Sound Track

I am a whole-hearted subscriber to the idea of "theme music". For me, this fixation goes all the way back to the days of listening to Bill Cosby and his tales of go-cart races, where each kid had their own theme song as they flew down "Dead Man's Hill" (”It was called Dead Man’s Hill because it went straight down, for about a quarter of a mile, and then it emptied out onto a freeway”). This resonated for me, since my friends and I had been making the soundtrack to our imaginations with our mouths for years. I was especially fond of mocking a theremin as we traveled the trackless void of the vacant lot behind our house, in search of a monster that would eventually loom as tall as two or three houses. For us, the intensity of the event was based solely on how tall the creature was. We understood this from watching "Science Fiction Theater", with all manner of freakishly large insects, and even Killer Shrews.
That was all well and good for creeping across Martian landscapes, but for my own intense imaginings, sometimes I needed a more somber tone. This was the first soundtrack album that I wore out: "Bless The Beasts And The Children". Before the advent of portable tape players and personal stereos, I used to play one particular cut, "Cotton's Dream" over and over before I went outside to engage in the pre-teen ennui that I had worked hard to cultivate. The brooding, somber piano was the perfect accompaniment to my brooding and somber moods. I wanted to be as misunderstood and righteous as Cotton himself was in the movie. After a few dozen plays, I could hear the melody in my head as I walked out of my room and into the world I was creating.
Imagine my chagrin when, five years later, that same piece reappeared as "Nadia's Theme" after the ABC television network lent the music for Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci's performance during the 1976 Summer Olympics. That's when I discovered that composer Barry De Vorzon had already sold that piece again as the theme to the soap opera, "The Young and The Restless". Didn't they understand that this was the soundtrack to my own personal soap opera?
Over the years I have made peace with this sonic conundrum, and moved on to the Jerry Goldsmith score to "Patton" and eventually themes like "Chariots of Fire" and "Rocky". Still, every so often when the clouds are low and grey, and the house is empty, I hear the sad strains of "Cotton's Dream".