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A conversation with Jim Smith, Cartoonist/Musician
by Michelle Klein-Häss
Ok...let's drop all pretense of journalistic detachment here. In
writing about Jim Smith, one of the founders of the Spumco cartoon
studio, I am writing about a person who has become more than a mere
friend...he's family now. My husband is in a band with him, FreeHead,
a project that will be discussed in the second part of this article.
(Note: as of 5/5/1996, FreeHead has disbanded.--Webkeeper)
When I met John Kricfalusi for the first time, I was hanging out
with Jim at Spumco. Jim was working on model sheets for characters
for the He-Hog The Atomic Pig concept, and I was thoroughly
entertained just watching him draw. Suddenly, John K., unmistakeable
with his silver hair and trademark almond-shaped glasses, darted into
the room. Jim nudged me with his elbow. "Hey John, I'd like you to
meet my friend Michelle Häss...she's the wife of the bassist in my new
band."
I went bright red, and despite my nervousness managed to say, "Uh,
hi John...good to meet you...I've been a fan of yours for years and
I really enjoyed Ren &Stimpy...I think you've done some great
stuff..."
Wordlessly, John pointed at Jim. John then said, in a very quiet
voice, "See this guy? I couldn't have done anything without him."
Jim hid his face in mock embarrassment. John smiled a faint smile
then quickly walked away.
From the first project that they worked together on, John and Jim
have been a very strong team. The artistic success of such endeavors
as Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures and Ren &Stimpy owes as much to
Jim's sense of design as well as John K.'s inventive, Orson Welles-
with-a-pencil cartoon auteurism. During the 3 1/2 years that Spumco
formulated and produced the original Ren & Stimpy Show, it was Jim
who designed a lot of the weird environments and bizarre situations
that Ren Hoek and Stimpson J. Cat found themselves in. He even did
some voice work on the show, bringing to life such characters as the
Dogcatcher, (Big House Blues) Sheriff Abner, (Out West) and even the
President of the United States. (Powdered Toast Man) And it was his
guitar work you heard at the beginning and end of every R&S episode,
even the ones made after Spumco got kicked off their own show by
Nickelodeon.
Now Jim is one of the primary artists on Spumco Comic Book, (tm
Spumco, Inc.) a joint venture between Spumco and Marvel Comics. In the
pages of Comic Book, stories are told visually, without much dialogue.
It's a lot like looking at one of Spumco's R&S storyboards...the tale
is told by the expressions and actions of the characters primarily.
It's a kind of storytelling rarely seen in comics, and even rarer in
modern-day animation. But once upon a time, when people like Avery and
Clampett and Fleischer and Iwerks were making cartoons for studios like
Warner Bros., MGM, The Fleischer Studio and Disney, this was the prime
means of expression. Dialogue would be there to enhance the visuals,
not the other way around.
"After doing R&S I wasn't nearly as excited about doing a comic book
as opposed to animation...I wanted to get back into making cartoons.
But now that we're into it...I just got finished penciling a story for
the third issue...I'm really digging it. We have to prove ourselves
all over again, this time in a new medium. But it's cool.
"Part of our philosophy regarding the comic book is that it's got to
be convincing. We want to involve people in the comic book, to make it
convincing at the same time it's cartoony. It seems that in a lot of
cases comics have lost their way...gotten lost in the art without
paying attention to story. Either characters get so stylized it's hard
to tell what they are, or they're so realistic and so detailed they
give you a headache...sensory overload. What we're trying to do is to
bring the feel of our animation into the comic book, to translate that
aesthetic to the printed page."
The team working on Spumco Comic Book is a lot smaller than that which
was involved in R&S, but includes some of the major players. John K.
actually did some penciling on the first few issues, and also Vincent
Waller and Mike Fontanelli. Waller also did some inking of the first
few issues, as did Matt Brundage. Rick Altergott is the colorist,
painting the pages by computer. Altergott is known in alternative
comic circles for his "Doofus" comic books.
Comics and cartoons were in Jim's blood since childhood. By the time
Jim was in the seventh grade, he was making comic books of his own for
sale to friends.
"Yeah, we'd just take these big sheets of newsprint [paper] and
draw these comic books...we'd copy Marvel Comics and Superman, write
our own stories to them, and go sell them to friends. At that point, I
was real sure that I wanted to do that for a living...be a comic book
artist."
Even during a long period of time when Jim was a professional
musician, playing guitar on the bar-band and lounge circuit in the
South in the 1970s, he continued to draw and sketch. Finally it got
to a point when the business aspects of being a professional musician
became too onerous, and he went back to his first love: art, especial-
ly as it applied to animation.
"Around 1978 or so, I got this job working at this small animation studio in Houston. My brother Doyle (who's also at Spumco now)
had gotten into animation in college, and I saw what he was doing and
absolutely fell in love. I had to do that. I mean, it was primarily
for industrial clients, but it was animation regardless and I was
hooked....Later, I started working for this firm in Dallas that was
doing stuff for this studio out in LA...Henry Porch, who's now over
here at Spumco doing sound and musical direction, got me the job...he
was a friend of Doyle's. It eventually dried up...and it became obvious that I'd have to come out here to LA to really make a stab at it."
It cost him his marriage and security, but in 1985 Jim pulled up
stakes and moved to Los Angeles, where cartoonists' lives are cheap
and cels are expensive. He suffered working at places like Ruby-Spears
and Marvel Animation making typical Saturday morning cartoons until
the enigmatic Mr. Porch showed up in his life yet again to introduce
him to John K., who was then working with animation legend Ralph
Bakshi.
Jim stuck around with John K., assisting on practically every
cartoon John did from then on, and eventually helped to found Spumco
in 1989. The office he now calls his own at Spumco once was the extent
of the budding studio's premises, comfortable for one person but no
doubt cramped for the five people who worked there: Jim, John K.,
Henry Porch, Lynne Naylor and Bob Camp. Soon after the founding of the
company, Nickelodeon decided to pick up R&S.
Working on R&S was certainly hard towards the end, when creating a
cartoon became an exercise in corporate politics. But Jim still has
fond memories of the show.
"At the time we were doing the show, we were in such a panic to get
things done that we didn't have time to enjoy it, but looking back
on it, it was the best chance yet that we've had to really do cartoons
the way we wanted to. It was great while it lasted."
Many of the Spumco-era R&S episodes owe a great deal to Jim's
participation.
"I only wrote one of the cartoons myself, (I think he was referring
to Untamed World aka Nature Show...--.\\<-H--) but many of the
premises I had a hand in, like (Commander Hoek & Cadet Stimpy episodes
such as) Space Madness, the Pilot (Big House Blues) and so on. Since
everything was written on the storyboard, whenever I did a storyboard
I'd often throw in a lot of my ideas.
"The Nature Show (Untamed World) episode and Space Madness episode
were perhaps my favorites, because I had a lot to do with them. With
the Nature Show, we really had to do a lot of homework on the
characters...we weren't about to let anything get past us, because the
audience won't let you get anything past them. We did a lot of
combining of animals to come up with the ones you see. In the case
of the Frilled Ren for example, there are two different lizards that
we modeled it after: the desert lizard that picks its legs up one at a
time to keep them from getting too hot, and the frilled lizard which
runs on its hind legs."
As for future Spumco plans, the company that brought you R&S is still
trying to get another animated cartoon series going. There have been
some disappointments in that realm, including the abrupt 11th hour red
light given to He Hog The Atomic Pig by USA Network just as intensive
pre-production work had commenced. At present, however, there seem to
be a few possibilities just over the horizon. Jim spoke of promising
negotiations with the Fox network, home of the creator-driven and
creator-owned show The Tick, and which took the first chance in a long
time on prime time animation back in 1990 with The Simpsons. It would
seem as if a Fox/Spumco alliance would be a good fit. But the one
thing that Jim and the rest of the Spumco crew long to do is
theatrical animation...specifically to bring back the animated short.
"We're trying to bring cartoons back to where they really belong... on a big screen, right before the feature. We want to take our
characters Jimmy The Hapless Boy and George Liquor and actually produce shorts featuring them. Sometime in the 1960s, the theatre owners
decided that running a cartoon before the feature movie took away too
much potential business, so by eliminating the cartoon, they could
cram one more showing of the movie into the day. And it also allowed
them to make room for the damn LA Times commercial, too!"
But what about the Roger Rabbit shorts? Many people went in to
see "Honey, I Shrunk(Blew Up) The Kid(s)" because of the shorts...some
even walked out afterwards, not bothering to see the feature. And what
about the animation anthology shows that pack hungry animation fanatics in to see, in essence, a collection of shorts?
"Yeah, no doubt people are hungry for real animation. We know
that. The studios sorta know that. But the real resistance comes from
the theatre owners.
"I'd love to do feature animation, but that looks like that's way into
the future. Unless some cool person decides to drop a whole ton of
money on us, I don't see that happening any time soon. I really want
to get a crack at doing theatrical shorts. I really want to see some
way of doing that. It would take years of training to get to a point
where we could even think of doing features...it takes long years of
training a crew to do that. And the shorts are the way to do it...look
at how long Disney did shorts up until they did Snow White."
In the concluding half of this interview, Jim will be speaking about
his other artistic pursuit: music.
A conversation with Jim Smith, Musician/Cartoonist
by Michelle Klein-Häss
In the first part of this article, we concentrated on Jim Smith in his
role as one of the two remaining original Big Shots at the Spumco
cartoon studio. But something that a lot of animation fans don't know
about Jim is that he's also a longtime musician who worked
professionally beginning in his teens and continuing through the early
part of his adulthood.
It was "Dog Pound Hop," the unmistakeable guitar raveup which is heard
at the beginning of each episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show, which gave
the first hint of Jim's talents as a musician. Just as during his time
as a working musician he kept up with his drawing, so did Jim keep
playing even when he was working in the Saturday Morning animation
factories. And once Spumco was formed in 1989, he finally got a new
outlet for his talents with the in-house band The Screamin'
Lederhosen.
And once he had begun playing seriously again, even the breakup of the
Lederhosen in the wake of the Nickelodeon takeover of R&S didn't faze
him. A few months later, Jim was back, playing in a new band formed
with two people who weren't even involved in the animation industry,
but had been longtime fans of R&S. The band eventually got a name:
FreeHead.
And a free head -- an open mind -- is really what is needed to
appreciate this band's eclecticism. Jim's foundations as a guitarist
were forged in the Country and Blues music he grew up with in his
native Texas. And of course, Rock N' Roll was a prime influence, not
a surprise considering that he was born in the same Texas town which
produced Buddy Holly.
His bandmates, M. Segal and Richie Häss, also contribute very diverse
influences to this band. Both Segal and Hass played in two separate
bands which both recorded on SST Records, the alternative label
founded by members of Black Flag and which was the first home for such
influential groups as Soundgarden, The Meat Puppets, fIREHOSE, The
Screaming Trees, The Leaving Trains and SWA. M. Segal is also a master
hand percussionist who studied with some of the finest Latin
percussionists to immigrate to this country. He also plays a pretty
intense blues harmonica as well as providing the rock-solid drumming
which anchors FreeHead's music. Richie Häss is not only a fine
bassist, (I would think so even if I wasn't married to the dude!) a
journeyman keyboardist, and perhaps the only Rock N' Roll mallet
percussionist the world has ever known.
From M. Segal, there are Latin Jazz, Blues, straightahead Rock and
Progressive influences. And Richie Hass brings Pop, Punk, Funk
and experimental musical influences to the band. All told, there is
a variety of influences that are rarely seen anywhere else except
in FreeHead's live performances and on their CD, "First Head." The
music pulls in so many different ways, you almost think you're
listening to a compilation album...yet there is enough of a cohesive
sound to the band which tells you that this is the work of three
very remarkable musicians.
All three members of the band write songs, and all three sing. In
previous ensembles that Jim had been involved in, he never really
got the chance to do either. In FreeHead, however, he's made his mark
as a songwriter and vocalist.
Like many young men of his era, he observed the kind of effect
that Beatlemania was having on the opposite sex, and decided that he'd
have better luck getting to know young females if he played guitar.
"I got my first guitar sometime around 1965. I saw how girls reacted
to the Beatles, and figured that was a way of getting girls. I mean,
there I was in 3rd grade, and these four guys put Beatle wigs on and
got up in front of the class and mimed to a Beatles record. All the
little girls in the class were screaming, man...they got all excited
despite the fact that these were only four third-grade boys lip
synching. I was amazed by that. Shortly thereafter, I got my guitar."
But it was the music of the Beatles and other bands of that era which
kept Jim going.
"I heard "Daytripper" and that just about blew my mind. That guitar
riff...it sounded so good to me. I also spent a lot of time listening
to the Ventures...I suppose their influence kinda rubbed off on me.
Can't shake that...."
But along the way, Jim became enamored of the instrument itself,
eventually deciding on a career as a professional musician. Despite
torturous years of slogging it out in bar bands and even the hotel
lounge circuit during the 1970s, he pressed on. By 1978, however, the
business aspects of music became too much for him and he packed it in
to start working in the animation industry. But even though he was not
active professionally as a musician, Jim kept his chops up.
Around the time that R&S got into full production, Jim got together with fellow Spumco artist Chris Reccardi, and with studio
handyman Scott Huml the two founded the band The Screamin' Lederhosen,
which was the first band he had put together since the old days in
Texas.
"We actually met on Beany & Cecil. During lunch breaks, Chris and
I would get together and jam...there were always guitars and basses
around the studio and we'd just bang away...then everyone heard us and
we began getting requests to play parties. Then Chris had gotten in
touch with this drummer friend of his from New York, Scott, and the
band was formed just in time to do the music for the pilot episode of
R&S, "Big House Blues."
The Lederhosen played several gigs around Los Angeles, and even cut a
demo before late 1992, when the Lederhosen broke up in the wake of
Spumco's firing by Nickelodeon. There was a second version of the band
formed without Jim at Games Animation, and they are notorious for
having recorded two Ren & Stimpy-related albums, "You Eediot" and
"Crock O' Christmas." Without Jim's guitar talents and without the
guidance of John Kricfalusi, both albums were creative disasters in
this reporter's opinion. Jim can't help but agree.
"The music wasn't broke, but fuck if they didn't go back and fix
it anyway!" Jim said with a tone that was half angry and half wistful.
"I mean, they could have released some well-recorded, well-performed
versions of the old stuff, like "Dog Pound," but they went and com-
pletely re-did it. It sounds like hell now. I don't understand why..."
The breakup of the Lederhosen left Jim without a musical outlet. Then
in June of 1993 some fans of both his music and his art at Single
Bullet Productions, a concert promotion company, contacted him. They
were working on putting together a benefit concert for a local HIV
support group.
Since he was no longer a part of the old band, one of the people
in the company suggested that perhaps he'd like to jam with a rhythm
section which had been playing together for a year previous: Häss
and Segal. Deciding that it was potentially too good to be just a
one-off thing, the three jointly decided to work intensely to forge
the new alliance into a real band.
About a year and a half has passed between the formation of FreeHead
and the present, and now the band has its own CD, "First Head" out on
their own Poodle Puddle Records label. Jim has never had as much input
in a given band than he has had with FreeHead, and that makes him very
happy.
"At the time that I was with the Lederhosen, things were so crazy at
Spumco that I really didn't have time to contribute anything of
substance creatively with that band. Now that we've hit a little bit
of a lull here, being able to actually write songs and play live with
FreeHead is very satisfying."
But don't ask Jim to choose between his work as a cartoonist and his
work as a musician...to Jim, both are two halves of a single whole.
"I don't place the music over the art, nor the art over the music.
I've been doing both since I was a kid, and both are extremely
important to me....I'd rather not side with one over the other. I'd
like to see the music take off, but cartooning is something that I
love so much...I don't want to let that go. For me, being a musician
and being a cartoonist are inseparable. I want to be known equally for
both."
The first part of this article has never before been published. The second part was published on Norman Sippel's now-defunct FreeHead home page. Both articles originated in an earlier article, written in late August 1993, and was published in Animato! Magazine #28 in Spring 1994. This revamped version was done in Spring, 1995. If you want to inquire about ordering the FreeHead CD, which is still available despite the breakup, email Richie Häss at rhass@2cowherd.net.
For those who'd like an update, since after all the article's now 2 years old, here's another interview with Jim Smith, on the official Spumco website.
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Page last updated 1/15/1998
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