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Ten Favorite Themes from 1970s TV Shows

Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!

It recently came to my attention that last Friday, September 13, was not only the 50th anniversary of the NBC debut of The Rockford Files, but was also the 50th anniversary of the ABC debut of Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Now, chances are good that these milestones (and TV shows) mean little to you unless you’re, like me, as old as the proverbial hills. But to my mind, Rockford and Kolchak represent the high-water mark of American network television, as well as a warm reminder of the years before my baseball or music obsessions kicked in, when I would typically spend at least five hours a day in front of the television — years when I would study the newspaper’s TV guide with the same zeal that I would later apply to absorbing the daily AL and NL box scores.

One of the biggest frustrations for me when we moved to England in the late summer of 1974 was that I would be missing out on all the new shows that were making their US TV debut that fall. (Well, most of ‘em — the new Planet of the Apes series, shown on CBS in the US, was picked up for broadcast in the UK.) When we returned to America that December, I was unable to fall asleep my first night back, as the flight from London to Los Angeles had completely screwed up my body clock; I didn’t mind, though, because that meant I could stay up late gorging myself at the cathode tube buffet. I saw The Rockford Files for the first time ever that night, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker not long after; to this day, they remain two of my all-time favorite American network TV shows, with The Odd Couple completing the holy trinity.

Aside from being incisively-written (and often quite funny) shows featuring rumpled but nonetheless charismatic lead characters, Rockford, Kolchak and The Odd Couple all had something else in common: Great theme music. And this was extremely important to me at the time; even though it would be a couple of years before I actively began to pay attention to what was on the radio, and another couple of years after that before I actually started buying records, whether or not I liked the theme music could make or break a TV show for me.

It’s true; even from a really young age, my music critic impulses (or maybe peccadilloes) were already firmly in place. For instance, I completely avoided Lidsville and The Electric Company, to name two favorites among my kindergarten classmates, simply because I thought their opening themes were really lame; ditto for Ultraman, the syndicated Japanese sci-fi series that would have been totally up my alley, if the show’s cutesy theme hadn’t rendered me too embarrassed to actually watch it.

But a good, or even great, theme would make a show instantly appealing to me — and network television in the 1970s was overflowing with dynamic (and often really catchy) themes, whose minute-long bursts helped to plant the seeds of my long-running obsession with soundtrack and library music. Here, then, are ten of my favorite TV themes from that decade…

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Kolchak: The Night Stalker

A sorely underrated soundtrack composer, multi-instrumentalist Gil Mellé had a real knack for thrillers and horror films, as evidenced by his scores for The Andromeda Strain, The Sentinel, Blood Beach, as well as his music for TV’s Night Gallery. But I’m not sure he ever topped his opening theme from Kolchak, which perfectly sums up the show’s tricky balance of humor and horror by going from light and breezy to tense and terrifying in less than a minute. That moment where the cellos kick in still chills my blood and raises the hair on the back of my neck.

The Rockford Files

A true giant in the world of TV music, Mike Post has won Grammy awards for his Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law themes, and his resumé includes such shows as The A-Team, NYPD Blue, The White Shadow and about a couple dozen more. But nothing he’s done fills me with joy quite like his theme from The Rockford Files, which is an instant mood-lifter every time I hear it; in retrospect, this theme was (along with “Popcorn”) one of the first times that my mind was totally blown by the sound of a melody played on a synthesizer.

The Odd Couple

Speaking of instant mood-lifters — that “Chopsticks”-style keyboard vamp at the beginning of Neal Hefti’s theme from The Odd Couple always sounds to me like sunlight bursting through a cloudy Manhattan morning. Sure, Hefti’s theme originally graced the soundtrack of the 1968 film of the same name, but I didn’t hear it until the seventies, when my dad made sure that the TV show was appointment viewing in our household.

S.W.A.T.

Okay, here’s an example of a theme far outclassing the show it was attached to. I can’t remember a single episode (or even a single scene) from this relatively short-lived cop show, which ran for only two seasons between February 1975 and April 1976, but I remember every single note and nuance of its funky-ass theme. Penned by Barry De Vorzon, the Emmy- and Grammy-winning composer and arranger who later came up with the fantastic synthesized score for 1979’s The Warriors, “Theme from S.W.A.T.” turned out to be far more popular than the show that spawned it, hitting Number One on the Billboard charts in early 1976 in a version recorded by studio disco outfit Rhythm Heritage.

Barnaby Jones

Another legendary Grammy- and Emmy-winning composer, the massively prolific Jerry Goldsmith (Chinatown, Logan’s Run, Alien) somehow found time in his busy schedule to whip up this tasty flute salad for Barnaby Jones, which was far groovier a theme than Buddy Ebsen’s milk-guzzling private eye probably deserved.

Hawaii Five-O

Okay — like The Odd Couple, this is technically a sixties theme, having been introduced when Hawaii Five-O debuted on CBS in September 1968. But the show ran all through the 1970s, and my elementary school friends and I were so into its pounding, Morton Stevens-penned theme music that we would tape it off the television and then play it over and over again while pretending to arrest each other. To this day, the Hawaii Five-O theme still totally gets my adrenaline pumping, especially when I hear it in conjunction with the show’s tightly-edited opening credits; whomever thought it would be a good idea to pair the jet sequence with the key change was a goddamn genius, because that particular combination of sound and images still gives me goosebumps EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Baretta

Everyone remembers the Sammy Davis, Jr.-sung version of the Baretta theme, which featured the immortal couplet “Don’t do the crime/If you can’t do the time” (which in turn inspired me and my deeply foul-mouthed elementary school friends to come up with all manner of vile alternative rhymes). But the show’s first season featured the instrumental version recorded by Latin funk legends El Chicano, which I’ve included here so you can dig its supremely funky groove. The theme was co-written by Dave Grusin and Morgan Ames; had I realized back in the early nineties that Grusin was the man behind “Baretta’s Theme” (not to mention Sergio Mendes’ “Crystal Illusions” and a whole mess of great soundtracks), I might have been a little less dismissive of his smooth-jazz GRP albums that we stocked at my record store.

Kojak

Like The Odd Couple, Kojak was a show we watched every week in my house. My New York-born dad terribly missed the city of his birth, and the show was one of several NYC-based programs that he regularly turned to in order to assuage his homesickness — as well as a way to teach my sister and I that NYC was a far cooler and more interesting place than the midwestern college town where we lived at the time. Billy Goldenberg, who wrote the theme music for the show’s first four seasons, had previously written the scores for Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and the Elvis flick Change of Habit; and every time I heard his propulsive Kojak theme, I knew I was in for another lesson in Big Apple awesomeness… as well as a few well-timed Telly Savalas grunts of “Stavros!” and “Who loves ya, baby?”

The Streets of San Francisco

The fantastically prolific Patrick Williams scored over 200 films, including his Oscar-nominated score for 1979’s Breaking Away, and he also contributed music (though not the opening themes) to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show and Columbo. For me, though, his finest minute was the fantastically funky theme from The Streets of San Francisco, which goes hard from the first clavichord note and never lets up for a single second.

The Houndcats

Here’s one I’ll wager few of you remember, since The Houndcats was a Saturday morning cartoon from 52 years ago that only ran for a single season. And yet, that recurring fuzz guitar riff seared itself across my frontal lobe in September 1972 and has never left me since — in fact, I’m pretty sure it was my introduction to fuzz, as I didn’t knowingly hear “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” or any other pop hit with a classic fuzz guitar riff until much later. The rest of the show’s theme (apparently penned by one Doug Goodwin) was admittedly kinda goofy, even to my first-grader sensibilities; but that riff was so damn cool, it instantly made me a Houndcats fan.

So how ‘bout you, dear Jagged Time Lapsers? What were some of your favorite 1970s TV themes?

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