"Five days ago I sent Gerald Fried an email wishing him happy birthday--he'd just turned 95. He wrote me right back as he always did every time I emailed him with an enthusiastic greeting. Last night I heard that he had died. Gerry was another great artist who formed so much of the background music of my childhood, even when I wasn't aware of it. I grew up watching goofy shows like It's About Time and Gilligan's Island, and Gerry wrote goofy, infectious comic music like nobody else. Then I started watching Star Trek and even at age 11 or 12 the music leaped out at me. For years I wanted to own all that music, and somehow my obsession with that and other film and TV music led to my weird little career writing about this stuff and about movies and TV in general. In the mid-90s while still living in Ohio I started working on a book about Star Trek music and spoke on the phone to Fried, Fred Steiner and Alexander Courage, the last living composers for the original show. By then Fried's "Amok Time" music from Trek was not just indelible, it was almost infamous, and I asked him if he'd ever heard any of his music parodied. "Well I heard this the other day," he said on the other end of the line, and then I heard him pounding out the "Amok Time" fight music on his piano.
In 2012 Lukas Kendall managed to pry all of the original Star Trek music free to be released in a giant box set by La-La-Land Records and I spent several glorious months going through the music with Neil Bulk. La-La-Land's Mike Gerhard and Matt Verboys agreed to do a huge event at the Egyptian Theater to launch the set, and we got Gerry and writer David Gerrold to appear. I had met Fred Steiner in person in 2001 but he had passed on a year before the release of the music, but Fried arrived in Burbank the night before the event to meet us for dinner and he endeared himself to me forever when I first met him by saying, "Jeff! I thought you'd be more of a nerdy guy, not tall and handsome!" I remember my wife Brooke watching in concern as Gerry pounded down a 14-ounce steak--he was a little, elf-like guy but an enthusiastic carnivore.
Interviewing Gerry on stage the next night before a big crowd and actually having him perform his Star Trek themes on oboe was truly one of the great experiences of my life. A few years afterward we found a memo from Star Trek producer Bob Justman written about Gerry during the first year of Star Trek after he'd scored "Shore Leave," encouraging Gene Roddenberry to bring Fried back to score more episodes. "This man's music ennobles everything it touches," Justman said. We emailed the memo to Gerry, who'd never seen it. "Emails don't get any better!" Gerry wrote back.
Gerry did so much music that I'm still discovering stuff I didn't know about to this day. He started out working for Stanley Kubrick and within the last couple of years I was able to watch To the Moon and Beyond, an animated documentary made with Kubrick's involvement by some of the visual effects artists who would later work on 2001--almost an audition for the project by Fried, but he and Kubrick would soon part ways. Gerry scored some of Kubrick's early classics like The Killing and Paths of Glory, but then like Elmer Bernstein he was relegated to low budget horror films like I Bury the Living. He found his medium in television where his incredible gift for melody and a knack for jazzy action got a workout week after week. His Star Trek scores--"Shore Leave," "Amok Time," "Catspaw," "Friday's Child," "The Paradise Syndrome"--defined the spirit of fun and excitement that was a key part of the show, especially in its second season. His action music was brassy, full of attitude and thrilling, his comedy music droll, and if you can listen to the tragic end of "The Paradise Syndrome" without tearing up you're tougher than I am.
Fried was a huge part of the '70s TV movie renaissance, and when Quincy Jones failed to produce enough music for the epic miniseries Roots Fried jumped in and provided its memorable theme and much of its underscore. He did things like The Mystic Warrior, a would-be Native American epic with a fantastic, romantic score (his other Native American-inspired I Will Fight No More Forever was almost as good)--Fried also supplied documentary music for L.A.'s Skirball Museum in 1996 for a film called Visions and Values: The Skirball Musical Experience, and he earned an Oscar nomination for his 1974 doc Birds Do It, Bees Do It. He did nighttime soaps (Flamingo Road, Dynasty), detective shows (Mannix, Police Story)--in fact the only thing Fried NEVER did was bland background "wallpaper" music. Gerry's music was always up front, with instantly memorable melodies and wild effects. He scored a whole episode of The Man from UNCLE with kazoos, and for Star Trek he wrote a piece of music just a few seconds long, "Klingon Blip" for a little graphic of a spaceship on an Enterprise viewscreen that's so thunderous it just about forces you out of your seat. Gerry could do anything. He had a long, happy life and always seemed to be in a terrific mood. The world and I will miss him but we'll always have his music. RIP."
- Jeff Bond
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