 | Well, the NFL season is over but it won't leave a huge whole in my life this time for I do have other interests. For one: I plan to re-watch most of the 6 seasons of the Rockford Files.
I love that character. There's probably no other TV character that I still feel as warmly about even though they aren't, never were or will be, real. Maybe Hawkeye from M*A*S*H, I haven't watched that in a while. The shit just found him. He would take a case about some little thing and it would turn into a big mess. Rockford would just chug ahead doing mostly the right thing, often against his own instinct of self-preservation, until he solved the case by doing the unglamorous legwork. I like the show because the "good" people in it are usually 65/35 good-bad, practically real.
He never ranted about "common pond scum, how it blocks the sun and strangles the depths of the pure waters"-- he wasn't a creep or a vigilante. |
His fee was 200-a-day plus expenses.
Someone asks him:
Q: Don't you trust anybody?
A: My father...but he's bonded.
Visually it conveys a pastiche of run-of-the-mill Los Angeles, there's a lot of driving, people eating tacos and drinking beer. It was the time when Prop 13 just was kicking in. Rockford lived on the beach in Malibu in a trailer, that spot must be worth a billion now. I wonder if he held onto it? (...I've been informed that Rock didn't actually own the land at 28128 Pacific Coast Highway or at 29 Cove Road-- he just parked his trailer there and paid rent on the spot or something. I did find a real estate listing in that area going for about $3.9 million, however.) He was neither naive nor casually cynical but understood well the humanity of others, for him empathy was not a weakness. I suppose it was something like a Chandleresque update but since it was TV all the dots got connected in G-rated fashion.
And that theme song, it was a radio hit. That arrangment really influenced me in a deep way. The TV-jingle chamber group of drums, bass, harmonica, dobro and electric guitars, flutes, French horns, trombones with a Minimoog as the lead voice. Real instruments. It featured a faceless guitar solo that I later found out was done by Larry Carlton who played on records by Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, and the Partridge Family, among others.
As much as I like knowing details about commercial music recordings I sometimes wonder if I don't like hearing music better when it is unattached to any specific ego or story. That could be why I never really enjoyed the music video era. Not very Rockford of me, though, to be so bitter and judgmental. |
