The Mike Post

This is a tribute to the Greatest of All Time. 

The sense of humor, the energy, the carefree machismo. But if you think I’m referring to Tom Selleck, you would be wrong (I’m writing this, not my mother). As magnificent as Tom Selleck was, and is, and if I was going to write about the Two Greatest Moustaches of All Time, this would indeed be about him, but here I’m actually referring to something even more impactful: the Magnum P.I. theme song, which was composed by the Greatest TV Theme Song Composer that Ever Walked the Earth, the one and only Mike Post.

Born Leland Michael Postil, Mike Post grew up as an otherwise unremarkable middle class kid from the Los Angeles suburbs who picked up music and started playing in rock bands in the ‘60s.  He became a solid performer on the piano and guitar, and was even a decent session musician, arranger, and producer for other artists. He never went to college.  He never did drugs.

While he was still a young man early in his career, he experienced the unbelievably good fortune that each of us longs for, whether we realize it or not.  He figured out the thing he was genuinely good at in life.   For Mike Post, that thing was composing music for television shows.

When I was in third grade, our class was introduced to musical instruments by learning to play a primitive contraption called the flutophone.  It was basically a dumbed-down version of the already dumb instrument called the recorder.  Mr. Miller was the band teacher, and he would come and teach the class once a week. 

I had been working on it all week, figuring it out by ear.  One day, when flutophone class was over, I raised my hand and asked Mr. Miller if I could play a song in front of the class.  He and our teacher, Ms. DeBenedittis, were both taken aback — why would a kid do this voluntarily?

I stood in front of the class and played it.  My third grade class was not a sophisticated lot, but I knew what they liked, and I was a man of the people.  Sure enough, the crowd went bananas. After all, it was the theme song to the hottest show on TV: The A-Team.  While I was playing the song, my buddy Pete proudly held up a sketch he had just drawn of Mr. T, a fine tribute.

To this day, if I’m a passenger in a car with someone driving too aggressively, I find a way to reference the A-Team theme song.  (“I’m not saying you’re a bad driver, but why did the theme to the A-Team start playing when you turned on the ignition?”)

The A-Team theme was Mike Post at the height of his powers, a height that lasted about thirty years. He initially made a name for himself in television by composing the theme to the Rockford Files, starring James Garner.  Oh, you don’t know how awesome that theme song was?  Well, it became a hit song on the radio in 1975, even though it had no vocals. 

Just listen to it.  It was a little before my time, but tell me it doesn’t want to make you rumble out of your house, pound a six pack, drive a golden brown Pontiac Firebird, get into random fist fights, and be smart-alecky the whole time.

Incredibly, the Rockford Files wasn’t even the only Mike Post theme song that became a hit single.  There was actually an unreasonable amount. For example, do these words sound familiar? 

Look at what’s happened to me

I can’t believe it myself

Suddenly I’m up on top of the world

Could have been somebody else

If not, you might be more familiar with this version of the chorus, from Seinfeld:

Believe it or not, George isn’t at home. Please leave a message at the beep.

I must be out, or I’d pick up the phone.  Where could I be?  Believe it or not, I’m not home.

The Greatest American Hero, one of Mike Post’s masterpieces.  Others: The White Shadow, Riptide, LA Law, Hunter, Doogie Howser, M.D., NYPD Blue, News Radio, Wiseguy (featuring Jonathan Banks, who later played Mike on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul), just to name a few, and certainly his most famous—and lucrative—theme song composition, Law and Order.  To the extent anyone is familiar with Mike Post, it’s probably because you heard that every time you hear the Clu-Clunk from any of the Law and Order shows, Mike Post gets a royalty check in the mail.  Hell, if I accidentally clang my metal thermos on the counter, I’m legally obligated to mail him a dollar.  

His talent for conceiving and arranging songs, specifically songs intended to support the art of television, is unmatched. It was no accident that Mike Post’s particular sensibilities found their ideal complement with the hour long TV shows of the ‘70s and ‘80s.  Serious people today tend to look down upon that era of television, but serious people are often seriously wrong.   

A year or two after I played the A-Team theme in front of the class, I played the piano in front of people for the first time—my first recital.  I was ten years old. I played two songs: Jump by Van Halen (then a hit song on the radio) and another classic, the theme song to Hill Street Blues.  This was yet another Mike Post composition, but this time with a little pathos sprinkled on top.  For many years after that, my father would sometimes sit quietly in his chair in the living room and ask me to play that song.  He would always close his eyes.     

This was just how it was.  You watched TV with your family and you talked about it with your friends. And you hummed the theme songs.

Mike Post was the man who was there at just the right time.  Let’s reset and think about how television worked during those thirty years.  There was no streaming, no bingeing.  You waited for your show each week and tuned in, usually with other people around you (not by yourself on a phone like a loser).  Every episode was self-contained, meaning you usually didn’t need to watch the previous episode to follow what was going on.  But if you were tuning in for the first time, or simply forgot, the opening sequence would fill you in on the entire premise of the show.  Like this one, for example, which is awesome and ridiculous, music by Mike Post:

Milton C. Hardcastle is a retired judge from the Los Angeles Superior Court.

Mark McCormick, an ex racecar driver turned thief, was Hardcastle’s last case.

McCormick has been placed in the judge’s custody and together they’re going after 200 cases that walked out of Hardcastle’s courtroom on technicalities.   

The theme song and sequence thus served several functions, to take you into the world of the show, to introduce you to the characters, and to provide key information.  What if you tuned into Quantum Leap for the first time without any context?  You wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on. Why is Scott Bakula wearing a dress? Why is he mentally retarded?  That’s why they did those theme songs. 

Over the past 25 years, the role of the opening theme song has evolved, for better or worse.  More shows use existing music as opposed to using original scores and compositions.  It started with shows like Friends, Dawson's Creek, Party of Five, and continued even with The Sopranos.  Today, how many times is Peaky Blinders going to trot out that same song? Some shows, even great ones, just want to get on with it.  Think of the ten second refrain of Breaking Bad.  As television has become more cinematic, so has much of the music.  While some of it is quite excellent (I’m a particular fan of Succession and The Leftovers) it’s not the kind of music I want playing in the background while I live my life.  I don’t—and you don’t—need that kind of drama in your life.

In college, there was a guy in our dorm who grew up on the Gold Coast of Long Island, the son of a successful doctor.  My buddy and I—both middle class kids from Queens—made fun of him endlessly for being rich. We were real classy that way.  This kid led a pretty sheltered life up until that point, and like many kids who go away to college for the first time, he was not nearly mature enough to handle even the low level of independence required of an undergraduate. We had a television in the living room and this guy woke up at noon every day, usually skipped class, cracked open a beer, and all he did was watch reruns of Magnum P.I., a show that he watched with great fervor.  He was basically living his version of Thomas Magnum’s Life of Reilly in real time, but in the dorm.  To this day, I’m not sure he even realized it was a television show and not a mirror. 

One spring day towards the end of freshman year, he took us out on his boat on the Long Island Sound.  I remember him hauling two things onto the boat: a case of beer and a boom box.  As the boat sped out of Cold Spring Harbor, the boom box blared out for all to hear, playing none other than the theme song to Magnum P.I.  Let’s face it, no one would ever play the theme song to Game of Thrones while drinking on a boat.       

Sadly, the art perfected by Mike Post seems to be vanishing.  This, of course, raises a more existential question: what if you are the best ever at something that may become a relic in history?  It’s like being the greatest Ollamaliztli player that ever lived.  What’s that?  Exactly.  (It’s the sport the Aztecs used to play.)  I myself am rooting for a theme song comeback, played un-ironically, because TV shows, like life, should sometimes be kick-ass fun.    

After the world has ended and alien visitors rummage through the remnants of our lost civilization, I pray they dig up Mike Post’s bunker.  I like to imagine that they would figure out how to replay all of his old tapes and attempt to draw conclusions about these strange beings called humans and the civilization they erected.  There are two conclusions that would be self-evident. 

First, that humans worshiped vehicles, seemingly in a complicated hierarchy with subway trains at the bottom, followed by sports cars, speed boats, and there, sitting at the top, the god among the people, was the mighty helicopter, soaring through the skies for all the glorify.

From Magnum to the A-Team to Riptide to Quantum Leap to even Wiseguy.  The Mighty Copter God. 

The other conclusion to be drawn would be even more obvious: that human beings were fucking awesome. 

This post was inspired when a friend texted me a link to the theme song to an old show I never watched or even knew existed. It was called Tenspeed and Brownshoe, and starred Ben Vereen and Jeff Goldblum (in case you were wondering, Jeff Goldblum was Brownshoe). Who knew Jeff Goldblum was the star of a short-lived TV show that only aired 13 episodes back in 1980? Anyway, when I clicked the link, I had only one thought: this song is fantastic. I wonder who wrote it…

It becomes an integral part of the fabric of the drama or the comedy or the emotion.  You know, music is… I’d like to give you something highly technical, and I can certainly walk you through everything technical about it . . . but I don’t know anything about it emotionally except that it’s magic.  And I don’t even know how it happens.  It’s just this lucky little gift. — Mike Post