CCS was honored to showcase 50 individuals and activities during our 50th Anniversary in 2017-2018 to share our rich history. Take a look at the amazing people responsible for making our unconventional College possible!  

Although he won a 2017 Daytime Emmy for his song “I’m Not Very Nice” on the Disney television show The 7D and toured the world as the lead singer for the band Nerf Herder, UCSB alumnus Parry Gripp (CCS Literature ’92) doesn’t think of himself as a good musician—at least in the formal sense. But this is not a fair assessment: his music and his career are anything but formal.

A native of Santa Barbara, Gripp entered UCSB after graduating from Dos Pueblos High School and felt lost during his first few quarters as an undeclared freshman. “I was really flailing and floundering,” explained Gripp. “I was just taking general education classes and had no idea what I was going to do.” He had the inkling that he would get into the sciences, but he was not passionate about any of the classes he was taking. That all changed when he took a general education English class from Bob Blaisdell. Blaisdell, a CCS Literature faculty member, noticed Gripp’s writing and invited him to apply to CCS. “He basically grabbed me and picked me up and took me to CCS and forced me to [apply],” remembered Gripp. He attributes Blaisdell’s initiative and persistence to having “really changed my life for the better.”

Once at CCS, Gripp began to thrive. He blossomed with the independence and flexibility that the College offers. He recalled fondly that there “was a freedom to do what you wanted to do,” and was encouraged to explore opportunities that may have been frowned upon in other, more scripted majors. He went on, “I really didn’t fit in anywhere else.”

One of Gripp’s most memorable experiences at CCS was taking a writing class from Marvin Mudrick, CCS founder and first Provost, during Mudrick’s last year teaching at UCSB. “To us, he was a saint of the place and everyone was always talking about him,” said Gripp, “so it was neat that I got to take one of his last classes,” Gripp remembers Mudrick as an intense person who was passionate about CCS and had a strong personality. Gripp summed it up succinctly, “he was great.”

Champagne in Limousines

While at UCSB, Gripp began to dabble in music when he started taking CCS Music Composition classes. At the time, Blaisdell was also the Arts Editor for the Santa Barbara Independent. Knowing Gripp was interested in music, Blaisdell, who at the time needed a music writer, asked him to start covering local concerts and bands. Gripp began to many of the Santa Barbara musicians and bands through his writing gig with the Santa Barbara Independent and eventually started playing in some of the bands as well. “It was the mid-90’s and there was a really good music scene,” he said. “If you were just a guy around town, you were in a band. There were a ton of bands and everyone was in one.” Nerf Herder began with little expectations of mainstream success. “We were just a local band at the time,” recalled Gripp, “It was just a fun thing for us to do and we never in a million years expected to be signed and tour.” But that is exactly what happened. They were signed to a major record label and were touring all over the world after one of their songs titled “Van Halen” hit the national music scene in 1996. Once the song got a lot of playtime on MTV, the rest was history. They soon were being flown around the globe, drinking expensive champagne in limousines and meeting famous people. Nerf Herder even wrote and performed the theme song for the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They had made it—or at least that is what Gripp thought.

Reinvention

Jump to 2003: The band had retired and Gripp realized this part of his life was over—he wasn’t drinking champagne in limos anymore. “I was like, ‘Woah, maybe I haven’t made it.” He felt incredibly lucky for what he had experienced —most bands never reach that level of success — but he realized he had to reinvent his career.

Surprisingly, his career reinvention was not something he did consciously. He saw himself as a serious musician and did not want to be thought of as anything else. While at CCS, Gripp played a song he wrote for one of his CCS classmates and when he finished the song his classmate said, “You should write music for kids.” In the moment, this upset Gripp, who wanted to write and perform rock songs for people like himself. “I was so angry because I thought I was cool and I wanted to write cool music for adults,” he said. He did not know it at the time, but his classmate was right.

Gripp’s music after Nerf Herder began to morph; instead of rock n’ roll, he was creating jingles simply to entertain himself. Gripp thought it would be fun to put videos of these songs on Youtube. Over time the videos became very popular, accumulating millions of views. As of this writing, his songs “Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom Nom” and “Baby Monkey (Going Backwards on a Pig)” have about 30 million and 25 million views, respectively. Although children weren’t his intended audience, those who found the videos could not get enough of the tunes. Slowly, people in Hollywood began recognizing the Santa Barbran’s originality and he began getting advertising and television gigs. His songs have been featured in Amazon Echo commercials and he has written jingles for restaurant chains. Gripp recounted an example of how he gets gigs, “A Disney executive really liked my videos. He thought they were funny, so he brought me in to see what types of ideas I had. I went to talk to the executive and he had me try out for different things and I ended up getting hired for the show The 7D.”

After his career transitioned in a new direction, Gripp realized that his former CCS classmate who encouraged him to write songs for kids was right all along. “It became really obvious that she was right because kids really liked the songs,” he admitted. Having the flexibility to go wherever his career took him, even if it was not his first choice, and not sticking to one type of music enabled Gripp to recreate his career. “You have to be open-minded to what works,” he stated. “I definitely have a niche, but it is not what I would have expected.”

Naiveté Leads to an Emmy

Although he had worked on many television series over his career, The 7D was Gripp’s first time being a part of the creative process of a show. While on the show, the writers would leave gaps in the script for Gripp to fill with a song—or that is how it was supposed to work. Not knowing this process, Gripp naively wrote a variety of extra songs thinking that maybe the showrunners would like it. Most of these songs never made it in the final cut of the show, but one song, titled “I’m Not Very Nice,” made it onto the small screen. “The song almost didn’t make it in and actually was squeezed into the last episode of the series,” said Gripp. “I’m Not Very Nice” ended up winning the show’s only Emmy. “It was great because it made the show become an Emmy award-winning show,” Gripp proclaimed proudly. “It was sort of a last-minute Hail Mary touchdown.”

Gripp associates his continued success in the music industry to CCS. He said, “I definitely would not be doing what I am doing without CCS.” To him, a successful songwriter needs to be able to write and he attributes his success as a songwriter to his writing abilities learned at CCS. As a result, he has stayed involved with the College, making a lasting impact to generations of CCS students. In the early 2000’s, he told the Literature faculty he was writing a book and he was invited back to CCS give a talk. When he got behind the podium he told the audience of eager CCS students that even though he was a CCS Literature alumnus, he was not writing a novel and he just came to play some songs he wrote. Alex Scordelis (CCS Literature, ’04), an Emmy nominated television writer, was one of the students in the audience and unprovoked brought up this event in an interview about his Emmy nomination. Scordelis recalled, “Moments like that made me think that there are different career paths you can take. Parry was definitely a hero, somebody that I looked up to, who was a CCS graduate and was doing cool things out in the world.” Gripp exhibits how one does not need to follow a traditional career path to become successful and serves as a model of how unconventionality can lead to success.

Gripp returned to CCS to be a keynote speaker at the first annual Research and Creative Activities Conference this past November.

This story originally appeared in the 50th Anniversary CCS Newsletter under the headline "Unconventional Success"