Yesterday on the FSM board, Thierry Schreurs posted a long list of rare Lalo Schifrin themes and cues, most from the 1970s. I had so much fun going in and watching these on YouTube.
Lalo was, for this period, at the cutting edge of the “happening” sound, especially in television. His combination of jazz, pop and orchestra was quite idiosyncratic and a little hard to describe. But you know it when you hear it, just from certain gestures and colors.
I was born in 1974, so my earliest memories of the world are from the mid to late 1970s. So when I check these old TV title sequences (it’s usually a bunch of crap, but that’s beside the point), there’s a huge nostalgia factor to being four years old and remembering what the adult world looked like around me—haircuts, shag carpets, cigarettes and that particular disco–TV sound. I love it.
The above video is the title sequence to Most Wanted, a short-lived Quinn Martin cop procedural—and you can find Lalo’s theme and pilot score on this 2CD set from La-La Land Records, courtesy the album producer, Jon Burlingame.
A lot of the other clips that Thierry listed are so obscure that it’s unlikely they’ll ever be released. I did try, when I ran FSM, to get more of Lalo’s vintage work available on CD.
Oh, and that includes Pretty Maids All in a Row, an insane score to an even more insane movie written by Gene Roddenberry and directed by Roger Vadim—two of the most voracious horn-dogs of the Western world, and would you believe it shows?