If you’ve been to Disney World or Disneyland or Tokyo Disneyland or Disneyland Paris then
there’s a good chance that you’ve, at some point, experienced the Main Street Electrical
Parade.
A version of the parade has run over in California for a combined thirty-five years out of the
resort’s 65-year history.
In Florida, it ran for 14 years before coming back in 1999 and running for another two years,
before coming back again in 2010 and running for six more years after that.
And in Tokyo and Paris, it ran for just over a decade in the 80s and 90s.
The result is that the soundtrack for the parade is one of the most iconic at the Disney
Parks, second only to maybe “ it’s a small world”.
Did you know that the song behind the parade wasn’t made by Disney, had nothing to do
with Disney when it was made and that the person who did make it didn’t even know
Disney was using it for nearly a decade?
Jean-Jacques Perrey, born Jean Leroy in 1929, was a French musician and is considered by
many as one of the pioneers of electronic music.
Growing up, he had played the accordion.
However at that point music was simply a hobby.
Rather than pursuing a musical career, he attended medical school in Paris, and it was
then that he got his first taste of electronic music.
He was introduced to a man by the name of Georges Jenny, who had invented an instrument
called the Ondioline.
Essentially it was an early electric synthesizer keyboard.
It was fairly new and extremely novel, and it inspired Perrey to drop out of medical
school and teach himself piano by ear.
Jenny then hired Perrey to help to demo and sell the instrument to potential buyers.
In 1960 Perrey moved to America, where he began to build a career for himself by making
jingles for television and radio.
At the same time, he was experimenting with electronic music in his own studio.
Towards the middle of the 1960s he had partnered with another musician by the name of Gershon
Kingsley, and the two released albums together under the name Perrey and Kingsley.
One album in particular was released in 1967 and was titled “Kaleidoscopic Vibrations:
Electronic Pop Music From Way Out”.
It was weird and different and experimental, and it was notable in that it was one of the
first albums to include the use of the Moog Synthesizer, a revolutionary electronic instrument.
The Moog Synthesizer was special in that is was modular, meaning that musicians could
add and combine different modules to achieve different sounds.
The Moog made their album popular enough that it would later be re-released in 1971 to capitalize
on the instrument and was titled “Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Spotlight on the Moog”
Perrey, by the way, loved the Moog Synthesizer.
During his entire career, he had released 27 albums and he made sure everyone knew what
they were all about, with titles such as The Happy Moog, Moog Indigo, Moog Sensations,
Moog Expressions, Moog Generation, Moog Mig Mag Moog, Good Moog - Astral Animations & Komputer
Kartoons, and Moog Acid.
Meanwhile, over in California Disney was hard at work developing a nighttime parade to debut
in Disneyland.
Borrowing inspiration from Disney World’s nighttime Electrical Water Pageant show, the
parade was going to feature a number of floats covered with vivid colorful electrical lights.
It would run down Main Street USA, and so it was aptly named the Main Street Electrical Parade.
While it was being developed, the topic of the musical score came up.
VP of Entertainment at the time, Bob Jani, suggested that the parade utilize the score
from Disney’s classic animated feature, Fantasia.
As the story goes, it was producer Jack Wagner who stepped in and insisted that it would
be better to use something different, like electronic music, rather than orchestral music.
After all, it was the Main Street Electrical Parade.
He was given the weekend to find a track to pitch for the parade and wasted no time in
going through his collection of music.
It was that weekend that he happened across the Perrey and Kingsley album, Kaleidoscopic
Vibrations, and it was on that album that he found the track “Baroque Hoedown”.
Like the album itself, it was weird and different and interesting, and unlike a lot of electronic
music at the time, it was extremely upbeat and energetic, which would be perfect for
a parade.
Disney turned to musician Paul Beaver to work on two demo tracks that used Baroque Hoedown
as a foundation, both adding a baseline to the music as well as making a more patriotic
version of it for the parade’s finale.
Disney was pleased enough with the result that they worked out the rights with Perrey
and Kingsley’s publisher, and got to work at adapting the song for the parade.
For the parade’s premiere, six tracks were put together, again using Hoedown as a foundation.
They were titled Baroque, Alice, The Angry Dragon, Cinderella, Dumbo, and Patriotic Finale.
The following year a Small World track was also created for its corresponding float.
Over the years the music for the parade, as well as the parade itself, evolved.
Tracks were added as well as removed.
After the passing of Paul Beaver, musician Don Dorsey took over the reins, and it was
Dorsey who, in 1977, created a fanfare for the parade’s beginning.
Just two years after that he folded a vocoder into the mix, which gave human speech an electronic
robotic sound, and the two, combined with Jack Wagner’s narration, created the now-iconic
beginning of the classic parade.
"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! The Magic Kingdom proudly presents our spectacular festival pageant of nighttime magic and imagination.
In thousands of sparkling lights, and electro-synthe-magnetic musical sounds: the Main Street Electrical Parade!"
A year later in 1980 Jean-Jacques Perrey took a vacation to the Disney parks, and to his
complete surprise, he heard his Baroque Hoedown playing during the nighttime parade.
As it had turned out, while Disney did arrange the rights to use the song with Perrey and
Kingsly’s publisher, his publisher never told the two.
Now to be clear, depending on the details of the musician-publisher relationship, they
might not have had to tell them.
They still got the check either way, but you’d think they’d let the two musicians know
that one of their songs was playing nearly every night at one of the most popular tourist
destinations in the world.
The Main Street Electrical Parade, and by extension, Perrey’s Baroque Hoedown, spanned
three continents and by now has been played for hundreds of millions of people.
Echoes of the music had even lived on in its successor, Paint the Night.
Perrey would continue to make and release electronic music right up until his passing
in 2016.
While perhaps he was never a household name, his legacy still touched the lives of millions
of people, both as a pioneer of electronic music in general and as the creator of one
of the most recognizable pieces of Disney park music ever.