Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
In honor of the late Quincy Jones, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “The Streetbeater,” Jones’s theme from Sanford and Son.
Jones was a legendary jazz trumpeter/bandleader, the producer of countless R&B hits, a philanthropist tied to many progressive causes, and a TV mogul whose biggest hit shows were The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and MADtv. He was also such a candid and profane interviewee—remember when he said Marlon Brando was so promiscuous he would fuck a mailbox?—that his six daughters, including Rashida Jones, another multitalented Jones, had to stage an intervention in 2018 because of his hot takes.
So many of the obits about Jones point to Michael Jackson’s string of hits and USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” which was written by Jackson and Lionel Richie, as his greatest accomplishments. USA for Africa’s famine relief efforts are admirable (“We Are the World” raised about $60 million), but I’m not so big on “We Are the World,” which Jones co-produced with keyboardist and arranger Michael Omartian. Like Tom Breihan, I prefer Artists United Against Apartheid’s “Sun City,” the 1985 protest song that was written, produced, and organized by Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band and The Sopranos and co-produced by legendary remixer Arthur Baker, over “We Are the World” as an all-star ’80s charity song. (Breihan gave “We Are the World” a 1 out of 10 in his 2020 “The Number Ones” piece on the song.)
When I look back at Jones’s discography, “We Are the World” is hardly in the league of, for example, the 1979 Rufus & Chaka Khan jam “Do You Love What You Feel” or the 1989 slow jam “The Secret Garden (Sweet Seduction Suite),” in which Jones united Barry White with R&B balladeers from two different eras that followed White’s: ’80s hitmakers James Ingram and El DeBarge and New Jack Swing crooner Al B. Sure! (The exclamation mark isn’t me shouting like Meek Mill. It’s part of the name of Mr. “Nite and Day.”) “We Are the World” is one of Jones’s blandest tracks.
Jones was so much more than “We Are the World” and Jackson’s Off the Wall/Thriller/Bad era (the Off the Wall half is my favorite half of that era), and an underappreciated and overlooked part of his career is his period as one of Hollywood’s first Black film and TV composers.
“Jones’ presence and persistence led to opportunities for a flock of Black film composers, from Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield to Terence Blanchard and Kris Bowers,” wrote theGrio’s Matthew Allen in 2023.
The Chicago native’s period as a top Hollywood film and TV composer kicked off in 1964 with his original score for The Pawnbroker. (His first film score was actually for a project outside Hollywood: the 1961 Swedish film The Boy in the Tree.) Sidney Lumet’s film about a Holocaust survivor in Spanish Harlem contained the first film appearance of “Soul Bossa Nova.” That’s the same 1962 Jones instrumental Mike Myers later introduced to a new generation that included me when he and director Jay Roach opened 1997’s Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery with Austin and a bunch of other Londoners dancing to it on Carnaby Street (which was actually a backlot at Paramount, where, by the way, Candyman star Tony Todd—the latest great Star Trek actor to pass away—shot six Trek episodes in the ’90s, including four episodes in the role of Kurn, Worf’s brother, and 1995’s “The Visitor,” one of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s most popular and emotional episodes).
The original Italian Job, which Jones scored, is a bigger deal in the U.K. than in America—“You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” is a favorite line of any British comedian who does a Michael Caine impression—and musically, the 1969 heist flick is as charming as the Mini Coopers it immortalized. Jones’s most memorable contribution to The Italian Job is “Getta Bloomin’ Move On!”—a.k.a. the “Self-Preservation Society” song. Its Cockney-heavy lyrics were provided by Don Black, who wrote songs for five 007 movies, including Shirley Bassey’s Diamonds Are Forever theme and k.d. lang’s “Surrender” from Tomorrow Never Dies.
The Anderson Tapes and The Hot Rock are a pair of entertaining early ’70s heist flicks whose snazziest elements include a funky original score by Jones. In yesterday’s A.V. Club piece about Jones’s funkiest film scores, Craig D. Lindsey wrote, “The most valuable player this time around, though, [in the Hot Rock score] is Gerry Mulligan, whose bluesy baritone sax seems to musically represent the woes of [Robert] Redford’s protagonist, a career criminal whose continuous bad luck gives him a bad case of gastritis.”
$ (Dollars), another early ’70s heist flick and a filmed-all-over-Germany action comedy starring Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn, isn’t as good as The Anderson Tapes and The Hot Rock, but it’s elevated by the Jones-produced sounds of Little Richard singing, “I’m so mean with the green/I make a dollar wanna holler.” Mobb Deep brilliantly sampled Jones’s “Kitty with the Bent Frame” from the Beatty/Hawn movie in “Shook Ones, Part II.”
If you directed a heist flick in the ’60s and ’70s and you needed a score that will thrill, but not in a Miklós Rózsa kind of way like in The Asphalt Jungle and more like in a contemporary way, Q was your man.
Over on the small screen, the first of many themes Jones wrote for TV was the ebullient main title theme for the short-lived Hey Landlord!—the first sitcom that was co-created by Garry Marshall, who was fresh off of writing for The Dick Van Dyke Show, as was Hey Landlord! co-creator Jerry Belson—in 1966, but the first Jones TV theme that really made an impact was his subsequent main title theme for Ironside, the cop show that starred Raymond Burr as a paraplegic San Francisco police detective. The Ironside theme was notable for using early synths to simulate a police siren. (Shaw Brothers Studios loved the siren noises from Jones’s 1971 extended version of the Ironside theme so much that it inserted them into the opening titles and the fight scenes in 1972’s King Boxer. Quentin Tarantino’s use of the Ironside siren in the Kill Bill movies was an homage to King Boxer.)
“I felt that Henry Mancini, Johnny Mandel, Benny Carter, and Duke Ellington were all pioneers of jazz-influenced film scores. I’d tried to bring the sensibility of modern R&B into scoring,” wrote Jones in 2001’s Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones.
From this period emerged the theme from Sanford and Son, a great example of Jones bringing the sensibility of modern R&B into scoring. When Jones found out from producer Bud Yorkin that Redd Foxx was about to anchor a sitcom pilot for Yorkin and Norman Lear and was cast as a Black version of junk dealer Albert Steptoe in the Watts section of L.A.—Sanford and Son was a remake of Steptoe and Son—he couldn’t believe that the famously blue comedian who told crowds that “You gotta wash your ass” was going mainstream. He said to film music historian Jon Burlingame in a 2002 Television Academy Foundation interview that he remembered thinking in 1972 that “you can’t put Redd Foxx on national TV. I worked with Foxx 30 years ago at the Apollo. There’s not one word he said that could go on national television.”
Though Foxx was a lot younger than the grumpy old dad he played—he was only 49 when Sanford and Son began—Fred Sanford contained Foxx’s gift for comic timing, as well as bits and pieces of his brother and mother (Foxx named Fred after Fred Sanford Jr., his late older brother, and based Fred’s fake heart attacks on something his mom used to often do). A scruffy man needed a scruffy theme, and it doesn’t sound like any network TV sitcom theme that preceded it. It’s early ’70s R&B to the max.
In my favorite obit about Jones that has been posted, IndieWire writer Christian Blauvelt said that The Greatest Night in Pop, director Bao Nguyen’s 2024 Netflix documentary about “We Are the World,” showed how “Jones is something like a general, giving orders and telling his troops where to go and when to play their part; but he’s also a bit of a sonic painter too, knowing exactly what aural brushstrokes are needed to fill in every part of the record’s canvas.”
The brushstrokes Jones applied to “The Streetbeater” included organ riffs, cowbell plonks that sound like Fred smacking Rollo on the back of the head with a frying pan, and the presence of a bass harmonica, which was played by Tommy Morgan, who later played the harmonica for Mike Post and Pete Carpenter’s theme from The Rockford Files. During the 1971 Aretha Franklin jam “Rock Steady,” bassist Chuck Rainey’s bass line pulsated with energy, and that same kind of bass line is key to why “The Streetbeater” slaps. Rainey’s bass line, which bassist Paul Thompson included as an honorable mention (and performed) in his “10 Greatest TV Theme Bass Lines” video for his YouTube channel last year, is the first thing you hear in every Sanford and Son episode.
After the recording of “The Streetbeater,” Rainey felt he made a mistake when he ended his part of the instrumental in the wrong key. But Jones liked the flub because it was perfect for a sitcom about a scruffy junk dealer from Watts. In a 2006 interview with the Bassplaying website, Rainey recalled that Jones said to him, “I thought you did [the off-key note] on purpose. That’s why everybody’s going to think I’m a genius!”
Bonus track: “The Streetbeater” remains fantastic. Ella Fitzgerald thought the tune was fantastic as early as 1972. A few months after Sanford and Son’s series premiere on January 14, 1972 (Fitzgerald’s performance of “The Streetbeater” at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium took place on June 2, 1972), she added it to her set list and gave it lyrics just like Turk later did on Scrubs. They make more sense than “Beyond the rim of the star light/My love is wandering in star flight.”
I wish I got the chance to meet Jones. I would have thanked him for saying in Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones that he refused to drive. (A driving instructor in Culver City told him he was a terrible driver, and he never learned to drive again.) After learning to drive for nearly a year, I failed my driving test in the summer after I graduated high school, and I was so discouraged I never went back to undergo extra training and retake the test. That was the last time I drove a car. I prefer trains, public transportation, or walking because I hated the act of driving—it often stressed me out—and Jones and Jordan Peele’s statements that they didn’t drive made me feel less alone. Jones was “fuckcars” long before there was an r/fuckcars.
I tagged the hosts of The War on Cars, an excellent podcast about the movement to push against car culture and the negative effects of car dependency, in a Bluesky post where I mentioned Jones’s refusal to drive, and The War on Cars co-host Sarah Goodyear said to me, “I just learned this about Quincy Jones.”
I would have handed Jones my copy of The Autobiography of Quincy Jones to sign, and I would have also told him how much his 1973 cover of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” (which I first encountered when the Pharcyde looped it in “Passin’ Me By”) and his scores to In the Heat of the Night, The Italian Job, The Anderson Tapes, $ (Dollars), and The Hot Rock mean to me. “The Streetbeater” and so many other Jones tracks are full of his brilliance as a sonic painter.
“I try to paint pictures with sound,” said Jones to the Los Angeles Times in the middle of a promotional tour for his album Q’s Jook Joint in 1995. “In the beginning it feels like charcoal sketches, then pastel and watercolors as you start to figure out the contour and shape of it, its climaxes, its rises and falls. It has a shape just like a dramatic form, and you’ve got to make each climax a little higher. You can’t go back to a lower climax and build anything. It’s like sex, you know.”
You see what I mean when I said Jones was a candid interviewee? He will be missed.
There’s no prompt today. In the meantime, I suggest playing a bunch of your favorite tunes Jones produced or composed—Jones’s 1981 cover of Chaz Jankel’s “Ai No Corrida” slaps, especially when Craig Huxley waltzes in to play his blaster beam from the Star Trek: The Motion Picture score, and “Stomp!” by the Brothers Johnson remains my favorite thing from 1980 that’s not a line from Airplane!—or maybe revisiting Sanford and Son on YouTube or Peacock. The show had a writers’ room that included Richard Pryor, Paul Mooney, and Garry Shandling.
Sanford and Son is my favorite Norman Lear production because All in the Family, most of its spinoffs, and the two One Day at a Times can get really heavy and solemn, and on most days, I just want to watch a cantankerous (and cowardly) junkman and his pious sister-in-law hurl at each other schoolyard insults that are sometimes punctuated by Jones’s pitch-perfect theme.
