Ross Bagdasarian was an Armenian-American grape farmer who moved his family to Hollywood with big acting dreams. Instead, he became one of the biggest music phenomenons of the 1960s, earning Grammys, the admiration of The Beatles and millions of fans charmed by his high-pitched rodent singing trio.
In every interview he ever gave, singer-songwriter Ross Bagdasarian took sole credit not only for his 1958 holiday hit “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late),” but also for all the musical performances by the rodent trio — Alvin, Simon and Theodore — that came before his death in 1972. But as the high-pitched phenom exploded, spawning dozens of albums, a TV series and multiple films, the songwriter called in ringers — who’ve been silent until now about this quirky chapter in their careers.
Bagdasarian, a frustrated actor (Alfred Hitchcock put him at the piano in Rear Window) and sometime songwriter (he co-wrote the catchy 1951 tune “Come on-a My House,” made popular by Rosemary Clooney) who was then in his 40s, experimented with a reel-to-reel tape recorder to re-create the sound technique that MGM had used to produce The Wizard of Oz‘s Munchkin voices 20 years earlier. In short, the process involves recording a voice at half-speed and playing it back at normal speed, which raises the pitch (the trick: a laboriously slow delivery of the lyrics).
The result achieved a wacky sound he managed to sell to the then-struggling Liberty Records, which gambled on the gimmicky song he called “The Witch Doctor.” Whatever spell it cast was a potent one: Listeners loved the simple duet to the tune of 5 million records sold in a matter of weeks. Appearances by Bagdasarian on TV’s American Bandstand and The Ed Sullivan Show followed. “The Witch Doctor” also resuscitated Liberty Records, and they wanted more.
“I decided to try for a Christmas song,” Bagdasarian explained to Teen magazine in 1960. “I thought of a melody on my way to work and I went to the studio and whistled it into a tape machine so that it wouldn’t be forgotten. Since I can’t read or write music, I whistle into tape machines.
“Then I wrote the words and decided the singers should be animals or maybe even insects. I don’t know why, but that’s what I decided.”
He nixed the concept of singing mice or rabbits and even butterflies to finally settle on chipmunks, which he named after Liberty Records executives Alvin Bennett, Simon Waronker and Theodore “Ted” Keep.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter