Art by Daniel Špaček.
This episode was written & produced by Casey Emmerling.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, world-class musicians gathered in smoky studios to record tracks that you couldn’t buy in a store… but ended up everywhere. In this episode, Dallas and the TTH crew dive into the golden age of production music: versatile cues crafted for everything from car chases to romantic montages to space odysseys. Along the way, they uncover how these obscure records found their way into sports broadcasts, hip hop singles, and modern sitcoms, and reveal the vintage library track that Quentin Tarantino brought back into style.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Gerhard Fang - Like a Shadow
Guy Trevino and Friends - Funky Flashback
Martin Landstrom - Moonshiner's Turn
Matt Large - Straight from the Souce
Ritchie Everett - Catch Me
Rachel Sandy - Machina Soldier
The New Fools - Feel My Swagger
Martin Landstrom - (Why Are You) Telling Me No
Ritchie Everett - You've Done Enough
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View Transcript ▶︎
[20K Sonic Logo]
[music in: Gerhard Fang - Like a Shadow]
Casey: Testing, one, two. Testing one, two.
Recently, our Supervising Producer Casey scheduled a mysterious recording with me, and our producer Grace.
Grace: I have no idea what's about to happen, and I'm thrilled about it. t
Casey: Yeah, it should be fun.
** Basically, Casey manages this podcast, while Grace oversees our sound designers and works with our clients over at Defacto Sound.**
Casey: All right. Should we do this thing?
Dallas: Sure.
Grace: I’m ready to rock.
Dallas: No idea what we’re doing, but let’s do this.
Grace: Me either. I’m so excited.
[music out]
Casey: Okay. So thank you for joining me on this mysterious audio journey. So this is a topic that all of us in the podcasting and TV and film industry know something about, because we use it all the time. But I think there is a lot of rich and interesting history to this topic, and there are a lot of hidden connections between stuff that was made 50 or 60 years ago and modern stuff that we still enjoy today.
Casey: So, do you wanna take a guess at what the topic is?
Dallas: Okay. So there's something that we would all know in podcasting and TV…
Grace: Hmmm. My mind to like radio maybe? Like some podcast ancestor or something?
Casey: Mmm, not quite.
Dallas: Speakers.
Casey: Sadly, no.
Dallas: I'm just looking at things in my room.
Casey: Sure, yeah, sure.
Dallas: Lamp.
Casey: I'll play you a little montage, and that may give you a hint.
Grace: Okay.
[Production Music Montage]
Casey: What do you think?
Dallas: TV show theme songs?
Casey: Closer, close.
Grace: ‘80s movie…
Dallas: Uh, ‘70s TV show theme songs… 80—1979 to 1984 TV show theme songs.
Casey: So it’s broader than that, but uh, that definitely does apply to what we're gonna talk about, which is drum roll… [drum roll] Vintage Production Music, AKA Vintage Library Music!
Grace: Great.
Dallas: You know, I was gonna say, I was like, ‘80s theme songs that are from music libraries.
Casey: Yep, well, that would've pretty much been it.
Dallas: I should have said it. And you said, interrupt with your thoughts. And I didn't. I will do that from now on.
[music in: Guy Trevino and Friends - Funky Flashback]
Casey: So production music, also called library music, or stock music, is music made to be licensed out for film soundtracks, TV and radio advertisements, theme songs, corporate videos, you name it. Now obviously, we use plenty of library music on this podcast. And a lot of the ads and promos that Defacto Sound mixes use library music as well.
Casey: But the quote unquote “Golden Era” of production music was from the ‘60s into the ‘80s. During that time, there was an explosion of media demand. TV networks and film studios needed cheap but professional music, so they turned to these companies.
Dallas: Wait, hold on. These companies needed cheap, but professional something.
Casey: Music.
Dallas: So, uh, very similar to the entire industry today.
Casey: Yeah, totally.
Dallas: Cheap, yet incredibly professional insert anything.
Casey: “Can you make it amazing, but also cheap?”
Grace: What about the specific era elicited all of this need for licensable music?
Casey: I think it was just a, you know, an explosion of pop media in general, television itself. There were more and more networks being born, more and more shows being born…
Grace: Sure.
Casey: …the movie industry was just making so much money, and yeah, it just fueled this whole industry.
[music out]
Casey: Most of it was coming out of Europe, interestingly enough. In those years, some of the best composers in Europe were pumping out thousands of these tracks. They were working for companies like KPM and DeWolf Music in the UK, Selected Sound in Germany, Sermi Records in Italy, TeleMusic in France, there were dozens of these companies.
Casey: And these libraries would give their composers briefs of what they wanted. The brief might say something like, "We need music for a fugitive on the run from the police." And so they would write something like this.
[clip: Fugitive]
Casey: Another example could be "Music for a happy couple swimming in the ocean."
[clip: Clear Waters]
Dallas: Wow.
Casey: Or maybe "Music for a spaceship traveling across the galaxy.”
[clip: Nebulae]
Dallas: Ope! Hundred percent.
Grace: Ooh!
Casey: So composers would write one or two tracks every day, and then they would go into the studio and record with these world-class session musicians that they had on-staff. The musicians themselves would be recording around eight tracks per day, so they're just getting this sheet music, knocking it out, hardly any rehearsing, I imagine.
Casey: And the composers would only get paid if their tracks got used.
Grace: Whoa.
Casey: So they were encouraged to write stuff that was versatile and appealed to what was popular at the time.
[music in: Martin Landstrom - Moonshiner's Turn]
Dallas: I can also set the stage here. I'm seeing thick-rimmed glasses, sideburns, mustache, smoky studios for sure.
Casey: Yes.
Grace: Oh, yeah.
Dallas: Brown everywhere.
Grace: Yeah, lots of like mustard yellow, like muted reds.
Dallas: Were turtlenecks a thing back then? Because I feel like there’d be turtlenecks.
Casey: I think so. Yeah, there were se—definitely ‘70s turtlenecks. We should get that on the artwork. A guy who looks just like that.
[music out]
Casey: So yeah, it could be funky, bombastic, romantic, psychedelic, basically any subgenre of music that existed at the time, there was a production music version of it.
Casey: But it's important to note that this music was not available to the public. You couldn't just go to a record store and buy these records. Instead, the library would produce just a few hundred copies of these LPs, and they would send those out to filmmakers and production studios. The editors at those places would listen to them and decide which tracks they wanted, and then they'd pay a fee, and the library would send them the master tapes for those tracks.
Casey: So it was a very manual, snail-mail process. But through that process, a lot of this stuff did end up in film soundtracks in the 1970s. So oftentimes, filmmakers couldn't afford to commission an original score. So they'd use these cheaper library tracks, or maybe they'd hire a composer to just write a few key themes for their film, and then the rest of the music in the film would be fleshed out with production music.
Grace: Huh.
Casey: So that could be for a horror movie, like the 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead. Here's a track from that.
[clip: Dawn of the Dead]
Dallas: That is so good. That's production library? Wow.
Casey: Yeah. Right. It's really good stuff, as I hope to demonstrate. Um, there is production music…
Dallas: Spoiler alert.
Casey: …in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, here's a track from that.
[clip: Monty Python and the Holy Grail]
Grace: That's a library pull?
Casey: Yep.
Grace: No way!
Dallas: That’s like a Stravinsky vibe.
Grace: Wow.
Casey: And then a lot of kung fu movies used a lot of production library music. So here's from a Shaw Brothers film called Flag of Iron.
[clip: Flag of Iron]
Dallas: Oh, this is cool. I mean, this is just amazing.
Grace: Wow.
Casey: Also, the movie rating system, meaning PG, R, etc., was established in 1968. And that opened the door to more mature cinema, which was another big market for production music. So that's how you get a lot of stuff like this track, which is called “Makin’ It.”
[clip: Richard Davies - Making It]
Grace: Okay. That has become such a motif, though. Like, I feel like that has become shorthand in movies for like that exact theme.
Casey: Totally.
Grace: It's amazing. Oh my God.
Casey: The clicky wah wah. “Waka waka wow! Wacka wacka wow!”
Dallas: You know my friend Jordan Brady was the comedian in the ‘90s, now he's a commercial director, who coined the phrase, “Bow chicka wow wow.”
Casey: What? Wow.
Grace: For—Wait, I'm sorry. The fact that we have not done an episode on this is absurd. We must. We must. That's incredible!
Casey: All right, so it was in all those movies, but then it was also used on TV, so definitely also in sports broadcasts. So here's a track called "Heavy Action" by British composer Johnny Pearson. Tell me if you recognize what TV program this was used on.
Grace: Ooh!
[clip: Johnny Pearson - Heavy Action]
Dallas: Bum bum, bum bum. Monday Night Football!
Casey: You got it, Dallas. Monday Night Football.
Dallas: I did!
Casey: Yep.
Dallas: Alright. How many points is that, Grace?
Casey: Tell us the score.
Grace: That's right. I famously don't like sports and even I knew that one.
Casey: Nice. Staying with television, here is a track called "The Big One" by British library composer Alan Tew. Do you recognize this song?
[clip: Alan Tew - The Big One]
Dallas: Oh. Keep it, keep it going. Oh, I know this! We can't, we can't stop. We've gotta get the—dur nur! Oh…
Grace: It's like, detective investigation, something like that.
Dallas: Oh, I got it! I know what it is.
Casey: What is it?
Dallas: The People's Court.
Casey: You got it! Ding, ding, ding.
Grace: Oh my god! Nice.
Dallas: Look at that. I'm crushing on this non-game show.
Casey: Yes indeed. The People's Court theme song was also a library pull.
Grace: That's wild.
Casey: Another common use for production music was industrial videos, educational videos and PSAs. So this is a 1970s promo video from the Masonite Corporation, which made wood products.
[Masonite clip up]
Masonite Narrator: When your product is better than wood to start with, improving it isn’t easy… We keep trying.
[Masonite clip out]
Casey: So sometimes these were not full two to three minute songs. They could also be short little musical stings and fills. One composer who wrote a bunch of those was Dick Walter, who we had on the show for our Shock Horror A episode, this guy.
[clip: Dick Walter - Shock Horror A]
Grace: No way.
Dallas: Yeah.
Casey: So he wrote a ton of those little stings in a multi-part series called The Editor's Companion. Here are a couple more examples from that. This is a kind of a “drifting into a dream” type track.
[clip: Dick Walter - Floating Down B]
Dallas: Kind of like a Wizard of Oz going from Kansas into the…
Casey: Totally. That's exactly what I was thinking.
Grace: I was just thinking that.
Casey: And then here is a Hawaiian track of his called “Aloha” that I think you may recognize. Tell me if it's familiar.
[clip: Dick Walter - Aloha]
Dallas: I mean, it does seem like “Mai Tai on the beach” type of thing, and…
Casey: Totally. But there was a specific TV show set in a aquatic setting that used that specific track quite a bit.
Dallas: Baywatch?
Casey: More kid-friendly.
Grace: I’m gonna say Gilligan's Island, but I'm probably wrong.
Casey: Even more kid friendly, and it's a modern show. Or a more modern show.
Grace: Oh my God, SpongeBob? SpongeBob Squarepants?
Casey: Yes, yes, yes. SpongeBob Squarepants used that one a bunch.
Dallas: Oh! That sounds…
Grace: Totally.
Casey: And I think maybe a few other Dick Walter Hawaiian tracks.
Casey: So today, it's pretty hit or miss how widely available this stuff is. Some of it is very easily accessible. Like if you type in KPM, which was one of those library companies, if you type in KPM on Spotify, you'll get a ton of results. But a lot of it is pretty rare and obscure. So there is a big subculture of vinyl collectors who seek out these records. And one group of people who've used this music a ton over the years is hip hop producers.
[music in: Matt Large - Straight from the Souce]
Casey: So, as you know, there's a long tradition of sampling in hip hop, especially sampling ‘70s and ‘80s funk, R&B, jazz, stuff like that. During the ‘80s and ‘90s, hip hop producers also sampled a lot of popular radio music, often without permission. That was just part of the art form for a good 15 or 20 years.
Casey: But then of course, the copyright holders started demanding royalties, and there were lots of lawsuits, and the industry really cracked down on sampling pop music. So that's a lot less common now.
Grace: Hmm.
Casey: But on the other hand, production music was made specifically to be licensed out and reused and repurposed. And of course, licensing some obscure production music record from the ‘70s is a lot cheaper than trying to license a #1 R&B single from 1978…
Grace: Right.
Casey: …which is why this stuff gets used so much.
[music fade under]
Casey: So I'm gonna do some examples in chronological order of the hip hop songs themselves. I dunno how much you guys listen to hip hop, but as I play through the original production music track, if you recognize the hip hop song that it was sampled in…
Grace: Ooh!
Casey: …you're welcome to shout it out.
Grace: Okay.
Casey: So here is a 1973 library track called “Look Hear,” “Hear” is spelled H-E-A-R, by British composer and guitarist Clive Hicks.
[clip: Clive Hicks - Look Hear]
Grace: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Wait, it's, um… It's like “duh dun duh duh duh…”
Casey: Yep. You're getting it.
Grace: Oh my gosh. I, it's like in my brain. I was gonna say Jurassic 5, but I feel like I'm wrong.
Casey: You got it!
Grace: Yes! Let's go!
Casey: So that is sampled by Jurassic 5 in their 2002 track “What’s Golden.”
Grace: Yes! “What's Golden.” Yep.
[clip: Jurassic 5 - What’s Golden]
Dallas: Oh, that’s cool.
Grace: Ugh, such a banger.
Casey: Yeah, it’s a great one. All right, next example. This is from a 1969 French library album called Psych Impressions. The track is called “In the Space” by Janko Nilović and Dave Sucky. It’s very ‘60s acid rocky.
[clip: Janko Nilović - In the Space]
Grace: I don't know. This is stumping me.
Dallas: I have no idea.
Casey: Yeah, I mean from here on, I wouldn't have known any of these, so no worries. But that was sampled in this 2009 Jay Z song calling out the overuse of Auto-Tune in hip hop. It’s called “DOA” which stands for “Death of Auto-Tune.”
[clip: Jay Z - DOA]
Dallas: Woo. Wow.
Casey: All right, next one is a library track by our man Dick Walter of Shock Horror fame.
Grace: Okay.
Casey: Ten years before he made the first Editor's Companion album, he put out this groovy song called “Shifting Sands of Sound.”
[clip: Dick Walter - Shifting Sands of Sound]
Dallas: I have no idea
Grace: It sounds like something like MF Doom would sample creatively, but I have no idea what it's actually in.
Casey: Totally. That's a good guess. So in 2011, that was sampled on the debut album of one of the most influential rappers of the modern era, Kendrick Lamar…
Grace: Ohhh.
Dallas: Oh.
Casey: …with his song, “Hol’ Up.”
[clip: Kendrick Lamar - Hol’ Up]
Grace: Kendrick Lamar is so good.
Dallas: I am sorry to everyone out there who's just…
Grace: Furious?
Dallas: …disgusted with us right now. I’m sorry.
Casey: It's alright. It’s not our expertise. That's okay.
Grace: My hip hop expertise is definitely like ‘80s to ‘90s, and drops off sharply in the 2000s.
Casey: Sure. Sure.
Casey: All right. The next one is a 1970 track from an Italian group called The Blue Sharks with their track “Itinerario Romantico,” which means “romantic itinerary.” And who doesn't love a good romantic itinerary?
Grace: Okay, I love that so much.
[clip: The Blue Sharks - Itinerario Romantico]
Grace: I don't know.
Dallas: Nope, no idea. Sorry everybody.
Grace: It's delightful though.
Casey: So 45 years later, that was sampled for this song by Travis Scott. This is a song called “90210.”
Dallas: Oh! Okay.
Grace: Ohhhh.
[clip: Travis Scott - 90210]
Dallas: I am feeling like an old man.
Casey: That's all right.
Grace: Honestly, same.
Casey: All right, last one in this section. So this is a 1973 track called “Liquid Sunshine” by British composer John Cameron.
[clip: John Cameron - Liquid Sunshine]
Dallas: Ooh, I recognize this.
Casey: Ooh.
Grace: I don't.
Dallas: It's down there. I just don't… I don't have it.
Casey: Tell me if this helps. If you speed it up and add a drum beat to it, you get this single from the rapper whose legal name is Sir Robert Bryson Hall II.
Grace: Incredible.
Dallas: Sir Robert Bryson Hall II?
Casey: Yeah, apparently that's his actual birth name.
Grace: I'm obsessed.
Dallas: Okay.
Casey: I saw a Reddit discussion that was like, "How is his name ‘Sir?’ He's American, and he is not a knight.” And they're like, his parents just literally put ‘Sir’ at the top of his name.
Dallas: Gosh, that's a real workaround.
Casey: So the answer is Logic.
Dallas: Oh!
Casey: Logic's real name is Sir Robert Bryson Hall II.
Grace: Oh, that's so cool.
Casey: And his song is called “Like, Whoa.”
[clip: Logic - Like Whoa]
Casey: There are literally thousands of these hip hop examples. There's a great website called who sampled dot com that shows what songs were sampled in what tracks.
Grace: Mmm, so cool.
Casey: And you can filter by production music, and you'll see over a thousand vintage production music tracks. And then each one of those lists anywhere from one to several dozen hip hop songs that sampled that particular track.
Casey: So it really is this like bottomless well of material that hip hop producers can draw from. But it's not just them who find modern uses for these tracks. It's also filmmakers and TV producers. Casey: So here is a piece of vintage production music that I know you have heard and will recognize. So just go ahead and shout as soon as you recognize it.
Grace: Oh boy. Okay.
[Curb Your Enthusiasm Theme]
Grace: Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Casey: Yay.
Grace: No way. Is it really?
Dallas: That was production music?
Casey: Yes.
Grace: Oh my god, that's incredible!
Casey: So that's the theme from Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's a track called "Frolic" by the Italian composer, Luciano Michelini. It was written for a 1974 Italian film called La Bellissima Estate, which means "the beautiful summer."
[La Bellissima Estate in]
Casey: I found the scene on YouTube where this song plays, but it wasn't subtitled, so it was hard to really get the full context. But in the scene, there's a bunch of kids running around a neighborhood and this, you know, quirky, upbeat track is playing. And then they bring some fish to a guy who lives in a shack on the beach.
Grace: Great. Casey: And they gift him with some fish so that he'll tell them a fun story. And then they all sit down and he's like doing this dramatic story for them to listen to.
[La Bellissima Estate up, then out]
Casey: So the soundtrack to that film was owned by RCA Records in Italy. They sold the rights to a production music company called Killer Tracks, which was eventually acquired by Universal.
Casey: So now I'm gonna play you a clip from an interview with Larry David and the Curb cast at the Paley Center for Media. Larry's talking about how he first heard the song in the mid ‘90s.
Larry David: I was watching television about five years ago and, and, uh, there was a bank commercial. And I thought, “Boy, I love that! Where did the, where'd they get that from?”
Casey: So according to Larry, the commercial ran for a week and then he never saw it saw again, and he didn't know how to get ahold of the music. So...
Larry David: I had my assistant research it. I said, “There's this bank commercial," I, I forgot the name of the bank. And then it became this whole, this whole ordeal to get the name of the bank and the music. And finally she tracked it down, and I had the name. And I sat on the name for four years.
Casey: And then when he was coming up with the idea for Curb Your Enthusiasm, he realized that tuba-heavy circusy sound would be a great fit.
Larry David: It just sort of introduces the idea that you're in for something pretty idiotic.
Grace: That's amazing. That's exactly what I was thinking as you were playing those clips. It almost sets you up for the, like, buffoonery to come. It's very self-aware in a great way.
Casey: Totally. And they built the whole soundtrack around that. So when they started working on the show, the Music Supervisor of Curb went back to Killer Tracks, which had this particular song, and asked them for more material along those lines. And they gave him 70 CD’s worth of music.
Grace: Oh my god!
Casey: And according to him, that's where around 70% of the show’s music came from.
Grace: Wow!
Casey: So one of the CDs they got was from a library album called Circus Cartoons Comedy. And here is one track from it called "Amusement," by Italian composer Franco Micalizzi.
[Franco Micalizzi - Amusement]
Grace: Oh, I totally recognize that. Yes, yes.
Casey: Yeah, Larry’s feeling good. He’s like galavanting around LA. Everything’s…
Grace: Walking down the street.
Casey: Yeah. He’s walking down the street. Yeah, exactly.
Grace: Another thing I'm thinking about as you were playing that too, is the tuba as shorthand for goofiness or awkwardness or something.
Casey: Yeah, totally. It works perfectly for that. I wonder if tuba players feel annoyed that people think it's like a goofy…
Grace: Resentful.
Casey: Yeah. They're like, “I can play…”
Grace: “It’s a graceful instrument!”
Casey: “…a beautiful heart wrenching ballad on my tuba, if you would only let me.”
Grace: Yeah.
Casey: And then here is another track from that same CD, from the same composer. This one's called “The Puzzle.”
[Franco Micalizzi - The Puzzle]
Casey: So this is like when Larry's doing that thing where he is trying to figure out if someone's lying, and he’s looking at them suspiciously, and they're kind of looking each other up and down, trying to figure out who's lying. And then he kind—it kind of ends and he goes, “Okay. Okay.”
Grace: It's so good.
Casey: So along with those circusy tracks, Curb also has some spaghetti western music that also came from music libraries. So the spaghetti western stuff plays in scenes that feature Susie. If you're not familiar, Susie is the wife of Larry's manager, Jeff. She's hilariously intense and frequently furious at Larry and Jeff. And when she's about to unload on them, they'll often play this track.
[Gianni Ferrio - For Whom the Bell Tolls]
Grace: It’s so good. Oh man.
Casey: I just can't hear that without thinking of Susie spewing a beautiful monologue of curse words at Jeff and Larry.
Casey: So that one is a track called “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Italian composer Gianni Férrio. And there's one last track from Curb that I wanna play you. It's another spaghetti Western style track. But tell me if this sounds like anything else outside of what you've heard on Curb Your Enthusiasm
Grace: Ooh. Okay.
[clip: Gianfranco and Giampiero Revérberi - In the Tucson Cemetery]
Dallas: Makes me think of a Quentin Tarantino film.
Casey: Sure, yeah. He likes stuff like that, too. Grace: It totally does. Yeah, very Kill Bill-esque.
Casey: Does that ring any bells?
Grace: No, I…
Dallas: I don’t think so.
Grace: Yeah, I don’t think so.
Dallas: I mean, somewhere deep?
Grace: I feel like my brain is—is grasping. But yeah, somewhere deep.
Casey: So anyway, when I first heard it, I was like, "Is that 'Crazy' by Gnarl Barkley? Is that like an instrumental version of ‘Crazy?’”
Dallas: Ahh, I hear it now.
Grace: Oh my God.
[clip: Gnarls Barkley - Crazy]
Grace: No way.
Dallas: Yeah. That’s great.
Casey: Yeah. So it turns out that it's a track called "In the Tucson Cemetery" from a 1968 spaghetti western called Django, Prepare a Coffin composed by two brothers, Gianfranco and Giampiero Revérberi. It was later put on a production music compilation and retitled "Last Men Standing." And then many years later, Gnarls Barkley sampled it for “Crazy,”
Grace: Whoa.
Casey: …and also used parts of the trumpet melody as the vocal melody. And because of that, those two Italian composers are credited as co-writers on “Crazy.”
Grace: Wow.
Dallas: I'm really proud of Italy.
Casey: Yeah, right?
Grace: They're showing up for this.
Dallas: Gosh. Wow.
Grace: Great job. Great work, everyone.
Dallas: Italians! You know what is up!
Grace: Is that why it's called a spaghetti western?
Casey: Yep. It refers to Westerns made in Italy in the like ‘60s and ‘70s.
Grace: Wow. What? Okay. The more you know. I just, I was like, “Wait a second. Is that why?”
Casey: Yep.
[music in: Ritchie Everett - Catch Me]
After the break, another modern sitcom that's full of vintage production music… Plus, the ‘70s library track that Quentin Tarantino brought back into style.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music sting: Ritchie Everett - Catch Me]
Casey: All right, so that concludes our Curb section. But there's another sitcom that does something really similar, and once again, you'll definitely recognize it. So just shout it out as soon as you know what it is.
[clip: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia theme]
Grace: It's Always Sunny!
Casey: Yep!
Dallas: Love it.
Casey: It’s Always Sunny.
Grace: No way!
Casey: That is a production music track called “Temptation Sensation” by the German composer, Heinz Keissling. I couldn't find the exact year it was recorded, but based on his career, it would've been in the ‘60s or ‘70s.
Casey: And in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Charlie Day said that the original pilot of Always Sunny actually took place in Los Angeles, which is interesting to think about since, you know, Philly is obviously such a core part of the show.
Grace: Totally.
Casey: So in that LA-based pilot episode, they used a different theme song, which was inspired by the city of LA.
[clip: Hooray for Hollywood cha cha]
Dallas: Oh, that's good.
Casey: So that's a cha cha version of the song "Hooray for Hollywood," which is from a 1937 musical called Hollywood Hotel. Here's what the original "Hooray For Hollywood" sounds like.
[clip: Hooray for Hollywood]
Casey: It's a pretty famous show biz tune. An instrumental version of that song plays in the closing credits of the Academy Awards.
Casey: But according to Charlie Day, FX loved their pilot episode, but they wanted to take out the Hollywood element, and that's why they moved the setting to Philadelphia.
Grace: Hmm.
Casey: And for the music, Charlie asked their Music Supervisor for everything he had that was quote, "Leave it to Beaver in a Big Band swing kind of feel." Very specific request.
Grace: Yeah, for real.
Casey: So their Music Supervisor came back with a bunch of vintage library tracks. And that's what they use for most of the show. For example, here's a song called "Off Broadway" by another German composer, Werner Tautz.
[clip: Werner Tautz - Off Broadway]
Grace: Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. Wow. No way! This is blowing my mind.
Casey: So Charlie Day wanted to use that last track as the show's theme song, but FX’s president at the time really loved "Temptation Sensation," the one that actually became the theme, and put his foot down.
Casey: But yeah, most of the music in the show is from those two German composers, Keissling and Tautz. Here's one more from Keissling called “Blue Blood."
[clip: Heinz Keissling - Blue Blood]
Grace: Wow. It's like hard to not see it in the sh—or like hear it with the show.
Casey: I know.
Grace: It's amazing to me.
Casey: And then one more from Tautz called "Derby Day."
[clip: Werner Tautz - Derby Day]
Grace: Another thing that's funny to me about this is that the music sounds so wholesome…
Casey: Yeah, totally.
Grace: And the show is the complete opposite. So there's just this hilarious juxtaposition happening, which like really works.
Casey: Yeah. I think that contrast is a big part of what makes it work so well.
Grace: To me, it's paralleling how hip hop artists use it. It's like the ultimate collaboration of like, “I'm gonna take your original creation, and then I'm gonna overlay my own artistic interpretation over that, and it’s gonna create this whole other thing.”
Casey: Right. And completely change the vibe of it, or what the result is.
Grace: Yes! It’s so cool.
Casey: All right, we've reached the last segment. This one's maybe my favorite, because I'm such a movie nerd.
Grace: Oh my god.
Casey: This final track is written by British composer Keith Mansfield, who is a legend in the world of production music. He wrote a ton of music for the company KPM, and specifically, he made a number of songs that became sports themes in England.
Casey: So there was a show there called Grandstand, which was the BBC's flagship sports program, and they used this Keith Mansfield track as their theme for 30 years or so.
[clip: Keith Mansfield - Grandstand]
Casey: I feel like sports themes were a lot more wholesome back then.
Grace: Yeah. A lot more like levity than what we have now, I feel like.
Casey: Totally.
Dallas: It's a little bit more of like, "Hey everyone, this is a game, right?
Casey: Yeah. Now it's like…
[music in: Rachel Sandy - Machina Soldier]
Casey: “Intense sports for guys. Are you ready to rock some competition? Get your beer and hot wings, ‘cause it's sports time.”
Grace: Saturday. Saturday, Saturday.
[music out]
Grace: Oh man.
Casey: Yeah. And another wholesome one is a soccer show called The Big Match that ran from the ‘60s to the ‘90s. They used one of Keith's tracks as their opening theme song.
[clip: Keith Mansfield - Young Scene]
Dallas: I love the bends. “Bwaah, buh buh bwaah, buh buh bwaah!”
Casey: Yeah.
Grace: It's so good!
Dallas: That, I mean, just the interpretation on that though. Somebody's like, for soccer, or I guess football, they'd be like, "This works!" But I'm not exactly sure where they were mentally, in order to…
Casey: Yeah, I know. I agree. And the track is called "Young Scene," which to me feels like a much more accurate… like, it sounds like some ‘60s teenagers boppin’ at a pool party, you know?
Grace: Right, totally.
Dallas: Oh, that’s it. Yeah.
Casey: So Keith was in the right headspace for “Young Scene,” but someone was like, “No, football!”
Dallas: And he's like, "I'll take the check."
Casey: Right? Yeah. Eh, one more of these sports ones. This is for the BBC's coverage of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships, they used a Keith Mansfield track called "Light and Tuneful."
[clip: Keith Mansfield - Light and Tuneful]
Dallas: There's more bends. “Wah!”
Casey: I love that title, “Light and Tuneful.”
Grace: And tuneful!
Casey: It sounds like a… like a polite British person asking how you'd like your tea, but instead, they're asking how you'd like your music. Like, “Oh how do you like your music?”
Casey: “Oh, light and tuneful, please.”
Grace: Tuneful.
Casey: “Oh, certainly, dear! Light and tuneful it shall be!”
Dallas: I feel like everyone is like playing tennis on their tippy toes or something, with that.
Grace: Yeah, yeah.
[music in: The New Fools - Feel My Swagger]
Casey: Anyway, Keith Mansfield also wrote a song that was used in a series of snipes. Now a “snipe” is a movie industry term for anything that plays on the screen before a movie that is not a trailer.
Grace: Hmm.
Casey: So, could be a “No Smoking” message, or “Refreshments are available in the lobby. These days, there's of course, the “Silence your cell phones.”
Dallas: Ahh. Is this gonna be the, “bah dah dah dah, bah dah dah dah…”
Casey: I think you know where this is going.
Dallas: Like the “Go get your hot dogs!” Yeah.
Casey: Well actually, no. Not the hot dog thing, but it's along the same lines.
Dallas: Okay.
Casey: So, if a snipe lists a specific date for something that's happening at the theater, it's called a “dater.” So there is a specific set of snipes or daters that are kind of famous. They were created in 1968 by the National Screen Service, a company that had a monopoly on the distribution of trailers and movie posters in the US for many, many years.
Casey: These snipes are often called the Astro Daters, and they're also known as the Grindhouse Bumpers. These snipes were used pretty widely in America in the ‘70s, so if you were going to a grindhouse theater, or a drive-in theater, you'd often see these snipes before the movie.
[music fades under]
Casey: They had a very distinctive look, and they were all set to a Keith Mansfield song called “Funky Fanfare.”
[clip: Keith Mansfield - Funky Fanfare]
Dallas: Uh, yep, that's it. I don't think this was the “Go get the hotdog” one…
Casey: No.
Dallas: Because this was like right before the film, and it was getting you in the… in the right headspace. It's like, “Don't disturb people around you,” type of vibe, from what I remember.
Casey: Well, I just wanna show you the visual look of it. So I'm gonna send you a link on Slack to a Youtube video.
Grace: Okay.
Casey: And then maybe Dallas, you can describe what the visuals look like.
Dallas: Okay.
Casey: Okay. So there's the link.
[Keith Mansfield - Funky Fanfare in]
Dallas: Okay. It's a lot of words. “Previews of coming attractions.”
Grace: “Preview. V-U-E-S.”
Dallas: PreVUES of coming attractions.
Grace: It looks like we're inside a lava lamp, is the best way I can describe it.
Dallas: Oh! And then it kind of explodes out.
Grace: Oooh!
[music out]
Casey: Yeah, so it's this kind of swirly, colorful, psychedelic background…
Grace: Cool.
Casey: And the words are kind of coming in from the edge of the screen. And then there were a bunch of others that looked basically the same, but said things like "Our Feature Presentation," or "No Smoking in This Theater," or "Starts Friday." And they all used the same track, "Funky Fanfare."
Casey: But these Astro Daters have become emblematic of that ‘70s grindhouse and exploitation movie era. And Quentin Tarantino, who grew up in the ‘70s watching hundreds of those kinds of movies, and then went on to make films heavily inspired by those kinds of movies, he used one of the Astro Daters at the start of Kill Bill: Volume One. So at the beginning of that film, it plays the “Feature Presentation” Astro Dater that we just watched.
Grace: No way.
Casey: And he also used it in the double feature that he did with Robert Rodriguez, Grindhouse, with the movies Planet Terror and Death Proof. And then Robert Rodriguez used it at the start of Machete Kills, which was kind of like an offshoot of Grindhouse.
Casey: And then finally, since 2007, Tarantino has owned a movie theater in LA, a historic theater called The New Beverly. And he's in charge of all the programming, and plays a lot of movies that were influential to him. And before every movie they run, they'll play one of these Astro Daters. They have one of the original prints of it on film in a canister, you know, that they run through their projector, and kick off the movie that way.
Grace: Aww, cool. That’s awesome.
Dallas: There are very few perfect things, but this is a perfect track for getting yourself in the movie headspace.
Casey: Yeah, totally.
Grace: Yeah.
Casey: But then finally, Danger Doom, which consisted of Danger Mouse and MF Doom, they sampled “Funky Fanfare” in a track of theirs, featuring Talib Kweli called "Old School Rules."
[clip: Danger Doom - Old School Rules]
Casey: Yeah, so before we leave Keith Mansfield behind, I just wanna play you a quote from him. The PRX show Studio 360 interviewed Keith Mansfield about writing production music, and he had a great bit about why it appealed to him so much, which I think is probably applicable to many of the other composers who were doing the same thing.
Grace: Hmm.
Casey: So here's Keith.
Keith Mansfield: The whole thing about the library music, it may not have had the glamor of being a film composer or of being a pop star or whatever, but that's not what I wanted. I mean, I just wanted the opportunity to be all the different people I could be as a composer. I could be serious, I could be humorous, I could be evil, I could be nice and innocent, I could do angry music, I'd do all sorts of things. So that was very fulfilling as a composer, and it kept me interested for my whole musical lifetime.
Grace: That's so cool.
Casey: Yeah, right? It sounds like a fun job.
Grace: It makes total sense to me, too. It's like, if you don't wanna be pigeonholed into one genre, or like one identity your whole life, it makes total sense that you'd wanna be sort of like a musical chameleon and do production music. It's so cool.
Casey: Yeah, right? I want to hear Hans Zimmer's wholesome, “Wake up in the morning and eat your breakfast cereal” music.
Grace: Me too!
Casey: Well we've reached the conclusion. I have just a few closing questions for you. We use several modern music libraries to score this podcast. How do you think the music in the libraries we use compares to the stuff we've been talking about today?
[music in: Martin Landstrom - [Why Are You] Telling Me No]
Dallas: What really jumps out to me is the obvious use of real instruments and real musicians.
Casey: Totally.
Grace: Yeah.
Dallas: Everything I've heard just sounds like real people who wrote sheet music, and then got a group together or had a scoring session, or a small session of musicians, and then recorded it in one take, because everyone's really good.
Dallas: And I guess that now, a lot of production music is so singular, and quantized…
Casey: Right.
Dallas: …and click tracked, and “in the box” that, I don't wanna hate on it, because there's some really amazing stuff that's being done by individuals with plugins. But it's a little bit of just like one step into AI, where now AI's making it so obviously soulless, and in the uncanny valley so deeply.
Grace: Hmm. Yeah.
Dallas: But you hear so much human soul behind all of these tracks.
Grace: Yeah.
Dallas: Every single instrument…
Grace: That’s so true.
Dallas: Every single breath, every single groove, on all fronts is like so human.
Casey: Another difference I thought about is that most modern libraries don't have house composers and house musicians on staff anymore.
Grace: Mmhmm.
Casey: A few of them will apparently commission music from specific composers, but most libraries today are basically distribution platforms where independent artists can license out their music.
Grace: Right.
Casey: So it's just not as much of a full-time job option as it used to be, unless you're lucky enough to get hired by a film scoring company, or a trailer music company, which do exist.
Grace: Yeah.
Casey: So, yeah, tons of killer music. Some of it has been digitized, but I imagine probably a lot of it still hasn't. So I just think it's tantalizing to think about the undiscovered records that are out there somewhere, just waiting to be sampled in some awesome hip hop track, or used as the theme song to a new sitcom, or used in some grindhousey, throwbacky movie.
Dallas: I just wonder, with all the stuff that we recognize, how much exists that just never got used. All this human music…
Casey: Yeah.
Dallas: …with real people…
Grace: Yeah!
Dallas: …that's just living on a vinyl record in somebody's grandparents’ garage.
Grace: For real.
[music out]
Casey: So I had two goals today. Number one was to convince you that vintage production music is awesome. And number two was to demonstrate that this 50+ year old music is still actually really relevant to creators today. So have I achieved those goals?
Grace: I feel like both boxes get a big check from me, I loved it.
Casey: Great.
Dallas: You get a saxophone and a green check mark emoji on this.
Casey: Ooh, nice. Put that in my email signature. Show it off.
Dallas: I know that's a deep cut, and nobody would understand what that means on the podcast. Basically, most of my reactions in Slack is either a green check mark, “Got it.” Or a saxophone, which is kind of, I just imagine Kenny G wailing with pure joy. “We're all jamming together.”
Grace: Like, “We’re moving, we're grooving.”
Dallas: It is! It's like synchronicity…
Grace: Yeah.
Dallas: I don't think we've ever talked about this before.
Casey: No.
Dallas: But this is really delightful.
Grace: I love the—I love…
Casey: Some deep 20K lore going on… on the pod.
Grace: A little peek behind the curtain.
[music in: Ritchie Everett - You've Done Enough]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by my sound agency, Defacto Sound. If you’d like to work with Grace and I, get in touch by emailing hi at defacto sound dot com.
Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Jade Dickey.
Subscribe to my Youtube channel, Dallas Taylor dot mp3. Over there, I go behind the scenes with the audio crews of SNL, Friday Night Baseball, Meow Wolf, Disney Imagineering, and more. You can also find clips of these videos on Instagram and TikTok under that same name, Dallas Taylor dot mp3.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
