A Hefti hit
When the bar bet calls for you to sing a classic TV theme, this is the one you want: the tune is simple, and you already know the words.
I always figured the late Neal Hefti — he died Saturday at his home in Toluca Lake in the San Fernando Valley — was somewhat bemused by its success; it’s not exactly the sort of thing he did with Woody Herman’s First Herd, and it in no way resembles the charts he did for Count Basie. But by the middle 1960s, Hefti, then in his early forties, was already getting TV and movie work, and he probably figured it was easier than heading up a big band of his own, which he’d also done. And he wasn’t too proud to play trumpet on his own record, given its sheer difficulty.
Yes, I said “difficulty”:
It was, Hefti later said, the hardest piece of music he ever wrote.
“I tore up a lot of paper,” he told Jon Burlingame, author of TV’s Biggest Hits, a 1996 book on television themes. “It did not come easy to me … I just sweated over that thing, more so than any other single piece of music I ever wrote. I was never satisfied with it.”
It got him three Grammy nominations, and one win (“Best Instrumental Theme,” 1967). And it is an instrumental: there are no actual voices on Hefti’s RCA Victor recording of the theme, or on the theme as used on the television series. Adam West says so, and he should know, right?
McGehee »
17 October 2008 · 11:36 am
Of course, Adam West could be pulling everyone’s leg — or the man they interviewed could have been the other Adam West, the mayor of Quahog — but I will admit it’s plausible that a well-played instrument on a well-mixed track could be made to sound like that.
Masterfully done, if true.