I never got to see Prince perform live. But every time the eccentric musical genius and consummate guitarist performed live on TV (instead of lip-syncing on TV, aside from earlier appearances on The Midnight Special and American Bandstand), it was a can't-miss event, even whenever I had to sit through a bunch of unfunny SNL sketches just to watch that SNL episode's purple-loving musical guest, who died yesterday at the too-young age of 57.
Sure, it would have been dope to attend a Prince concert or better yet, rock out to one of his even more legendary surprise sets inside smaller and more intimate venues. But I didn't have to check out Prince live to know that he was tremendously skilled when it came to both putting on a show and making a song (whether it was one of his own songs or another artist's) sound even more alive and vibrant than the original recording of it, especially when he shredded on his electric guitar like there's no tomorrow. On stage, nothing compares to Prince.
Inside both my MacBook and my phone, I have a good-quality mp3 of a terrific Prince cover of Radiohead's "Creep" from Coachella 2008 that I've never removed. Prince, who hated encountering footage of his music he had no control over, assigned one of his techie goons to wipe out all traces of his live "Creep" cover. That goon clearly sucked at attempting to wipe them all out.
I love Prince's epic take on "Creep" more than Radiohead's original version. Even Thom Yorke himself agrees that Prince improved upon "Creep."
At their house, my parents want me to get rid of stuff I've left behind there and don't use anymore, like stacks of manila folders I stored inside their house's overhead cabinets. The folders contain press kits for albums like DJ Kool's Let Me Clear My Throat CD and movies like The Big Lebowski; old scripts of segment intros I typed up for the terrestrial radio version of AFOS; and newspaper/magazine article cutouts I enjoyed reading and had saved so that I could read them again someday (whatup, early 2000s Mercury News interview with De La Soul about the Art Official Intelligence"trilogy") or use one of them as the basis for some script for either TV, a film or a comic. For example, there was a folder from the early 2000s that I labeled "Jigsaw." It consisted of articles about crime in San Francisco I collected and saved as research for a San Francisco crime show idea I wanted to call Jigsaw (for a while, I wanted to create the Sucka Free equivalent of Homicide: Life on the Street and populate the cast with a few Asian American detectives).
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I was only able to empty one cabinet by throwing away a whole bunch of cutouts I don't need to save anymore--like the Jigsaw clippings (yeah, I don't think that show's ever going to get made). But there are some items from the folders in that cabinet that I don't want to dunk into the basura, so I've taken them along with me. They include a few issues of Scud: The Disposable Assassin I've held onto since college--one of those issues was written by a pre-Channel 101/CommunityDan Harmon!--and a comic strip I snipped from a 1994 issue of Pulse! magazine.
Pulse! was a music review magazine the now-defunct Tower Records published and handed out for free in its stores. The final page of each Pulse! issue always featured a music-related comic strip. My favorite of those Pulse! strips is "The Big Score" by cartoonist Richard Sala, whose serialized 1991 "Invisible Hands" mystery shorts during Liquid Television were a favorite of many fans of the MTV animation anthology show. (Sala's horror comics are full of old-fashioned movie monsters and hot heroines. Cartoon Network is too dunderheaded to allow it, but I'd rather see the network's Adult Swim/Williams Street department produce a new Scooby-Doo animated series with character designs by either Sala or someone equally offbeat and not-so-kid-friendly instead of CN and Warner Bros. Animation rehashing the same old Scoob for kids.) "The Big Score" takes place in a noirish nightclub and cleverly replaces all the dialogue with names of classic crime movie scores that Sala thinks would be appropriate for each moment.
"At the time I was listening to a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly the cool, atmospheric soundtracks of thrillers and spy movies, which I found to be inspiring background music to play while I wrote," said Sala in a 2010 blog post about "The Big Score." I don't have a Mac-compatible scanner with me to digitally preserve "The Big Score," so good thing Sala--whose latest work is the digital-only Fantagraphics graphic novel Violenzia--scanned his own 1994 strip and posted it on his blog.
Thanks to YouTube and Spotify, I can now take that 1994 strip and post it alongside the exact same audio Sala envisioned when he drew it. Vertigo and Our Man Flint are the only film titles from "The Big Score" that contain themes that are currently in rotation on AFOS. I've streamed cues from Touch of Evil, The Ipcress File, Experiment in Terror, Arabesque and Psycho on AFOS before, and after first catching Kiss Me Deadly on TCM, it's hard to forget that batshit crazy Robert Aldrich flick, but I'm not familiar with the other movies Sala references in "The Big Score." I actually still haven't seen The Third Man. There are a couple of Ida Lupino flicks mentioned in there that I need to check out after hearing Greg Proops devote an entire segment to her work during The Smartest Man in the World.
Panel 1:Touch of Evil
Panel 2:The Ipcress File; The Third Man; Experiment in Terror; On Dangerous Ground
1. Neal Hefti, "The Odd Couple," The Odd Couple, Dot
2. Neal Hefti, "Man Chases Man," The Odd Couple, Dot
3. Neal Hefti, "Batman Theme," Batman, Film Score Monthly
4. Royal Scottish National Orchestra, "Batman (T.V. Theme)," The Batman Trilogy, Varèse Sarabande
5. The Four Tops, "Are You Man Enough?," Shaft in Africa, Hip-O Select/Geffen
6. Levi Stubbs and Chorus, "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space," Little Shop of Horrors, Geffen
7. Ben Taylor, "Dolemite," Dolemite: Special Edition, R N P Muzak
8. W.G. Snuffy Walden, "West Wing Main Title," Music by W.G. Snuffy Walden, Windham Hill
9. W.G. Snuffy Walden, "West Wing Suite," Music by W.G. Snuffy Walden, Windham Hill
10. Sean Callery, "Palmer's Theme" (from 24 episode #118), 24, Varèse Sarabande
11. Bear McCreary featuring Raya Yarbrough, "A Distant Sadness" (from the Battlestar Galactica episode "Occupation"), Battlestar Galactica: Season 3, La-La Land
12. Jerry Goldsmith, "Welcome Aboard, Sir," Air Force One, Varèse Sarabande
13. Brian Tyler, "Ready or Not," Finishing the Game, Brian Tyler
14. Bernard Purdie, "Hap'nin," Lialeh, Light in the Attic
15. Stan Ridgway and Stewart Copeland, "Don't Box Me In," Rumble Fish, A&M
16. Jeff Beal, "Riding Off, Appaloosa End Credits," Appaloosa, Lakeshore
17. Jerry Goldsmith, "Lost in the Wild" (from The Edge), Jerry Goldsmith at 20th Century Fox, Varèse Sarabande
18. Neal Hefti, "End Title," The Odd Couple, Dot
"AFOS A-Go-Go" airs every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday in November (except the week of Thanksgiving) on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel.
The composer of the themes from the '60s Batman TV series and the 1968 movie version of The Odd Couple, Neal Hefti died of a heart attack over the weekend. He was 85.
Here's what Jeff Bond wrote about Hefti's surf rock-style Batman theme in his liner notes for the Film Score Monthly release of Nelson Riddle's 1966 Batman feature film soundtrack:
Hefti (like Riddle a band leader and jazz arranger) wrote an appropriately dynamic and instantly recognizable theme that launched with a heavy 4/4 rhythm for bass guitar, low brass and percussion and eight singers (four sopranos and four tenors) singing the words "Batman!" in unison with the trumpets... Ironically, despite (or perhaps because of) its apparent simplicity, Hefti has described the Batman theme as one of the most challenging things he has ever written.
In 1989, Hefti received the ultimate shout-out when Prince quoted the former Sinatra bandleader's Batman theme during "Batdance," a highlight of the Purple One's much-malignedBatman-inspired concept album.
Hefti's other credits included the cult favoriteLord Love a Duck, Sex and the Single Girl, How to Murder Your Wife, Duel at Diablo, Barefoot in the Park and A New Leaf. It's a shame that much of Hefti's work--like the enjoyable Odd Couple soundtrack, which contains themes that were later reupped on the classic Tony Randall/Jack Klugman TV series--hasn't been reissued on CD (props to Film Score Monthly for including Hefti's How to Murder Your Wife and Duel at Diablo score tracks on its now-sold-out MGM Soundtrack Treasury box set).
The Nov. 4 edition of "AFOS A-Go-Go" will open with a tribute segment consisting of Hefti's themes from Batman and the '68 Odd Couple. Those Odd Couple tracks still sound sweet even though the soundtrack album is a re-recording that's interspersed with Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau dialogue clips that for some stupid reason, were reedited to include a laugh track (canned laughter on a film score album is like Mohinder's voiceover narration on Heroes--totally pointless).
