Chapter 20: When Disney Started to Rock
Excerpt from In the Service of the Mouse: A Memoir, by Jack Lindquist
Entertainment has always been a mainstay of the Disney resorts. Live shows, bands, dancers, walkaround shows, you name it! And up until the 1980s that music was pretty much what Walt would have been willing to be publicly heard listening to. That meant a lot of old-timey jazz, a lot of folk & country, and a lot of that ‘50s/’60s bubblegum pop like you’d hear from the Mouseketeers.
One thing you certainly didn’t hear was an electric guitar shredding power chords (that’s a thing, right?). So, when Bambi Moe from Disney Music came to us with a rock & roll band for the Space Mountain stage, we were understandably reluctant. But she and producer Mike Post brought us this group that was essentially
Kiss crossed with
Star Wars. At first, they didn’t even have a name set in stone yet (Starfire? SQWAD? Solar Flare? Space Jam?), but for whatever reason they settled eventually on the nonsense word
Halyx[1].
(Image source “cinemablend.com”)
This was in 1981, and George Lucas’s space opera had totally taken over the world.
Star Wars 2 [SIC] had just come out and was on everyone’s lips. And anything Sci-Fi you did would inevitably be compared to Star Wars. Even Ron Miller’s
The Black Hole, which was in production years before the Millennium Falcon took flight, was affected, becoming slightly less
The Poseidon Adventure in space and slightly more like
Star Wars! I guess that Bambi figured if you were going to get compared to
Star Wars anyway, you might as well just file off the serial numbers and make something
Star Wars in all but name!
Even so,
Halyx was weird. The lead singer Lora Mumford truly was talented, with a powerful but beautiful voice. She was also just that right mix of Girl Next Door and Rock & Roll, a “punk rock Snow White” as Mike put it. They dressed her up like space Pat Benatar. Her husband Thom Miller, meanwhile, dressed like a robot and played the keyboard from a converted maintenance cart that looked like a small space ship. They had a Chewbacca [SIC] playing bass, a little Yoda [SIC] playing bongos, and…you get the picture. We set them up to play at the Space Mountain stage in the Summer of ’81 and they built up a small but loyal following of mostly teenage fans.
As a professional “hype man”, to use the vernacular, people always ask me what it takes to become “famous”. What is the “secret” to breaking out? And the only honest answer that I can give is dumb luck. Be seen by the right people with the right connections at the right time. The truth is that some of the most talented musicians in the world can languish in obscurity for decades while some hack with three chords to his repertoire becomes an international superstar. And it is entirely possible if not likely that
Halyx might have played over the summer and sold some albums through Disney and largely went about their lives. But they got lucky: John Henson was a fan.
John was around 15 at the time and he and his sister Heather had the run of Disneyland as children of an executive, much like Dianne, Sharon, and Roy did back when it first opened. And back in ’81 there weren’t all that many options attractive to teens at Disney, but Space Mountain was one of them. John and Heather used to go to the
Halyx concerts and while neither was one of those “front row fanatics” dancing up front, they enjoyed the show. I think John may have had a crush on Lora and, at first, I thought that Heather wanted to
be Lora, but when Bambi took them backstage Heather, then-11 or so, mostly wanted to talk to the effects guys and see how the lights and pyrotechnics worked! A chip off of the old block there.
So, since John liked them, Jim checked them out. He and Ron had signed off on the band, who were completely off-brand for Disney at the time with their long hair and loud music (the band members used to get stopped by security for breaking the dress code!). I’m still a bit surprised to this day that they signed off on “Jail Bait”, but I digress. Jim checked out a show and agreed that Lora in particular had real talent and stage presence and that there was certainly a need for more teenage entertainment at Disney, which had a bad rap with the youth at the time. I went with him to the concert and noticed that the fans were so starved for
Halyx merchandise that they’d started making their own and sharing it with the band!
“These guys have potential,” Jim told Bambi and me. Bambi hoped that we could get Lora signed with a major label like Geffen rather than just distribute them like a novelty act under Disney[2], but Jim thought that Disney and
Halyx had a future together. When the summer concert season came to an end Jim, Bambi, and [Disney Records executive] Gary Krisel produced a couple of music videos which he played on a special Tomorrowland-inspired episode of
Disney’s World of Magic in the fall of ’81. The videos got a good deal of fan mail, and a nasty letter from George Lucas! Jim and George eventually worked out a deal behind the scenes where George got an interest in the sales and some limits on merchandise and spinoffs, even though they remained something that was not
Star Wars but their own universe. Lora and Thom even did the singing and keyboard work [for Sy Snootles] in
Star Wars 3 [SIC] as a sort of nod, and
Halyx posters have found their way into the background of Star Wars productions over the years, the text now in that made up Star Wars language [aurebesh][3].
(Image from Yahoo Music)
And so, Marty Sklar and I put together a team to build that new not-Star Wars world of
Halyx with the usual Disney attention to detail. Now the band were actually the rag-tag crew of the star runner “Halyx”, the fastest ship in the galaxy and shaped roughly like the double-arrow H that was the band logo, which ironically made it somewhat resemble the Tie fighters [SIC] the bad guys flew in
Star Wars. The crew was (naturally) on the run from the Vader-like Lord Thraal, dictator of the Galactic Dominion, whose menacing masked face would be projected upon clouds of steam above the band like an evil Great and Powerful Oz and make menacing threats. Since Mumford isn’t the most rock & roll or sci fi name, Lora was now Lora Ranger, captain of the Halyx and last of the “Galactic Rangers” who once maintained justice and freedom in the galaxy before the evil Dominion took over. She’d escaped from a Dominion prison planet along with Chewbacca-like Baharnoth (bassist Roger Freeland), whose noble savage race of aliens had been enslaved by the Dominion for manual labor, the mischievous and mystical alien Tolaras (percussionist/performer/acrobat Tony Coppola) and the smuggler and maintenance worker Brycas (Brian Lucas, the drummer, no relation to George). Meanwhile, Dominion assassin Brogo the Mad (lead guitarist Bruce Gowdy) was dispatched to find and terminate Lora, but betrayed the Dominion and joined forces with her, bringing with him deprogrammed Tactical Heavy Operations (Mechanized) cyborg #319 (THOM-319) (Keyboardist Thom Miller). Together, they and the rest of the “crew” (backup singers) live out their adventures in an ongoing “rock space opera”, forever on the run, undermining Lord Thraal and the Dominion.
Only the early ‘80s could have created
Halyx. And only Disney could have made them work. They were the right mix of odd, sincere, campy, and rebellious for the era, anti-establishment enough for the teens, innocent enough for their parents. We released an album under the Buena Vista Music label (with the infamous “Jail Bait” not included) and had a few concerts around the LA Basin. We produced some shirts and other simple merchandise. Soon enough, the combination of the videos playing on
World of Magic and then getting picked up by the fledgling MTV led to growing sales, so we pushed farther, distributing the album further, launching a seven-city US tour, and even having some tie-in comics made by Gold Key and some other merchandise (but no toys as a stipulation of the deal with George Lucas). The album went gold at one point with a growing, mostly teenage fan base.
The summer of ’82 saw overflowing performances at Disneyland and EPCOT Center. Then we sent them to Tokyo Disneyland for a week, and the Japanese went nuts[4].
Halyx was charting in the top ten! The “week in Tokyo” turned into a multi-city tour. By the summer of ’83 and the release of
Star Wars 3,
Halyx was on the verge of being a sensation in the US and Canada and
was a sensation in Japan. The second album sold well. We played them on the new Disney Channel and sent them to do interviews with the Today Show and the like. While they only once broke the top 40 in the US, they remained huge in Japan and remain popular there today. Toei even approached us in ’83 about licensing the characters for a cartoon! George put the kibosh on any US cartoons, but the Japanese cartoon was a hit, with many Japanese telling me that they “preferred Halyx to Star Wars” as kids.
Alas, all good things come to an end. Lora knew she had the makings of a real rock star, and soon broke up with both Thom and the band in 1984. The band lived on with a new lead singer, Michie Nakatani, the Shonen Knife bassist, the idea being that she was some kind of Dr. Who style regeneration by Lora Ranger. By this time
Halyx’s core audience was growing up and moving on and the whole “progressive rock” thing they were riding had slipped out of the public eye in favor of new forms of music. But with Michie filling in, they squeezed out another two albums and three good years touring in Japan before they called it quits.
Lora, meanwhile, changed her stage name to Lara Whitehall and formed a new all-girl band in the
Mötley Crüe mold called
Sunset Strip, which were occasionally called the “Sunset Strippers” due to their revealing outfits. We launched them under the new Hyperion Music label and they went on to moderate success in the US and Europe. She made “Jail Bait” into a #8 hit. When Lora and her bandmates got caught with some illegal substances in the car in 1987, inevitably the press caught on and we were deluged with less-than-clever headlines like “Disney Diva Down with Drugs”. Needless to say, this only helped her rock career. We managed to get them all back together in 2001 for a 20th Anniversary show, but that was essentially the end of the
Halyx story.
I remember
Halyx for a lot of reasons. They were the first Disney band to break out of the clean-cut mid-century mold. They were the first Disney musicians to make a real splash beyond the parks in over a decade. They were a “story band” with comics tie-ins and other merchandise. And they marked the first new music production from Disney Music that wasn’t a read-along record, movie sound track, or
Mickey Mouse Disco style novelty album in far too long to remember.
But mostly, I remember
Halyx because they were truly one of a kind, and a unique moment in Disney’s history.
[1] Ersatz Storm Trooper Helmet tip to
@Plateosaurus for bringing Halyx into the picture. And to Ken Perjurer at Defunctland for reminding us all about them.
[2] This is what they tried in our timeline. Lora initially was signed by Warner Music with a big advance, but they never pulled the trigger and she got frustrated and left LA, abandoning the music scene.
[3] As I see it Lucas wouldn’t be too keen on canonizing someone else’s vision into his world, but he’d likely agree to some Easter eggs for the fans.
[4]
@nick_crenshaw82 called it!
