
At least the soundtrack gave them interesting names Capitol was happy enough with things like “7-ZR-33 Sombre Emotional” (on reel D 14).
#CAPITOL HI Q PRODUCTION MUSIC LIBRARY MOVIE#
As best as I can tell, ‘D’ stands for ‘dramatic’ and a number of the Hormel dramatic beds ended up (with other Capitol Hi-Q music) in the soundtrack of that cult movie favourite Night of the Living Dead. Some of the cues from the ‘D’ reels were re-released. while in the coast guard he met a gentleman, name I cannot remember, and after a brief conversation, Geordie had told him of these themes that he had written and before long they were sent to Sweden or Denmark or somewhere like that and recorded and then sent on to Capitol, I am pretty sure it was at the beginning of the Zephyr era, again most of the details elude my memory. Geordie told me the story shortly after I began working for him, the details are a bit fuzzy but something along the lines of. As for how Geordie got involved, my anonymous correspondent revealed: We have Lp's in D, L, M, S and X Reel libraries.Ĭapitol used the term ‘reel’ to refer to both reel-to-reel tape and 33s. All his Q's begin with the track # and then ZR. His contibution to the library consisted of 16 of the Lp's we believe. About the Capitol Hi-Q library, he wrote: Several years ago, I had a little conversation on the web with someone who had been working for four years with Geordie to restore his music. But Capitol also picked up material from Hormel’s Zephyr Records.

A lot of it came from Phil Green writing for EMI, some from the Sam Fox library (for which Loose and John Seely had earlier done work). While some of the cues were specifically written for it by Bill Loose, music from other sources was acquired to flesh out the library. Somewhere along the way, Hormel came up with a pile of background music cues (whether he even arranged them, let alone wrote them, is open to question).Ībout this time, Capitol was putting together a production library. Zephyr leaned toward jazz recordings but the label also signed Paul Frees as a singer in August that year (yes, that Paul Frees). More germane to our story is he founded his own little record label, Zephyr Records, in Los Angeles in mid 1956. He fired a bullet through the window of his home (after being acquitted on a bizarre marijuana possession charge) as a publicity gag. He bought the Wrigley Mansion in Phoenix in 1992 (being an heir has its privileges) and could be found there every Sunday playing his Steinway. He sounds like a cool guy I’d loved to have met. But Geordie was interested in things other than canned luncheon loaves of, well, something. George Albert Hormel II was born in 1929 and named for his grandfather, who started a family meat-packing company in 1891. The composers were all experienced musicians but the most improbable musician out of the lot was Geordie Hormel.

Hanna-Barbera went the inexpensive route and paid for needle-drops from production libraries. True, the music was never scored to the cartoons, like Carl Stalling did to everyone’s great delight-and to the cartoons’ benefit-at Warner Bros. And one of those Hormel folks brought you some of the music which you hear in the background of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.Ĭynics will suggest another similarity-that Spam bears as much resemblance to real food as the melodies wafting behind Baba Looey’s dialogue does to real music. For Spam is a product of the folks at Hormel. We mean that pre-cooked food-ish product invented of necessity during the waning days of the Depression. No, we don’t mean the e-mail kind of spam. It would seem, at first, to be improbable that there is a connection between Quick Draw McGraw and Spam.
