Disneyland's Forgotten Sci-Fi Rock Band - Live From the Space Stage (Full Documentary)

this film was made possible by our incredible backers on indiegogo if you missed the campaign but would still like to contribute check the description below and now please enjoy our feature presentation the very first rock concert i ever went to was in the summer of 1981 at disneyland [Music] at that point i'd been going to disneyland about every year for about five years since i moved orange county at the time i was only interested in the rides and stuff like that but you know all of a sudden m

usic is kind of in my brain and it's becoming a passion of mine tomorrowland is my favorite part of disneyland if i could just retire and live there i thought of that when i was 12 years old i want to live in tomorrowland june or july of 1981 i was at disneyland just enjoying a day with friends we were walking around tomorrowland and we see these posters for this star wars-esque rock band called helix and i convinced my friend's dad hey we gotta come back here in the afternoon to watch this show

so we went in our disneyland day and we come back at the time that they were going to hit the stage got dead center seats in the middle of the venue and had our minds collectively blown by this rock band that was playing at the space stage beneath space mountain [Music] [Music] i've always been a giant disney fan it's one of the first things i became aware of as a child in entertainment most important my life was the movie davey crockett we all wanted to be davy crockett we learned that song ba

by davey crockett king of the wild frontier second were donald duck cartoons i loved donald duck everybody wanted to talk like him in second grade i would uh trace pictures of donald duck and pretend that i drew them and sell them to my friends if i could work for a company that combined creativity with business which i just started taking business classes in college that would be ideal so i cold called disney and i was thrilled to get the job at disneyland and marketing so i got in the door wel

l disney records had come into being with davey crockett surprisingly and a close friend of roy disney's senior was interested in the record company and so he started a record company inside of disney and they had good success with davy crockett and then they didn't have much until mary poppins came along and had another big success but each year i was told when he would walk into the room uh for a certain annual review they'd say well how much money did you lose for us this year not fun i'd com

e from working in recording studio i had produced records so i kind of knew my way around a little bit one day the word was out they fired the head of the record company and then i heard the really bad news is that some other guy who i didn't even know never heard of before was being moved over there he was in consumer products and said well that's it and then the phone rang and it was that guy and he said you know i'd like to meet you the chairman of the board said i should meet you that maybe

you'd be a good person for me to have in the run the creative end of the music he gave me tons of freedom and i was off in the record business one of the things in my background was sort of radio theater a guy went to college with jim magon also did radio theater recordings i was dying to work for disney that was my big goal i was just such a huge disney fanatic that i probably would have worked for nothing how much will you do i have to pay you to work here you know i was very excited the reaso

n they brought me in is they had just made a deal with golden records disney had made a deal to do 24 of them as read-along records these little 7-inch 33 and a third records with a 24 page book so that's what i did i was pretty much the story record guy charlie viewed the smoldering sentries reinhardt's got plenty more of these and we can't fight them all let's take the air car replied old bob so much what disney about was kind of book and record products the music stuff came directly out of th

e movies they had created other music but none of it successfully we thought now that we've got the company stable and profitable let's get back into the music business the basic of good record company is music we have to find a way to get back to music what would be a way to get there as a first step disco had done nothing but get hotter and we just had this funny idea of doing it with disney characters so we did the disco record mickey mouse disco and it seemed to be well received but we sold

80 000 records and that's not a hit bob king who was really in the motion picture marketing division he heard it and he came around he said look would you let me cut some footage to this i think i could make a short that we could put in theaters before a movie that would be just so great so cool so he got together with one of the head editors edward polo bob king came back with this clip that he'd put together and it was fantastic at that point in time there were a fair amount of direct mail com

mercials on television they're long ads running from a minute to two minutes look it's america's favorite mouse all grown up and gone disco now you and your children can catch mickey mouse fever with this exciting new nine song album from walt disney productions we figured out you know it wasn't that big a risk you don't go nationally all at once you went market by market at least we did in those days the retailers got very upset with me if you're going to sell them directly on television we're

not going to waste our shelf space on you so i raced around the country selling them an idea i said i promise you where this plays your sales will go up tremendously if we can stay there long enough well it worked unbelievably [Music] mickey mouse disco was a huge hit for our company we sold three million copies of that record this made a big mark in the in the business not just in our business but we had offers from some of the biggest labels to buy our company seeing what we were doing they wa

nted what we were doing to maybe apply elsewhere of course we weren't interested in selling we were doing really well ourselves and the record business was kind of shaky at that point [Music] honestly by the early 80s i was getting to the point where if i have to do another readalong record i want to shoot myself you know i mean i'd done everything i wanted to i'd done star wars i'd done star trek i've done black stallion i didn't charlie brown rainbow brad had done all these different projects

for other for our company and other companies we began to think what we could do next that would be the next step in things the basis of judy garland mickey rooney movies often was hey i know what we'll do to solve our problem we'll put on a show and my uncle's got a barn and i've got a saxophone and my two friends can dance well i'll get together and put on a show make some money or whatever they need to do it would solve their problem i'm gonna write a show for us and put it on right here in s

eaport how about it and it was really that spirit of we work at this great place with all these unsung great talents let's put on a show let's let's let's put together a band carson van austin he's a fascinating guy who'd been a rock and roller performer who also turned out to be a great artist in terms of drawing disney characters and other things so i told him what i was thinking about i said i'm thinking about a band it can't be a band that's based on talent like frank sinatra because they wo

uldn't sign with us it's got to be a show it's got to be something that we can do visually something we can put on television something we can take on tour there weren't many examples to look to kiss was making noise definitively but there was no lady gaga there was no janet jackson there's none of this there was no michael jackson show really everybody that shows before were four guys in suits that looked identical and and danced in rhythm together so we were thinking something much more outrag

eous so that was kind of the nascent beginning of thinking about what later became haylets and carson began drawing up what this might look like and we went through a lot of drawings and said what if we did this with that type thing you know in a creative process you know i mean i guess you could compare this to the cantina band in star wars but boy did they have nothing in common with that coming from music side my thing was well this is likely not to work because you're trying something so rad

ically different than anything that's done we need a producer who understands show production as well as record production and we have to find somebody that is intrigued with the idea as much as we are that eliminates almost everybody so i went to my friend sunny anderson and he came with four or five names and i finally got to mike post [Music] so my name is mike post i'm a record producer i'm a composer for television shows i don't even know when it was but it was a long time ago a guy named g

ary kreisel at disney records called me up with an idea and the idea was halex all of us took a back seat to mike post gary chrysler got a hold of mike post and said this is our dilemma we need to put together a band then it's going to be this sort of outer spacey thing and we don't even know what to do basically he was the producer of the show gary had an idea just these wild ideas about what this rock and roll band would look like you know in the realm of the future in the realm of not just hu

man beings but aliens and everything you know that that entails so how would we staff a rock and roll van if we could choose from you know not just a homo sapien and mike posted oh no it's no problem we'll have auditions and we'll we'll do this that and the other but basically an ad went out in variety or hollywood reporter you know looking for strong female singer for this rock band we didn't say what the name of it was we didn't say what it was for and we rented this sound stage down in hollyw

ood there was this huge line of girls lined up to audition for this and the first girl that came in out of this long line of singers was laura mumford and i remember writing down on a pad of paper number one laura looks like a punk snow white and that just sort of set it for me you know that's we were looking for it's like we needed something that looked wholesome but also looked hip she fit the bill and she had great chops she seems authentic you don't just sing songs for effect you're seeing t

he lyrics like they're inside of you like you know you're bleeding the lyrics i remember hearing laura knowing that she was perfect you know because she was not janice joplin but but close close and we both thought about it a little bit and came to the same conclusion that's the one we've got to design these outer spacey things you know with a girl lead and whatnot i remember looking through some magazines for here's a picture of susie quattro in a leather jumpsuit and you know here's some fashi

on things out of time magazine that kind of thing and we then went on a search for the rest of the band members we needed a keyboardist so tom really came to the band through laura the question was she's married to a keyboardist certainly life is easier if that keyboardist is her husband and not someone else but is he good enough and as we got to see with tom as we had more experience with him suddenly we found out actually he wasn't just good enough he was really good we were worried because it

looked like all he would do is sit there and play the keyboards on this little cart so we wanted a kind of an entrance so i ended up going through a lot of magazines looking for golf carts or maintenance cars and i found one and we wanted to mount all these different keyboards on it and put lights on it and make it look all fancy and i go over to this manufacturing company i show them and i say this is the cart we want and these are the keyboards and we need this built now this company is the o

ne that put together the main street electrical parade that's a big project you know so they they were used to doing these elaborate things so when he said to me so how do we do this and it's like i don't know you did the electrical parade as far as developing the characters obviously the bass player you know we wanted a large person that could be something akin a cousin of chewbacca so you know that's that's why we got a furry guy it wasn't harry he was furry so the next i went over to makeup t

o work with bob schiffer who was the makeup artist at disney at the time bob was supposed to make this huge bookie suit and i remember him scratching his head like how am i going to make this thing what do i use what you know polyester fur what do i use and they decided nope it's going to work best if it's yak hair and it was not cheap so we built this gigantic suit and he's up on platform heels and everything and he had this whole head built and it went around his eyes which were you know they

put black makeup around it and put this hat on him i can't even imagine how hot it was to be inside that suit and trying to play bass guitar at the same time you know for laura she's going to just wear cool clothes and be herself great the hardest one is the bass player roger he's a good bassist and like every artist at that period they wanted to be cool and be we saw him in the themse and started talking to him he said wait a minute you want me to wear this costume this bear suit and you're goi

ng yeah i said i'm not doing as you can see nothing's changed white hair white hair it's all the same i did audition i met mike post and auditioned and met the rest of the folks involved the cosmonaut was fabulous it was well done because it was disney star wars meets rock and roll that was the essence of it that may have sounded i don't know i don't know how it sounded to people i don't know if it sounded like it was like it was jive but it wasn't i don't know how seriously you can take somethi

ng like that but it wasn't supposed to be we eventually came up with a percussionist who was also a gymnast i think i may be wrong but i think that was again my post that he was looking for some something more unusual to happen but hearing that this guy was an acrobat it all started to come together and then we found out later he was more than just an acrobat he was really something quite special i think everyone was kind of impressed with tony because of the stuff he could do on stage i'm tony

coppola i was the percussionist with helix uh i guess i was mostly the visual part of the show when helix came along i was about six years into a dance career that was injured and trying to come back slowly from an injury and protect myself i had started full-on dancing intensively for a career in 1974 and helix came along in 1981. when they talked about this character he was an amphibian not a full-on frog but an amphibian took a while they molded this latex mask to me which was very very hot b

y the way and when you take it off it smelled pretty bad as well as the mask there was like a hood and a burlap uh almost like a cape and a hood like a a druid amphibian combination is what it came out to be at one point my character was called the wag w-a-a-g as in polywog so i assumed my wife's name would have been polly they wanted to call this little froggy guy a [ __ ] and it's like you can't call him that that's a derogatory term in great britain you know anyone who is of any color was a w

alk and i guess it didn't stick but they didn't really have a name for my character that i remember after that i was just so excited to get the backup part i actually secretly of course i wanted to get the lead but i knew in my heart that they chose somebody a little bit more experienced for heading up a band like that so laura was awesome and our voices blended well and we got to pick out all these cool world war ii and world war one pins and badges and stars and things so that we could decorat

e our little you know warrior space girl outfits we went to a club and i don't know how we got there i think we were going there to see roger but we were both impressed with brian okay right before haley's i was playing in a band called well i was playing with a girl singer named rainey and roger got me involved with halex told me i got this job this new job coming up with this band at disneyland and they're looking for a drummer and he told me he talked to mike post who was going to produce the

band and so my post came out one day saw us unliked it and the rest is history there you know i can't remember how we found bruce i just remember that the moment we saw him we all just said yes that guy is just what we'd be looking for my involvement with helix was i was the guitar player songwriter of the the group i just heard helix was looking for guitar players i grew up with great guitar players so all of them were out for the gig the audition process was gave me a tape had to learn it the

y probably wanted a visual kind of guitar player that was exciting on stage so i wouldn't have done it if i had to wear the thing like tomlow and i wouldn't have been a wookie bear and i wouldn't have been a freaking percussion player that's a frog i didn't like the first costume they gave me i almost refused to wear it everybody had a costume except the drummer and it was kind of like woof okay do i just come up with my own costume or do i wear my jeans and my t-shirt like i'm comfortable playi

ng in or they decided that because bruce was not going to wear that outfit they were going to put me in that outfit so they put me in the outfit and it was immediately uncomfortable because what it had was these big puffy kind of tubes that ran across your torso and it was in the tubes on the shoulders and stuff like that and what it did is it interfered with my movements my drumming movements that i that i had and then they came up with that nice space jacket that was like okay now we're talkin

g [Music] we were very forthright in the hiring process we said look this is the gimmick here this is what we're doing you know you're going to be wearing some crazy stuff here it's kind of silly but who knows and again i was costumed i didn't care it wasn't going to hurt anything that i did outside of the band because nobody would know i was in the band so it really was the thing of let's put on a show we have some of the best customers best makeup people best choreographers and the missing lin

k when i thought of it and said wait a minute disneyland [Music] [Applause] hi there you know this is one of my favorite times of the day here just about sundown i like to be around when the lights come on it seems like a new kind of magic takes over in disneyland after dark basically there were numerous stages around the park and the park was always looking for some band to be on that stage perform for a half an hour and then disappear and then people are supposed to sort of gravitate toward th

e next show on the next stage say uh while you're in tomorrowland i suggest you take in our band over there don't say maybe yeah come along [Music] it started out as a tomorrowland stage it was there before i started working there they had a lot of different acts there at night time because they used to do a lot of name talent then when they built space mountain they put a stage in there called the space mountain stage and that's where halex performed only big acts that kind of came through disn

eyland played space mountain it was like a little amphitheater a small greek theater outdoors wasn't enclosed all the other bands that i knew played disneyland played the smaller stages this was the big stage for disneyland we did the kids of the kingdom during the daytime they did disneyland as your land which is another kids of the kingdom show disneyland didn't like the idea at all what an unknown act when we can have these sort of bands that are known in orange county and everybody likes it'

s a big risk and i i got it because a band needs time to play together to get together perform together to find themselves the beatles did in liverpool playing crummy dance halls 10 000 times we didn't have quite that luxury we were still facing our biggest challenge music i felt that at some point the music and the image and the idea of what they were had to find meaning in a unified way i'm bambi moaway and february 9th 1981 i started a new job at disney i was a copyright assistant in music pu

blishing and i was trying to find songs songwriters since there was no guidebook on how to put together a rock band you know we all found out through trial and error [Music] [Music] oh right okay i can talk about that's that one i remember jail bait was written by jeannie cunningham what would be fun is for to hear it again because she put her own spin on it and it coming from a female voice was really like kind of turning it on its ear and giving it a really fresh feeling i'd been told by a num

ber of people if you really want to get good creds as a singer-songwriter you got to do some writing for disney i said well i'd love to work for disney that's great okay then you need to contact this gal she's in the publishing department her name is bambi mo a so i called up disney and i said hi my name's jeannie cunningham and i was told to call bambi so they said well yeah come on in and if you have any demos bring them with you so that we can hear how you write so i put it on and i was prett

y proud of myself because it's fresh out of the box and put it on and they're listening to it and tapping and then they fast forward it to the next song and they listen to a few bars and then fast forward it to the next song and listen to a few bars and then it was very nice to meet you and we'll get back to you something okay they'll get back to me and i'm looking forward to an opportunity to work for disney when the next phone call came they said oh by the way we have selected jailbait this is

the i believe this is the demo [Music] wait a minute did you say disney wants to do jail bait you have to wait till you're older you'll understand baby i want you but you're jail bait listen to the gunners [Music] they had just done this thing back then which is probably why jail bait was all over the place during the 70s is they had just created a law that said if you're over the age of 18 and you're dating somebody younger than 18 you're in the risk of dating jail bait and then the part we al

l know sing along [Music] who's gonna sing this and well they informed me um there's gonna be a band of excellent musicians excellent singer it's like the wookie's going to be seven feet tall the wookie yeah he's the bass player the bass player okay and yeah and the keyboard player has they show the stuff and i'm thinking oh that's that's good this must be really serious okay well it's disney mama don't be afraid of your mama please what was i thinking back then and i said but jail bait are you

sure that's gonna be appropriate for uh you know for a kid's theme park oh sure yeah and everybody's gonna be dressed up in star wars characters stuff and i thought okay that's fine jailbait at first was not something that i thought would work so i went to ron miller who's disney family he listened to the song and he said yeah i get us a close call he said really when we get down the road just playing it as a live performance i'm not too worried about it i said if we get complaints we have to pu

ll it back i was never 100 comfortable with it but it was a pretty good song i remember the rehearsal process we did it at buena vista disney and they blocked out a whole section of one of their buildings and at the time tron was being filmed so we would see these guys dressed in tron suits so we were all really hyped up on it even finding a name was hard that came pretty late in the whole experience i think we called the band strike we called it starfire i suggested squad which stood for skyler

ward air defense we had all these wacky names i think there might have even been a contest or something or a something that went on to try to name the band partly was out of somebody proposing helix which was a real word of not everybody knew about dna in those days but the ones that did knew of the helix thing no and i don't even know how they arrived at the name helix i never heard how they arrived at that name not a big fan uh with the name helix i don't even know what helix means is that do

es it mean something did you guys ever heard hear that i hated it what the [ __ ] is a helix what in the is the helix okay i mean kiss my helix or suck my helix i don't know what it is i mean i don't know i'm sorry do you remember any of the other names that they went through beforehand or no no but they had to be equally stupid [Music] i just remember we wanted to make this band look as legit as possible and so we got a movie poster artist to do this beautiful painting of the band for coming to

disneyland summer 81. it looked impressive it looked like something was going on you better not miss it well i'm sure everybody was a little nervous because it was totally different than anything we had done at the stage before we had rehearsed a lot we probably felt prepared the first night you do any show any production where your mind goes is is all the tech and the lighting and sound going to happen ladies and gentlemen [Music] it's a horrible venue in a way for new band because people are

just milling about and passing by nobody goes to disneyland to sit down and spend time watching a band they're eating hamburgers at the tomorrowland stage it was you know it's like what you really don't want is a dinner theater audience [Music] helix had this logo that was kind of like wings it had a h in the middle for helix that was the logo that was in lights behind them on the stage we had some special effects stuff i had a laser light that was strapped on the back of the neck of my base and

you know i would shoot the light out at the the audience and they really liked that [Music] yes they used to spray fog on the stage right and they wanted me to kind of jump in and ramp up and i think end of my knees but this spray that they used for this fog machine was oil based so when i came in and ramped up i slid all the way through the stage off off the stage we did a few experiments we listened to a lot of other people's music there was a hit song by billy joel i think was called just th

e way you are and it was a very mellow romantic sort of song [Music] i thought you know i could see laura at one point to break up the show singing that to roger that would be bringing together who they are and so on and give it a different meaning billy joel's singing it's like you know you don't have to be something special don't go change i think the personal lyric is don't go changing to try and please me so it's a it's a weird process of searching uh that sometimes works and sometimes says

[Music] i remember one particular thing they had an acapella thing that we used to did i think we did it once maybe twice one of the songs that they did we originally heard it on an album by the bothy band which was a hot celtic band around that time and the band learned it and they sang it in harmony i remember the first time i went out to do it i got the key wrong so i was the one guy singing in the key and everybody else was in the right key so it sounded very very strange so they did a noble

attempt of doing it and it was it did not work after that one really horrible faux pas they took it out of the show which was i was thankful for then i get a phone call from either bambi or gary or tom and they said so we're opening over at space mountain do you want to come and i said sure i'd love to see this i mean come on who doesn't want to see a seven foot wookie playing bass and your song i can hardly wait so i decided to take a friend of mine with me we're sitting there and i'm listenin

g to this whole thing we're watching them watching kids screaming and having a great time and i think this is good this is good and i'm observing the lead vocalist and i'm already starting to process how is she going to do jail bait because the way that the lead vocalist sounded it sounded as if she had been properly trained her breathing had was proper um everything about her enunciation everything was very proper and the thing about jail bait is it's very guttural it's like uh oh it's meant to

be done like that all of a sudden a new song starts that is jail bait oh my goodness it is jailbait and so i'm listening to it and the band sounds great they're kicking it they're kicking it and then laura starts to sing i'd say hey a little sugar i don't want to see you tonight oh you made me weak ooh you give me butterfly highs and so i'm hearing oh they've changed my words how dare they and she's not going with the guttural attacks on everything so meanwhile out of the corner of my eyes i'm

seeing the publishing department leaning forward to see what's what's the reaction and bernadette goes start tapping your feet smile smile and i go why all right she said smile they're looking at you okay okay tapping my feet trying to get it going it sucks [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's good we were good i mean we didn't crash and burn you know i think there were a couple of technical things in fact i know there was it was really hot under the lights in the summer and i would usually lose abou

t five pounds of water weight every night i think we thought we were okay i thought that we were doing the best we could and you know we were fine the audience reaction was was pretty decent this was i don't want to use the word artificial but it was manufactured but after a while it did get a groove lighting stuff didn't work and some of this stuff didn't work and that stuff and and we definitely improved on the mix as we went along it's art it very rarely is perfect the first time welcome ever

ybody [Applause] [Music] [Applause] she did a very good job but i think that first night she might have been nervous whatever so i just hated it and then i listened to newer versions of laura's performance and i thought yeah she nailed it [Music] i wasn't expecting an audience reaction i was expecting get them on stage get them experiencing what an audience is like which is for good or for bad as a real entertainer you can't be going up there saying oh i'm gonna be a good entertainer because the

audience loves me that's not the way it works i'm going up there and i got to make these people love me and they learn from how the audience responds to you and they do [Applause] there were lots of little fun glitches at disneyland the security guards weren't too sure about these long-haired people because they didn't allow long-haired people in we were employees of the park but it was a show i do remember that there was some tension and i think we thought that was kind of funny because we wer

e going to go and do our show and hey there it is it was just that was our characters that we were playing in the disneyland world uh we were the long-haired rock band i had to sign a contract and i was the first guy to perform with long hair at disneyland so i was stopped by the security guards because my hair was shoulder length hair and they go you we're going to kick you out just like no no i'm playing space mountain shut up unfortunately i don't think everybody involved was as proud of it a

s i was you know they were a little bit more it's cheesy it's disneyland but it really wasn't cheesy i mean it was phenomenal i had moments when i had to really encourage the band look i know you felt it was very disrespectful when this guard asks for your id because he looks at you and doesn't believe you could be performing here but they have a whole nother business they're trying to accomplish and that's more important than my little band you know i want to do all this pyro because you know t

hat's just the rock and roll show you know you got to blow stuff up but you know they had really strict rules i mean really strict rules and we were looked at in the park as like lunatics because it was all barbershop quartets and you know the rock and that was put on at the park traditionally was really kind of milk toast ladies and gentlemen disneyland proudly presents the k austin show all right now ladies and gentlemen please welcome direct from the grand ole opry in nashville tennessee hey

austin thank you boys knowing that your door is always open and you'll fall we had to be extremely careful with any sort of sexiness to the act or the language it was really really restrictive so it was our job to push the boundaries and their job to hold them just too loud at seeping into other venues and other i go well you know it's you just can't play this music quietly i mean it's just not gonna happen guys you know [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] tom was in this remote truck and he was

dressed as the storm trooper he had a sequencer that programmed all these sequence notes and he could solo over it and really impressive and that added a whole other layer to the overall look feel design of the band the drum riser was kind of neat and it would rise up and blast smoke out of it and stuff like that and the lights would flash on it as you're playing [Music] the one thing i didn't like about it was that it wobbled it jiggles so i tried to keep my movements my enjoyment of playing dr

ums to a minimum because it would jiggle the entire stage the entire riser which in turn would jiggle the cymbals which in turn would jiggle the drums which in turn would throw everything off a little bit and made it harder [Music] well the fans to use an old expression it was teeny boppers bruce was probably a big big star with the teeny boppers he had the jail bait experience which is he would have these girls who we didn't know how old they were propositioning him i do remember getting a lot

of fan mail from girls and my girlfriend at the time just hated it bruce goudy was just this really good looking i remember he had like long dark hair and just a great smile he was really handsome i like bruce and all but i think personally for me you know i kind of saw myself uh as up here you know um so i thought the guys in the band were cute if i remember correctly bruce would do some of the stuff where he'd come over and we'd lean against each other while he was playing a solo and that kind

of stuff everything that a proper rock and roll band would do at the time [Applause] he does have a solo in the thing but you can see him just working fretboard and was having a great time at it but he sounded great he was a real players player and lo and behold he was a babe magnet there were a lot of girls who wanted to meet the guy in the very suit because he was so cool all the guys i know you couldn't pay them three million dollars to get dressed up in a wookie suit with some kind of flash

light at the end of it all the guys i know they would have been way too macho to pull that off but um they they pulled it off and they did great and i would you know get down on my knees and lean back and put the base up in the air and play and stuff it was rock and roll [Music] [Applause] i had congas i had bongos which they programmed to make different sounds these were the old-fashioned syndromes and you could you could hit them and they could program them to make all kinds of ripple sounds o

r screeching sounds or whatever they wanted and then i had a lot of little instruments handheld cowbell and shakers and things like that and they allowed me to be more visual i could move away from the congas and the bongos and stuff the venue the space theater i think was perfect for this group we had just enough room for the number of bodies we had on stage and there was still room for me to move around because as i said i was supposed to be a visual element roger was great roger was full into

character from the first day of rehearsal i think he created a lot of things about the character people refer to that character as a wookie and if you look at that costume you can understand that but roger has a special name for that character he called it the boharneth like was a cross between a bear and something else i don't know how he spelled that but i specifically remember roger calling his character the baharna and he played that character great because we were antagonistic to each othe

r on stage and i was supposed to bother him he would be an annoyance was the way we played it he'd sort of be bouncing around and stuff and i'm you know get out of here he would snarl and you know throw his base at me and eventually chase me around the stage which was kind of fun and then eventually when he chased me i had to go up the rope and hang off and play tambourine into space there's no question about the talent of ben the players in every one of them including laura every single one of

them was a really great musician [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you know i'm looking at these shots which are not the greatest shots but it's like i remember the star field looking so amazing and cool the picture doesn't necessarily reflect that it's funny looking at this i i have a memory of it being bigger than this you know in a funny way there were a lot of songs and i'm asked about the songs and i i don't i can't honestly remember all of them i mean if i heard them i'd go yeah yeah that

's but the one song that i thought was incredible was hey there boys [Music] make some noise because i'd watch the band playing each night and it would seem to be the one that got everybody really really excited i would have made this tape to play for the bosses to see if anybody would have responded to the music so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and then it builds and then they rock [Applause] [Music] [Applause] out [Music] oh laura really was the anchor she held it together laur

a sang her ass off and what i loved is that voice really cut through she obviously was an experienced performer i think she really loved doing it the audience really related to her the audience loved her she was really the star no matter what anybody else in the band it was really about laura [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] do [Music] my name is tommy miller i was the keyboardist in helix and the husband of laura mumford the lead singer that's basically what i did for my

sequence is just that this is a monophonic so you can only play one note at a time so if you play another one it cancels out the other one i would play a sequence into the sequencer so when i had my feature uh during the show i'd i would drive this card up to the front of the stage had these aircraft lights i'd switch on i had two buttons to blast co2 out i'd push the button that sequence would go boom you know and i had it a certain chord pattern then i would play along with it so kind of soun

d like switched on ball one night i sequenced the thing and everything was cool and then when i drove up there did all that thing when i pushed the sequencer button it went haywire it just went random all over the place and i it was something i couldn't play with so i thought what am i going to do so i started because i look kind of like a robot i started doing these erratic robot things like i was having technical difficulties and i just went and then i turned it off and went and they pulled me

back and we started the next song and that was the end of it i was like oh crap on the break they're going to yell at me i was worried i was in trouble but whatever laura and i were living in buena park we had a band called vixen i think it was about two or three months into it laura and i kind of started going out you know right about that time laura had a connection through the u.s military for the uso tours she called them and they came and looked and they heard the van and they hired us and

we went to korea japan we were out about six months i think on a tour when we were in seoul korea with us we were stationed out of for a while and the consulate i guess american consulate building we were walking around we found it we went in there and there was american the lion american soldiers getting married to korean woman and we just got in line and we got married and it was just a stamp stamp stamp stamp no big deal said let's just get married for the hell of it and we did and called ou

r parents and hey we were in korea we got married you did laura was reading the newspaper and she saw a cattle call for a girl singer and she went up and uh did the audition and came home and you know we didn't hear nothing about and then a couple days later she got a call and they asked her to come back up to burbank and and she came home said she got there she auditioned it they would come and watch us to check laura out and i mean they watched for hours they'd watch her and then that's when t

hey decided well just bring him in on it you know there's a keyboard player already happens to be her husband so at first i thought was just going to be laura i'd already planned to carry on with the band and get another singer and then let her do what she wanted to do but you know i guess i was lucky that i got thrown into the whole fray of it they could have had her without me and i would have totally been thrilled to have her go and work at disney you know mom and dad own a bar that was our b

usiness and we'd go up there and he would just announce to the bar my star is here everyone and they had a guy on the piano that played and he made her get up there and i think that might have a little bit of you know angst on her for being pushed like that from her dad but laura was a total entertainer i mean she she had to move she was not clumsy on stage there wasn't anything they had to tell her to do [Applause] sometimes i felt i was brought into it so they thought it would make my wife hap

pier if i was around her she had somebody familiar because it was kind of a it was put on her a lot you know she was going to be the star of and she had the fortitude for it and stuff but i guess they may have thought that me being around would help her with all that but hell i'm not going to stand in the way of anybody succeeding in what they were meant to do [Music] but there was a group of kids about 30 kids that were there every night in the front row and they were our biggest fans and we'd

go out and shake hands with them probably you know how disney loves to merchandise i'm sure there was going to be dolls and t-shirts or anything the only marketing was done was by some fans these kids they asked me what my name was which uh i went by tom miller then and i always spelled my tongue with a h and these kids took it upon themselves to reverse my name to mott willem which is tom miller backwards and they called me montreal beethoven from space and they made bumper stickers with their

own money the one that i went out there and she had them they handed me like a packet of bumper stickers and so these kids were doing this on their own i mean there were a fair number of folks that came that would come back and come back and come back they really enjoyed it and they had this this hand sign that they did this was an h for helix and they you know they would do this and they really enjoyed it that was the thing that i thought was great about it those guys hit the stage and that pre

tty much changed my opinion about my big favorite thing being music forever it blew my mind it just my 12 year old brain melted because i'm sitting here basically watching luke and chewie rock out in disneyland that was the only way a 12 year old brain could process that the audience reaction was just crazed they loved us and they kept coming back and back and back and they as i said you know occasionally they'd sing the top of a chorus with us but yeah we did feel like rock stars that summer th

ey were all doing these dances like in their sheets where they all go forward together and they made dance and you weren't supposed to dance there and they dance on their seats every night it was crazy these kids that very first time that they performed the kids went nuts they were screaming you know and were like wow you know they're really kind of speaking to an audience a young audience that's who we were you know trying to appeal to [Applause] [Music] and we were put on the disney stage as m

ore of a showcase to show us to hollywood to get another label in on it and i think every night they there was a mike post and gary and they would be hosts to different record label executives and i began talking to my counterparts and other record companies because i felt like i want a legitimate record company to be their label more than disney [Applause] [Music] so we would invite record executives down you know ranging from lukewarm i don't get it to wow i get it this is really interesting i

t's so different than anything else that's going on i think in the end we were down to i think it was at warner's that and one other offer but once came one night and said i'm signing him great so we were off and running this was real rock and roll we wanted it to feel that way and so when they were planning to be distributed by warner's that gave it a legitimacy that disney records didn't necessarily have you know disney records is the world's biggest children's record label but not necessarily

the right label to be distributing helix the unifying factor was really laura laura was just emerging as a star so by time we were finishing the record contract they said to us look we really just want to sign laura this is not a band of equals this is a band of laura and the group and that was concerning because everybody had given their heart to it properly and so we had a frank talker and said look we will have to find ways to compensate you as it goes forward but this is the reality it's la

ura and then when we're done at disneyland we'll start recording and we'll be set by then [Music] the last performance we were all just glad it was over that we could it was like i said it was so hot and so kind of uncomfortable for us on this stage and we were excited that okay now we've done our stage thing now we can go into the studio and make a record i remember driving out to chatsworth and recorded some of these things and was like great this is going to be wonderful we went in the studio

with mike um and everything was overdub so the other tracks were already laid down and we were just there to lay down percussion tracks and stuff like that honestly i thought they were amazing i mean it was so exciting i just saw all this potential so for me i was really excited about it it just seemed like it was only going to get better and better and better well this was where their album the first helix album would go so i kind of wanted it to be you know in fact i remember when i gave it t

o them i said this is not the beatles white album but with any luck who knows so that's this is kind of a treasure love always bruce goudy tom to bambi keep in touch to bambi thanks for sharing the beginnings yeah it was to my wonderful friend roger and i feel the same way i felt that way about him let's hope it's not over see you soon um you know it's it it sounds a little foreboding like it wasn't gonna happen like there might be a chance that it might not happen and who is that from laura yea

h laura meanwhile i was investigating how we might tour uh how we might promote what could we do how we get on television all these other things so we're finishing summer they're stopping performing we're still in the final throws of the record contract we sign it they give us the money we've now basically broken even on everything we've done the record company falls apart the executive scientist is gone and we're dropped how do we go forward was the tough question how are we going to bring the

record companies back in we don't have a venue anymore do we stage it do we and you just can't fake this kind of thing was our conclusion so we began to drift my time was really becoming more and more difficult in terms of what i could devote to it it was a giant swirl of things and mike tried a couple of things i don't remember what his contacts were and i tried but it just suddenly was like there was nothing there hey there [Music] i remember feeling horribly disappointed i mean when you think

of all the effort and the energy and all the people involved mainly i do remember feeling bad for the players and singers i felt bad for them they worked hard but that's showbiz [Music] but then just one afternoon i got a call that's all we got was a phone call it was very abrupt no explanation really of what was going on or why it was suddenly over i think i got another job disney just said you know what we're done what do you want to do you want to continue and it's like well no i need to mak

e money i think that's when my next situation came up well and we knew it was our last performance of that run at the space theater because you know the weather changes and all that summer you know they shift over but i don't think we knew that that was the last thing the band was going to do we all kind of went into a funk and didn't really communicate with each other and went about our ways we went to the four winds man everybody went back to what they were doing before halex laura got a job a

s a waitress at a restaurant i started branching out and playing within bands in la and she she was more still hooked to disney she felt that she couldn't be involved in other projects because uh you know disney called she she wanted to be on the ball with it well for the individual band members they had a realistic perspective because they were band members and that's what they had done before they'd gotten gigs play for two nights here and wait a week and maybe get something there and it was v

ery uneven world laura had come from it was really like a whole nother world who suddenly she's a [Music] there's star down on our own for the time all the tired excuses we've learned so well tonight we make them stop no one cares how you struggle after the lights go out so heads high [Music] boys it was a kind of paralysis because here she was with a record contract and it wasn't like you could just go out and be laura mumford and get another record contract it was a record contract as laura mu

mford of helix with disney behind you that was part of it without that i don't think there was a direction so days turned into weeks and weeks turned into i don't know how long the other band members went out just could get work as musicians laura was just really torn that she was waiting and waiting waiting for something to happen and ultimately the bad news was nothing was going to happen it was over we gave her her chunk of the the advance from the record company and that was it and laura got

the news that the disney thing is over she got to keep the money and she took her money and ran and we got divorced and like i had her dog she came by and got the dog and went outside and talked and she she kind of apologized for running away and i think by then i was all good with it and you know and i didn't see her for probably 13 years after that you know there was definitely an effort was made to see how you know they could bring laura into other projects she did sing i think she made her

disney records debut on mouser size and she sang on duck's dance too [Music] laura doing duck's dance too doesn't necessarily promote the idea of a real rock and roll artist's career launching point you know so in some ways i don't know that that was necessarily what she was all about and what she wanted [Music] i'm not mad at her nothing i don't blame her being pushed like that and she was just waiting every day for that phone to ring [Music] she come home you know that was before cell phones s

he checked that foam machine see if gary called or anything you know after her shift at the restaurant and that i'd go play gigs at night and she'd be at home i know that was frustrating for her and it brought to a head so no remorse i enjoyed the disneyland thing overall it was a good thing she gave me five thousand dollars of the money [Music] so i have that was all right you know here's five thousand dollars i've got to go i i think she was pretty disappointed with that whole thing enough to

run on a run run away from l.a and run away from disney and run away from me and i don't think she was in contact with bruce or janette or any of the friends that we made from the helix thing she went back to l.a back to orange county got an apartment and that was the last i heard of her pretty amazing and uh then i was looking through facebook one day and i saw this uh facebook site um remembrance of laura francine mumford and i went huh and i got on it and she had passed away and that she had

moved to colorado and i guess had some complications with diabetics i heard about laura mumford i had no idea she was gone you just assumed that somebody like laura who's so talented will just go on and do great things so it's very hard to hear that laura hadn't bounced through and her friends had put this facebook thing together i was her only husband i wasn't even on it anywhere you know and i didn't even know she passed away until i saw that facebook thing [Music] my life was like a rocket th

at just kept going and so you sort of feel like it will keep going for everybody else when you're on that rocket ship i just you know i didn't have time to stop and look around and and stay in touch and it was one of the things it's funny when bambi told me that about laura it was one of things reminded me why i stopped i stopped because i didn't have enough time to have a long lunch with anybody i stopped because i didn't have time to talk to friends i'd have time to read a book i didn't have t

ime to to do what i considered what i really loved in life so it was really hard to think about laura out there without the support that we had given her uh carrying on in a very different trajectory with a very different outcome really tough it's hard to even think about now [Music] i don't know that i ever heard a completed track i heard us live on stage and i don't know if they recorded i don't know if they recorded live on stage tracks for sound as well but i never heard a completed track i

wanted to believe an album was out there i'd heard i'd read rumors that demos were recorded so i figured someone may have saved them someone may have trashed them because that was very common practice especially in the 70s and into the 80s of masters not being used just being dumped before cds record labels generally didn't save a lot of masters i'd like to believe that i would eventually get to hear something but you know until that day presented itself i figured maybe it will maybe it won't i

don't know if it's gone i don't know where it could be found i was stunned that you found anything if somebody come to me and say i heard about this helix can you show me some stuff i have nothing to show i wanted to keep the jacket they wouldn't let me they claimed it was like ten thousand dollars maybe back when maybe so but it's like no sorry do you think that any of that stuff is lying around anywhere first of all i i'm not a hoarder and i took everything that was on two inch audio tape and

went nope you know there's never going to be a bunch of nerdy young people that come around and want to know about halex or hear it hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to podcast the ride the show about theme parks hosted by three childless men in their 30s uh i'm scott gardner joined by mike carlson hello and jason sheridan aye so i'm at a meeting with a producer and we get off track and discover that we're both disney nerds and we start trading this reference that reference do you know abou

t videopolis yeah of course you know trying to best each other and then he says well obviously you know about halex [Music] i said no i do not know about helix his next sentence he just tosses it off like it's nothing oh yeah that's like when disney tried to do like a star wars kiss anyway he keeps talking the meeting goes on i am stuck back in helix land what the hell is this i i go home i open my laptop the first picture i see so entranced and i know that there is something bigger here i'm so

excited you guys don't previously know about hey let's look at this i remember scott texting us like hey did anyone come across helix and it's not a word you encounter regularly if they were playing now in the theme park i would make everyone see them every time we were there i do that with much less good stuff in theme parks so i would have had to do it for this i told the guys this this needs to be seen [Music] a group that was only there for one summer but those who know this band loved it h-

a-l-y-x yes i've seen photos of this it's insane yes just for whatever reason i think i was on a lunch break and i was just messing around online and i was looking at stuff and google serves up a picture of the poster in its images and it was a link to ebay 10 bucks plus shipping okay click and lo and behold i won it and it shows up and it's the exact poster that i saw around tomorrowland pointing you to the space stage in tomorrowland [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's sort of still alive a little

bit i guess hey like somewhere in some mines we're still around we're talking about halos i love it i think they're great i honestly couldn't believe that it was real wish they would come back i would like to see them in action someday the cults is building people are shouting in the streets hey lick say alex i think it's wonderful i think it's really cool i'm just sorry that laura's not gonna be able to see it because she was a real big part of helix [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey [

Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] is [Applause] i've been doing this my whole life i'm 74 i've been playing since i was six you can't play me any music i don't understand intellectually but the art of it is like god why is that so so meaningful and moving emotionally well you can apply that same magic and same mystery to why something makes it and why something doesn't make it there is a big giant part of this whole thing that is magic and sometimes the magic just doesn't happen sh

e's probably the best singer i've ever seen or been around you know i still bring her up to people i said god i wish my my first wife was still alive you talk about a singer huge that girl could belt them out [Music] helix was not a success it was not a disappointment and it's not bittersweet it was a joy from beginning to end i wouldn't trade that time that experience that pleasure of being with those people trying to do something creative and getting as close as we did it's what it was it didn

't keep on growing it grew to a point and just had to stop all shows come to an end [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] hey there boys spread the word around make [Music] [Music] shoulders to the crown here's our chances [Music] all the tired excuses we've learned so well tonight we make them stop no one cares how you struggle after the lights go out so heads [Music] let the curtains rise [Music] boys i said hey there [Music] is so take a good look remember there's nowhere down on o

ur own for the time all the tired excuses we learned so well tonight we make them stop no one cares how you struggle after the lights [Music] we could spend our whole lives or we can try to take the future in ours i just need to make making last walking round like an entrance and i won't take that chance take one last look remember there's nowhere down on our own for the top all the tired excuses we've learned so well tonight we make them stop no one cares how you suffer after the lights go out

to the deep breath boys and good luck to you heads high boys night has come