PERSONALITIES
STEVE BARTEK
The former Oingo Boingo guitarist talks “Dead Man’s Party,” his early days with future Skynyrd guitarist Ed King, upcoming shows with Danny Elfman and a lifetime of scoring films
By Andrew Daly
WILL THERE BE AN OINGO BOINGO REUNION?
“Danny [Elfman] has more or less said that a reunion will never happen. He’s just not interested. But the rest of us love playing together, and that’s why we’ve been doing the ‘former members’ tribute thing. We play pretty often, and it’s all the members of Oingo Boingo except for Danny. We’ve been doing that for around 15 years, and we’re especially active around Halloween because that’s when interest in Boingo spikes”
Oingo Boingo’s Steve Bartek with his Gibson Les Paul goldtop in 1982
NEIL ZLOZOWER/
ATLASICONS.COM GUITAR HEROES COME in all shapes and sizes, but the imagery often associated with the “greatest” ax-slingers always seems to coincide with bombast, pomp and circumstance. But there’s another side of the proverbial pillow. Don’t believe us? Just ask former Oingo Boingo six-stringer Steve Bartek.
Throughout the Eighties, Bartek played sideman to Boingo’s founder, vocalist and primary songwriter, Danny Elfman. And if the duo’s exploits had stopped there, to be sure, their legend as champions of all things quirky and alternative would be set in stone. But in truth, cuts such as “Weird Science,” “Fool’s Paradise” and “Dead Man’s Party” were just the tip of their musical iceberg.
“The chemistry between Danny and me was immediate,” Bartek tells Guitar World. “It was the kind of thing where we connected on many levels.
We had similar musical interests and loved injecting ethnic elements into our work. And Danny had ventured to Africa and brought back all these African instruments, some of which we used on our albums. So we had a shared mindset for sure.”
Elfman was a deft songwriter and inventive multi-instrumentalist. But without Bartek, who “filled the gaps” in Elfman’s seemingly endless creativity, what happened post-Boingo might never have come to pass. And what happened was a succession of hypersuccessful film and television scores such as Back to School, Beetlejuice, The Simpsons, Edward Scissorhands and so much more.