Today’s article was written by Tough Pigs pal Grant Harding. Thanks for sharing your remarkable research, Grant!
In a 2022 episode of Tough Pigs’ Fraggle Talk podcast, Muppet performer Dave Goelz and our own Joe Hennes were talking, naturally, about Fraggle music.
As many Tough Pigs readers know, the songs for Fraggle Rock were co-written by composer Philip Balsam (RIP) and lyricist Dennis Lee. On the podcast, Dave related that all Fraggle songs had first existed as “demo” versions sung by Phil, and recorded on cassette tapes that were presented to the rest of the production team. Even when they were just Phil with his guitar, Dave said, every song sounded great. This prompted Joe to wonder out loud: Do those audio cassettes still exist?
Well, they do, and I found them.
Some of them, anyway. The ones I found are in the Dennis Lee Papers, which are archived at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto. While chasing leads for Muppet Wiki, I had noticed that the online catalogue for the archive contains such tantalizing phrases as “tapes of songs by DL with music by P. Balsam,” and “Demos, for early shows.” This certainly seemed promising! So the next time I went to Toronto (a five-hour train ride away), I arranged to visit the library.
A rare book library doesn’t work like your local public library. All the material in question is stored in numbered boxes. A few days before you show up, you need to request the boxes you want to look through, and the librarians bring them to a reading room where you can, well, read.
It was still the height of Covid times, so the library was only open two days a week, and I was only allowed to be in the reading room for two hours (during which I was also speed-reading scripts for unproduced Fraggle Rock episodes and scanning storyboards from The Song of the Cloud Forest). The librarians had provided me with a Walkman (remember those?), which I used to listen to bits and pieces of the various tapes, making notes as to their content so that I knew what to ask them to digitize for me later.
Because yes indeed, there were tapes! I could hear Phil Balsam singing Fraggle songs, mostly from season one, but including two songs from season four. (Demo versions had once existed for every single Fraggle song, but these were the only ones that had found their way to the library’s collection.)
Some of the tapes contained songs that had been written for Fraggle Rock but never used. One included a “scratch” version that Phil recorded when he’d written the song’s melody but Dennis hadn’t yet written the words. (Scratch versions existed for every song too, but only this one survived.) One of the tapes even broke when I tried to play it, because it hadn’t been played in forty years! I was very apologetic, but the librarians told me not to worry, and they fixed it. A couple of the songs also featured a female vocalist whose identity is no longer known.
Some of the songs underwent changes between the demo versions and the versions we all know today. For example, the demo version of “Workin’” – the first song that Phil and Dennis ever wrote for the show – had Red working as a Pipebanger, Mokey harvesting “super berries” (whatever those are) and feeding them to baby Fraggles, and Boober dusting the caves.
Most notably, a beloved recurring character had a different name. On the demo tape, the Fraggle whom Mokey recruits to persuade everyone to stop eating Doozer buildings is named Convincing Jones.
As part of this whole process, I ended up contacting Dennis Lee himself, and he explained the reason for the name change. The episode was produced in 1982, only a few years after the notorious Jonestown Massacre, which was orchestrated by a highly convincing leader named Jim Jones. The echo was unintentional, but once the Fraggle team spotted it, they said, “Aaaa, we can’t call him that!” So Convincing Jones became Convincing John, and Dennis tweaked the lyrics accordingly. (“And all your troubles will be gone” sounds better than “And you’ll believe it in your bones” anyway.)
I even found one of the audition tapes that helped get Phil and Dennis the job. The two had written a number of songs together, but none that were aimed at children. So to show the Fraggle team what they could do, Dennis gave Phil a few of his books of children’s poetry (very well known here in Canada), and Phil set some of the poems to music. To my ear, “The Coming of Teddy Bears” is the track that sounds the most like Fraggle songs would eventually sound.
The proper audition would come later, when all the shortlisted songwriting candidates were given the script for the first episode produced (“The Thirty-Minute Work Week”) and asked to write a song (or possibly two) for it. The plan had been to use different songwriters for different episodes, but Dennis and Phil’s work was so good, they were hired as the exclusive songwriters for the series. (Contrary to rumors, “Follow Me” is not on the audition tape.)
You’ve read this far, so at long last:
Here for your listening pleasure are all the Fraggle Rock song demos in the library’s collection. Enjoy!
It’s very exciting to find something that no one else in the world has – and then to share it so that everyone in the world can have it.
My sincerest thanks go to Natalya Rattan (the Archivist who arranged my visit), Dave Pascoe (the Media Specialist who digitized the tapes), Dennis Lee (the lyricist), Carol Hall (Phil Balsam’s widow), and of course Muppet Wiki for hosting the files.
Click here to believe it in your bones on the Tough Pigs Discord!
by Grant Harding
