An Ode To ​“The Simpsons”

I sat on the stage under the lights at Best Video Film and Cultural Center, and we were playing a song about prostitution. Drummer Mike Paolucci had just started up the beat. Singer Anne Rhodes was swinging it. Guitarist Chris Cretella, accordionist Adam Matlock, cellist Nathan Bontrager, and bassist Mike Tepper fell in. I was waiting for my part. In one hand I had my violin, and in the other I had a bicycle horn.

The song was ​“We Put the Spring in Springfield,” and we — Dr. Caterwaul’s Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps — were performing 23 songs from the animated series The Simpsons, a year of planning and one blizzard later.

Eat These Shorts

Created by cartoonist Matt Groening, The Simpsons began life in 1987 as a series of animated shorts on The Tracy Ullman Show, a comedy on Fox Broadcasting Company, itself then only a year old. It got its own time slot in 1989 and found its audience relatively quickly. For the new network, the show was a hit. And then, for a stretch of about a decade, The Simpsons became what many consider to be the sharpest, funniest, and most incisive show on TV.

For the three or four people reading this who may not have ever seen it, The Simpsons revolves around a somewhat dysfunctional family — father and mother Homer and Marge, sisters Lisa and Maggie, and brother Bart — who live in a quintessential American town named Springfield. The I‑love-you-so-much-but-I-can’t‑stand-you dynamic inside the family fueled the show from the beginning. But as time went on, thanks to an extremely talented writing crew, an equally gifted bunch of actors, and the sarcasm and generosity built into Groening’s original vision, the show developed a small army of supporting characters. There are Bart’s and Lisa’s classmates at school, not to mention the adults who worked there. Homer’s fellow employees at the nuclear power plant where he works, and his usually heartless boss. The barflies at the place where Homer unwinds after work. The family’s friends and neighbors. The man who works at the convenience store.

The show also dug into all its characters. It was a tenet of the show that it be stuck in an eternal present. The characters have never aged (though a couple have died). But they have changed, become deeper and richer. They have given the actors who voice them literally the roles of their careers. And for all the zaniness that happens on the show — it is, after all, an animated series — it’s that vast cast of characters that has kept people watching, and that have turned The Simpsons into something like Our Town, except much funnier, and with more doughnuts, aliens, and snake-eating gorillas.

The place of The Simpsons in popular culture is assured, but more specifically, it left an indelible mark on those of us who grew up with the show. It shaped the sense of humor of an entire generation (e.g., mine), and not only with its innumerable catch phrases, but for its broader sensibility, a cockeyed way of looking at the world that questions authority, gleefully tears down popular myths, slaughters sacred cows, punctures ego, mocks hypocrisy, and loves to laugh at pratfalls — but at its heart is never actually mean, and is sometimes deeply humane. That worldview has aged well. You could say it’s more relevant than ever.

And the show has terrific music.

Putting The Spring In Springfield

The Simpsons theme song was composed by Danny Elfman, who made his mark scoring Tim Burton’s movies and has since had one of the most successful composition careers in Hollywood. The Simpsons theme is still one of his best, a kind of kitchen sink of his most fun compositional ideas that also announces to the world that this is the sort of show on which anything can happen.

But the vast bulk of the musical work on The Simpsons was written by Alf Clausen, who when he came to The Simpsons in 1990 had already been doing music for TV and film since the 1970s. If you’re wondering who wrote all those songs you love so much from The Simpsons — to say nothing of all the incidental music that keeps the action rolling — it’s Clausen.

And for a few years, Dr. Caterwaul’s Cadre of Clairvoyant Claptraps — the New Haven-based band that I helped start back in 2010 — had wanted to try to do a whole night of it.

Since the beginning, we’ve made a point of never sticking to one genre for long. Often we switch genres from song to song, from American folk to Ethiopian jazz to Latin American pop. But over the years, we developed a wish list of sets in which we’d stick to one thing, and we’ve been working our way through them. We’ve done sets of all Kurt Weill songs. The music of film composers Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone. We did music from the show Twin Peaks, composed by Angelo Badalamenti. But the music from The Simpsons was always out there, and this year, we finally got around to it.

The show was originally scheduled for early January, and we got to work. First we split up arranging duties. Cretella emerged with a full score for the theme song, arranged for our group. Matlock and Bontrager produced piano scores and lead sheets for a few other songs. I produced some sloppy and error-ridden lead sheets for others. And we bought several more scores that gave us what we needed to get the job done.

We scheduled a show at Best Video — which has been more than kind enough to host our previous shows like this — and set aside two evenings in January right before to figure everything out. The first thing we discovered is that there were a lot of songs to cover, from the theme, to the bordello hit ​“We Put The Spring in Springfield,” to the musicals based on A Streetcar Named Desire and Planet of the Apes, the latter of which was probably the most requested when we told people what we were planning.

The second thing, though, was to realize just how much the music of The Simpsons — when it wasn’t a direct parody of, say, Falco’s ​“Rock Me Amadeus” or ​“Talkin’ Baseball” or the theme song from the popular sitcom Cheers — was rooted in Tin Pan Alley and the American Songbook. In so many songs, there were the same melodic moves, the same chord progressions. It was Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart. No wonder the songs from The Simpsons had inserted themselves into America’s pop culture so easily.

And at the same time, there was room for musical mayhem that the songs of the American Songbook would never allow. We’re a band that likes musical mayhem. As it turns out, so does Clausen. The ​“Itchy and Scratchy” theme may seem like a silly cartoon throwaway, but on the page, it’s a blistering exercise in extreme chromatic runs and hairpin tempo changes, a building full of energy compressed and compacted into something the size of a golf ball that explodes at the end. And it’s kind of hysterical.

For two days the living room of my house was a pile of music stands, instruments, amplifiers, and microphones. When we were all in there — and for this show, there were seven of us — only a couple of us could really get out. In the first couple runs through the songs, it was hard to get through them without dissolving into laughter. But we got it together.

Then there was an enormous blizzard the day of the show and we had to cancel it. We refunded the tickets we’d sold already and stayed in to lick our wounds and play a game of Scrabble in which we made up words and their definitions. Somehow there was scoring involved. I don’t quite remember how that worked.

Bontrager now divides his time between the U.S. and Europe, so we had to wait until he got back into town. We rescheduled for July. This week, we got together for two more nights and relearned — in some cases, just dusted off — the songs. Hank Hoffman at Best Video told us we’d sold a few advance tickets and people around told us they were coming (and made more requests).

But still, one of the small anxieties of being a working musician is wondering whether anyone will show up. We may love the music from The Simpsons, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anyone else does. And we love playing that music, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to hear us do it. The world owes us nothing in this regard. We played some shows to full houses and others to nearly empty rooms. So we planned to arrive before 7 p.m. at Best Video, and crossed our fingers.

The Extra Arms On Vishnu

As it turned out, it was a good night. Best Video sold half its seats beforehand and more people arrived. The crowd was multigenerational. Parents brought their kids. They filled the room in, from the tables in the back to the front rows.

“We have 40 minutes to complete this show before Danny Elfman comes after us,” Bontrager joked.

The theme song, which Cretella had scored, went well. We moved on to ​“We Put the Spring in Springfield.” I got the bicycle horn in the right place, but flubbed a favorite line of mine from Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, who owns the Kwik-E-Mart in Springfield (Nahasapeemapetilon describes the charm of the town’s bordello as ​“the extra arms on Vishnu”).

But the crowd cheered, and we settled in, moving through our 23-song set in about an hour. We hit ​“The Amendment Song,” an extremely cynical take on lawmaking in the style of a Schoolhouse Rock song. It aired in 1996. As Matlock put it, it’s ​“one of those satires that’s getting less funny by the way.”

But still funny. Or as an audience member put it, ​“that was a really cromulent song.”

We got to the Michael Jackson-penned song ​“Lisa, It’s Your Birthday,” and the audience kept down the beat. People began to haul out their favorite lines (“My cat’s breath smells like cat food.” ​“Our manager said for you to shut up.”) When we got to the barbershop quartet number, ​“Baby on Board,” by the fictional band the Be Sharps, the audience snapped along with us. We were all together.

Just before we did the Music Man-inspired ​“Monorail Song,” in which a huckster convinced the town of Springfield to, in fact, build a monorail, I recalled a memory of being in Memphis and riding just such a one-rail conveyance out to Mud Island, out on the Mississippi River. My family and I were in the car with another family. It was quiet as the car got moving. Then, unable to contain myself, I burst out with it.

“Monorail!” I sang, my arms out, jazz hands fluttering.

The other family looked up and the other father locked eyes with me.

“You just said what we were all thinking,” he said.

I told that story to the crowd. When we did the song, everyone sang along.

Karen Ponzio contributed reporting.