A popularizer of jazz, a dependable Hollywood professional. Although I didn't think in those terms, by the late '60s he had metamorphosed, certainly in my mind, into an incredible square. His popular standards from films, his recordings and Pops concert appearances had made him into a Grammy-laden institution of middle American entertainment. Well, I don't know. In the last decade, though, New Wavers and punk bands from a generation even more tube-irradiated than mine have made the Peter Gunn theme a kind of No Wave national anthem.
Someone ought to send a telegram or something.
And I'll start thinking about a late summer sun setting over 1,500 identical rooftops and my family and bob glasses and Holly Golightly, about being lonesome out there in America and how that swank music connected up with so many things. Maybe I ought to get my bongos out of the attic. Not yours, my man. It's strictly, like, solid.