One of my regular ports of call when strolling through the Thursday Thirteens every week is The Story of Me. If you don’t know it, go have a look and prepare to be entertained. Chelle’s most recent TT was a list of thirteen of her favourite TV theme songs. Like most people, I know lots of them and can call them to mind instantly. In fact, I suspect that Chelle had people humming softly to themselves as they looked down the list. I didn’t grow up in America and my TV watching habits were obviously different from Chelle’s, so there are some that I don’t know, but others brought back memories.
Then I remembered a fact of passing interest – I say “passing interest” because I am about to pass it on to you. Some of those themes songs that we heard every week (or every day if we watch the shows in syndication) have words, even though they are never heard. In some cases, I suspect, they were not meant to be heard. They were a way for someone to get royalties because, when a song that has words and music (duh! They all have music) is publicly performed, both the composer and they lyricist receive a royalty. Hypothetical example: if you hear “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” played by the 55-strong Baltimore Comb & Toilet Paper Marching Band on your radio (I said it was hypothetical), without words, it generates a royalty payment to both Andrew Lloyd Webber who wrote the music and to Tim Rice who wrote the lyrics. Those two very successful and rich gentlemen are no doubt both happy with that situation but it is not unheard of for someone not normally associated with music to dash of a quick lyric and attach it to the music of a TV or movie theme song in order to get royalties when the music is played. The composers are often people under contract and not in any position to protest. If they want their music published and performed, they just have to put up with it.
Another reason, of course, that we didn’t hear the words was that they were deemed quite unsuitable for a TV audience. For instance, Johnny Mandel’s theme music for M*A*S*H which I am sure you are all hearing in your heads right now, as you read this. All those figures in army-issue green uniforms running uphill to meet the incoming helicopters. We all remember that, right? Music playing in the background. It was a very effective tune, because when the programme started, it sounded poignant and rather downbeat, matching the images of wounded men on stretchers and harassed looking doctors. Half an hour later, when the show ended, usually after a final witty retort from one of the characters and a freeze-frame, the same theme sounded jaunty and cheerful, rounding off a fun half hour (incidentally, if I may be slightly partisan here, I much preferred watching M*A*S*H in England because there were no commercials and the BBC removed the completely unnecessary laugh track: I didn’t need anyone to tell me what the funny bits were). Some of you may not know, if you didn’t see the movie M*A*S*H with Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, that the title of the theme, is “Suicide Is Painless” and Mike Altman’s downbeat lyrics match the title. In the film, one of the medical orderlies sings it to the accompaniment of a guitar while the camp dentist, who has decided to kill himself, has a last meal with his colleagues (the visual parodies of The Last Supper would definitely get today’s fundamentalists in a tizzy) and then climbs into a ready prepared coffin as the whole camp watches, before swallowing the fatal dose that Hawkeye has supplied him with. I won’t bother you with the why or wherefore. Anyway, when they decided to make a TV series of M*A*S*H a few years later, they concluded that the music would be perfect but, rightly in my view, that the words just would not do for home TV audiences. The TV show was as firmly anti-war as the film, but not nearly as bitter. And that’s why right now you are hearing the M*A*S*H music in your heads, but probably not the words.
One equally memorable TV theme that had unheard words was the theme to Star Trek (I mean the real Star Trek, with Captain Kirk, Spock and the gang). I suspect that these fell into the category I mentioned above, of words that were probably never intended to be heard. I certainly have never heard them performed anywhere, by anyone. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek wrote them. They are not exactly up to Cole Porter or Irving Berlin standard. In fact, they seem a bit clumsy to me, with one or two syllables unaccounted for, hanging loose on their own. However, the man created the show that gave us “The Trouble With Tribbles” and “The Corbomite Maneuver” so I’m not complaining too much. And in case you’re curious, here are the words:
Theme for “Star Trek”
Music by Alexander Courage, lyrics by Gene Roddenberry
© 1966. All rights reserved
Beyond
The rim of star-light
My love
Is wand’ring in star-flight.
I know
He’ll find in start-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.
I know
His journey ends never.
His star trek
Will go on forever,
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me.
And as the Starship Enterprise reaches warp factor five and whooshes off into the distance, I suspect that we all agree it was probably just as well that those lyrics were never performed.
Did I have you all softly singing to yourselves as you read those words? I do hope so!
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