Interview: Composer Jonathan Wolff (Pt. 2)
WARNING: If you haven’t yet read Pt. 1 of this piece, then you’re going to want to do that. I’m not saying you can’t read Pt. 2 first, but you’re only ruining the experience for yourself.
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With the realization that maybe IMDb is right and maybe it's wrong, it's interesting to at least look back at the shows I think you worked on. You did actually work on The Charmings, right?
I did! I wrote that original theme for The Charmings. I...would''ve liked to have been in the room when they greenlit that dog. [Laughs.] It was just awful! But Christopher [Rich], who starred in it... He was Prince Charming, and he later starred on Reba. So I got to see him again. I was the composer for Reba for the last couple of years of my career, so it was nice to see him. And...who was the princess on that? Was it Julia Campbell?
Um... No, it was Caitlin O'Heaney at first, and then it was Carol Huston.
Thank you. I got confused. Julia Campbell became the "It" girl for awhile. I don't know how many failed series I did with her. Two or three. [Writer's note: The only two I could find were Blue Skies and Oh, Grow Up.] But then she showed up on Seinfeld, too, as a girlfriend of Jerry's. It was the one with the Lopper. Otherwise known as the Frogger episode. But she's the girlfriend that he spent hours breaking up with, and then he thought he was being chased by this serial killer called the Lopper. I just remember that because I contributed to the ridiculousness of the Lopper storyline with B-movie science-fiction / horror / death-kill music!
You're listed as "Performer" on "Brand New Life," the theme song to Who's the Boss. Is that accurate?
[Takes a deep breath.] Yes, in that I sang backup on it. But I was not "the performer" of it. When I was hired onto that show... Obviously, I did not create that theme. I was hired in season five or six, and my first assignment on that was to... [Hesitates.] They were aware that that theme was recognizable and beloved, but wimpy. And it kind of bothered Tony [Danza]. It bothered some of the execs that it was kind of sing-songy and wimpy, and they wanted to know if I could butch that song up a little bit.
[I just have to pause here for a moment and say that the expression on Jonathan's face at the end of this particular sentence was priceless. I can't really describe it, I can only say that it underlined the preposterousness of their request.]
I said, "Uh... I can write you a new one!" [Laughs.] They go, "No, no, we're not doing that." Because the execs had written the words for it. They liked that added income stream! So I did a re-record of it with a more manly voice. Not mine: it was David Morgan, a studio singer, who sang it, and I sang backup on the chorus lines. But, no, that phrasing is not correct. I would not call myself the performer. I was the producer of it. But, no, not the performer.
Well, you did work on another one of my favorite short-lived sitcoms: Flying Blind.
I've got behind me - you can probably see it - a trail of mushroom clouds and blast craters which chart the course of my career. [Laughs.] You seem to enjoy visiting those disaster sites!
I don't see them as disasters, personally. I loved Tea Leoni in that show. I completely fell for her on that sitcom.
Yeah, everyone did. We all loved her. But you look at the beginning of my career, those credits are like a long death list of failed show titles. I was like the Kevorkian of network TV! [Laughs.] Every network had a little graveyard of shows that died too young, and on way too many of those headstones it says, "Music by Jonathan Wolff"! I was afraid the network presidents were going to get together and whack me just to stop me from writing more of their losers' themes! It was a good thing Tony Danza liked me, so [Chairman of ABC Entertainment] Ted Harbert wouldn't do that!
So how did you find your way onto Seinfeld? Did they come looking for you specifically or was it assigned to you? I don't know how your career worked at that point.
First of all, thank you for getting away from the painful misery of all my failures. [Laughs.]
Oh, I'll go back to them, don't worry.
[Laughs.] And the truth is, from each of those disaster sites - from the fallout! - came moments of startling clarity and a zenith of understanding of what maybe I could've done differently to help that along. But here's the answer to your question: Hollywood - as I'm sure you know - is a union town, and if any combination of powerful labor unions has a contract that ends concurrently, like the teamsters or the directors or the writers or the actors, it's a perfect storm for a strike. And there were a number of labor strikes during my career, and during those first ten years that I was in Hollywood.
What I would do is take my thimbleful of talent and my bag of skills - a lot of skills, a little bit of talent - and take 'em on the road, play with rock 'n' roll bands, do concerts. And then I finally landed on writing shows and conducting for Vegas acts. You make real money, it was good, and after the strike was over, I figured out that I could keep a car at McCarran [International Airport in Las Vegas], keep a car at Burbank Airport, work all day long in the studios in L.A., catch the 6 p.m. flight to Las Vegas, conduct the early show, write in-between, conduct the late show, write some more, maybe take a nap... [Laughs.] Take the early morning flight back to Burbank, record everything I'd written... [Takes a deep breath.] I did that for three years.
Wow.
Yeah, I didn't sleep. [Laughs.] I had two complete careers going. And I made plenty of money.
Well, Vegas is the city that never sleeps anyway, so that worked out, right?
That worked out okay! Two of my Vegas acts - Diana Ross and Tom Jones - shared the same opening act, a brilliant comedian who is still among my best friends: George Wallace.
Who is hysterical. I've interviewed him. He's fantastic.
Isn't he wonderful? Now, you may think that during the interview he was en persona, but...that's just how he is. He's always been that way, as long as I've known him. He's just a really funny, jovial, loveable, clever, smart guy. So he and I made friends, I wrote little songs for his act, and came out before the main act and accompanied him on piano while he sang these silly songs. And we remained friends long after that. And it turns out years later that Jerry Seinfeld, in real life, has a best friend named George...except it's George Wallace! So just like Jerry and George complained to each other on the show, Jerry was complaining to his best friend George about the music for the pilot for The Seinfeld Chronicles. And George said, "Call my buddy Wolff! He'll take care of ya!" So I got a phone call from Jerry Seinfeld through George Wallace. Did that answer your question?
It did. By the way, just an odd little tie-in: one of my regular freelance gigs is writing posts for Rhino Records, and just the other day I wrote a piece for Don Henley's birthday where I put together a list of his best Eagles songs, and I pointedly cited Seinfeld in the write-up about "Witchy Woman."
I love it! Yeah, that's right: in the end credits of that episode - I think it's "The Checks" - George is playing the surgeon, and he gets mesmerized and hypnotized by that song playing in the O.R., and the patient dies! [Laughs.] It was a silly, silly bit that was a callback to earlier in the episode, where Elaine was dating a guy who did the same thing whenever he heard "Desperado."
Do you have a favorite underrated theme - or just a theme you wrote for a show that nobody knows - that really stands out for you?
I wrote 44 prime-time network series themes...and most of 'em were like trees in a forest: nobody heard 'em fall! [Laughs.] So that's a long list in terms of themes that nobody knows. But you also said "favorite," and there was a sweet, tightly-written, well-run, well-acted show that had decent numbers, but at that time on NBC, where NBC ruled the airwaves, a decent show was not good enough. So Boston Common did not survive. I think we did... I don't know, maybe we did two seasons? I don't remember.
I think so, because I vaguely remember them retooling it.
Yeah, I think they did. But Anthony Clark was awesome, everybody was awesome, and I really kind of felt... [Hesitates.] I don't know what the word is, because I don't really get cuddly with my music. It's like an ATM doesn't get cuddly with its money. It just hands it out! [Laughs.] But I really was extra happy with the way that theme for Boston Common turned out. I thought it served the show really well.
They had shot the opening before I was hired, and it's Anthony Clark dancing his fool head off on rooftops of Boston, and it looked to me like he was performing for the whole city, so I created a song and recorded it in a way that it was being performed in a huge rock arena. You hear 50,000 people cheering the song, and he says, "Hey, Boston!" and sings the song. And that kind of helped sell the imagery of Anthony Clark's character performing for the world, and I think it helped in my pitch selling that theme. They heard it once, and they said, "Wow, we're done!" So that was one I wish had gone a little longer.
But the good news, Max Mutchnick and Dave Kohan, who created Boston Common, I knew them from when they were junior writers and we worked together on a show called Good Advice. Which should've been a hit if you look at the cast: Treat Williams, Shelley Long, Teri Garr... People had great expectations for that show, it was hyped before we even made it, and it just died instantly.
[Please note that the below episode from season two of Good Advice features a past THAT THING THEY DID interviewee, not to mention someone who will probably unsubscribe from this newsletter when he sees that I’ve called out his appearance, which takes place right off the bat: Peter Tolan.]
But it's where I met Dave and Max, and years later - unlike somebody else we mentioned earlier - were wonderful showrunners. They had come up through the ranks and they understood what it took to run a show. Boston Common was a well-run show, but it died. But they already had their next script ready to go, they had a crew that they liked, they had writers that they admired, and that script was Will & Grace. So we just jumped right in, and we didn't lose a beat. So Will & Grace was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Boston Common!
Another one that I kind of wish had gotten more of a listen was my theme to a show called Double Rush. [Expects a remark of recognition, receives none.] So you don't even remember that one!
I...can't believe I don't, but you're right: I'm drawing a blank.
It starred Robert Pastorelli, and it was my first time working for Diane English, which was really an honor for me, because even before I met her she was a legend. She created Murphy Brown! She was just really good...and a strong showrunner! And she hired me to write the music for this show, and she explained it to me: "It's gonna be really high-energy, real frazzled energy." I don't even think there was a pilot. They just hired her on the basis of her strength. But it was about bicycle couriers in Manhattan, and she wanted the opening credits to reflect that energy, the thrill, the risk, the daredevil of it.
And I pitched her... [Pauses.] Sampling technology was still very young. It was in its infancy when I created the Seinfeld theme using it, but it was still pretty young. So I explained to her, "You know, I can take any sounds and build it into an instrument and create a groove from it. For instance, I can take the sounds of my bicycle that I rode over here to meet with you. When you're riding a bike, there's something hypnotic and rhythmic about it. You can really get into the groove and the sounds of it. I can create a groove like that for your show, for the theme, and I can build the theme with that groove being the bedrock of it. What do you say, Diane?" And she goes, "Well, can I hear what it sounds like first?" And I said, "No." [Laughs.] "Because I'll be building the plane while I fly it! There's no such instrument made out of bicycles!" So she took a leap of faith. She said, "Okay!" And I never heard from her or her people until it was done, and I called her office and said, "It's ready! Wanna come hear it?"
And I had started with that as the groove, and I added to it the heartbeat and the sound of my breathing, with the sound of the tires going and the gears and the derailleur clunking in the chain, and I added to it the frazzled energy of a wild guitar, and...I built a city soundscape. Remember, she left me alone, so I had free hand on all of this stuff. The producers who did that got my best work. As soon as a producer says the words, "Ooh, the music should sound like..." It doesn't matter how that sentence ends, Will. It's derivative music, because it "sounds like."
I was more into creating a new species of music, a real sonic brand, an instantly identifiable signature for my shows...and she let me do it! So I created this soundscape: horn honks, people shouting, doppler effect of sirens going by, jackhammers, people screaming out... Okay, it was all me screaming out. [Laughs.] And it really took a long time. It was a very complicated mix. And when it was done, she sat down, closed her eyes, and she listened to it...and she said, "Play it again." And I played it again. And she stood up, and she said, "Thank you. Excellent work. We're done." She then handed my work to an unknown, up-and-coming guerilla filmmaker named Spike Jonze.
Nice.
Nice, indeed. And this guy, also fearless, he had no permits for any of this stuff. He was a guerilla filmmaker: he got out there on his skateboard with a handheld camcorder and grabbed hold of taxis through traffic and made this amazing, beautiful main title picture to go with my music...and he told me he had it on in his headphones while he was shooting! And the two components just worked so well together.
So to answer your question, I wish Double Rush had gotten more love. And here's how classy Diane English is: when it got canceled, she sent a note to me and Spike saying, "I apologize that the show never lived up to the promise of that main title."
That’s awesome. Well, there is one other short-lived show from your back catalog that I wanted to bring up, but it was a critically-acclaimed series, so I’m hoping that’ll ease the sting a little bit: Action.
[Slightly audible sigh of relief.] Thank you! Action... Jay Mohr, Illeana Douglas... Chris Thompson. All rise. [Laughs.] I loved working for Chris. Chris was another one of those producers who - maybe just because he was so busy - left me alone. He may actually have been on Flying Blind. He was definitely the showrunner on The Naked Truth with Tea.
He and I were already doing a typical sitcom with Alfred Molina called Family Man, and...it was okay, I guess. It was good. Nobody got hurt. Chris knew what he was doing. He could totally write a sitcom. He was on Dave's World, and I think he was on Caroline in the City. So when he started getting his own shows, I was really happy, because he's another one of these writers with a real voice.
And he called me up and said, "Okay, I'm kind of busy, because I'm writing every script on Ladies Man, and now I'm writing every script on this other show called Action. I'm gonna be way too busy to babysit my department heads. So I'm telling you now, Wolff: every scene in Action is gonna have music in it. Underscore, wall to wall. And I already have in my head the music I want for every scene. Your job, Wolff, is to not give it to me." [Laughs.] I love this guy! I think I said, "Aye-aye, Captain!" And he was ready for it. He'd show up at that mix, and the music was whack. I did crazy things with the music. And I brought in a collaborator, because there was just so much music on it, a guy who worked for me for years and had graduated into becoming a composer with me: Paul Buckley. He did a lot of that music on Action, and I'm really, really proud of that show.
Fox, however, had no idea what to do with that show. It was way ahead of its time. You can picture that show being on HBO or Netflix or something now! The main characters are an anti-hero and a hooker. [Laughs.] And...one of my favorite guests on Seinfeld was Lee Arenberg, He elevates any scene he's in, which he does probably most famously in Pirates of the Caribbean. Lee forever has a throne in the pirate pantheon for that, and his character on Seinfeld, Phony Mike... He just killed it! But my favorite of Lee's characters was in Action, where he played Bobby G. Brilliant! Just brilliant. He so understood Chris Thompson's writing that he just embodied that character.
I had a wonderful time every week seeing what was going to show up through my mail slot at night on those episodes. We did them quickly, because there wasn't budget or time, and each one of them was like a little feature film. It was really ambitious TV product. So thank you for bringing up Action!
Hey, I have the complete-series set on my shelf.
The complete series? [Laughs.] What did we do, six of them?
I'll have you know it was thirteen.
Ha! Well, it was really a fun series, and...maybe I'll show it to my wife. I hope it still holds up.
It holds up disconcertingly well.
I'm not surprised. Because at the time, I remember thinking, "This may be the best series I've ever worked on." And it was funny!
Well, when you've got Buddy Hackett...
Oh, Buddy Hackett! We actually had Buddy Hackett on our show! Buddy, who was brilliant and untamable, by the way. You can't write script pages for Buddy and expect him to do what's on the page. [Laughs.] And Chris was okay with that! Chris gave him kind of a stricture to work within, where he couldn't really damage the flow of the conversation, and he let him do his thing. He's another guy who... Well, he's Buddy Hackett! Who doesn't love Buddy Hackett? But there's a scene where a character is holding a gun to his head, and Buddy goes through this long diatribe of things that are wrong with him. "I got one gonad, I got heart disease, I haven't had sex in forever... Kill me! You'd be doing me a favor!" I'm sure I completely misquoted the writing, but you get the idea…and I know we're getting off-topic. I still have an album to plug!
Hand to heart, I was actually planning to ask this question next, anyway: what took so long for a Seinfeld soundtrack album to come out?
While we were making Seinfeld episodes, we were busy, Will!
That's fair.
[Laughs.] Nobody was thinking about a Seinfeld soundtrack...especially not for the first three seasons, when we didn't even have a regular timeslot! We were just shocked when people started noticing our show after we finally got a timeslot where people could find us...and then we became a hit, and we were busy! We did so few episodes at first. That initial order when Jerry called me that day? Four episodes. Four. That's not an order, that's an insult! I took the job because he was a friend of George, but as it turns out, that was the best "yes" I ever gave! But that meant that, for a syndication package, we were wayyyyyyy behind. So we did 25 or so episodes every season for a number of those seasons. That's a lot of episodes for a sitcom. So we were busy. That was one of the reasons why it never crossed my mind during the show.
And then there was the fact that I was the composer. You already know that I wrote 44 themes, but I was the composer on 75 prime-time TV series. You don't get that number by doing them one at a time. So I was busy. I was the flavor of the month, so I'm doing anywhere from 10 and 14 shows a week! I don't have time to stop and do a soundtrack album, and - quite honestly - I didn't want to suffer the pay cut that it would've required to devote those hours to curating it and remastering it and doing interviews like this to support it. So it never occurred to me. And then I retired and kind of forgot about it, and then at some point I just figured, "I'm out to pasture, nobody's thinking about me or my music."
But with Seinfeld's unbelievable juggernaut ability to increase in value... About five years ago, Hulu paid $180 million for the streaming rights, and everyone on the Wall Street Journal went, "Wow, look at those numbers!" and Variety went nuts. And then more recently Netflix paid half a billion - with a "B" - for those streaming rights. So clearly there is an appetite - a growing appetite - for Seinfeld. So my lawyer and the lawyers for Warner Brothers' record label, WaterTower Music, worked out a deal for me to create this album based on music from Seinfeld, and I had full authority to curate the playlist, which was important to me.
There are a lot of soundtrack albums that include brilliant masterpieces of musical artistry and compelling, momentous film score suites. There is none of that on the Seinfeld soundtrack album, Will. [Laughs.] My opus magnum is a big daddy pimp walk!
The music on the Seinfeld: Original Soundtrack Album was created and chosen for the album to peg the funny meters. Each track is designed to do one thing for the listener: evoke a favorite happy moment in Seinfeld. So it's for Seinfeld fans only, please.
I set up some criteria for it. Was the music primary audio in the scene, or was it buried behind dialogue? If it was primary audio, we could keep it. Was it key to the comedy of the episode? If it was a part that the writers let me throw in with the comedy, then it belongs on the album. And most importantly, is it a clear, identifiable reminder of a favorite Seinfeld scene? And if it met those criteria, baby, it was on the record! And that helped me. Those were rules I needed to establish for myself to get rid of music that did not fit into those categories. I'm hoping that when Seinfeld fans hear that sexy, throbbing, pumping, feel-the-beat music for George's underwear photoshoot scene, they will make their own "you are a loverboy!" videos for Instagram and TikTok. [Laughs.] I would love to see that! That's what this music is for!
There's one track that the Warner Brothers lawyers - it hadn't even gotten to the record company yet! - that they asked about, just because they're all Seinfeld fans. They said, "What about George's answering machine?" And I said, "Well, I did not write that." [Laughs.] You know, it's my album! But I said, "Tell you what: since you brought it up, I did create those instrumental tracks that Jason [Alexander] sang along with, I have those tracks, and it fits the criteria: people love that scene, and - more to the point - if we put the instrumental tracks on the album, if you license it from the Greatest American Hero people, then Seinfeld fans can make their own voicemail-answering message using this track!" It's kind of an interactive album like that...and believe me, I've gotten dozens of them DM'ed to me. People keep sending me George's answering machine music with their words set to it...and I love that! I love that we've hit our target demo with that, and that people are having fun with it.
And I hope when they listen to the "John Jermaine Jazz" tracks, they'll instantly smile, remembering why John Jermaine was unable to perform on saxophone in that episode's final scene. By the way, that's the one exception to the rule: when Carol Leifer wrote "The Rye," it included more scenes of John Jermaine playing, because her idea... It was important to her that John Jermaine was established as a killer jazz musician, that he was an artist to be reckoned with, and when I created the music for it, I kept that in mind, and we used three of my very best friends who I've worked with for decades and who - besides being studio musicians - are also some of the best jazz musicians in L.A. So I created all this music for those scenes that ended up going bye-bye, because at some point the writers decided that that was not necessary for the character or for the comedy of the episode, that it wasn't that important, so they could get rid of the scenes where he was performing. So we'd come in on the tail end of those scenes. But on the album, there are three "John Jermaine Jazz" cuts in their entirety, including "Hot and Heavy" and the song he's playing in the final scene, although it was recorded before he, uh, added to his repertoire. [Laughs.]
Well, as a Seinfeld fan myself, I'm certainly excited that this is finally out there.
Thank you! Yeah, I've been getting messages for years from a certain demographic who've wanted the song "Jesus is One." [Laughs.] And for years I've written back to them and said, "I have that, but I can't really send it to you. I have no real authority to release it to you. It doesn't belong to me, and I can't license it." But remembering all of those emails and DMs from people, that was reason enough for me to put "Jesus is One" on the soundtrack, remembering how surprised Elaine was when she heard it coming out of Puddy's car window. By the way, the singer on that is another one of my longtime employees - he was my music editor for nineteen years - and that's Jack Diamond.
And that guy Paul Buckley I mentioned earlier, by the end of Seinfeld, he'd earned his place as a collaborator, so there's one piece of music that maybe I included because it's co-composed by Paul, who I'm so proud of, and that's "Blimp," from "The Puerto-Rican Day." There's a movie that George has to go to, because he's got a funny bit that he wants to shout out at a pivotal moment, and even though we don't see the movie, we hear a lot of it. There was a recurring comedy trope in Seinfeld of fake productions that were heard but never seen. Checkmate... Chunnel... Deathblow... The Pain and the Yearning...
Rochelle, Rochelle...
Rochelle, Rochelle...and then Rochelle, Rochelle: The Musical! [Laughs.] Which, by the way, made it onto the album! When I created it, I knew we were only going to hear the opening to it, because when Larry [David] called me to tell me about it, I asked him - because it was important to know - how many seconds or minutes of the script he had devoted to this opening number. And he goes, "It doesn't matter how long it is, because we're never gonna get through the opening line, because the understudy singing it will be too weepy!" So I knew when I created it that we were never gonna hear much of it. But... I hope this is not insulting, but you appear to be of a certain age - as I am - that you might have actual memories of Tonya Harding crying about her skate lace.
Oh, absolutely.
There are generations of younger Seinfeld fans who have no real memory of Tonya Harding. So to them, that scene with the girl crying about her boot lace is just another funny moment about...nothing! And that is why I recorded those instrumental tracks coming from a fake orchestra pit, and that's on the album, as is my fake Tony Award-winning "Scarsdale Surprise"! [Laughs.] And all you ever hear of "Scarsdale Surprise" is the music, because they play it at the Tony Awards! So that's a funny enough moment that it made it onto the album, too. I was a little bit disappointed - just a tiny bit - that I never got to create that tap number for Raquel [Welch]. Remember, it was Kramer's job to fire her because she wouldn't move her arms when she was tap-dancing? I was kind of hoping that would pop up in the script at some point, but it did not, so I didn't get to do it.
Anyway, I'm hopeful that Seinfeld fans really enjoy this album, and I think they will, because with so much time and distance passed between those Seinfeld production years and now, I can view the show and the music differently. I'm a fan. And I put on that "just another fan" hat when I was going through this music. But I was on every episode of Seinfeld, so it's hard to pick a favorite. But people always ask. You didn't, because you're a real journalist. [Laughs.] Which is, I presume, why you didn't ask, "What's it like to work with Larry David?!"
My wheelhouse would be more to ask about doing the music for Sour Grapes. But I won't drag you down that path.
Yeah, Larry and I… We’ve agreed not to speak about that ever again.
Well, Steven Weber still kind of likes it.
Oh, he's the one! [Laughs.]
Loved this conversation! Mr. Wolff knew he was talking to someone who knew a great deal about his body of work. Will can draw out so much from his subjects with his easy going manner, knowledge, and experience.