Cheesy background "rock music" in 1960s/70s TV

A movie with great library music: Olga's Dance Hall Girls.

 

I heard some the other night while watching Dragnet on MeTV. Some kids were having a backyard party playing records when a kid with a hand grenade showed up. Friday and Gannon just kind of stood there while the kid with the grenade wanted the music to continue.

 

I immediately thought of The Sacred Cows on Get Smart. Some nice Roky Erickson guitar tone followed by the requisite amount of cheese and 99 dancing.

 

This isn't 70's, but here is some late 90s rock guitar in the movie opening to No One Would Tell:

 

Not sure if that is the actor singing... but the actor is Marjoe Gortner.
Marjoe Gortner - IMDb

 

Doesn't Play Misty For Me feature some generic inappropriate rock music at the beginning?

 

The payoff is about 1 minute in...

 

In the 70s, I used to listen to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. The show did a great job of bringing back the mystery radio show and gave a lot of older and younger voice actors work, but they had no clue what music teenagers and young adults were listening to. To save money, they also used stock CBS music, so they didn't have much to work with.

Fortunately, the stories didn't include a lot of teen/young adult situations, but the ones they did have included very corny music.

 

To think this music showed up when Zeppelin, Sabbath, the Carpenters were all on the charts.

 

I think you nailed it! Something I think many SH members don’t quite understand is that their coveted hippy pop rock wasn’t really all that popular among mainstream music consumers and especially the older population. So, producers used very generic sounding music with uptempo drumbeats and cheesy guitar bits to illustrate and depict hip music. A favorite television show of mine is Adam 12 where depictions of hip music are cheesy to the point of being hilarious! Does this sound familiar?

 

I like this! The singer reminds me of that AC/DC guy!

 

I love this! Reminds me a bit of 101 Strings Astro Sounds and The Animated Egg. GROOVY!

 

If this is cheesy, then I certainly have a serious penchant of cheesy musical nuggets! Everyone perceives and enjoys music uniquely, and I hear excellent musicianship and production here! I adore that mod sound and can't help tapping my feet and imagining groovy chicks shakin' it in their miniskirts! GROOVY BABY!!!

 

I was watching Adam 12 last night and this music actually came on! hahaha!

 

I'm sure this one was on Irwin Allen, who I believe was very "frugal" when it came to assets used in his shows.

 

I remember noticing this as a teen when I watched Leave it to Beaver and other such shows. Here's one I stumbled on today. In this episode of I Dream of Jeannie the juke box music being played starting at 1:20 is an instrumental "I wanna be free" which was sung by the Monkees. Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart wrote that song. Boyce and Hart were hired on songwriters for Screen Gem TV shows - and they wrote some of hits by the Monkees. Days of Our Lives theme song is among their most famous written song along with some of the Monkees' songs. Anyway, I assume that the producers of these TV shows would keep the music in-house as much as possible in order to keep costs low.

 

^this^ and using such generic music production likely minimizes licensing costs and other related issues especially when song catalogs trade hands.

 

I can’t believe somebody hasn’t compiled and issued an anthology of these on CD. Rhino? Sundazed? Let’s get moving on it!