Danny Elfman released a new solo album earlier this month, Big Mess, so I thought I'd comb through his band Oingo Boingo's back catalog. Oingo Boingo is one of those bands I'd always meant to explore more -- "Dead Man's Party" is one of my favorite modern rock songs of the '80s and it bummed me out that it was one of the songs that I used to hear regularly on WHFS that's kind of disappeared from airwaves since the '90s. My college roommate Mike was listening to a lot of Only A Lad when I lived with him and that's a pretty warped, entertaining little record, but I'm glad I finally checked out the others.
Oingo Boingo deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. On The Outside
2. Controller
3. Capitalism
4. Wild Sex (In The Working Class)
5. Insects
6. Running On A Treadmill
7. Who Do You Want To Be
8. Dead Or Alive
9. Cry Of The Vatos
10. It Only Makes Me Laugh
11. The Last Time
12. Heard Somebody Cry
13. No One Lives Forever
14. Help Me
15. My Life
16. We Close Our Eyes
17. Goodbye, Goodbye (live)
18. Violent Love (live)
19. Try To Believe
20. Lost Like This
21. Ain't This The Life (live)
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Only A Lad (1981)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from Nothing To Fear (1982)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from Good For Your Soul (1983)
Tracks 10 and 11 from So-Lo (1984)
Tracks 12, 13 and 14 from Dead Man's Party (1985)
Tracks 15 and 16 from Boi-ngo (1987)
Tracks 17 and 18 from Boingo Alive (1988)
Track 19 from Dark At The End Of The Tunnel (1990)
Track 20 from Boingo (1994)
Track 21 from Farewell: Live From The Universal Ampitheatre, Halloween 1995 (1996)
For a long time Devo and Oingo Boingo have been kind of informally twinned in my mind. Growing up it seemed like every film score or TV theme I liked enough to take note of the composer was either by Danny Elfman or Mark Mothersbaugh. And besides both band's frontmen becoming big movie score guys, both bands obviously have a certain twitchy, darkly satirical new wave aesthetic, Oingo Boingo sort of leaning more towards horror to Devo's sci-fi bent. And both acts sort of stumbled into becoming major label rock bandsd after starting out as the musical outpost of a sort of more avant garde art/media project -- the short film The Truth About De-Evolution in Devo's case, and the theatre troupe The Mystic Knights of The Oingo Boingo founded by Richard Elfman, which slowly evolved into a rock group led by his little brother.
I don't want to compare Oingo Boingo too much to another somewhat more famous act, though, because they were a wonderfully unique band in their own right. Their combination of a horn section playing ska and a band playing rock songs on electric guitars wound up being sort of a unique precursor to the ska punk that would become hugely popular a decade later (a 2005 Oingo Boingo tribute album featured Reel Big Fish and The Aquabats).
Ironically, by the time that ska punk wave was on the horizon, Oingo Boingo had dropped both the horn section and the first half of their name for their final studio album, and their only album as simply Boingo, in 1994. It's not a bad record, or a grunge bandwagon thing at all, and it's interesting to hear a more guitar-driven sound from them with longer, more epic songs. But it's certainly a classic example of a band that had a place in the '80s alternative landscape getting a little lost in the '90s shuffle. Elfman made it right on the heels of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is at this point by far his most famous work as a singer, so it seems kind of a shame that the band were never able to capitalize on that, and that it took him 25 years to return to vocal music with this new album.
The 1984 album So-Lo was credited to Danny Elfman, but he's backed by members of Oingo Boingo throughout the album and he soon persuaded MCA, who'd signed him as a solo artist, to include the band in his contract, and they performed a couple songs from So-Lo on Boingo Alive. So it's kinda been folded into the band's discography, much in the same way the sole Difford & Tilbrook album is now considered a Squeeze album. Elfman revisited two songs from Nothing To Fear recently as a solo artist -- he re-recorded "Insects" for Big Mess and uploaded a performance of "Running On A Treadmill" to Instagram last year.
Boingo Alive is a 'live in the studio' record with no audience, so it really just feels like a chance for a band of skilled perfectionists trying to improve on the previous studio recordings of songs. Farewell, however, was recorded at their final shows in 1995, including a 4-hour set on Halloween, and is a more traditional live album, and an excellent one. And both live records feature a few non-album tracks, outtakes and b-sides and soundtrack work. In addition to Danny Elfman's many film scores, Oingo Boingo's music made it into quite a lot of movies. Obviously their biggest hit is the title song for Weird Science, and they performed "Dead Man's Party" in Back To School. But there was also "Goodbye, Goodbye" in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, "Wild Sex (In The Working Class)" in Sixteen Candles, "Who Do You Want To Be" in Bachelor Party, and "Violent Love" in The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.
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