“Forbidden Planet: Main Titles (Overture)” composed by Louis and Bebe Barron.
“Forbidden Planet was a huge event in our neighborhood, made even larger because you could get in for free with a Quaker Oats proof of purchase coupon. Everybody went. When the movie was over we all walked out of the Port Theater into the bright light and familiar neighborhood sights, but we were changed.”
My dad was 10 when Forbidden Planet came out—a big-budget MGM sci-fi extravaganza based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which was one of the first movies to depict humans with enough technological sophistication to explore deep space (rather than having the extraterrestrials come to us). Just as important—and perhaps even more otherworldly—was the all-electronic soundtrack by husband and wife team Louis and Bebe Barron, also the first of its kind.
Louis built the electronic circuits himself and was in charge of recording the outcomes, which were unpredictable and unrepeatable as they required the circuits to overload and burn-out. Bebe was the composer, shaping music out of hours of recorded noise which she manipulated through tape delay, reverb, loops, collage, and other methods to create the bubbling sound environment of the film. They had worked together on John Cage’s early tape experiments; in fact, it was Cage himself who encouraged them to think of their work as music. Despite this they were banned from Oscar consideration due to a dispute with the American Federation of Musicians (perhaps due in part to insecurities about musicians being replaced by machines)—and a last-minute change to the credits replaced “Electronic Music” with “Electronic Tonalities” in a reversal of Cage’s earlier proclamation.
All of my dad’s art projects require some sort of homemade technology, so the Barron’s DIY constructions were right up his alley. Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet was another source of this compulsion, as my dad himself explains: “This began my mad scientist phase. I am still very much in that phase. I collected old radios including several short wave sets, mechanical items, motors, record players, army surplus, junk anything. These were all pressed into robot construction.” He later built a theremin, and after retiring to Longmont, CO he acquired a following of neighborhood kids as each Halloween he would don his Clara Rockmore T-shirt and play an impromptu concert for unsuspecting trick-or-treaters—the performance growing more atonal and raucous as the night wore on.
My dad’s love of electronic music also helped to counteract the dogmatic threat of my own teenage acousticism, which had me believing Bob Dylan’s electrification of the Newport Folk Festival was still a salient controversy in the early 90s.
The opening overture to Forbidden Planet is singularly thrilling as the MGM lions roar into a spacescape of sounds no one had ever heard before. It’s no wonder my dad was forever changed.
OUR LAST SONG…takes us to Africa