Part One: The Kidz
Dana Wilkinson, Kidz Bop Producer: People don’t remember this, but there was a draft in the early 2000s. We’d show up at some third-grader’s door, and they could only bring one duffle bag and a handful of their homeland’s soil with them. We called them the Kidz Korp.
Eileen Atwater, Kidz Bop Kid: The Kidz Korp was run by Irving “Big Irv” Schopenhauer, who was a studio exec from the 1940s.
Harry Collins, Kidz Bop Kid: Big Irv was strict but fair. We could only eat cat food and cigarettes, but we could have all the cat food and cigarettes we wanted.
Mike “Fancy Feast” Lewis, Kidz Bop Kid [archival interview]: We all ate the cat food. I don’t know why I’m the only one who got the nickname Fancy Feast… I’ll die a happy man if no one ever calls me Fancy Feast again.
[Ed. note: Mike “Fancy Feast” Lewis was killed in 2014 when his tanning bed fused shut and burst into flames.]Harry Collins: Fancy Feast said that? Crazy.
Part Two: The Piece
Eileen Atwater: The whole idea behind John Cage’s 4’33” was that the sounds of everyday life were just as interesting and engaging as those in a traditional piece of classical music.
Harry Collins: He wanted you to listen to the sounds you usually ignore. Like people breathing and birds chirping. I wasn’t all that excited about it, but they kept telling us that if we didn’t do what they said, they’d sell us to Randy Quaid, and he’d hunt us for sport. So yeah, we fell in line.
Harvey Roth: We were all terrified of Randy Quaid. The only movie they let us watch was Caddyshack II.
Irving “Big Irv” Schopenhauer [archival interview]: Well, ah, in the original piece, it’s mostly people fidgeting and coughing and stuff. It wasn’t very kid-oriented. So we thought, why not get a clown and let him do this thing? Then, we’ll get audio of the kids in the audience reacting.
Part Three: Showtime
Dana Wilkinson: I don’t know where they found that fucking clown. I think they paid him in cough syrup.
When the piece begins, the first sounds you can hear are some tentative giggles. Then, about forty-five seconds in, you hear Eileen Atwater’s distinctive gasp.
Eileen Atwater: People still recognize me, “Oh, are you the little girl who gasps in 4’33”?” What they don’t know is that I gasped because the clown was trying to balance on a skateboard while holding two lit torches, and I guess I was the only one who saw it coming.
Harry Collins: The clown was juggling fire. We all knew that was [record executive] Al Hirschfield’s idea, because Al Hirschfield had a saying: “If a little fire is good, a lot of fire must be great!” Poor guy. No one ever explained fire to him, I guess.
Dana Wilkinson: Al Hirschfield? He was killed in 2014 when his tanning bed fused shut and burst into flames.
In a cough-syrup-induced haze, the clown drops one of the torches. The curtains immediately ignite. That’s when the kids start screaming.
Mike “Fancy Feast” Lewis [archival interview]: The first wave of screams is playful, like maybe it was all planned. I don’t know; I was six, and I hadn’t slept in three months. I was hallucinating that my blood was alive and trying to escape out of my feet. I later found out I had mercury poisoning from all the cat food we were eating.
Dana Wilkinson: The curtains went up in flames, and the kids were stampeding toward the exit. I tried to throw some of the cat litter from the kids’ litter boxes on the clown, but I think he was already dead by that point.
Al Hirschfield [archival interview]: The only people who didn’t flee were me and Big Irv. He just kept screaming, “Keep rolling! Keep rolling!” That’s mostly what you hear in the finished recording: him yelling and me chanting the Mourner’s Kaddish for the clown.
Dana Wilkinson: Listen, if you’re gonna cry about every clown that dies during a Kidz Bop recording session, you’ll never get anything done. I learned that on my first day on the job.
Part Four: The Legacy
Eileen Atwater: It’s nice that it’s had such an impact over the years.
Harry Collins: People come up to me all the time and are like, “Is it true you watched a clown burn to death, and they recorded it for a Kidz Bop album?” No one ever believes that to us, it was just another Tuesday.
Mike “Fancy Feast” Lewis [archival interview]: I can’t listen to it anymore. It just makes me crave cat food.
Editor’s Note: 4’33” composer John Cage passed away in 1992 when his tanning bed fused shut and burst into flames. His estate has formally denounced the Kidz Korp.
