The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 152 - Jon Burlingame, Henry Mancini and Peter Gunn

DON

Today on the Musical Innertube we say hello again to Jon Burlingame.  Jon is an expert on music composed for movies and television, His books include Sound and Vision, The Music of James Bond, Music for Prime Time -which we talked with him about earlier on the podcast. His newest book, out now, is called Dreamsville - Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn and Music for TV Noir. Welcome back, Jon Burlingame!

JON

Thank you so much, you guys. It's a pleasure to be back.

DON

Now, what caused you to write a book specifically about Henry Mancini and Peter Gunn?

JON

Well, there were a couple of reasons. One is I knew him slightly. I interviewed him in the late 80s and the early 90s and was a big fan of his. And he was a lovely gentleman, as any musician who ever played for him will tell you. And I had always loved the private eye show Peter Gunn, which I had encountered when I was a kid in the 1960s. And because I was a jazz fan my whole life - still am - the kind of modern dramatic jazz that he wrote for Peter Gunn, and then for a companion series, Mr. Lucky, in the same period of time, was always just among my favorites. That, coupled with the fact that this year 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Henry Mancini's birth.  So, the Centennial, which the Mancini estate is making quite a big deal about, seemed like the perfect opportunity to contribute something. There are already 2 existing books on Mancini, one of which is his own autobiography, which is very good, and there is another book by an academic on the East Coast named John Capps, which is also very, very good, which looks at his entire career. But what I felt I could contribute was a deep dive into the period of time from 1958 to 61 in Mancini's career when he was virtually unknown, but during that three-year period became a colossal success, with the music of Peter Gunn. And his collaboration with the guy who made Peter Gunn, Blake Edwards, really begins there. And then that is the stepping stone, really the launching pad, if you will, for the entire Mancini career and all the success that he had afterwards. It all stems from this three-year period when he was doing Peter Gunn for television.

JOHN

One of the things I want to really enthuse about for a moment in your book is that you evoke a very interesting time in entertainment history, and that is really the early days of national television. Just when people were starting to put out a good number of filmed weekly series, which is what Peter Gunn was going to be, and there were all of these, these, it was really a slapdash world. I mean people met each other in the commissary, I think. Didn't - how did Blake Edwards and Mancini meet? Did they just run into each other at the Universal Studios lot?

JON

Yes. And that's, as you correctly point out, that it was a kind of haphazard world in in that era when it comes to making television. What had happened was Blake Edwards was at Universal in the late 1950s, and he had met Mancini, and Mancini had written a little bit of music for a Tony Curtis movie that Blake had just directed. But what happened was Henry Mancini was under contract at Universal, but they let everybody go in early ‘58, what we would today call downsizing, they just fired everybody in the music department. But Henry Mancini still had his studio card. And so, if he needed a haircut or wanted to go have lunch at the commissary, he would go on the studio lot. Well, one of those days, Blake Edwards, happened to be coming out of the commissary. Mancini had just had a haircut. They stumbled on each other and Edwards said, by the way, I'm doing this this new TV show. It's going to be called "Gunn For Hire.” Are you free? Are you interested? Well, Mancini had three kids by that time, and a wife at home and needed a job. And "Gunn For Hire” sounded like a western to him, and he goes, “Sure, I'm available.” It was that that casual an encounter that ultimately resulted in a colossal career for both of these guys.

JOHN

It's just if they hadn't met at the barber shop, wherever it was, the history would have been so completely different.

DON

 The other thing is that when Blake Edwards started to put Peter Gunn together, he had an idea for sort of an off-kilter detective show. Peter Gunn is, actually, when you look at the show, not really a licensed PI in the sense that people just hire him because he's good at what he does....

JOHN

He's a fixer!

DON

He doesn't have an office. He hangs out at a bar every night. But one of the things that is integral to it is Mancini's music. As a matter of fact, when you look at the credits of Peter Gunn, “Music by Henry Mancini” is, like the second – before even all of the assistant directors and all that other stuff, “Music by Henry Mancini” is the second credit that pops up. So, it was a very integral part of the show. And I wonder if Blake Edwards had that from the beginning or if his meeting with Mancini sort of steered him in that direction.

JON

Well, you know, it's a combination of factors, I think, Don. Number one, the way Blake wrote the pilot, the idea that Pete would hang out at a waterfront bar called Mother's, where his girlfriend was the singer that fronted the small five-man band, was integral to the basic concept of the show. And the fact that this was an independent production, this was not a studio show, so there was no studio money, it was kind of almost a low budget operation, so Mancini thought, well, if I've got to have a band, they're playing jazz, maybe I can utilize jazz in a dramatic form to be the underscore and to provide the theme and the and the weekly scores. And so, music becomes an integral part of the whole show from day one, and Blake I think was a sophisticated guy who understood not only the value of a solid dramatic underscore, but he loved jazz. As he told me in one of our two interviews, he used to hang out with the big bands. He loved Count Basie and the Duke Ellington Band and all the really the great bands of the 1950s. So, this was right up his alley.

JOHN

Continuing with our slap-dashery theme, you recount where they were talking about, well, we got to have music, and a lot of things happened for the first time. First of all, Edwards does something that only about two shows in all of America are doing. He's going to commission original music for every episode, which was made possible, according to your book, by a change in the union requirements for royalties so that they weren't completely impossible to do. That led to this great Wednesday night, this Wednesday night ...

DON

Jam!

JOHN

Jam, where they go out for an Italian dinner, and come back and play until midnight and get paid $90.00. And all of them just sight-read the handwritten scores, in and out. And I can't believe John Williams is playing piano? The Star Wars guy?

JON

That's right. That's right. That's exactly right.

JOHN

I mean, yeah, it's like a who's who of West Coast jazz.

Speaker 2

It's so true! Mancini handpicked his band because he knew these guys, number one, would need to be sharp, but also, they needed to have a jazz sensibility, and not everybody in the studio system in the 1950s really had that kind of playing accessibility. So, you've got John Williams on piano, who, by the way, was also unknown in 1958, he was a studio pianist. He had met Mancini the year before, as I recall, and so Mancini hired him for it, for the Gunn piano work. And then you’ve got Ronnie Lang on woodwinds. John, the flute solos are really Ronie Lang. The great Dick Nash on trombone, maybe the greatest trombone player in Hollywood history, whose tone is just so smooth and silky. And then you've got Red Mitchell on bass, you've got Shelley Manne on drums most of the time.  You've got Vic Feldman on vibes...

JOHN

This is a guy who also plays with Steely Dan later. I mean, it's crazy, these people.

JON

See, there you go. So, this is like an All Star band. And I can't remember now if it was 13 players most of the time, I think, and these guys were just killer, you know? And so, when it came time to put out an album - we look at this now and say, well, yeah, these were great players. The music was great. No wonder it was a hit. But let me tell you, in 1959, no television music had been taken seriously. Nobody thought this was going to sell and nobody - well, the old guard of the record community didn't think it would sell. Nobody had put together the idea that  a popular television show combined with melodic, accessible cool West Coast jazz would combine to create a hit record.

DON

I tracked down the Peter Gunn soundtrack on YouTube to familiarize myself a little bit with the music. The comments section in YouTube was full of people saying, “I remember my parents bought this album and would listen to it all the time,” sort of like a situation where they would listen to any album, any jazz album. It wasn't a soundtrack. It was like listening to a jazz album to a lot of people.

JON

And again, this comes back to Mancini's really astute understanding of what people wanted to hear. As he said to me, actually, in one of our interviews, “I couldn't put a series of  30- and 40-second cues on an album.” He rearranged all of the best tunes that he wrote for that first season into a sort of listener friendly 12 tracks on an LP. So that these are like three to four minute versions, they're fully fleshed out. And the guys are given an opportunity to solo and – oh! Bob Bain on guitar! I don't wanna forget him!

JOHN

Batman!  He played the Batman theme!

JON
And the Bonanza theme! Absolutely!

Speaker 3

Bob Bain! I mean, come on. Yeah, this is, it's crazy, isn't it? So many of these players went on to fame and fortune, and they should have had it. Yeah. And the West Coast cool jazz scene was at its peak at that very moment, so that plays into it, yeah.

DON

John plays flute. That's one of his initial instruments that he took up because, when we were in high school, he was in the band playing flute. So, I know that for a fact. But when I started reading that Henry Mancini thought a good way to create suspense in a song was to use a bass flute, I said, oh John's gonna eat this up! And did you eat it up, John?

JOHN

Well, let me tell you something about that, Don. Two things. First of all, Jon, the details in this book are golden. I think it's amazing that it's as well documented as it is, because you found out that Mancini arrived at the very first recording session for the Gunn show, and the guy was setting up, the sound recordist was setting up, and he was going to do it with just a single mic and have the ensemble sit around it as was just normally done, and Mancini said no, you're going to individually mic the drums and the bass. And when they recorded bass flute, as Don mentions, he had the base flutes - sometimes he had the base flute choir – Hello! Beauty, beauty, beauty! Of course, I'm saying as a flutist, but he had the bass flutes individually mic’d. And I was dancing. I was dancing. Here I was, going, yes, yes, yes, yes! And let me just enthuse a bit further about the bass, ‘cause I'm also a bassist. I'm playing the top and the bottom, as I've always said for many years, and Don can tell you that - anyway, he had this concept already in his head that he wanted a walking bass and drums as sort of the guts of everything, which is jazz, right? In sort of 12-eight shuffle time, which is pretty much jazz. But he also did a lot of effects with the bass, a bass flute choir, for example, and other things like this. And later, when people were saying, man, I've never heard an album quite like that, when the Gunn thing was running in the top ten, he said, well, you know what it is, people just haven't heard the bass coming out of their TV like that. So he lived it! He was a musician! Yeah! And I'm going to stop talking now!

JON

Well, I'm delighted that you're so excited about this! I was saying to Don before we started that my wife was kind of upset with me because I hadn't told her I was going to write this book, and she knows when I write a book that that's all I focus on for three straight months. And in this this case I was listening to endless Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky scores constantly upstairs in my office. But you're so right about Mancini's clever understanding of what would come through that little screen, that little speaker in our old TV sets circa 1959 and 60. And you would never have heard the bass flute if it was one mic hanging over a group of guys. But he was smart enough about that. And he complained, Mancini complained quite a lot about how poorly mic’d most film scores were. He was used to working in movies at Universal in the 1950s, and he wanted to change that. He was determined that this was going to be properly mic’d, and then of course mixed, before you have a final score that’s going to be as effective as it was on Peter Gunn.

DON

And when he moved on to Mr. Lucky, which was another show that Blake Edwards developed a couple of years after Gunn became a sensation, that was about a gambler - instead of going, he kind of went with the with the moody jazz theme, but I want to say he did it in a very lush way. There are strings on Mr. Lucky, and then there's a Hamond organ. How did he determine that a Hammond organ would add just the right level to Mr. Lucky to make it pop?

JON

Also new for television. You gotta remember that in in 1950s TV, there were really only two shows before Gunn where music was taken so seriously that there was original music written on a weekly basis. One was Dragnet. And that's because Jack Webb was a stereophonic nut. He had huge speakers. He loved jazz. So, he wanted a fresh score every week on Dragnet. The other one, of course, was I Love Lucy. And again, you had a band there playing almost every week. And so, there was original music frequently written for I Love Lucy, but most of the other shows in 50s TV used library music, and it was referred to as “canned” music, because it was essentially generic, dramatic music written here, recorded cheaply in Europe so they wouldn't have to pay the unions, and then brought back here and tracked into the shows willy-nilly, almost arbitrarily, and it just was not very good. Now here, you've got a smart producer and a smart composer joining forces. So, in the case of Mr. Lucky, he felt that it needed a more elegant sound. So, he brought in strings for the main and end titles, and he added a Hammond organ, in this case played by Buddy Cole on the LP. But on TV, played by Johnny Williams! So, the Mr. Lucky band got together on Tuesday nights, and on Wednesday nights it was the Peter Gunn band in that 1959-60 season, when both shows were going at the same time and Mancini was scoring both every week.

JOHN

That is unbelievable. It speaks not only to his amazing year and his concept, but to his versatility. Don just pointed out that at the same time you could say that he was a pioneer of small group ensemble jazz in television and also, sort of, this bourgeois lush orchestration, for which maybe he's a little too well known. Now, you know, I think people often talk about him being the sort of the, the background to the 1960s. And that's sort of unfair, I think we'd all agree. But it shows that he could do just about anything he wanted.

JON

It it's absolutely true. It's an unfortunate cliche, but what happened with Mancini was, he became so successful with romantic music and romantic comedies - when you think about Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Pink Panther and Charade, for example, - all of these sort of movies that required a more elegant touch. He became famous for that, but in fact he could write anything. Some of his dramatic skills were as honed and as sharp as, you know, John Williams or any of those guys who came out of the 60s and beyond.

JOHN

I think one of the moving things that you point out repeatedly in the book is the close association between his producer Blake Edwards and Mancini. That as soon as Blake Edwards heard Mancini's first efforts.... well, first of all, when they're talking about scoring, Mancini sort of said, “Could I do a jazz score?” And Blake Edwards, in a sense says, let's see what you come up with. He hears the Peter Gunn theme, which he writes “lifted him right off the floor” and gave him lush, continual credit in a way that very few producers, I think, do from the beginning. And that leads to the credit, which says, you know, he's giving him as much artistic credit for what Gunn is.

JON

Yeah, and Blake Edwards, you know, my hat is off to him, you know. Let's face it, not all Blake Edwards movies were great. You know, he made some clunkers. In fact, he made a lot of them. But he also could make great movies, like Victor/Victoria, for example, which is a full-blown musical with a Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse score. The thing about Blake was, and this astonished me when he talked to me about this, I said, well, would you spot a movie in the traditional way, where you and Henry sit down and watch the picture and decide where music is gonna go and what it should say and how it should sound? And he said, nah, I didn't bother. Henry knew what he was doing. I just let him do it. So, Blake would shoot the movie, and he would basically just give it to Henry, who would then decide exactly what musical sound it should have, and whether there should be a song and how it should sound. Well, who does that? Nobody!

JOHN 

I mean very few people have I mean, first of all, nobody did it before. So, there's nobody with that talent, you know, and we're looking at two guys working on something that didn't exist yet, and they sort of help helped create it.

JON

Right.

DON

One of the interesting things, too, was that Henry Mancini was able to hold on to the ownership of that music. Is that mostly because it was an independent production?

JON

That's exactly right. And but again, a remarkable indicator of Mancini. When you think about Mancini, he’s the guy who stands up in front of a band and plays great music, but he had a great business sense as well. And so, as Peter Gunn starts, it is not a studio production, it's an independent show, an independently produced show. And he says to Blake, listen, we're gonna have to have a publisher for all of this music that goes on during the show. Would you mind if I control the publishing? Blake says, sure, I don't mind. Which means Henry Mancini owns and controls 100% of all the music on Peter Gunn, which, when it became a bestselling album, turned into a colossal fortune for the Mancini estate, which continues to this day. You want Peter Gunn licensed for your life insurance commercial? You have to come to the Mancini people, and they will license it. And it was really funny when Mancini and Edwards did a TV remake of Peter Gunn in 1989, which starred Peter Strauss - which, by the way, I like a lot, and I think it's pretty good. The people at ABC were informed that Mancini would own and control all the music for the show, and that sort of put all the lawyers on edge, because that wasn't how things were done in television, and never were, and still aren't. And so, one of the lawyers in the meeting said, “Could we get Mr. Mancini to write a new Peter Gunn theme?” To which the answer was, no, youngster!

JOHN

Yes, it's a rather young lawyer, I believe. You know, what is he doing?

DON

Now, do we have Peter Gunn on DVD? And if not, is it because of the music rights?

JON

We do have Peter Gunn on DVD, all 114 episodes. Same is true for Mr. Lucky, there's 34 of those. We can enjoy those. I've found Peter Gunn also on Amazon Prime. And the 1989 Peter Gunn made for television movie with Peter Strauss is available on DVD. But the 1967 feature film with Peter Gunn, which Blake also made, with Craig Stevens as the star, is not on DVD, and that is specifically because of music rights and stuff. Gets a little complicated. Gets a little into the weeds. I go into it a little bit in the in the chapter on the movie in the book.

DON

Now let's talk about how what he did for Peter Gunn changed the way music was written for television. I'm trying to think of other jazz themes in television. The closest I can come is when Lalo Schifrin did Mannix, another TV show that was sort of jazzy, but it was more of a, almost a waltz. 

JON

No, it was a jazz waltz. It was a jazz waltz, in fact, it's in three quarter time.

JOHN

How about Mission: Impossible?

JON

Mission: Impossible, the year before, is done in 5 four, and there's a lot of jazzy material in in Mission, but to your point, Don about jazz scores in television, Peter Gunn launched the whole trend. Now let's face it, TV is nothing if not a copycat medium. If something hits, you know you've got 5 producers come in the next year saying, well, let's clone that, maybe we can make a hit out of this. But almost immediately, every theme written for a cop or detective show automatically had to be jazz. So, you got Count Basie doing M-Squad. You've got Pete Rugolo doing Richard Diamond. Nobody remembers the show, but there was a TV show based on The Asphalt Jungle that has a Duke Ellington theme.  Dave Brubeck comes along and does Mr. Broadway a couple of years later. So, it was very much the trend for a while. And yes, Lalo's Mannix is a jazz waltz.

JOHN

I love that tune. Always loved that tune.

DON

Oh yeah, that's one of my favorites.

JON

In the 80s, they created a show called Remington Steele, right? Who scored it? They immediately knew that with a title like Remington Steele, you have to go to Henry Mancini for your theme. And they did.

DON

I do remember when Bob Newhart's second show, the one where he was the innkeeper in Vermont, came out, that was a huge selling point that the theme was by Henry Mancini, and again he got his own title card.

JON

That's right. Sure. And in the case of Peter Gunn, he got his own title card in the end titles. But in the case of Newehart, he was actually credited in the main title. That did not happen a lot in television and it and it's a hint of how well-known he was. Henry Mancini was going to write a theme for your show. You wanted to promote it.

DON

A lot of his compatriots, John Williams, for example, went on to do movies, and I know that Jerry Goldsmith was big in television, then went on to do movies too. So how does that all work in?

JON

I'm so glad that you mentioned those guys because in in effect, all of these guys started in TV and graduated to the big screen. You know, John Williams was at Universal for several years, doing shows like Checkmate - by the way, another private detective show with a jazz theme. And Jerry Goldsmith was at first at CBS and then at Universal in the early 60s, doing shows like Thriller and Twilight Zone, and The Man From Uncle had a kind of jazzy feel to it, the spy show from 1964. One of the things that I do love though, is that - and it's you don't have it anywhere today in films - but in that era you would hire your composer to score your film, and if he was great with the tune, he would be the guy to write the song that very often accompanied these shows. So, you've got Henry Mancini, who was a great tunesmith, as well as a great composer of dramatic scores. So, he's your guy, you know? But Williams wrote songs. Jerry Goldsmith wrote songs, although people don't really remember them very well. But these guys all had the ability to do that. And when you have a song whose melody can be echoed throughout the dramatic score of the film that all ties together and unifies the picture sort of sonically in a way that I think is not done today.

DON

And there is a range to him when he goes out to do movies. I mean something like the Pink Panther theme is very reminiscent of Peter Gunn. And then you have Baby Elephant Walk from Hatari, which is a goofy song that I must have heard on the radio thousands of times. And then he gets into Breakfast At Tiffany's and he gets into Moon River, which is one of the classic ballads that's out there.

JOHN

Exquisite. So as a flutist, flautist, flautist, let's talk about his gift for melody. It's quite wonderful. Don mentioned the Elephant Walk tune, which is really wild, but it's perfect, you know, and very 60s and but also kind of jazzy with all those half steps and all that stuff going on. You have Moon River, which is one of the great songs probably ever written. So beautiful. Did that begin, by the way, his partnership with Mercer, with Johnny Mercer.

JON

No, actually, the Mercer partnership begins on - Peter Gunn! It's another reason I wanted to write the book, because so much begins here. So much starts here for the Mancini career, and also for the Mancini-Edwards collaboration. It really starts right here. So, two things. One is the melody issue. You know, it's interesting to me, he was at Universal on staff in the Universal Music Department from 1952 to the beginning of 1958. But almost never got screen credit because most of those scores were written by a team, by the Universal team, and most of those were like B movies that nobody cared about anyway. So, with Peter Gunn, it's almost as if Henry Mancini bursts onto the scene, brand new. “Who's this guy? we never heard of him.” Every single tune is a great tune. Something hummable is on every single track of those Gunn albums and those Lucky albums. And the sense of melody is extraordinary. Dreamsville, which was what I named the book, was the love theme that he wrote for Craig Stevens and Lola Albright, who played his girlfriend in the bar. But in fact, it was written for the album. When the album deal was made, Mancini had written, I think probably 8 or 9 scores for the TV series, eight or nine episodes had been scored at that point, so he had, I think, if I remember correctly, 8 tunes. So, he had to have four more to make a 12-tune LP. That’s what they all were back in those days. So, he just dashed off Dreamsville, which Bob Bain the guitarist said he thought was one of the all-time great Mancini tunes, and there are a lot of great Mancini tunes. John Williams is on piano, and Dick Nash is on the trombone. It's just fabulous. So, so gorgeous. But yeah, he had a great sense of melody, and I think it kind of astonished everybody that he could come up with this stuff week after week. We think of Mancini and Mercer as the Moon River architects and of course, they were. But, in fact, what happened was, after the Peter Gunn album hit, it was being played on the radio all the time. Johnny Mercer had a habit of hearing a good instrumental tune on the radio, and then if he liked it, he would go home and write a lyric to it. So, one of the one of the tracks on the - I can't remember if it was the 1st or the 2nd Peter Gunn album - played on the radio. And so, Mercer called the radio station and said, what is that? Oh, well, it's off the Peter Gunn album. Henry Mancini wrote that. Mercer wrote a lyric sort of sight unseen and said, “Is It OK, Hank, if I do this?” And that's how they met. And of course, Johnny Mercer was one of the great lyricists of Hollywood history, whose career, by the way, was on the downhill slide in the late 50s because rock and roll was coming in. And Mercer felt that his brand of lyric writing was going the way of the dodo. But in fact, it was Mancini who rejuvenated the Mercer career to huge success all through the 60s, many of which were tunes written with Mancini.

JOHN

“My huckleberry friend” will be forever emblazoned in the Lyric Writers Hall of Fame. We're talking about, you know, these innate senses of melody, and feeling that you have to have to be a musician, you have to have to be a lyricist.  I would have people look at the first stanza of The Days of Wine and Roses. The movie is very hard to watch. It's very sorrowful. It's incredibly well acted, and the song is often done in a very lush, romantic way, but that first stanza says that memory of those days opens the door that wasn't there before, and closes, and you can't get back to them. And it's a tremendous lyric, and it's not the only one he wrote for him. But it's both romantic, which that song is too often played up as being only, and also sorrowful, because that's what the movie is.

JON

Oh yeah. It's about alcoholics, you know, some of whom don't come out of it, and some of whom manage to get past it. And, as you say, it's a rough movie to sit through. It's Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick. And again, this is a Blake Edwards picture. You know it right after they did Moon River, they dove into The Days of Wine and Roses. And it is a great dramatic score. Yes, that theme is just tremendous. I tend to live in the past, frankly, because I'm happier there. But people ask me, do you have favorite themes these days? And I just think that that nobody writes tunes like this anymore. And I wish they did. But they either don't work hard enough at it, or they don't have the ability. Sometimes it's simply an innate ability to, you know, to write a song. But boy, when Mancini was on, nobody was better.

JOHN

Let me add another amazing lyric I just remembered. That’s Charade, which is a Mancini-Mercer tune. It was a big hit like so many of the ones that we're talking about. But part of it really was the lyrics, to give Johnny his credit. “When we played our charade, we were like children posing, playing games, acting out names, guessing the parts we played. Best on the bill lovers until love left the masquerade.” Oh, get outta here!

JON

Isn't that fabulous? Isn't that fabulous? You know, again, this is Johnny Mercer collaborating with Henry Mancini. And these songs are timeless, you know.

JOHN

Another gentle, jazzy, urban waltz, right? 

JON

I would mention one other one that is a particular favorite of mine. In 1969, Mancini did a picture for Blake Edwards called Darling Lily, which starred his wife Julie Andrews. The opening song from that is called Whistling In The Dark. And if you ever get a chance, just watch the first five minutes of the movie. Because it's so mood setting, and it's just another great Mercer lyric. And I just, you know, I can gush about this stuff all day.

DON

So, let's talk about where we are now. You were talking about living in the past because we didn't have a lot of good melodies nowadays. Is there anything on television right now that you think it's anywhere close to what was concocted by Mancini and the others in the 60s?

JON

Well, I think it's a matter of personal taste. I was 40 before I thought I even had any good taste, and now I feel like I have very good taste in my - as David Rexton once put it - in my “anecdotal age." I just, I feel that there's a lot of good music on television. I don't know how much of it is truly memorable in the way that you want to rush out and buy the CD or rush to Spotify or Apple Music and push a button to hear it.  I'm a big fan of people who -because scoring music for television or films is not an easy profession. And it takes a great deal of understanding of both music and drama. So, my hat is off to these folks. But I feel that the era of great movie songs is largely past us. I feel like that period of time which started in the 50s but was very strong in the 1960s and 70s in the 80s, when these guys were active people - I might add people like, you know, John Barry and Don Black, you had things like Born Free and David Shire who came along in the 70s and wrote some of the songs, and won an Oscar for the song for Norma Rae.

JOHN

Right. Well, Bacharach, David had a few great ones, yes.

JON

Bacharach and David! And we just lost Bert not long ago.  I was lucky enough to be able to interview Bacharach and David, and was in awe of those guys too, so....

JOHN

OK, I hate you now. I knew there was a reason I hated you, now I know. You're killing me.

JON

I think it's dangerous to live too much in the past. I think we need to keep up with what's happening. But I reserve the right to come home and play stuff from my youth.

DON

John Burlingame, it's been fantastic to talk to you about Peter Gunn and Henry Mancini and all of the fine music that came out of that show, and Mr. Lucky, but also all of the movies that Mancini did. And it's incredible to think that this is his 100th birthday. And you're right. I think I'd rather live in that era sometimes than live in this one. It was so much more fun. You could go to Mother's and have a drink and listen to a jazz song.

JON

Exactly. It's been a pleasure to talk with you guys about this. I love talking with you guys and thank you so much for having me on today.

DON

Terrific. Again, John's book is Dreamsville, Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn and Music for TV Noir. Find it wherever good books are sold. Thanks again, John.

JON

Thank you.