365 DAYS PROJECT

2003   JULY 29   #210

Mike Post - For My Home

If Mike Post isn't a household name, he should be. He's one of the most successful composers in TV history, having composed music for many series including The Rockford Files, L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues, and NYPD Blue. His official bio charts the beginning of his career in 1969, when he was appointed music director for "The Andy Williams Show" at the age of 24.

Nowhere in any of the numerous websites devoted to Mr. Post is there a single mention of this obscure single from 1964 (he would have been 19 at the time). On first listen, he sounds like yet another singer-songwriter smitten with Bob Dylan. His snarling, nasal vocals and occasional lines with too many syllables in them were de rigeur for folkie protest songs of the era. However, if you pay attention to the lyric, you find that it is indeed a protest song, but not of the garden variety. It's a right-wing protest song with all of the trappings of the other kind.

What better label to snap up this fine, upstanding, patriotic songwriter than Frank Sinatra's Reprise, at a time when Sinatra had just switched political allegiances, furious when JFK "snubbed" him by declining an invitation to stay at his Palm Springs home (because of Sinatra's reputed Mafia connections).

For those who may doubt that this is the same Mike Post who composed the top 10 hit theme to "The Rockford Files", note that the same unusual musical figure - a rapidly alternating repeating tonic and sub-dominant - occurs in both pieces. In "For My Home", it occurs right after the wham-bam drum beats in the intro.

- Stormy Hunter, http://tstormhunter.iuma.com/

TT-4:08 / 3.3MB / 112kbps 44.1khz
Reprise single #0406 (1964)


(Image courtesy of Stormy Hunter)