Everybody knows that the Seinfeld theme music is some of the most quirky going around in the sitcom game.
And no matter how many times you hear it, its uniqueness somehow never wears out.
Now in a recent interview for Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume, legendary screen composer Jonathan Wolff reveals that the NBC executives were originally extremely opposed to the Seinfeld theme music he brought to the table.
“I pitched Jerry the idea that Jerry’s voice would be the melody of the Seinfeld theme. And my job would be to accompany Jerry in a way that worked organically with his human voice.”
Speaking on getting the tone for the theme music right, Wolff said, “Now, remember, late-’80s theme songs were melodic, with a lot of silly lyrics and sassy saxophones. And, yes, guilty, I did a lot of that kind of music! But I knew it wasn’t going to work here.”
How did he want to differentiate? Two words, one instrument: slap bass. “Slap bass had not yet enjoyed ‘celebrity status’ as a solo instrument.”
Wolff continued, “I knew I wanted to use that. And in the late ’80s, sampling technology was in its infancy, and I really, really wanted to use it as much as I possibly could to create new and weird genres of music.”
After the music was created, Wolff got pulled into a meeting with the NBC execs as well as Seinfeld’s creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.
Wolff prefaced his run-in with the execs, saying, “First of all, let me just say that the NBC execs that were there for Seinfeld… they’re all good guys. They’re all smart people. And their objections were natural and realistic.”
But they seemed to have differing tastes in tunes. Wolff continued, “They thought the music sounded odd and weird: ‘Is that real music? What instrument is that? Could we not afford an orchestra?'”
He also added that NBC Entertainment’s then-president Warren Littlefield said that the theme music we know and love today was “weird…. distracting… and annoying”.
Anyone who’s privy to a Larry David antic knows that yes, he is basically all three of those notions combined. As the story goes, Wolff offered to re-composed the music and come up with something new. But David wasn’t having any of it.
After he suggested that, Wolff recalled, “Larry got so mad at me! He just started yelling at me: ‘Get out! Wolff, you’re done here, get out!’ He was just so offended at the notion that I would cave. And he threw me out of the meeting… Larry was not having it. Larry did not like being told to change things.”
For more on this topic, follow the Film & TV Observer.
Watch Jonathan Wolff talk about the ‘Seinfeld’ theme song:
