A TV theme has a job to do and that is to set the tone for
the show that follows. Unfortunately, most twentieth-century TV shows were
pretty goofy and got the catchy/crappy themes they deserved. Hey, I can
remember all the words to the “Brady Bunch” theme song as well as the next
asshole, but it isn’t exactly my idea of good music.
On occasion shows ended up with legitimately good themes,
either because they were extraordinary pieces of television that deserved complimentary
music or…err… by accident, I guess. I’m not talking about programs that cheated
by using pre-composed music or classic pop songs as themes, otherwise the
following list would be loaded with classics such as “Paint It Black” (“Tour of
Duty”), “Reflections (“China Beach”), “Bad Reputation” (“Freaks and Geeks”),
“Rock Around the Clock” (“Happy Days”), “Five O’ Clock World” (“The Drew Carey
Show”), “Having an Average Weekend” (“The Kids in the Hall”), “And Your Bird Can Sing” (“The Beatles” Cartoon), “Falling” (“Twin
Peaks”), and “For Pete’s Sake” (a way better song than the cutesy “Monkees
Theme”). Instead I selected ten songs specifically created for specific
programs that I wouldn’t feel ashamed to blast with the TV turned off.
1. “Twilight Zone
Theme” by Bernard Herrmann
The discordant tune that instantly conjures memories of
gremlins, murder dolls, and pig doctors is Marius Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”, a
piece of music recorded for CBS’s library of stock cues but not necessarily “The
Twilight Zone”. Eugene Feldman edited it with Constant’s “Milieu No. 2” to serve
as the series’ theme in the second season, probably because the music that
opened the show’s first one simply isn’t very catchy. It is, however, an eerie
scene setter composed by perhaps the greatest composer of cinematic thriller
scores, Bernard Herrmann. If Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”/“Milieu No. 2” delivers
the skin-crawling shocks of “Eye of the Beholder” then Herrmann’s theme is more
in line with the haunting subtlety of “Mirror Image”…
…an episode of “The Twilight Zone” starring Martin Milner,
soon to be star of another oddball CBS series. “Route 66” was a
Kerouac-inspired picaresque about a couple of hipsters who run into an
assortment of quirky characters along the famed highway. Famed composer Nelson
Riddle tapped into the series’ beatnik cool with a jazzy piece loosely based on
Nat King Cole’s version of Bobby Troup’s “Route 66”, a track CBS didn’t want to
pay for.
“The Twilight Zone” and “Route 66” are both key examples of classic
TV. Kayro-Vue/Universal Productions’s, “Karen”, is not. Lasting a mere 27
episodes on NBC, the teen-targeted sitcom about a pair of sisters never got any
kind of second life in syndication despite its theme song recorded by the most
famous musicians on this list. The Beach Boys cut a groovy little raver with
exceptionally dough-headed lyrics (“She sets her hair with great precision/It's
her favorite indoor sport”). The band’s usual verve is particularly present in
the nasty Dick Dale-dive bomb that kicks off the song.
Kayro-Vue/Universal had much better luck over on CBS by
taking advantage of the resurging interest in Universal monsters sparked by
movie packages like “Shock” and “Chiller Theatre”. “The Munsters” left no crypt
unopened, uniting the Frankenstein Monster, werewolf, and a couple of vampires
in a familial monster rally that only lasted two seasons, but had a much richer
syndication afterlife than “Karen”. To appeal to all those kids who’d spin
Duanne Eddy 45s while drooling over the latest issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Jack Marshall (who’d arranged Peggy
Lee’s “Fever” and co-created Frank Marshall) bashed out a surfy rocker with a
grungy riff. Fortunately, the corny lyrics got 86-ed before the “The
Munsters” aired, and its theme now stands as one of TV’s coolest classic
instrumentals.
Nelson Riddle is responsible for the score to Bill Dozier’s
live-action comic strip “Batman”, but its opening theme is the work of legit
jazzman Neal Hefti. There’s none of jazz’s complexity in his “Batman Theme”, a
driving chromatic blues riff over which The Ron Hicklin Singers chant the
superhero’s name in a fit of crime-fighting ecstasy. The show’s pop-art palette
and super-hip ironic humor fit the tenor of the times perfectly, helping
Hefti’s tune to slip into the repertoires of The Marketts, The Ventures, The
Who, The Kinks, Jan and Dean, and The Jam, while it was also a likely influence
on The Beatles’ “Taxman”. Even without such a hip pedigree, the “Batman Theme”
would still be a knock out rocker.
For the theme to Dick Clark’s pop variety program “Where the
Action Is”, Paul Revere and the Raiders merely whacked some new lyrics over Chris
Kenner and Allen Toussaint’s “I Like It Like That” (a big hit for The Dave
Clark Five in 1965). Paul and the guys put a bit more effort into their
theme for “Happening ’68”, Dick’s 1968 update of the variety format. Fat and
funky, the track was among the better ones on the Raiders’ spotty Something Happening LP.
“Sugar Sugar”
was the cartoon bubblegum smash of 1969, but a far groovier tune inched into
Billboard’s Hot 100 earlier in the year. Actually, The Banana Splits weren’t
really cartoon characters, just a bunch of actors slumming it in smelly animal
costumes, though they regularly hosted Hanna-Barbera cartoons on “The Banana
Splits Adventure Hour”. Their theme which both jumped on the late-sixties
bubblegum band wagon and presaged the dawn of early-seventies glam, was the
puppy of Mark Barkan, who’d written “She’s a Fool” for Leslie Gore and “Pretty
Flamingo” for Manfred Mann, and Ritchie Adams. The hip cred of “The Tra La La Song” lived on in 1995 when
Liz Phair and Material Issue hooked up to cover it for a CD comp of Saturday
Morning Theme Songs.
When I was learning to play the bass, there were two things
I was determined to master: John Entwistle’s “My Generation” solo and the line
session man Jeff Berghofer contributed to the theme from “Barney Miller”. That
seventies cop-com is probably one of the first places I really took notice of
my favorite instrument. The rest of Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson’s theme is
pretty cool too, with its popping drums and sly electric piano riff, but man,
if it was nothing but Berghofer’s bass track, the theme from “Barney Miller”
would still be a killer piece of music.
The opening theme of another fondly remembered seventies
sitcom, “WKRP in Cincinnati”, has some pretty prominent bass work too (and I’m
convinced the bassist was using a Rickenbacker, my preferred instrument), but
it’s the song that closed each episode that is easily my favorite thing on this
list. Jim Ellis probably wrote it as a parody of punk, though few punk tracks manage
so many changes in barely 36 seconds. Don’t bother trying to decipher what
Ellis sings. It’s gobbledygook, another not-so-subtle swipe at punk, but
there’s nothing funny about how much ass this song kicks. The chord progression
that finishes it is one of the all-time great Rock & Roll endings. I’m dead
serious.
The brief run of “Square Pegs” was one of those “I can’t
believe this was on TV” moments, partially because of its surprisingly harsh
depiction of teenage outsiders and partially because it was such a tremendous
mess (one episode mostly consists of really long stretches of a kid playing
Pac-Man). An entertaining recent article on the AV Club goes into why the show
had such issues, so I’ll focus more on one thing that was great about it: the
severely attitudinal theme song by The Waitresses, who’d recently hit with “I
Know what Boys Like”. Oddly, the show’s producers couldn’t even get it right
with this song. Sometimes it was used as the opening theme for the show, and
sometimes it was shoved to the end while a version of the annoying piano-practice
staple “Chopsticks” took its place. “Square Pegs” made up for this crime by
actually allowing The Waitresses to perform both their hit and the theme song on the show:
