Warner Brothers cartoons are so joyfully zany, so gleefully anarchic that they can’t help but appeal to a kid, whose mission seems to be to create as much disorder as possible (this isn’t just me – all kids are like this – trust me, I have a couple of my own, I know from whence I speak). Yes, there is an inordinate amount of violence, which makes parents who have forgotten they were children wring their hands, but it’s really funny, meaningless violence where nobody really gets hurt. And it isn’t so much the violence that’s funny – or rather, it isn’t the physical violence that’s funny so much as the violence to physics. The gravity-defying, telescoping time, and inexhaustible supply of instant props (made by Acme, of course), is enormously appealing to a powerless kid. And the characters are great. Not all, to be sure. I, for one, wish Sylvester would choke on Tweety and take both of them out of the picture entirely, but it’s hard to find a more inspired and inspiring bunch of lunatics than Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam and Pepe Le Pew and, best of all, Daffy Duck. Chuck Jones, who knows all the characters quite well, as you might imagine, sums it up best. He says that Bugs is who you want to be, but Daffy is who you really are. Bugs is calm and cool and collected at all times – a cross between D’Artagnan and Dorothy Parker, as Jones puts it. He always gets the best of everybody and never ruffles his fur (unless, of course, Tex Avery introduces him to a girl-rabbit). Daffy, on the other hand, is conceited and jealous and spiteful and always ends up being his own worse enemy. But he’s also the most surreal, likely to break into a songs and go skipping across the water on his head at the drop of a hat (usually Elmer’s). My favorite Warner Brothers cartoon is the gloriously surreal (and extremely postmodern) Duck Amuck, where Daffy does everything he can to just survive the cartoon(s) he’s been placed into – a cartoon that, it is revealed at the end, is being animated by Bugs Bunny.

“Ain’t I a stinker?”

Like millions of kids of my generation, I have the Warner Brothers cartoons imprinted on my genetic code. They are as much a part our collective unconscious as the Beatles – as ubiquitous (and important) as the air we breathe. And they are as hard for me to think about as having been created by someone. People sitting over tables painstakingly drawing Daffy frame by frame is as nonsensical an image to me as Paul McCartney struggling to come up with the lyrics for Yesterday, calling it Scrambled Eggs in an early version. Those characters seem so alive, so inevitable, that it’s difficult to imagine them being created.

That’s why The Carl Stalling Project is such a revelation. A few years ago, well-known and even better-regarded producer Hal Wilner got access to the Warner Brothers vaults. Wilner was the early musical director for Saturday Night Live and has produced a fascinating series of all-star themed album projects, covering such divergent bases as Nino Rota (Amarcord Nino Rota), Thelonius Monk (That’s The Way I Feel Now), Kurt Weill (Lost in the Stars – my favorite of the bunch) and old man Walt (Stay Awake) and even Edgar Allen Poe (Closed on Account of Rabies). For The Carl Stalling Project (there are two volumes), he got his good buddy and avant-garde activist John Zorn to help him go through the hundreds of hours of Warner Brothers scores and cull some of the best for remastering and release on CD. It was, by his own admission, an exhilarating and maddening experience. Many of Stalling’s scores are so frenetic and extreme that, after listening to a couple of hours' worth, Wilner and Zorn would both end up screaming in the control room.

Nevertheless, they persevered and assembled two full volumes of Stalling’s greatest hits, the first released in 1990. So excited was I at the prospect of getting to hear some of that exhilaratingly anarchic music, that when the first disc was released, it caused me to break my hold-out against CDs. Having amassed a fairly sizable record collection by the late ‘80s, I really resisted the CD. I could read the writing on the wall – and it was binary – but I waiting as long as I possibly could before reluctantly diving across the digital divide. And it was this album that did it for me. It was the first album that I wanted that didn’t also have a vinyl counterpart and, unable to resist, I picked it up the day it was released, even though I didn’t have a CD player, and wouldn’t for almost a year.

The first volume, which is my favorite, contains a few full scores and a few compilations of scores (being that Stalling used such a dramatic cut-and-paste aesthetic anyway, smashing material from many different cartoons together works just as well as – and is virtually indistinguishable from – individual scores). But they also include a few tantalizing peaks behind the curtain by including snippets from recording sessions that show the musicians struggling to get the right level of frantic into their performances. I always thought the Warner Brothers Orchestra must’ve loved the days when they were recording Stalling’s scores. Most of the other days of the week, they’d be churning out syrupy love themes, or murky, noiry scores, and I can’t help but think they must’ve enjoyed the chance to let their hair down and go wild. But, it must’ve also been quite a workout. Keeping track of those sudden mood and tempo changes must have been quite a task, and it’s enjoyable listening to the conductor (I believe that would be Milt Franklyn) try to get his crew up to ramming speed.

Powerhouse is a collage piece, including cuts from several different cartoons. The Powerhouse theme is based on a Raymond Scott piece, and is one of Stalling’s favorite motifs. For Stalling, any and all music was fair game, and he’d be just as likely to throw jazz and classical together with some quotes from pop tunes of the day to run as commentary (although he figured that about 80% of every score of his was original), but Raymond Scott, the eccentric composer and electrical engineer and early electronic music enthusiast, was one of his favorites to quote.

As enjoyable as the Stalling compilations are, however, they are taxing to listen to. They’re more like dessert than a main course – a little goes a long way. Listen to the entire disc in one sitting and you’ll end up like Hal Wilner and John Zorn, screaming in your own control room.