Biography
Born May 4, 1931, Bruce Haack ranked among the most inventive children’s songwriters of the 1960s and 1970s in both musical and lyrical terms. Whether because of or in spite of that intended audience, his compositions stood out for their expressive range, blending self-built analog synthesizers with classical, country, pop, and rock ingredients alongside surreal, idealistic words. His technical advances and commitment to education continue to feel immediate, attracting admirers of analog synthesis and unusual recordings. Artists such as Luke Vibert and Add N to X later endorsed his singular outlook, which celebrated ideas like “powerlove” and converted everyday appliances into synthesizers and modulators.
Signs of this outlook surfaced at age four when Haack began selecting tunes on the family piano; by twelve he was already giving piano lessons, and as a teenager he performed with country & western groups. Growing up in the remote mining community of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, Canada, supplied ample opportunity to cultivate those gifts.
Determined to refine his skills through structured study, he applied to the University of Alberta’s music program. Although that institution turned him down over inadequate notation ability, at Edmonton University he composed and taped scores for campus theater productions, hosted a radio program, and joined a band. He earned a psychology degree there, an influence later evident in pieces exploring body language and the computer-like manner in which children take in information.
One of his theatrical scores earned him an invitation from New York City’s Juilliard School to study with composer Vincent Persichetti; a Canadian government scholarship enabled him to move to New York after finishing at Edmonton in 1954. At Juilliard he encountered fellow student Ted “Praxiteles” Pandel, forming a friendship that lasted the rest of his life. His coursework, however, proved uncongenial, and he left after only eight months, objecting to the school’s narrow methods.
For the remainder of his career Haack continued to resist limits of any sort, frequently pursuing several musical directions simultaneously. He spent the balance of the 1950s writing scores for dance and theater works while also supplying pop songs to labels such as Dot and Coral. Early efforts like the 1955 ballet Les Etapes already hinted at the futuristic concerns and experimental methods that would mark his later output; originally created for a Belgian company, the piece combined tape samples, electronics, soprano, and violin. The following year he completed the musique concrète composition “Lullaby for a Cat.”
Public curiosity about electronic music and synthesizers grew through the early 1960s, bringing Haack wider recognition. In addition to songwriting and scoring, he appeared on television programs including I’ve Got a Secret and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, often accompanied by Pandel. The pair frequently demonstrated the Dermatron, a touch- and heat-sensitive synthesizer, by playing it on guests’ foreheads; their 1966 spot on I’ve Got a Secret involved twelve “chromatically pitched” young women.
Haack also produced more serious pieces during this period, among them the 1962 “Mass for Solo Piano,” performed by Pandel at Carnegie Hall, and a commemorative song for Rocky Mountain House’s fiftieth anniversary. One of his most forward-looking works, 1963’s “Garden of Delights,” merged Gregorian chant with electronic sound and remained among his personal favorites, though it was never aired or issued in full.
Another avenue opened when he began accompanying children’s dance instructor Esther Nelson. Possibly prompted by memories of his own solitary youth, he joined Nelson in creating educational yet open-minded children’s music. With Pandel they founded the Dimension 5 label, issuing Dance, Sing & Listen in 1962; two sequels followed—Dance, Sing & Listen Again in 1963 and Dance, Sing & Listen Again & Again in 1965. While the series contained activity and story songs comparable to other children’s releases of the era, the music ranged freely among country, medieval, classical, and pop styles, incorporating piano, synthesizers, and banjo. Lyrics addressed music history or offered directives such as “When the music stops, be the sound you hear,” yielding a frequently surreal assemblage of sounds and concepts.
The otherworldly character of Haack’s work was heightened by the instruments and recording methods he devised for the Dance, Sing & Listen projects. Although he possessed little formal electronics training, he constructed synthesizers and modulators from whatever gadgets and surplus components were at hand, including guitar effects pedals and battery-operated transistor radios. Working without diagrams, he improvised devices capable of twelve-voice polyphony and chance composition. He then captured the results on two two-track reel-to-reel decks, imparting a distinctive tape echo.
As the decade advanced and audiences grew more open to his playful experimentation, friend, collaborator, and manager Chris Kachulis secured commercial outlets for Haack’s skills. These included jingles for Parker Brothers Games, Goodyear Tires, Kraft Cheese, and Lincoln Life Insurance, earning Haack two awards. He also continued demonstrating electronic music on television, explaining synthesizers on The Mr. Rogers Show in 1968, and released The Way-Out Record for Children that same year.
Further expansion arrived when Kachulis introduced Haack to psychedelic rock. The expansive quality of acid rock suited Haack’s approach, resulting in the 1969 release The Electric Lucifer. This concept album, depicting Earth caught between heaven and hell, featured a dense, propulsive sound built from Moogs, Kachulis’s vocals, Haack’s homemade electronics, and distinctive lyrics centered on “powerlove”—a force potent enough to redeem both humanity and Lucifer. Kachulis again assisted by bringing the project to Columbia Records, which issued it as Haack’s major-label debut.
Musical boundaries continued to widen in the early 1970s. Following The Electric Lucifer, Haack developed a friendship with composer and electronic pioneer Raymond Scott; together they explored Scott’s Clavivox and Electronium, though no recordings survive. Scott gave Haack a Clavivox, yet it went unused in his own work. Haack did pursue the rock-oriented direction on 1971’s Together, an electronic pop album returned to Dimension 5. To separate it from his children’s material he issued it under the name Jackpine Savage, the sole occasion he employed that alias.
Children’s albums continued as well, among them 1972’s Dance to the Music, 1973’s Captain Entropy, and 1974’s This Old Man, which presented science-fiction treatments of nursery rhymes and traditional songs. After moving to Westchester, Pennsylvania, to be nearer Pandel, Haack concentrated almost entirely on children’s music, supplying pieces for Scholastic Magazine Records such as “The Witches’ Vacation” and “Clifford the Small Red Puppy.” He also issued Funky Doodle and Ebenezer Electric (an electronic retelling of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol) in 1976, though output diminished later in the decade; two projects, 1978’s Haackula and 1979’s Electric Lucifer Book II, remained unreleased.
Haackula nevertheless appears to have shaped his final major statement, 1981’s Bite. The two share several song titles and a darker lyrical stance at odds with Haack’s customary idealism. Although Bite is more abrasive than most of his catalog, it retains his innovative, instructional bent: an extensive guide to electronics and synthesizers occupies much of the liner notes, and the album introduces thirteen-year-old vocalist Ed Harvey. Still forward-looking, Haack also teamed with rap pioneer Russell Simmons on the 1982 single “Party Machine.”
Declining health curtailed Dimension 5’s releases in the early 1980s, yet Nelson and Pandel sustained the label by issuing songbooks such as Fun to Sing and The World’s Best Funny Songs and reissuing selected earlier albums on cassette, editions still obtainable. Haack died of heart failure in 1988, but the label and its dedication to imaginative children’s music endured. Although later Dimension 5 releases, chiefly sing-along sets featuring Nelson, lacked the iconoclastic energy of the initial recordings, Nelson and Pandel’s ongoing efforts underscore the lasting strength of their bond with Haack, a singular and trailblazing electronic musician. Renewed attention in the late 1990s and 2000s brought many albums to CD and introduced collections that attracted fresh listeners.
Signs of this outlook surfaced at age four when Haack began selecting tunes on the family piano; by twelve he was already giving piano lessons, and as a teenager he performed with country & western groups. Growing up in the remote mining community of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, Canada, supplied ample opportunity to cultivate those gifts.
Determined to refine his skills through structured study, he applied to the University of Alberta’s music program. Although that institution turned him down over inadequate notation ability, at Edmonton University he composed and taped scores for campus theater productions, hosted a radio program, and joined a band. He earned a psychology degree there, an influence later evident in pieces exploring body language and the computer-like manner in which children take in information.
One of his theatrical scores earned him an invitation from New York City’s Juilliard School to study with composer Vincent Persichetti; a Canadian government scholarship enabled him to move to New York after finishing at Edmonton in 1954. At Juilliard he encountered fellow student Ted “Praxiteles” Pandel, forming a friendship that lasted the rest of his life. His coursework, however, proved uncongenial, and he left after only eight months, objecting to the school’s narrow methods.
For the remainder of his career Haack continued to resist limits of any sort, frequently pursuing several musical directions simultaneously. He spent the balance of the 1950s writing scores for dance and theater works while also supplying pop songs to labels such as Dot and Coral. Early efforts like the 1955 ballet Les Etapes already hinted at the futuristic concerns and experimental methods that would mark his later output; originally created for a Belgian company, the piece combined tape samples, electronics, soprano, and violin. The following year he completed the musique concrète composition “Lullaby for a Cat.”
Public curiosity about electronic music and synthesizers grew through the early 1960s, bringing Haack wider recognition. In addition to songwriting and scoring, he appeared on television programs including I’ve Got a Secret and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, often accompanied by Pandel. The pair frequently demonstrated the Dermatron, a touch- and heat-sensitive synthesizer, by playing it on guests’ foreheads; their 1966 spot on I’ve Got a Secret involved twelve “chromatically pitched” young women.
Haack also produced more serious pieces during this period, among them the 1962 “Mass for Solo Piano,” performed by Pandel at Carnegie Hall, and a commemorative song for Rocky Mountain House’s fiftieth anniversary. One of his most forward-looking works, 1963’s “Garden of Delights,” merged Gregorian chant with electronic sound and remained among his personal favorites, though it was never aired or issued in full.
Another avenue opened when he began accompanying children’s dance instructor Esther Nelson. Possibly prompted by memories of his own solitary youth, he joined Nelson in creating educational yet open-minded children’s music. With Pandel they founded the Dimension 5 label, issuing Dance, Sing & Listen in 1962; two sequels followed—Dance, Sing & Listen Again in 1963 and Dance, Sing & Listen Again & Again in 1965. While the series contained activity and story songs comparable to other children’s releases of the era, the music ranged freely among country, medieval, classical, and pop styles, incorporating piano, synthesizers, and banjo. Lyrics addressed music history or offered directives such as “When the music stops, be the sound you hear,” yielding a frequently surreal assemblage of sounds and concepts.
The otherworldly character of Haack’s work was heightened by the instruments and recording methods he devised for the Dance, Sing & Listen projects. Although he possessed little formal electronics training, he constructed synthesizers and modulators from whatever gadgets and surplus components were at hand, including guitar effects pedals and battery-operated transistor radios. Working without diagrams, he improvised devices capable of twelve-voice polyphony and chance composition. He then captured the results on two two-track reel-to-reel decks, imparting a distinctive tape echo.
As the decade advanced and audiences grew more open to his playful experimentation, friend, collaborator, and manager Chris Kachulis secured commercial outlets for Haack’s skills. These included jingles for Parker Brothers Games, Goodyear Tires, Kraft Cheese, and Lincoln Life Insurance, earning Haack two awards. He also continued demonstrating electronic music on television, explaining synthesizers on The Mr. Rogers Show in 1968, and released The Way-Out Record for Children that same year.
Further expansion arrived when Kachulis introduced Haack to psychedelic rock. The expansive quality of acid rock suited Haack’s approach, resulting in the 1969 release The Electric Lucifer. This concept album, depicting Earth caught between heaven and hell, featured a dense, propulsive sound built from Moogs, Kachulis’s vocals, Haack’s homemade electronics, and distinctive lyrics centered on “powerlove”—a force potent enough to redeem both humanity and Lucifer. Kachulis again assisted by bringing the project to Columbia Records, which issued it as Haack’s major-label debut.
Musical boundaries continued to widen in the early 1970s. Following The Electric Lucifer, Haack developed a friendship with composer and electronic pioneer Raymond Scott; together they explored Scott’s Clavivox and Electronium, though no recordings survive. Scott gave Haack a Clavivox, yet it went unused in his own work. Haack did pursue the rock-oriented direction on 1971’s Together, an electronic pop album returned to Dimension 5. To separate it from his children’s material he issued it under the name Jackpine Savage, the sole occasion he employed that alias.
Children’s albums continued as well, among them 1972’s Dance to the Music, 1973’s Captain Entropy, and 1974’s This Old Man, which presented science-fiction treatments of nursery rhymes and traditional songs. After moving to Westchester, Pennsylvania, to be nearer Pandel, Haack concentrated almost entirely on children’s music, supplying pieces for Scholastic Magazine Records such as “The Witches’ Vacation” and “Clifford the Small Red Puppy.” He also issued Funky Doodle and Ebenezer Electric (an electronic retelling of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol) in 1976, though output diminished later in the decade; two projects, 1978’s Haackula and 1979’s Electric Lucifer Book II, remained unreleased.
Haackula nevertheless appears to have shaped his final major statement, 1981’s Bite. The two share several song titles and a darker lyrical stance at odds with Haack’s customary idealism. Although Bite is more abrasive than most of his catalog, it retains his innovative, instructional bent: an extensive guide to electronics and synthesizers occupies much of the liner notes, and the album introduces thirteen-year-old vocalist Ed Harvey. Still forward-looking, Haack also teamed with rap pioneer Russell Simmons on the 1982 single “Party Machine.”
Declining health curtailed Dimension 5’s releases in the early 1980s, yet Nelson and Pandel sustained the label by issuing songbooks such as Fun to Sing and The World’s Best Funny Songs and reissuing selected earlier albums on cassette, editions still obtainable. Haack died of heart failure in 1988, but the label and its dedication to imaginative children’s music endured. Although later Dimension 5 releases, chiefly sing-along sets featuring Nelson, lacked the iconoclastic energy of the initial recordings, Nelson and Pandel’s ongoing efforts underscore the lasting strength of their bond with Haack, a singular and trailblazing electronic musician. Renewed attention in the late 1990s and 2000s brought many albums to CD and introduced collections that attracted fresh listeners.
Albums
The Electric Lucifer
2024
Preservation Tapes
2018
Bruce Haack Remixes
2012
Farad: The Electric Voice
2010
Captain Entropy
2005
This Old Man
2005
Electric Lucifer Book II
2001
Haackula
1978
Singles
