Spider-Muse

The 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, despite it’s flaws in writing and animation, had fantastic music. Much (if not all) of this, I’ve come to learn, was composed by a jazz musician by the name of Ray Ellis. While trying to track down actual mp3s of the original tunes, I discovered a band called Volume which has released a CD called The Amazing Spider-Band. There are 9 tracks on the album and the song tidbits that I’ve heard seem reasonably faithful to the originals, so I thought I’d support them and buy a CD. However, the album was out of stock on cdbaby.com and so I emailed the band through their website. Here’s the email I got back:

As you know we are unfortunately out of stock at the moment. We are actually in the process of producing a full length album with Ray Ellis producing. We plan on recording in Capitol studios in LA and using the best Jazz session guys in LA. The album probably will not be out until Oct….hopefully you can wait that long…..please spread the word and thank you for your interest!
Chris

So for heaven’s sake, here I am spreading the word and by gawd I am looking forward to the result of this collaboration! I only hope it contains dozens of the songs, and every single tune from the series is a real gem. Years ago, my pal Stephane made a CD for me out of the songs he recorded from video and they get constant rotation in my iTunes. And confidentially, there’s more than one of those tracks that “inspired” Thickets tunes (i.e. blatant ripoffs. See “Yog-Sothoth“).