"Theme from the vonHummer Hour" was the instrumental that opened and closed the cable access series. It was meant to have Brian Esiason's fiddle on it, but we ran out of time recording and never revisited the tune.
Little vonHummer, Jr., II. used to tease me at the time that the melody is a ripoff of the theme song from the 60's Spiderman cartoon. That's a stretch, but he was only 8 or 9 at the time, and hardly an expert at copyright infringement. Helvetica would correct him and say that it sounded more like the riff from Steve Miller's execrable "Abracadabra." That's a stretch, too, but an understandable one at least.
Making the theme song an instrumental was not my first choice. The first one I'd written had lyrics; very upbeat and silly, hippie-like. Something like, "…We'll chase that groovy dream of love/with lobsters in our hair…" The more I rehearsed it, the more annoying it got, so I went in more of a Mike Post direction. It works. It's a little grim, a little intense, a little dramatic, a tad ridiculous, and so was the series, really.
spare percussion items I had lying around: clave, an african drum, and some sleigh bells. Also, there was a wooden chair I might have been whacking on. I wasn't using the drum guitar at that point for some reason. I thought it was broken. (Although, the next time I tried to use it for the album "6+4+2," it worked fine, so it's a bit of a mystery to this day.
To my surprise, there have been quite a lot of MP3 downloads of "Theme…" from
vonHummer.com. One of my top 50, I think.
from
Isoprolific,
released August 21, 2016
vonHummer: bass, guitar and percussion.