I’m just going to ask the open question What’s up with that generic dance music from tv and movies?
I’m sure you know the stuff.
For one thing it’s instrumental.
It’s that unidentifiable music when teens want to dance or someone turns on the radio moments before a news bulletin that advances the plot.
What, or who, am I hearing?
Where does it come from?
Are these popular music groups from the day or is it some sort of album studios commissioned to avoid having to pay royalties?
I keep thinking it would be nice to stop things and ask the people on screen if they know the name of the group or the song playing. Of course, they would all be actors and wouldn’t know anything. Probably told to strip down to swimwear and dance like crazy in silence. The music would be dubbed in later. Which is hilarious to think about.
I often regard it as generic garbage from a dark age of music but maybe I’m wrong. Is it a totally factitious product of Hollywood? Or maybe they are using the good stuff and I’m just not recognizing it.
Maybe movies and tv are using a dumb down parody of it.
There are acts like Dick Dale that produced some highly regarded instrumental music in that era. He usually had a sound you can recognize though. Link Wray might be too bluesy for what I’m talking about.
Though, I probably shouldn’t throw stones. I have some appreciation for Tiki music that I expect most people would think is nothing but background noise unless you go nuts and listen enough to develop an ear for it.
It’s usually done by musicians who worked by the studio to provide background music to avoid the hassles of paying for rights.
That’s why the music is usually horned-based, like something from the 40s. The bands/musicians/arrangers were from the time before guitars were the main instrument. Also, the sounds were familiar to older people in the audience.
I wish you had some examples from movies. There were a lot of teen or Twenty-something oriented movies that used real bands that were not great. I know the Strawberry Alarm Clock did several movies.
The Biker movies used real bands that mostly never made it big. Roger Corman I believe also used LA area bands quite often when the movie was about young people.
“Davie Allan is an American guitarist best known for his work on soundtracks to various teen and biker movies in the 1960s. Allan’s backing band is almost always the Arrows (i.e., Davie Allan & the Arrows), although the Arrows have never had a stable lineup.”
Often described as “the groovy new sound” even though it’s generic pap. A lot of twangy guitars and tambourines.
One thing I find strange about representing different eras on TV is how there’s a very specific way of dancing that seems to be impossible for modern dancers to recreate accurately. If you look at any actual 60s dancing, 70s dancing, 80s dancing on YouTube, then see a current show set during those eras (GLOW, Stranger Things, Mad Men, That 70s Show), they just can’t seem to recreate it accurately, there’s just too much of now influencing their movements and hairstyles.
Thanks for the replies!
Sorry I didn’t have a bunch of clips for the OP. My movie collection is really sparse on bad 60s movies.
The more incidental the music the more work I think I’ll have finding examples.
That’s good. Taking a look I found this guy, Jerry Styner, who seems to have gotten around. This is why I hate that IMDB eliminated its message boards. There could have been some info there.
It’s like he must have turned out sheet music by the pound for some of those movies.
Here’s one of the big ones with known stars, some of them dubbed.
What I’m forgetting is everyone wants to be a star and have a career. Here we have 60s movie, including a man in a rubber gorilla suit. But was this really something real teens would listen too?
Thanks. It makes me wonder how much the movie industry promoted the west coast sound.
That’s a good find. I can hear some quality to there. I’d listen to that.
From that era I think they had a song if you need to know how to fix a carburettor for a 62 Plymouth or any other car. Trade schools must have been 1/4 lecture and 3/4 listening to hot rod songs.
Some of those movies a radio is turned on in a bank vault and a woman will appear with some twangy dance moves. Yes’ she’s beautiful, but please stop doing that.
On the other hand there is the highly energetic Toni Basil.
The first one has better dancing and the music is decent surf tune. The second is more campy musically and in dancing. The older slower woman looks more relaxed. Keeping up with that beat is a lot of work.
I was reading a long history about the '50s TV series,* The Adventures of Superman*, and somewhere in the middle, the author was talking about the Superman theme composed for the TV show. Paraphrased, it was something like this.
A lot of musicians got the hell out of Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. They came to the U.S. and ended up in New York and Los Angeles. Suddenly the entertainment industry had hundreds and hundreds of talented, experienced, professional musicians and composers grateful for the opportunity to keep practicing their art and willing to work eight hour shifts, cranking out everything from commercial jingles to movie scores.
Now, instead of falling back on 200 year-old works of Mozart and Bach, everybody could afford to have “contemporary” music even in cheap movies and TV shows (like The Adventures of Superman;)) True, it was generic, and not exactly cutting edge for its era, but neither the composers nor the musicians expected royalties, so it was cheap and plentiful.
In a similar vein, when Ang Lee was directing Taking Woodstock he wanted to recreate many of the iconic photos of the event like the guy with the flag draped over his shoulders and the skinny-dipping hippies. He said it was more difficult than anticipated because, “People were skinnier back then.” He went on to say there are still thin people around today but, “It’s a different kind of skinny.”
Whenever I think of this subject, I think of episodes of Dragnet where young people are having a party. They used instrumental ‘library music’ that no teenager of that era would listen to. (NB: I was little when the show aired, but my sister was a teenager.) Today, I’d say they were going for a ‘surf music’ sound, but they didn’t actually know what it sounded like.
That’s a great example! I remember it well on that an other 60’s/70s depictions of what was “hip” in the eyes of troglodytic “squares.”
I remember having conversations with friends back in the 80s and 90’s as we compared notes on the cheesy “library” music. I remember one guy calling it “Brady Bunch music”. The kind of lame horn-based stuff that was supposed to pass for rock when played over a radio, for instance. They did the same thing on ‘Leave it to Beaver’.
There was at least one episode of Perry Mason about “swingin’ teenagers” and their music (I think it revolved around the fight for legal rights to a song). Must have been made around 1964. I laughed out loud when I heard what the producers thought was “hip” back in the day!
My sister and I call that music Brady Bunch rock. They’d have some horrible generic music playing on the radio that the kids would dance to and the parents would make a comment about how loud it was. A lot of the sitcoms of that time used that kind of music.
