By barely popular demand, I will wrap up my reminiscences of producing the CDs in the Film Score Monthly catalog. Go here for the previous installment, which has links to the earlier ones.

I am not including sales and pressing numbers because I don’t even know what they are. I put off writing this column because, in all honesty, I was so burnt out that many of my memories are not happy ones. I never got tired of the music, but the administrative duties of running a boutique label—negotiating contracts, proofing packages, maintaining financing, finding new titles to release—did me in. Circa 2012 I was preparing to get married, producing a micro-budget movie, and embarking on the La-La Land Records 15CD box set of Star Trek music—so finishing the FSM catalog was fourth on my list of priorities. In addition, the last half-dozen albums had high degrees of difficulty as they had long been postponed in favor of easier ones. I took my time to release the last albums so that we could do them properly.

Vol. 15, No. 1: Ben-Hur (Rózsa): Mike Matessino handled the restoration and presentation of this mega-classic. My lasting memory is being grateful for Mike—and, when it was finally released, people complaining that they couldn’t get one of the discs out of the tray. Then when I got my copy, I thought, darn it, this disc won’t come out of the tray!What can you do? Manufacturing issues—good thing I quit! We had to get the Vol. 1 LP master from the Rózsa collection at Syracuse which took a while. 

Vol. 15, No. 2: It’s Alive (Herrmann): I love this crazy Herrmann score. I used to have a hissy cassette of it (back from the pre-CDR days when collectors traded these things amongst themselves). The legend (possibly true) is that the recording engineer was never paid for his work, so he either wiped or kept the tapes—so all we have left are the mono mixdowns which were at Warner Bros. The first roll had the cues at a miserably low level, so there was a lot of hiss when we kicked it up.

Vol. 15, No. 3: The Friends of Eddie Coyle/Three Days of the Condor (Grusin): This is fantastic two-fer of groovy ’70s Grusin classics. It doesn’t get much better than this! I was so glad we were able to include the Condor cues not on the original LP (newly mixed from the multitracks)—especially “Life and Death Introspection,” as Redford and Von Sydow talk at the end of the movie—and the complete Eddie Coyle, which is a terrific companion. The first time I heard Condor was in college when I got the Japanese SLC CD and I thought it was absolutely fantastic.

Vol. 15, No. 4: Body Heat (Barry): Talk about an album whose time had come. The original Label X release had been mixed without Barry’s involvement, and the composer loathed it—listen to the opening bars of the main title on the Label X mix with the piercing keyboard and compare it to how it is supposed to sound on our release. We used Dan Wallin’s original intended album mix and sequence (the album Barry wanted to release) for disc 2, and Mike Matessino mixed the multitracks anew for the complete score presentation on disc 1. We also added all those demos of the theme we found at Warner Bros.—and got Jon Burlingame, the best in the business, to write the liner notes. This album contains perhaps the all-time best movie cue title: “Kill for Pussy.” Vulgar, perhaps, but unforgettable.

Vol. 15, No. 5: King Kong (Barry): The penultimate release was our second bite at this big apple (ha ha), as the initial release had to be restricted to the LP master for licensing reasons. But since that time, Paramount opened up, and we could do a 2CD set with the complete score newly mixed by Mike Matessino with Neil Bulk’s editorial assistance. I can admit that I produced two albums of this soundtrack—and I avoided watching the movie each time. I love “Petrox Marching Band,” one of those unmistakable Barry throwaway creations. Jeff Bond told me that back in the '70s he and his friends would start singing “Presentation“ (aka “Kong Hits the Big Apple“) whenever they saw something overhyped and lame.

Vol. 16, No. 1: The Wild Bunch (Fielding): Ah, the grand finale—a fitting thematic conclusion to our 250-album, 15-year series. This was a mega-production and I remember going through some three dozen rolls of ½” tape at Warner Bros., folders of the scores at the Warner Bros. music library, correspondence from the Sam Peckinpah Collection at the Motion Picture Academy, gigantic Pro Tools sessions of the transfers (lining up all the stems and overlays)—all for the purpose of making this the definitive presentation. It was fascinating to read the memos between Peckinpah and producer Phil Feldman during the scoring of the picture. We even got ahold of the 1” master for the two tracks recorded specially for the LP, and (from AMPAS) the two tracks Fielding recorded as demos. Check out the supplemental online notes available for free at the site—it took ages to make sure all those slate numbers and recording dates were correct. I had a slight Peckinpah moment myself, if I do say so, when Warner Bros. refused to approve the use of the “Darkey’s Awakening” period overlay due to the lack of legal paperwork, and I put my foot down and said under no circumstances would I take it off. (It is so old, it’s conclusively public domain—and it’s in the movie, after all!) I was prepared to just say we removed it and leave it there, on the assumption nobody would ever listen to it—but they acquiesced.

There you go, friends. I am happy to have stayed involved in soundtrack CD production since ending the FSM CD series, particularly on Paramount titles for Intrada, La-La Land, Quartet and Kritzerland. As I said...I never got tired of the music! But those stories are not really mine to tell. Thanks for reading—and listening!