Tastes like Fresno

(Photo source: TV Time Capsule)

The craziest damn thing on TV right now is not American Horror Story. It's the funny six-part miniseries The Heart, She Holler, which is airing for six straight nights on Adult Swim until Friday. The Heart, She Holler is the Southern Gothic story of Hurlan Heartshe (Patton Oswalt, looking like a stand-in for Nick Swardson in Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star), a feral man-child who must battle with his poor-white-trash sisters, the devious Hurshe (Kristen Schaal) and the telekinetic Hambrosia (Heather Lawless), for control of Heartshe Holler, the small town that Hurlan inherited from their deceased cult leader father. The inbred yokels who populate Heartshe Holler are so filthy even Cletus from The Simpsons would tell them, "Git yerself a washcloth!"

Because it's from the minds of Wonder Showzen creators Vernon Chatman and John Lee, The Heart, She Holler gets its laughs from nightmarish and meth-y imagery that would cause most of the viewers who made a hit out of Modern Family (a show Schaal once guest-starred on) to puke into their tubs of Häagen-Dazs. A man pulls from an electric outlet intestines that go on forever. Another man French-kisses a glory hole that was carved into the cover of a Bible. If this show had a Baby Lily in its cast, she'd probably be walking around with a rotting piece of roadkill as her dolly.

The Heart, She Holler's nightly miniseries format and Schaal's soapy villainess both remind me of another comedy miniseries that aired over the course of one week 25 Novembers ago: Newhart creator Barry Kemp's not-as-meth-y Fresno. From November 16 to November 20, 1986 on CBS, this spoof of wealth-obsessed '80s CBS nighttime soaps like Falcon Crest and the soon-to-be-revived-on-TNT Dallas followed the nasty power struggle between the Kensington raisin empire, led by matriarch Charlotte Kensington (Carol Burnett), and rival raisin baron Tyler Cane (Dabney Coleman). Caught up in the feud are Charlotte's dickish eldest son Cane (Charles Grodin), his unhappy nympho wife Talon (Teri Garr), Charlotte's demure adopted daughter Tiffany (Valerie Mahaffey), the always shirtless ranch hand Torch (Trapper John, M.D. star Gregory Harrison, poking fun at his '80s himbo persona), gardener-turned-corporate spy Juan (Luis Avalos), country singer Bobbi Jo Bobb (Teresa Ganzel) and her convict husband Billy Joe (Bill Paxton!).

Shot on a bigger budget than The Heart, She Holler (for example, the gowns were designed by a name I became familiar with because I'd see it pop up during so many '70s or '80s opening or closing credits: Bob Mackie of Burnett's Gone with the Wind sketch gown fame), Fresno isn't quite a classic, but it's a fun comedic soap made for viewers like me who avoid actual nighttime soaps like the plague. Maybe if each episode had been 11 minutes long like each installment of The Heart, She Holler or other live-action Adult Swim shows like Childrens Hospital, the current live-action crown jewel of the Adult Swim lineup, and its spinoff NTSF:SD:SUV, Fresno would have been a classic. When I first caught it in reruns on Comedy Central in the '90s--fortunately without the laugh track that CBS reportedly tacked on to the miniseries when it rebroadcast it--Fresno felt like it was several minutes too long at an hour per episode (with commercials).

There are so many reasons to be pissed off at Fox--besides one of its cable channels' unusual definitions of the words "fair," "balanced" and "news"--like the fact that Fox owns the MTM Enterprises library and either butchers MTM properties on DVD or Hulu (worst example: the WKRP music clearance fiasco) or doesn't take advantage of reintroducing via DVD hours and hours of great or good MTM shows like Fresno (does Fox own Fresno?--I'm not quite sure) to younger viewers who'd get a kick out of these shows that were around either before they were born or when they were too young to understand why Dr. Johnny Fever always looks so exhausted. So because of that, YouTube is all we can rely on for little glimpses of Fresno.

As you can see from the YouTube clips of Fresno (hey, it's Kramer), one of the highlights of the miniseries is Mel Brooks film score composer John Morris' original music, from Bobbi Jo's fake country songs ("Just because you're a migrant worker don't mean we got a migrant love") to the main title theme, one of the best obscure TV themes of the '80s. Morris' theme morphs from bullfighting music to Big Country score-style Americana. It's amusingly over-the-top and awesome.

BBC's Luther may be as close as we can get to that TV version of Gotham Central some of us GC readers always wanted to see

The BBC One cops-vs.-serial killers procedural Luther, which concludes its second season on BBC America tonight, isn't a perfect show, but it's more enjoyable than most procedurals, due to an imposing and lively but never hammy turn by former Wire star Idris Elba (an actual lead of color who still has his show!) and a distinctive, not-so-generic look.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The '60s Batman had the Dutch angles and Homicide: Life on the Street had the jump cuts and washed-out color scheme (something Homicide phased out in its later and less interesting seasons). Luther likes to take its actors and place them at the bottom left and right corners of the screen so that they're surrounded by lots of negative space. If I recall correctly, a Luther crew member said the crew favored this framing effect because it makes it appear as if comic book-style thought bubbles are about to surface above the actors' heads.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

The framing effect, which was more prominent in Luther's first season (did some Beeb higher-up put NBC exec-vs.-Homicide-style pressure on the Luther crew to do less of it?), also enhances the show's sense of dread and unease. It dwarfs the actors and manages to make the tall Elba look as small as the runty white psychos he's been chasing this season (at times, Luther feels like a serious version of Chris Rock's post-Columbine stand-up routine about crazy white kids who scare the shit out of him, like the goofily named Trenchcoat Mafia).

Luther evokes dread and unease more effectively than most shows. The mute, hammer-wielding LARP-er who terrorized working folk in the penultimate episode of Luther's second season is scarier and more menacing than anything during Luther's American ratings competition, FX's trying-way-too-hard-to-be-scary American Horror Story. The LARP-er's muteness and the episode's preference for filming his killings from a distance or having them take place off-screen--we're subjected only to gruesome hammer-to-skull sound effects--both make his acts of violence more disturbing. And though it's resorted to the tired and annoying device of children in peril that's been used by torture-porn procedurals like Criminal Minds, Luther rarely feels as sadistic as that show (below an A.V. Club piece about Criminal Minds and its short-lived spinoff Suspect Behavior, a commenter astutely noted that "Middle America eat [sic] this crap up with a spoon. It genuinely baffles me that middle aged and conservative Americans have made this show such a mainstream hit.").

That quality of being unnerving without getting sadistic or graphic recalls Gotham Central, the much-missed DC Comics crime title that writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka told from the point of view of Gotham City homicide detectives who resent Batman (Gotham Central was a bleak book, but it wasn't as sadistic as most of DC's puerile attempts at edginess, perhaps because Brubaker and Rucka write like grown-ups instead of horny and torture-porn-obsessed adolescents). From "the operatic theatricality" that crime novelist and Luther creator Neil Cross once said he's brought to DCI John Luther's adversaries to that aforementioned framing effect that creates the illusion of thought bubbles, the larger-than-life Luther is basically a comic book--or as John's teenage charge Jenny Jones (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) would prefer, graphic novel--but it's a very good one, which Gotham Central was.

There was once talk of turning Gotham Central into a TV series, which would have been nice to see, although I don't think there are any showrunners who would have been able to master the tricky balance of supervillain theatrics with much more grounded police detective business that even Rucka occasionally had trouble pulling off in the comic (for instance, the gaudily dressed heroes from the Teen Titans stuck out like a sore thumb when they were awkwardly integrated into the not-so-gaudy Gotham Central).

But after watching how Luther handles John's bordering-on-superhuman investigative skills or the theatricality of both John's adversaries and his sociopathic adversary-turned-ally Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) without looking goofy and lame, I think Cross would be the perfect showrunner for a TV version of Gotham Central if it ever becomes a possibility again.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

If that TV adaptation never surfaces, then think of Luther as a pretty good Gotham Central spinoff in which Elba is terrific as deceased Gotham detective Crispus Allen, who's reimagined himself as a David Bowie-loving(*) British supercop in some sort of crime-ridden afterlife that's a cross between the original Life on Mars and Lost's much-maligned sideways universe.

(Photo source: Luther Caps)

(*) You gotta love a procedural that has a lead who idolizes Bowie and, as it's implied in one episode, uses his music to help him think, although why Luther didn't choose a Bowie track as its theme music--it went with Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus," which actually isn't too shabby--is as puzzling as any of John's cases.

"Grandpa, tell us the story again about the man whose life got flipped, turned upside down": 10 amusing tweets related to TV theme music

--recent New York Times Magazine profile subject and Office star/writer Mindy Kaling

--Patton Oswalt and A.V. Club writer Noel Murray on TCM's TV ratings graphics music

--Patton Oswalt and John Fugelsang on CSI and The Who

--God_Damn_Batman

--fake lyrics for the instrumental theme from The Good Life, a.k.a. Good Neighbors, the subject of one of The Young Ones' funniest Vyvyan scenes:

--Jonah Hill, looking into the future

--New York Daily News writer Josh Greenman on the July 31, 2011 debt debate

--HitFix's SNL and Fringe recapper Ryan McGee

"If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck": The best existing songs that are theme music for shows you've probably never heard of

1. "Somebody Start a Fight or Something" by TISM (The Green Room with Paul Provenza)
This rousing 2004 track by the Aussie alt-rock band TISM delivers a message of "Drop your pretentious airs and start keeping it real" ("Listen, motherfucker, let me make this clear/I've had your fucking poetry up to here... If I wanted Chekhov, I'd have worn my polo neck"), so it's the perfect theme music for a frank and uncensored Showtime stand-up comic panel show that's the anti-Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.

In other words, the stand-ups are required to have an actual conversation with each other, instead of pretending they're having a conversation when what they're really doing is just reciting their routines. Moderator Paul Provenza's anti-Comics Unleashed format has resulted in lively and thought-provoking discussions like the one Provenza, Bill Burr, Lizz Winstead, Russell Peters, Colin Quinn, Caroline Rhea and Tony Clifton (!) had about Tracy Morgan's apologies for his homophobic jokes during a recent episode that took place at Montreal's Just for Laughs festival. (Also in that same episode, Peters, an Indian Canadian comic, gives the funniest description of what porn flicks are like in a country where its movie stars can't even kiss onscreen. I can't do Peters' Indian porn joke any justice if I attempt to repeat it, so I won't attempt to.)

During an interview to promote The Green Room, Provenza said one of the purposes of his show is to get stand-ups who are always "on" to leave behind their one-liner comfort zones or stage personas and just be themselves. The frequent archness of the present-day stand-up world is a trend he dislikes:

Many comedians these days "take on characters. It's a lot of winking and nodding. Some comedians almost even apologize for the fact that they're working in the form of comedy, and they make fun of the form as they're doing it. That's the overriding trend. So what you get is people who are not actually talking from the heart. They're always putting some layer of detachment from their real, you know, emotional and intellectual passions."

In other words, he wants them to pull no punches, whether it's onstage or on The Green Room. Somebody start a fight or something.



2. "Yalili Ya Aini" by Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart (The Smartest Man in the World)
I first heard this hypnotic 1994 track by former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, his band Invaders of the Heart and singer Natacha Atlas (Allmusic calls it "one of the best bits of sexy, North African lurch that Wobble and [guitarist Justin] Adams have ever set to tape") while tuning in to SomaFM's Secret Agent, which has it on constant rotation. So when it wound up as the theme music for comedian Greg Proops' stream-of-consciousness podcast The Smartest Man in the World, I thought, "Sweet! It's that Arabian-sounding chillout joint from Secret Agent with the title that always escapes me."

"Yalili Ya Aini" perfectly establishes the nocturnal and international feel of The Smartest Man, which is recorded in front of a live audience, either at The Smartest Man's homebase, West Hollywood's Bar Lubitsch, or whatever venue Proops is performing at that night, whether it's in his old home turf of San Francisco or Melbourne. Unlike most comedy podcasts, The Smartest Man doesn't follow an interview format.

"I knew I didn't want to do that [interview format] because other people were doing it and doing better. Marc [Maron] and Jimmy [Pardo] and everybody just murdering it," said Proops to Laughspin.

What listeners are getting in each Proopcast is essentially an extra 60-to-70-minute stand-up set by Proops. But instead of joke-after-joke-after-joke, Proops delivers not-always-jokey but always interesting ruminations on current events, music, film history, baseball history (he's particularly fond of the San Francisco Giants and the achievements of the Negro Leagues, so he's joked that no Proopcast is complete without him mentioning Satchel Paige) and politics (he's progressive, so President Obama, who has been to progressives what the Green Lantern movie is to nerds, irks him as much as the Tea Party does).

The Smartest Man is where I got my first exposure to British punk poet John Cooper Clarke's "Evidently Chickentown," which Proops once recited to thunderous applause. I've become a new fan of "Evidently Chickentown"--and I don't even like spoken word (here's how much I understand the appeal of spoken word: whenever there's a slam poet on TV, I'm like, "Okay, when's the DJ gonna show up and drop the beat?").

Basically, The Smartest Man is like Craig Ferguson's freewheeling monologue but much more political and not as Scottish. And a little trancey, thanks to "Yalili Ya Aini."



3. "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8 (Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence)
Elvis Mitchell had the suavest opening titles of any interview show. On a loungy-looking NEP Studios set decorated with dangling lightbulbs, Mitchell walked out dressed to the nines, to the tune of the swanky 2000 downtempo track "Elysian Fields" by Minus 8, a.k.a. Swiss DJ/producer Robert Jan Meyer. This wasn't Conan in a suit gawkily riding his bicycle through Manhattan in the opening credits, that's for damn sure.

Under the Influence, in which the host of KCRW's The Treatment would chat with actors and directors about movies and movie stars they admire, was produced for only one season on TCM in 2008, but TCM still airs it from time to time. The Bill Murray episode is worth DVRing (the Laurence Fishburne ep is pretty good too). Mitchell was able to get Murray, who's notoriously guarded (except when he's on Letterman), to open up during his show and give candid discussions about movie acting and comediennes he either enjoyed watching ("Elaine May is like the most attractive woman in the world... If I had come up when Elaine May was coming up, I would have chained her to a typewriter and made love to her like every four hours just to keep her going. She's the funniest.") or couldn't understand the appeal of ("[Lucille Ball] never really made me laugh for some reason. I don't know why. Lucy was never my girl.").

"Elysian Fields" was a great choice to open and close a TCM interview show because of Minus 8's samples of dialogue from old movies (in the original version of "Elysian Fields," the samples are from the first Bogart/Bacall scene in one of my favorite movies, The Big Sleep, but the 2007 version that was used during Under the Influence replaced the Big Sleep audio with dialogue from some old movie I've never seen and is most likely not as awesome as The Big Sleep). I wonder how the Under the Influence intro would have looked with "Yakety Sax" instead of "Elysian Fields." Alex, I think I'll go with "What is not-as-suave?"



4. "Reckoner" by Radiohead (Vanguard)
Any investigative journalism series that would open with Radiohead is tops in my book. For those who weren't aware of Current TV before Keith Olbermann joined the channel, it was best known for the compelling and sometimes difficult-to-watch documentary series Vanguard. Correspondents like Laura Ling, Mariana van Zeller and Adam Yamaguchi often put their lives at risk for the sake of the story. One such story, human trafficking in North Korea, brought international attention to Vanguard in 2009 when the North Korean government arrested Ling and her footage editor Euna Lee for trespassing while they were doing research for their piece. Ling and Lee were sentenced to a labor camp for 12 years--until Bill and Hillary Clinton intervened and ex-President Clinton successfully negotiated with Kim Jong Il for their release.

Though Vanguard no longer uses Radiohead's enigmatic and contemplative 2008 track "Reckoner," it's still an incredible program. The recent Vanguard installment "Sex, Lies & Cigarettes" is an intriguing examination of the tobacco industry's insidious marketing tactics in Third World countries like the Smoking Baby's home turf of Indonesia, although there's an angle that Vanguard overlooked: the connection between the tobacco industry's tactics and environmental racism.



Gnarls Barkley's equally terrific live cover of "Reckoner":



5. "Pheromone" by Prince (Video LP)
I remember coming home from school and turning on The Avengers on A&E and flipping over to BET's music video/interview program Video LP whenever Steed and Peel were interrupted by a commercial break. I went back and forth between enjoying young Diana Rigg's catsuited body and judo chops and enjoying Video LP host Madelyne Woods' legs, as well as the way she maintained her resolve in the face of inarticulate rappers and new jack musicians whom I realized I never wanted to hear speak in interviews.

I know some rappers fare well in an interview setting, but most of them don't, and as someone who digs their music, it's torturous to watch or hear. If you want to hear their opinions, just listen to their lyrics. Don't drag them to do a lengthy interview. They're lost without a breakbeat or a beatbox (or a bong). It's like when HBO tries to interview boxers after their fights. What do they expect them to say after 12 rounds? "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain"? What's more likely to come out of their mouths is "Myeyzcudopngrb."

Back to Woods and Video LP. Woods left BET a long time ago but is still a reporter (and is actually on Twitter), and Video LP is largely forgotten, aside from a few YouTube clips and A Tribe Called Quest's "Electric Relaxation," in which Phife Dawg--one of those MCs who thrives in an interview setting--name-checked Woods ("Hon, you got the goods, like Madelyne Woods").

Video LP also bears the distinction of being the only TV show that contained theme music by Prince (he contributed to Video LP an instrumental version of "Pheromone," a song that later surfaced on his 1994 album Come). I bet Prince frowns upon scripted TV (even though he once made a guest appearance on Muppets Tonight), but I wish he'd contribute another TV theme because he's such a musical genius. It would probably sound like this (FF to 3:29):

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day archive

July 1, 2011: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi featuring Edda Dell'Orso, "Theme of Rome"
July 4, 2011: Babe Ruth, "The Mexican"
July 5, 2011: Goldfrapp, "Utopia (New Ears Mix)"
July 6, 2011: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie, "More [Theme from Mondo Cane]"
July 7, 2011: Count Basie and His Orchestra, "007"
July 8, 2011: Adrian Younge, "1969 Organ"
July 11, 2011: John Zorn, "Erotico (The Burglars)"
July 12, 2011: Barry Adamson, "The Big Bamboozle"
July 13, 2011: Mike Patton, "Deep Down"
July 14, 2011: Goldfrapp, "Pilots"
July 15, 2011: Jimmy Smith, "Walk on the Wild Side"
July 18, 2011: Elvis Costello and Sy Richardson, "A Town Called Big Nothing (Really Big Nothing)"
July 19, 2011: Count Basie and His Orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald & The Tommy Flanagan Trio, "Sanford & Son Theme (The Streetbeater)"
July 20, 2011: Daniele Luppi, "An Italian Story"
July 21, 2011: The John Gregory Orchestra, "It Takes a Thief"
July 22, 2011: Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, "Spy School Graduation Theme"
July 25, 2011: The John Gregory Orchestra, "The Avengers"
July 26, 2011: Goldfrapp, "Lovely Head"
July 27, 2011: Parodi/Fair, "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)"
July 28, 2011: Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, "Her Hollow Ways"
July 29, 2011: The Wondermints, "The Party"

The "Rome, Italian Style" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: The John Gregory Orchestra, "The Avengers"

I gave myself an assignment for the entire month of July: I've been writing one post per weekday in which I say a few words about a selected track from A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" block of imaginary soundtrack music and covers of '60s and '70s film and TV themes. Sometimes, I've found myself not being able to say much more than "It's dope" or "It's shiny," and other times, the TV series where the piece of music originated from is a more interesting subject to write about than the music itself, which is the case with today's post. The "'Rome, Italian Style' Track of the Day" series concludes this Friday, but the block will continue to air Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon on AFOS.

Song: "The Avengers" by The John Gregory Orchestra
Released: 1961
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's a faithful cover (that can be streamed here) of the other Avengers theme, the lesser-known one from the British spy show's pre-Emma Peel seasons that was composed not by Laurie Johnson, but by the late British jazzman John Dankworth. Those rarely seen (due mostly to the British TV networks' love of throwing their archived shows away) and shot-on-videotape first three seasons were more serious in tone, and Dankworth's crime-jazz theme reflected that harder-edged tone.

A show that's turned 50 years old (!) this year, The Avengers started out as a total sausage fest, with Patrick Macnee's John Steed partnered with Ian Hendry's David Keel, a doctor seeking vengeance on the drug dealers who murdered his fiancée. When leather-clad anthropologist/judo expert Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) arrived as a replacement for Keel (Hendry, the show's original lead actor, decided to bounce after the first season to pursue a film career), the once-grim procedural gradually evolved into the eye candy-filled, sexy and playful spy-fi classic we know and love today.

"When the women came, it coincided with the rise of women's lib. So women were totally excited to see, in what was after all a comic strip type show, a woman [who] actually does things," said Macnee in 1998, when he was promoting his memoir The Avengers and Me. "At that time, to see a women like Diana Rigg, with that beautiful auburn hair throwing men over her shoulder, then tossing her hair out of her eyes, smiling and saying 'Where do we go next?' was highly attractive--particularly to young women. And to young men, particularly with the clothes, because they were... err, revealing and interesting. Suddenly a woman was vibrant in a medium in which [that] normally didn't happen."


The Avengers 50th Anniversary Press Launch from Avengers 50th on Vimeo.

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: The John Gregory Orchestra, "It Takes a Thief"

Song: "It Takes a Thief" by The John Gregory Orchestra
Released: 1972
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: British bandleader/arranger John "Chaquito" Gregory's cover of Dave Grusin's slick It Takes a Thief theme lacks the funky bass playing and urgent percussion that I love so much about Grusin's third-season arrangement of the theme. But Gregory's rendition, which can be streamed here, is the only cover of the theme that's available (it's also the only recording of the theme that's available), so it'll do.

The It Takes a Thief theme is my favorite Grusin tune. It's the perfect opener for a '60s espionage procedural I've often found to be more enjoyable than most '60s American spy shows because it has a criminal as its hero, which is more interesting to me than the company man types who were frequently the leads in '60s spy shows. Plus, as Alexander Mundy, Robert Wagner was the epitome of cool and quite skilled with the show's moments of light, not-too-campy-like-the-worst-seasons-of-U.N.C.L.E. comedy. This ease with comedy was a skill that the future Number Two later put to great use when he literally made a mess of his debonair image in the funniest thing he ever did, the 1989 SNL "Sloppy Eater" sketch (Parks and Recreation has got to find a way for Rob Lowe to work in his amusing and dead-on Wagner impression, which he's done in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and on talk shows).

In 2006, Universal announced that Will Smith was attached to a big-screen version of It Takes a Thief, which hasn't been made yet. Nah, I can't see him playing a smooth thief like Mundy. Smith is more entertaining when he's playing a fish-out-of-water hero like in the original Men in Black and Hancock and is less entertaining when he tries to be suave. Mundy is more of a Taye Diggs or Idris Elba role or a role for Michael Weatherly, whose onscreen dad on NCIS happens to be Wagner himself.

Pushing for more Asian Americans as leads on screen or in fiction is an uphill battle that I continue to be passionate about, so why not think outside the box and get Sung Kang from Justin Lin's Fast Five, who looked like he was channeling Mundy in that surprisingly good heist flick, to play him? Just rename him Alexander Moon.

Then again, why make an It Takes a Thief movie when the USA show White Collar is currently doing a better job at channeling Wagner's old show than whatever the movie version would have attempted to do?

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Count Basie and His Orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald & The Tommy Flanagan Trio, "Sanford & Son Theme (The Streetbeater)"

Song: "Sanford & Son Theme (The Streetbeater)" by Count Basie and His Orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald & The Tommy Flanagan Trio
Released: 1972
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's a cover of Quincy Jones' classic Sanford & Son theme that I was recently made aware of by The Smartest Man in the World podcast host Greg Proops' funny reenactment of two different Ella Fitzgerald concerts he saw: first in the '70s, when the Sanford & Son theme was part of her and the Count Basie Orchestra's set list, and then about a couple of decades later, when Proops and his wife watched the audience of predominantly "75-to-80-year-old women who are wearing hats" chew out Fitzgerald's security guard for being too slow to help the frail singer sit more comfortably in her chair onstage. "The people in front of us who haven't stood on their own in 14 years are standing now!," recalls Proops, who then busts out his best cranky old New York lady complaining-about-the-prices-at-Talbots voice. "'She's not comfortable! Get her a seat!'"

I wish Greg Proops would occasionally have guests on his podcast because I'd like to hear him verbally spar with his old Whose Line Is It Anyway? host Clive Anderson again.

This portion of The Smartest Man's "Counts" episode includes a great description of Basie as a Frank Sinatra bandleader in comparison to Neal Hefti and Nelson Riddle. "The dynamic [between Basie and Sinatra] is fucking wild, right?... That's how the band was: shrieking horns, scintillating trombones... 'Angel trumpets and devil trombones,' right?," Proops says. "And then Count Basie would go, 'Pink!,' in the middle of everything, in the middle of fury. In the middle of a hurricane, Count Basie would hit one white key. 'Pink!'"

The dynamic between the Basie band and jazz singers like Sinatra and Fitzgerald is on display in Fitzgerald's live cover of "The Streetbeater" from her Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 album (listen to it here). "Minger's on trumpet!," says Fitzgerald, who's referring to trumpeter Pete Minger during his solo. I like the way Fitzgerald, Minger, saxman Jimmy Forrest and the other band members play off of each other here, and the musical dialogue Fitzgerald carries on with the band's guest soloists is even doper during their electrifying rendition of "C Jam Blues" at the end of the same album.

This is a snippet of an illustration I did for my currently-in-the-works book I Suck at Math: A Trio of 10 Articles About Pop Culture. The illustration speculates what it would have been like if Redd Foxx starred in The Phantom Menace, a movie that happens to feature the voice of... Greg Proops. Circle of life!

Speaking of jazz, Fred Sanford's insults to Aunt Esther are like jazz.

Aunt Esther: This old heathen want me to pay him for comin' in here!

Fred: He oughta tip me just to look at you!

Boom!

Aunt Esther: When I was born, my body was blessed by Mother Nature, honey!

Fred: And as you got older, it was cursed by Father Time!

Bam!

Aunt Esther: Fred Sanford, I have the feelin' of Christmas!

Fred: And the face of Halloween!

Woof!

Aunt Esther: Woodrow and I are going to have a baby.

Fred: Well, somebody better call the zoo!

Horn stab!

Jamie Foxx covers the Brady Bunch theme as Babyface, Luther Vandross and Prince

Thanks, Sherwood Schwartz, for making sitcoms that were so often devoid of logic that they led to many fun hours of dissection during tipsy or stoned conversations ("If Mike's supposed to be an architect, then why would he build a house for nine people that has only two bathrooms?"). The tuneful and surreal Schwartzverse in The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island has also served as fodder for countless stand-up routines--mostly bad, some good.

Because the Brady Bunch and Gilligan creator died earlier this week, here are the four best versions of the Schwartz-penned Brady Bunch theme ever, all performed in 2002 by Jamie Foxx (who, by the way, is very funny in this summer's Horrible Bosses, as a "murder consultant" who doesn't quite live up to his intimidating-looking appearance):



Because I watched a lot of Comedy Central during the '90s, I was subjected to tons of hacky stand-up clips from the '80s and early '90s. The hackiest ones always involved either of the following topics: "Asians talk funny," airline food, "White people drive like this, while bruthas drive like this," the differences between men and women and "Here's what the Brady Bunch theme would sound like if a rapper did it." Foxx's R&B-ified Brady Bunch is funnier--and much more accurate about the musicians he's imitating--than those '80s routines that basically said, "Hey everybody, watch me do the Brady Bunch intro as I demonstrate that I've listened to only one rap song in my life, that one by Aerosmith and Rum-DMZ."

Bernard Herrmann would have turned 100 today

Because today marks the centennial of influential composer Bernard Herrmann, CBS News recently assembled a lengthy slideshow/audio clip gallery that's a pretty good overview of Herrmann's career. It's fitting that CBS would be the one to give Herrmann such a thorough and reverent centennial tribute because Herrmann had a long association with the network, from the days when radio was a more dominant medium (Herrmann served as conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra and composed score music for countless CBS radio dramas, including Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast) to the period when CBS conquered TV in addition to radio (Herrmann provided music for several Twilight Zone episodes and composed the anthology show's somber and lesser-known first-season opening title theme).

These days, Herrmann is best known for his brilliant work with Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Ray Harryhausen, which probably would have irked Herrmann because the famously testy maestro hated being labeled a film composer and wrote for more than just the screen (for instance, he composed an opera based on Wuthering Heights). His final film score, is, to me, his most stunning achievement. Herrmann initially had no interest in working on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the ultimate vision of '70s New York-as-hell, but then he changed his mind because he liked the part of Paul Schrader's script where Travis Bickle poured peach brandy on his Corn Flakes.

Perhaps because Herrmann knew he wasn't long for this world at the time he wrote it (he finished recording it only a few hours before he died in his sleep on December 24, 1975), the Taxi Driver score sounds like the last few gasps of a dying man, with its thunderous, apocalyptic-sounding percussion, a melancholy theme for alto sax that was performed by an uncredited Ronny Lang and a final cue where the last few notes quote at a funereal pace a previous Herrmann theme, the ominous three-note motif that concludes Psycho.

Be sure to check out the mp3 clips of the Taxi Driver title themes and other Herrmann compositions that CBS News has posted--or enjoy Herrmann's cues from Taxi Driver, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, Jason and the Argonauts and Marnie whenever they're streamed during the "Assorted Fistful" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day archive

January 3, 2011: The Crystal Method, "Starting Over"
January 4, 2011: Run-DMC, "Rock Box"
January 5, 2011: Pulp, "Like a Friend"
January 6, 2011: Classic & 86, "Ridin'"
January 7, 2011: The Roots feat. Malik B. & Dice Raw, "Here I Come"
January 10, 2011: Puccio Roelens, "Caravan"
January 11, 2011: The Who, "I'm One"
January 12, 2011: Madvillain feat. M.E.D. a.k.a. Medaphoar, "Raid"
January 13, 2011: Stevie Wonder, "I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)"
January 14, 2011: Elton John, "Amoreena"
January 17, 2011: Edo G feat. Masta Ace, "Wishing"
January 18, 2011: The Motherhood, "Soul Town"
January 19, 2011: Tom Jones, "Sex Bomb (Peppermint Disco Mix)"
January 20, 2011: Matt & Kim, "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare"
January 21, 2011: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Crosstown Traffic"
January 24, 2011: A Flock of Seagulls, "Space Age Love Song"
January 25, 2011: Brother Noland, "Coconut Girl"
January 26, 2011: Spandau Ballet, "Gold"
January 27, 2011: Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar"
January 28: 2011: Harry Nilsson, "Jump Into the Fire"
January 31, 2011: The Blind Boys of Alabama, "Way Down in the Hole"
February 1, 2011: Vampire Weekend, "A-Punk"
February 2, 2011: Beastie Boys, "Shambala"
February 3, 2011: Cameo, "Candy"
February 4, 2011: Tony Lucca, "Devil Town"
February 7, 2011: Earth, Wind & Fire, "Reasons"
February 8, 2011: Dinah Washington, "This Bitter Earth"
February 9, 2011: Raekwon feat. Inspectah Deck, Ghostface Killah and GZA, "Guillotine (Swordz)"
February 10, 2011: Iggy and the Stooges, "Search and Destroy"
February 11, 2011: Neil Richardson, "The Riviera Affair"
February 14, 2011: The Jackson 5, "Never Can Say Goodbye"
February 15, 2011: The Skyflakes, "Talk About Today"
February 16, 2011: Pixies, "Where Is My Mind?"
February 17, 2011: The Dubliners, "The Rocky Road to Dublin"
February 18, 2011: Roxy Music, "Same Old Scene"
February 21, 2011: The Bar-Kays, "Too Hot to Stop"
February 22, 2011: Geto Boys, "Still"
February 23, 2011: Death from Above 1979, "Romantic Rights"
February 24, 2011: The Heavy, "Short Change Hero"
February 25, 2011: The Pogues, "The Body of an American"

The "Rock Box" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs 4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Death from Above 1979, "Romantic Rights"

Song: "Romantic Rights" by the once-disbanded, soon-to-reunite-at-Coachella Canadian duo Death from Above 1979
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: Dig that scratchy opening guitar riff. The opening title theme and bumper music for the Aziz Ansari/Rob Huebel/Paul Scheer MTV show Human Giant is my favorite theme tune for a sketch comedy show since Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet's instrumental "Having an Average Weekend" on The Kids in the Hall (Heavy D's second theme for In Living Color wasn't too bad either).

From 2007 to 2008, Human Giant gave us delightful moments like a sex tape in which Will Arnett says he gets turned on by abortions, a biopic about post-9/11 Bush starring a lisping preschooler as "Lil' Bush" ("Deeth colorth don't run!") and an Indian American sketch comic who managed to be funny without relying on minstrel-y, MetroPCS Tech & Talk commercial-style shtick. But the greatest moment from the Human Giant quartet (the fourth and largely off-screen member is segment director Jason Woliner) has to be when Ansari, Huebel and Scheer took over as MTV hosts for 24 hours, brought to the MTV studios musicians they enjoy but TRL and The Hills viewers wouldn't have cared for (like Tapes 'n Tapes and Ted Leo) and were given free rein to air on the channel whatever music videos or old MTV shows they wanted to see. Their hijinks during the 24-hour live telecast made the long-irrelevant channel temporarily watchable again.

After the MTV show ended due to the stars' commitments to other projects, the Human Giant cast members haven't been doing so well. Ansari is now starring in the great ensemble show Parks and Recreation and Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer's upcoming 30 Minutes or Less with Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride and Nick Swardson, a film Ansari has called "Heat with two really dumb dudes." Huebel is a cast member on Adult Swim's hilarious Childrens Hospital and has snagged a role as George Clooney's best friend in Alexander Payne's next movie The Descendants. In addition to co-hosting How Did This Get Made?, an amusing podcast in which he and his friends take a crap on crappy movies like Burlesque and Old Dogs, Scheer is starring in both FX's The League and Adult Swim's upcoming Childrens Hospital spinoff NTSF:SD:SUV and got the chance to work in close proximity to Kelly Brook's uncovered boobs in Piranha.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Blind Boys of Alabama, "Way Down in the Hole"

"'Rock Box' Track of the Day" is a series of weekday posts about each of the existing songs that are streamed during the "Rock Box" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks (4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays). Each post provides info on a different track from the "Rock Box" playlist and points out the movie or TV series moment where the track is so effectively used.

Song: "Way Down in the Hole" by The Blind Boys of Alabama
Released: 2001
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: The gospel group's cover of the Tom Waits tune was selected by Wire creator David Simon to be the theme during his show's brilliant first-season opening title sequence, which Andrew Dignan astutely described in a Museum of the Moving Image video essay as a sequence that "announces that The Wire is not a kicking-down-doors-and-busting-heads kind of cop show. The compositions are often off-center or partly out-of-focus, conveying world weariness and tedium on both sides of the divide."

Each subsequent season of The Wire would feature a different version of "Way Down in the Hole" in the titles. Season 2 episodes opened with Waits' original version, season 3 eps opened with a Neville Brothers version that was commissioned for the show, season 4 eps kicked off with a version that was also recorded for the show and performed by Domaje, a group of Baltimore teens, and season 5 eps opted for a cover by Steve Earle, who had a small role on the show as Bubbles' AA sponsor Waylon.

The Blind Boys version--the first piece of music that ever appeared on The Wire--was also the last existing song that was featured on the show. It accompanied the montage that concluded the series finale "-30-."

John Barry (1933-2011)

My favorite element of the 007 movies--besides the women--is the score music. John Barry, who died earlier this morning at the age of 77, wrote 11 of those 007 scores and made them so enjoyable and listenable outside the context of those movies. It's hard to listen to Barry's rousing and cool On Her Majesty's Secret Service main title theme without going up to a mirror and kneeling and pretending to aim a gun--just like what Danny once did on Hustle when he rehearsed a heist to the tune of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme blaring from a stereo.

I'm sure Barry would have rather been remembered for more than just Bond, so I'll mention that my two favorite non-Bond pieces of score music by Barry are the entire score from 1965's The Knack... And How to Get It and the theme from the Roger Moore/Tony Curtis buddy detective show The Persuaders!



"Another of the great composers has left us," tweeted Bear McCreary, who's currently scoring NBC's The Cape. "I'm cranking up The Black Hole in your honor."

Besides The Black Hole (an example of great opening title theme, schizophrenic and uneven movie--when I was a kid, I thought the Black Hole coloring book was more fun), I'm also fond of Barry's themes from The Ipcress File, The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy and Game of Death.

Barry also appeared on-screen as orchestra conductors in a couple of movies he scored. He cameoed in the 1968 Michael Caine heist flick Deadfall, which Fox Movie Channel aired last week, and The Living Daylights, his final 007 project (the above photo is from his Living Daylights cameo). Barry's musical output dried up in the late '90s (his last screen credit was the 2001 WWII codebreaking thriller Enigma), but British musicians kept alive his work by sampling some of his film themes. Mono sampled an Ipcress File cue in 1996's "Life in Mono," Fatboy Slim crafted a memorable hook out of the guitar riffs of Barry's first major film theme, the 007-esque Beat Girl theme from 1960, in 1998's ubiquitous "Rockafeller Skank," and Robbie Williams introduced the You Only Live Twice theme to a new generation in 1998's "Millennium" (seven years later, another of Barry's Bond themes got a similar introduction to a new generation when Kanye West sampled "Diamonds Are Forever" in "Diamonds from Sierra Leone").

Vanity Fair's intriguing profile of Barry from two years ago offers great insight into what made Barry tick and why everyone from his Out of Africa boss Sydney Pollack to Michael Caine thought of him as a man with the Midas touch, especially when it came to music.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar"

Song: "I Need a Dollar" by Aloe Blacc
Released: 2010
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's the opening title theme from How to Make It in America, HBO's recession-era New York dramedy (or is it more of a comma?). To promote his new Stones Throw album Good Things, Blacc recently performed "I Need a Dollar" on both Conan and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, where it sounded impressive live and won him some new fans at Studio 6A.

My reaction upon hearing "I Need a Dollar" for the first time on How to Make It in America was exactly like my initial reaction to American Gangster's original song "Do You Feel Me," a Hank Shocklee-produced throwback to the sounds of the period setting of the Denzel Washington film that was performed by Anthony Hamilton (and written by, of all people, Diane "My Heart Will Go On" Warren). I wondered, "Whose recording studio archives did they dig up this gem from?" Blacc's vintage soul sound was so convincing in "I Need a Dollar" that I was surprised to learn the track was new.

"I Need a Dollar" is the perfect song for both a show that's like Entourage's cash-strapped, bedbug bite-covered East Coast cousin and these shitty times. Blacc actually wrote it before the recession hit:

Complex: What inspired the concept for "I Need A Dollar"?

Aloe Blacc: No money problems. That was boom time. The housing industry was up. Everybody was happy. I lived in this house that we called the Monmouth Temple on a street called Monmouth in Los Angeles from 2003 to 2008. A lot of musicians tend to live in this house. One of the guys has a really nice record collection, and he gave me some chain gang field recordings of convicts, largely black, from the South, working on chain gangs. This was in my head at that time. It seemed to me a little bit like a spiritual. That's the way I originally made the song. I actually recorded it with my friends in 2007 at the Monmouth Temple when we were just sitting in the front room stomping on the wooden floor and clapping our hands. Kind of like a spiritual you could do it in church. So that's how I always heard it. At least the melody in my voice, that's always remained and it worked perfectly with the music that these guys made in New York.

That spiritual quality in Blacc's voice helps lend "I Need a Dollar" a certain timelessness that will outlast whatever fashion or beverage trend the hustlers in How to Make It in America will attempt to take advantage of all season long.



Blacc is one of many former rappers who have shifted towards more melodic material with tunes like "I Need a Dollar." In his pretty good remix of "I Need a Dollar," L.A. battle rapper Dumbfoundead dabbles with ease in this shift towards sung vocals that Blacc has fully embraced:

Catchin' Rec

Last March, the Parks and Recreation opening titles got Return of the Jedi-ized by a Parks and Rec fan. Now someone else has redone the titles in a big way. As part of promoting tonight's return of the much-missed Parks and Rec (it feels like it's been gone for ages--the extended absence was mostly due to star Amy Poehler's pregnancy), cast member Aziz Ansari has dropped an amusing remix.



The music in the Parks and Rec cast's CollegeHumor video is an actual hip-hop track from last March that sampled Gaby Moreno and Vincent Jones' great little Parks and Rec opening title theme ("Hampden Parks" by e-dubble).

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Roots, "Here I Come"

Song: "Here I Come" by The Roots featuring Malik B. & Dice Raw
Released: 2006
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in Superbad. (JANUARY 19, 2011 UPDATE: It also turns up in the Hancock closing credits.) "Here I Come" is the most upbeat (and party-friendly, hence its inclusion in Superbad) track on 2006's Game Theory, The Roots' most militant and brooding-sounding album. Game Theory was a bold move for their first album for Def Jam, a label that many feared would interfere with The Roots' sound and force the band to be more mainstream (luckily, Def Jam's been hands-off). You may be more familiar with the faster-paced version of "Here I Come" that The Roots perform each weeknight during the opening titles and end credits of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Dammit, Fallon! That was supposed to be the theme song for my talk show! You know, the one I host in my basement with my special guests, a cardboard cutout of Liza Minnelli and a cardboard cutout of Jerry Lewis?
Which moment in Superbad does it appear?: The scene where Jonah Hill, Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse finally arrive at Emma Stone's party.

Speaking of Superbad, last night's Daily Show superimposed the face of a crying John Boehner from 60 Minutes over the body of McLovin while he lost his virginity in the movie. That cracked my ish up.

Hear Black Thought, Malik B. and Dice Raw disturb the peace at my SwiftFM site.

All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Classic & 86, "Ridin'"
Pulp, "Like a Friend"
Run-DMC, "Rock Box"
The Crystal Method, "Starting Over"