RCA Victor 1956
Producer: Simon Rady
Track listing: Peter Gunn / Sorta Blue / The Brothers Go to Mother’s / Dreamsville Session at Pete’s Pad / Soft Sounds Fallout! / The Floater / Slow and Easy / A Profound Gass / Brief and Breezy / Not from Dixie
February 23, 1959
10 weeks
When The Music from Peter Gunn exploded onto the Best Selling LP’s chart on February 9, 1959, at number three, it was a surprise to everyone, especially Henry Mancini and RCA Victor. “It all happened so fast,” Mancini recalled. “The day after the first show went on NBC, the mail started coming in about the music.”
Recorded in Hollywood on August 26 and 31 and September 4 and 29, 1958, The Music from Peter Gunn wasn’t originally cut for an album, but for the NBC-TV show starring Craig Stevens as a detective named Peter Gunn. Mancini, working as a staff composer, had met aspiring director Blake Edwards at Universal Studios in Hollywood in the mid-’50s, and it was Edwards who had asked Mancini to compose the music for the pilot of his new show.
With much of the show originating from a jazz club called Mother’s, the primary sound of the series was jazz except, that is, for the throbbing, rhythmic pulse of the famed theme song. “I just felt that when you said, ‘Peter Gunn,’ the name was very strong with an exclamation point,” said Mancini. “I never even thought of the fact that it wasn’t jazz.”
Although RCA Victor funded the album, the company wasn’t completely behind it at first. “They didn’t have much faith in it at all,” Mancini recalled. “They didn’t know me from Adam.” In fact, RCA tried to get trumpeter/arranger Shorty Rogers, who was signed to the label, involved in the project. “I went to lunch with Shorty and he said, ‘This is your music. I have no business coming in here to record this. Why don’t you do it?’ And that’s what he told the RCA people, so I did it,” said Mancini.
Reluctantly, RCA gave Mancini the go-ahead to record the album himself, but he didn’t have enough material. “I had music that I had written for the show, but there wasn’t enough. I had to write other stuff that we use in later shows,” he said. When the album was released, much to RCA’s surprise, it became a hit, climbing to number two in its second week on the chart, and hitting the summit in its third week. “They were completely overwhelmed,” said Mancini. “They had only printed 8,000 covers, so they ran out of covers and had to put some out in plain sleeves with no artwork.”
The all-instrumental album included a ballad called “Dreamsville,” which Mancini said paved the way for the big-band sound he would use later for much of his career. “It was the first time I had used the four horns and four trombones,” he recalled.
Yet it was the title track that would become one of Mancini’s signature tunes, alongside such greats as “Moon River” and “The Pink Panther Theme.” Ray Anthony scored a number eight hit with his version of “Peter Gunn” in 1959, while Duane Eddy had a top 30 hit with the song in 1960, and even covered it again in 1986 with the British pop band the Art of Noise. “The thing about that piece is, just about every garage band and bar band in the world plays it. It’s so easy,” Mancini said. “Anybody who plays that bass line feels like they have arrived and they can play something.”
The Music from Peter Gunn was so successful that it spawned a sequel, More Music from Peter Gunn, which climbed to number seven in the summer of 1959.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of February 23, 1959
1. The Music from Peter Gunn, Henry Mancini
2. Flower Drum Song, Original Cast
3. Sing Along with Mitch, Mitch Miller
4. Come Dance With Me, Frank Sinatra
5. Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1, Van Cliburn