Frank Comstock (Part 3)
Before we explore Comstock’s albums, here are two interesting tracks from an album that has never been reissued and should be because it has such great music — an album released under Phil Silvers’ name since CBS ran his popular comedy show. Bugle calls were adapted into new compositions by Nelson Riddle, and Comstock scored five titles. Here is Last Chance and Come as You Are.
Comstock made an album with a quintet led by Ted Nash, which included Dick Nash, Tony Rizzi, Morty Corb and Alvin Stoller in 1954.
Here is Passion Girl and Whim Wham.
Paul Weston was the west coast A&R head at Columbia Records, and signed Comstock to make albums under his own name. The first was called A Young Man’s Fancy. Here is the entire album:
Here is his other Columbia album, Patterns, one of the first pop album issued as a stereo LP.
Weston was fired and Comstock was let go. Comstock would later say that Mitch Miller interfered with Weston’s decisions and saw to it that his albums were not promoted.
The album that is perhaps the most important that he made was called Project Comstock: Music from Outer Space on Warner Bros. Records, released in 1962. From an interview with Forrest Patten for The Robert Farnon Society, Comstock went into detail about the album’s creation:
“We had one electric organ and several repeating amps that they were starting to use with woodwinds. For example, a flute player might play a short phrase and it would repeat constantly until he would play the next phrase. (The organ) would do the same thing. We employed a few little tricks like that. We didn’t have any synthesizers back then. When I wrote the scores on paper, I’d take the last note and put it first and vice versa. The bottom line there is when somebody played that note, there was no attack and it came out backwards. Think about it. Any note, whether soft or loud, has an attack on it. In this case, the accents were all in the back. We recorded them that way, and played the tape back three or four times faster making the trombones sound like trumpets. The stereo era was just beginning and the labels were trying to come up with crazy sounds to help demonstrate the new left/right effect. We were playing nice songs that everybody knew, but we also threw in some pretty far-out items. I think Lowell Frank, the engineer, went mad trying to find all of the parts as we cut them apart and pasted them back together again. The album must have sold three copies.”
Here is side one and side two of Project Comstock: Music from Outer Space.
For TV, among the producer/directors he worked with, Comstock was Jack Webb’s go-to composer.
Here is his update of the Dragnet theme.
He wrote the original theme for Rocky and his Friends. The home video version has a different one.
His last work was for the Brian Setzer Orchestra. He died in 2013.
To end this series (we could go on and on), here is Marilyn Monroe singing I Wanna be Loved by You for the movie Some Like it Hot (1959).
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