Featured Essay: How I Became Obsessed With the Peter Gunn Theme and Why It’s the Best Song Ever

by Scott O'Kelley

My first concert? Emerson, Lake & Palmer, February 1977, Tulsa Fairgrounds Pavilion. Did I like Emerson, Lake & Palmer? Not really, but it was almost my birthday and my friends were going and I figured I should probably go to a concert before I got any older.

It wasn’t that memorable. Just about every show since has been a vast improvement. But I do remember—vividly—the lights dimming, a bombastic fanfare, and then feeling a loud, gut-rumbling riff of pounding bass and soaring analog synths. I knew that song. And there in the dark arena, among the clouds of ditch weed and the whoops and the whistles, soon-to-be-17-year-old-me was yanked back to 4-or-5-year-old-me on the TV room rug, enthralled by the jazzy graphics and jazzier swing of the “Peter Gunn” opening credits.

Music does that: Throws us back in time and taps us on the shoulder in a million different ways and stirs up smells and sights and other senses. I could feel that rug.

While I haven’t listened to Emerson, Lake & Palmer much since, I have listened to the Peter Gunn theme. A lot. After the show I dug out my dad’s soundtrack album. The tunes were suave and cool and daring, just like my memories of Mr. Gunn and his black and white milieu. This being pre-VHS days, I hadn’t seen (or heard) this jazzy TV noir since I was a tot. But the record brought it all back: The cool club (“The Brothers Go to Mothers”), the nightclub-singer girlfriend (“Slow and Easy”), the daring-do (“Fallout!”), the vibe (“A Profound Gass”). I was only 17, but it made me want a cocktail. Maybe a cigarette. Definitely a nightclub-singer girlfriend.

This rediscovery coincided with my growing love of jazz, spawned by my dad’s records, from swing, to Charlie Parker via Jay McShann and Lester Young, to The Blues and the Abstract Truth—the first jazz album I bought with my own money after hearing it in a mall record store, thinking that otherworldly skronking was Oliver Nelson—then on to Dolphy and points further out. Jazz also expanded my music-as-mood-stabilizer formulary: Neil Young to feel one way, Led Zeppelin or Alice Cooper or The Stones to feel another, jazz to feel something else. And Peter Gunn felt like a little of everything.

About the same time, Creem and Rolling Stone were telling me of wild happenings in the UK. Saturday Night Live introduced me to Patti Smith and Elvis Costello. Import bins expanded and artists’ haircuts got shorter. I discovered a punk radio show on a local college station and found “New York Rocker” at my favorite record store. This felt suave and cool and daring, too. And Peter Gunn fit right in.

A few months later I was off to art school in Kansas City, with bands to see and musical fellow travelers to chat with and new record stores to browse. And thrift stores. Tons of thrift stores.

Everyone seemed to have their shop that consistently did them right—a dependable cultural fishing hole of glassware and cotton shirts and books and weird paintings and whatever else society had abandoned, but which we still prized. And of course, records. My spot was the Hadassah Bargain Center at 31st and Main. Small, but packed and clean as thrift stores go. It smelled like your grandad’s closet instead of a dank basement. And all the sport coats and shirts and other wares seemed better cared for. As were the records, mostly, which also seemed to come from more refined collections. Despite the 75-cent bus ride to get there, it was always worth it.

And in those days the bins still held treasures: Sure there were the usual Streisands and Mitch Millers and countless Christmas records, but also great jazz, loungy 45s, classical, exotic LPs you didn’t usually see. Thumbing the albums on one visit, I froze at a big bold graphic of a Walther PPK. I didn’t know the artist, but I did know the gun. And who carried: He had a license to kill and a white dinner jacket and was also suave and cool and daring. It was Goldfinger—The Big Sound of Billy Strange, His Guitar & Orchestra. Along with the usual mix of hits of the day (“Goin’ Out of My Head”), a Beatles cover (“I Feel Fine”), and “mood music” (“More”), there was that unexpected tang of discovery you only get from the record bins: The Munsters! Paladin! Peter fucking Gunn.

I played that record loud and often. A cut or two went on every party tape. I used it in art projects and performance pieces. Pretty sure I drove my dormmates nuts with it. 

This was (literally) not my dad’s Peter Gunn. Still big and bold, but this version had the swing of the ‘60s. A loft party instead of a jazz club, fewer trombones and more snappy drums. It fit right in with late-‘70s rock and roll the way the Batman Theme was right at home on The Jam’s first record. Punk. Camp. Whatever. It rocked.

Not long after—another thrift store, another record bin—I locked eyes with a lady in a red bodysuit doing interpretive dance amid cartoon teevee sets: TV Jazz Themes. Another Peter Gunn, but this sounded like an afterhours jazz club instead of a Hollywood soundstage. The “band” was The Video All-Stars: West Coast jazz artists like Shelly Manne and Red Mitchell and Paul Horn who—I’m guessing—were thrown together to cash in on the late-‘50s private eye craze.

Then I ran across a version of Peter Gunn on Themes for Secret Agents by The Agents, a budget release with a lot of flute and a slow, loping beat by a band that sounded straight out of the local tenderloin district, maybe thrown together to cash in on the early-‘60s spy craze.

I may be foggy on the exact chronology, but you get the idea: A musical obsession and collectible quest were taking hold. Spawned by Henry Mancini, probably the least likely musical muse for a punky art student in the late ‘70s. A guy who looked more likely to do your taxes than compose a killer riff, but compose a killer riff he did. And it felt like that riff was everywhere.

Uncovering versions was easy once you figured out the album cover tropes to look for: Spy! or Action! in the title, some model in danger and a tight dress, a guy with a gun. Or maybe just the word “themes” or a stylized TV set on the cover. And that also prompted me to pore over records I’d ignore otherwise: easy listening records, mood music LPs, ersatz jazz albums—you never know. I was scanning track listings on some very unlikely records—Lenny Dee, 101 Strings, Jerry Murad’s Harmonicats, for crying out loud—and mining new versions of what was becoming my favorite song.

I found Peter Gunn twists, Peter Gunn mambos, and Peter Gunn on the Lowery Organ, courtesy of Eddie Baxter’s Great Organ Themes from Movies and TV. And while I’ve yet to find it, I know that somewhere out there is The Peter Gunn Polka.

I found a Jack Costanzo album with more memories: Themes from Route 66, The Untouchables, Naked City, Mr. Lucky, and yep, Peter Gunn, all with a Latin beat. There’s a chamber-jazz version on TV Action Jazz! By Mundell Lowe and his All Stars. It’s on Jimmy & Marion McPartland Play TV Themes. Sil Austin recorded it for Golden Saxophone Hits. The Jesters released a 45 of “The Peter Gunn Twist” and Jimmy Nolen, James Brown’s chicken-scratch guitarist, put out a single of “Swingin’ Peter Gunn, Pts. I and II.” I saw The Kingsmen covered it when I looked closer at On Campus, a record I’d ignored a thousand times before.

Just as the secondhand well seemed to run dry, I discovered a 1967 film reboot, Gunn…Number One! The theme, a little bigger and brassier, was a barely updated version of the original. But the real treat is the album’s closer, “Bye Bye,” a Peter Gunn theme with vocals. That led to versions by Living Brass, Anita Kerr Singers, and Sarah Vaughan.

And it wasn’t all used castoffs from suburban rumpus rooms, either. The then-current “punk” section at my local record store (two bins of largely Jem imports with a safety pin graphic on the divider, just in case you didn’t get it), yielded a raw, rocking version by Johnny Kidd’s old backing group The Pirates, a pub-rock band fighting for relevance in the late ‘70s. Pittsburg’s The Silencers included a Duane-Eddy-meets-Farfisa skinny-tie new wave version on their 1980 album Rock ‘n’ Roll Enforcers. The opening riff of “Planet Claire,” the first cut on The B-52’s debut album, was unmistakably Mr. Gunn. 

Since the original release in 1959, the theme’s been covered by orchestras, jazz combos, rock bands, and rappers, including Sandy Nelson, Ray Anthony, Hugo Montenegro, Roy Buchanan, and Quincy Jones. Brazilian artist Deodato gave the world a jazz-disco Peter Gunn in 1976. The Art of Noise teamed up with Duane Eddy for an ‘80s synth-meets-twang reboot. Grandmaster Flash recorded a hip-hop version for some reason. Billy Childish side project The Delmonas recorded a Peter Gunn/Locomotion mashup.

And all this was back when record shows and fellow collectors were your search engine, before discovery was internet-easy. Today I can just order a copy of the Barbados band Outfit’s 1978 funk-disco “Theme From Peter Gunn” 45 with the click of a button; back then I’d never even know it existed.

But I’m not the completist—or the crate digger—I once was. I used to keep a running log and tape each new find. Since my cassette deck’s long gone, I’ve lost count, but I do recall having around 60 versions, give or take. One I don’t have is ELP’s. Which may seem strange since that’s the one that kicked it all off in the first place. But I mean come on, Emerson, Lake & Palmer? I’m not that obsessed.

Scott O’Kelley is currently a counselor, educator, and state mental health director, who used to work in record stores. Now he just fantasizes about it. A lifelong music fan, he’s been buying and listening to records since the Nixon administration.