This project, organized by independent record label
Rope And Pulley, is aimed at reclaiming the
lost works of underground television composer
Reginald Gaylord. Because recordings of most of his
more than four hundred compositions have
been lost to us, members of a generation greatly
inspired by Reggie's surviving music (DJ Anton
Webern of Webern and the Gynoids and sound
collage artist Stttuttzzz, both also on Rope And
Pulley) have come together to reconstruct
Reginald Gaylord’s (1960-?) real name is lost to history. What’s sure is that he is not the illegitmate son of Oklahoma newspaper mogul Edward Gaylord, a claim the composer made in 1985 in an ill-considered attempt to extort money from the conservative publisher of The Daily Oklahoman in order to finance his latest television score (the “production companies” he tended to work for never offered cash advances and often closed up shop before the pilot was even half finished). Most film music critics agree that Reginald Gaylord, or “Reggie” as he prefered to be called, was born in the South of England to working class parents, and grew up obsessively listening to warped LPs of John Barry’s Gold Finger, Oliver Nelson’s Blues and the Abstract Truth, and Igor Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments. This much is clear both from sources independent of the famously dishonest Gaylord, and of course from the music he composed in his stormy, incomparable life; this music—unschooled in its conception, crude in its execution, jarring in its utter brilliance—bears the stamp of each of these musicians as well as the enigmatic faute de mieux approach of Gaylord himself.
Few Americans are aware of the thriving underground television phenomenon that swelled up out of the Heartland throughout the eighties and early nineties. Conceived of and written in 24-hour Denny’s restaurants, filmed in trailer park studios, starring local talent (and not infrequently, local prostitutes) and transmitted via homemade gear stuffed with rat’s nest wiring that made it possible to illegally piggyback on “legitimate” signals*, these television programs mirrored all of the conventional genres available on corporate TV. The difference was simply one of budget and control, authenticity and censorship. In late 1986 as the American television viewing public was riveted by the Iran-Contra Affair, a loosely affiliated group of street-auteurs in Kansas, Oklahoma, and North Texas were providing the seminal action-drama The Blame Infusion, sitcoms like Carne Asada in Farsi, and the romantic mini-series Love In The Time Of Voodoo Economics. The audience for these broadcasts, numbering in the hundreds on a good day, would never forget the bizarre music they heard as The Blame Infusion’s Agent Oliver Rocket annihilated another enemy of democracy. That music, and the soundtracks of virtually every program transmitted during this brief epoch, was composed by a young Englishman named Reginald Gaylord.
* Unlike the homegrown, rough-and-ready UHF channels that operated in pre-cable days, the underground television movement utilized VHF waves, thus illegally interfering with and often replacing the network television broadcast on channels 2-13. In this respect, the “stations” were more akin to pirate radio than public access television, more Pump Up The Volume than UHF.
