In the Jingle Jangle Evening

Earl Fowler

Like the shy kids on prom night they fidget on the sidelines, waiting to be summoned to the dance floor of consciousness.

We almost never reach for them, but when we do, their touch is as familiar as the cupboard latches from a long-forsaken childhood home.

Their domain is wordless, devoid of language, and no one ever sets out to lodge them deeply into the encrypted folds and furrows of our crania. Yet that’s where they wind up: crumbs in the cracks of the brainstem floor, long-term tenants in the nostalgia-dredged nooks and corners of the Palazzo Memory.

Researchers who work in the field report that familiar songs from childhood are among the final survivors of the multifarious ravages of dementia. Sufferers who are otherwise unresponsive will often hum or sing or clap along to music they were introduced to in their youth.

Dunno whether this has ever been tested, but I’d be willing to bet my bottom bundle of cerebellum neurons that collections of theme songs from long-cancelled television shows — today’s topic, by the way, which we’re slowly backing into — carom and echo within the fathomless caverns of our temporal lobes.

Even as our cache of reminiscences shrivels in tandem with our abilities to recognize others or verbalize basic ideas and feelings — all the sweet, green icing flowing down as if someone in stripèd pants left a cake out in the rain — remnants of TV ditties will survive, they will survive. (Special credit in shaping that last sentence goes to Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor, and with any luck I’ll never have that recipe again.)

How can you tell if an Alzheimer’s patient is Canadian? Aside from the inside-out tuque, I mean. Coo loo coo coo, coo coo coo cooo!

Well, assuming he or she is old enough, my best guess is that you’d elicit a recognition response by playing the orchestrated Dolores Claman classic that used to signal the beginning of “Hockey Night in Canada” broadcasts every Saturday evening.

Moreover, few who were (faute de mieux) glued to CBC-TV programming during their early childhoods any time from 1958-85 will ever slough off the gentle harp-and-recorder rendition of traditional English folk song “Early One Morning” that bookended episodes of The Friendly Giant.

The indefatigable staying power of those refrains might be a uniquely Canadian/American border state phenomenon. But when it comes to television viewing habits, of course, we in this country have long been colonized as the 51st state. After all, there were only so many times one could bear sitting through reruns of King of Kensington or La famille Plouffe. Take off, eh?

Thus, if you’re of a certain age and I mention the opening and closing credits of “Get Smart”, say, there’s a very good chance that somewhere inside your mind’s ear you’re already hearing “Da da dahhhh … dah, da da dahhhh … dah” along with the slamming of vault doors, the two sharp notes signalling intrepid Agent 86’s drop through a phone booth at the beginning of the show, and the slamming of massive doors on his nose at the end (or did they miss it by that much?). Roll credits.

(Would you believe that you now get to spend the rest of the day trying to dispel both that pertinacious earworm and any latent adolescent fantasies about Barbara Feldon in a beret and gloves, perhaps pointing a hot little Beretta 92FS pistol and excitedly exclaiming, “Oh, Max!” Sorry about that, chief.)

The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for dozens of wordless TV show tunes. Think about the beginning of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and you’ll almost certainly hear “Da da da da da da da dah, da da dah, da da dah” while visualizing Rob Petrie taking a header over the ottoman during the riff that composer Earle Hagen once described as “that little fillip.”

If you remember the opening sequence of Bonanza on Sunday nights as the Ponderosa map burned and Hoss leered goofily from atop his overburdened horse to the pumping of horns and the fierce strumming of guitars, then inevitably, the rollicking “dum didi dum didi dum didi dum, dee dee deeeeee …” will all come galloping back to you.

Hagen’s infectious virtuosity as a Roger Whittaker-level whistler was on display in his snappy song “The Fishin’ Hole,” that peerless paean to small-town life in Norman Rockwell-era America that set in motion (albeit extremely slow motion) The Andy Griffith Show.

Though largely forgotten today, Hagen was sort of a jingle genius. He also wrote the theme music for The Mod Squad and I Spy. If you’re a keener for mid-century Americana, you can find a version of “The Fishin’ Hole” featuring lyrics never heard on the show on my 1961 album Themes and Laughs from the Andy Griffith Show. (Psst. Anyone have indecorous photos of Aunt Bee they’d care to trade?)

Some airs and strains are a little harder to summon, but I’m confident they’re rolling around in your skull next to some dusty times-table charts, rusty Hula Hoop moves and a ragged sepia image of old men playing Chinese checkers by the trees.

They’re all in there somewhere:

Hollywood bandleader Hugo Montenegro’s flouncy, bellydance-ish bossa nova intro to I Dream of Jeannie. Doc Severinsen’s swinging horn charts and the extended drum roll as Ed McMahon announced “Heeeere’s … Johnny” on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Jazz-fusion keyboard player Bob James’s “Angela” track as the sonic backdrop for the serene cab trip over New York’s Queensboro Bridge at the beginning of Taxi.

But wait. There’s more! Order a complete set of mood rings and plastic bigfoot feet now and we’ll send you a lightly used Veg-O-Matic and the K-tel K-llection of 20 original TV themes! Twenty original stars! (Sorry, not available in stores.)

If you can remember the backstory to the TV version of The Odd Couple — “On November 13, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. That request came from his wife” — you most certainly recall the jazz theme composed by Count Basie wingman Neil Hefti.

If you don’t believe me, check it out on YouTube and I guarantee you’ll recognize the tingling harpsichords within two seconds. (Hefti also wrote the theme for TV’s Batman — the campy Adam West version — and liked to joke that he should have received a credit for “word and music by.” Da da da da da da dah, Batman!)

Mike Altman, one of director Robert Altman’s sons, was all of 15 when he took 15 minutes to pen the lyrics to “Suicide Is Painless,” the song he co-wrote with Johnny Mandel for the movie version of M*A*S*H. The amicable version that introduced the television spinoff — still heard daily in syndication on classic oldie channels like MeTV — is purely instrumental. (Robert Altman used to grouse that Mike had earned way more money from the song than he garnered from the film.)

Composer and musician Jonathan Wolff’s opener to Seinfeld, exquisitely timed to work around Jerry Seinfeld’s opening and closing standup routines, was not so much a melody as a sprinkling of eccentric, off-centre sounds that could be subtly reworked with each episode.

Seinfeld was famously a show about nothing, so on a hospital deathbed one could do worse than to hearken to the sound of that slap bass employed in the theme in one’s final spiral into the Big Nothing, that bleak and endless night of Three’s Company reruns that will devour us all.

Failing that, the womp, womp, womp of “Frolic”, Italian composer Luciano Michelini’s screw-the-pooch theme for Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, would be pret-tay, pret-tay, pret-tay good.

Might be even cooler to fade out to the mid-show “dun, dun” used to introduce scene cards in the manifold iterations of Law & Order. Like the clarinet/guitar/electric piano intro to the proliferating police procedural, we owe the “dun dun” to the genius of Mike Post, who also created the indelible theme songs from The Rockford Files, Hill Street Blues, Blossom and The Greatest American Hero.

If you’re skeptical of my jejune confidence in the extraordinary persistence of these themes, here’s an indestructible hint: This is Jim Rockford. At the tone, leave your name and message. I’ll get back to you. Beeeeeeep.

Oh, and be careful out there. The wistful Hill Street Blues piano melody was so catchy that it charted in the Billboard Top 10. So did The Rockford Files theme co-written by Pete Carpenter. (Bonus trivia: The harmonica solo in the latter is courtesy of Tommy Morgan, who also shone on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and Quincy Jones’s funky “Streetbeater” theme to Sanford and Son. “Streetbeater” brilliantly mirrored the gruff, cantankerous vocal mannerisms of star Redd Foxx.)

To me, the greatest of the police/detective/espionage series songs was Argentine composer Lalo Schifrin’s rhythmic, Morse code-inflected, Bond-era, bongos- and flute-powered theme for Mission: Impossible, regularly resurrected for M:I movies and the franchise video game series. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to try to put “dun dun, da da, dun dun, da da” out of your mind. As always, should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your derelict Napster account. This eight-track will self-destruct in five seconds in the middle of the theme from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Good luck.

Some more recent themes — such as singer-songwriter Danny Elfman’s beloved score for The Simpsons, which we first heard in 1989 (so not that recent after all, I guess) — hark back to what he once described as the “frantic and frenetic” vibe of 1960s sitcoms. The beauty of The Simpsons theme is that it easily expands or contracts from one episode to the next, like the one for Seinfeld, depending on the length of the opening credits.

I could go on. I mean, I already have. But we’ve barely scratched the surface of the teeming musical mind parasites walkin’ on the back roads, by the rivers flowing gentle on our minds.

What about that early collaboration between Blake Edwards and Henry Mancini, the hook-heavy theme from Peter Gunn? Even if you’re too young to remember the private eye series that started on NBC in 1958 and wound up on ABC in 1961, it has been branded into your hippocampus in countless covers, including with blazing synthesizers by prog rock pioneers Emerson, Lake & Palmer and in such movies as Sixteen Candles and The Blues Brothers. My favourite Peter Gunn sampling occurs in a superb Sopranos sequence mocking FBI agents that mashed it up with “Every Breath You Take” by the Police.

Then there’s the flittering, fluttering “Materia Primoris” by Mark Snow that you likely know best as the theme from The X-Files; the “Dunnn da dun dunn. Dunnn da dun dunn dunnnnnnn” of Dragnet, a hard-boiled, no-nonsense, square-as-SpongeBob-Squarepants leitmotif allegedly ripped off by composer Walter Schumann from Mikós Rózsa’s score for the 1946 film noir The Killers; and above all, the “Where No Man Has Gone Before” theme from Star Trek, which I’ll bet you figured featured a theremin but was actually sung by soprano Loulie Jean Norman, backed by flute and organ.

Boldly going where no personal loss of cognitive functioning had gone before, at least until you read this drivel, let’s arbitrarily designate that last one as the final frontier in this wistful exploration of embedded TV themes.

Now it’s not like people who have suffered losses of memory, language, problem-solving and other abilities can’t recall many other forms of music, including TV themes with lyrics. Boy, the way Glenn Miller played.

But to speak metaphorically, I wanted to focus here on the lightly regarded instrumental musical bromides that continue to hide like fairy-tale dwarves behind the miniature heads of cabbage in our minds, making them harder to spot and root out by the climbing-nettle nasties that spread their odious plaque over our little grey cells as we age.

The brain stores memories by changing how neurons communicate with one another, enhancing some through repeated experiences by forming stronger connections, dissipating others as connections wither and are lost with the catastrophe of time.

Adapting an image from 19th-century French fantasy writer Charles Nodier’s story Trésor des Fèves, I like to envision these tunes as occupying a little fairy coach the size of a bean, hidden under a tuft of grass. A tuft growing bravely through the hardening concrete of the incipient senility spreading all around it like a stain.

Alzheimer’s disease, according to a recent online article by Chicago non-profit healthcare system Northwestern Medicine, “spreads through the brain in a pattern. It typically starts in the areas of the brain responsible for memory and ends in the brainstem, which has a critical role in heart and lung control and swallowing. The long-term memory of music remains intact until the very late stages of disease progression, right before the disease attacks the brainstem. It is currently unknown why Alzheimer’s disease affects this area last.”

Which suggests one last metaphor (cab driver, once more ’round the block, dooby dooby do, never mind the ticket or the clock).

Imagine these tunes as being like larvae tucked into satin pouches near our brainstems, alongside the prehistoric vocalizations of frogs and toads and crickets, who pioneered our senses of rhythm and timbre, tempo and meter, volume and even melody hundreds of millions of years before our brains evolved from the common ancestors we share with them.

To hear a tune as a tune, a person suffering from any form of dementia must still have this impressive primordial ability to retain in his or her consciousness the preceding notes, and to link them with one another and the current aural input into something apprehended as a unified whole. This is no mere bagatelle. The people we love are still in there somewhere.

So sure. When we die, the malady is over … but the songs linger on. If the fat lady is singing, it’s far from over. Clap, clap against the dying of the blue TV screen light. Clap for the Wolfman, you gonna dig him till the day you die.

Hey, Mr. TV Theme Man, play a song for us. In the jingle jangle evening, we’ll come following you.