Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 138: "Plan 9 from Bed-Stuy (Featuring the Notorious T.O.R.)" (2022)

Criswell in "Plan 9 from Bed-Stuy."

How did you spend the last day of 2022? I spent it remixing the theme music from Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). Let me explain.

For a while now, I've been wanting to do an article about Trevor Duncan's "Grip of the Law," the dramatic, instantly recognizable composition we hear during the title sequence of Plan 9. Presumably it was music supervisor Gordon Zahler, not Ed Wood personally, who chose this bit of stock music. Nevertheless, this recording has become practically synonymous with Ed. When that iconic title card reading "Written-Produced-Directed by EDWARD D. WOOD, JR." appears on the screen—arguably the high point of Ed Wood's career—it's Duncan's music on the soundtrack.

English composer Trevor Duncan.

Like many examples of so-called "library" or "production" music, "Grip of the Law" has been used in numerous movies, radio shows, and TV series since the '50s—mainly British ones, I should point out, since Duncan was an Englishman who worked directly for the BBC. Outside of Plan 9, the most prominent use of "Grip of the Law" in America was probably Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), though I fondly remember hearing it on one of Bob & Ray's radio shows, too.

Anyway, I was listening to "Grip of the Law" on repeat recently while trying to figure out what I wanted to say about the darned thing. As an amateur musician, my instinct was to tap my toe to the beat. That's when I noticed something odd: "Grip of the Law" does not have a standard 4/4 rhythm like most popular music. I might be embarrassing myself here (and I'm sure more knowledgeable musicians will be quick to correct me), but it sounds like it's in 5/8, a la John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) theme. The song is off-kilter. It keeps the listener feeling unbalanced.

Just as an experiment, I decided to build a standard 4/4 loop around some string parts from "Grip of the Law." This took some trial and error, but eventually I pieced together a convincing 4/4 loop that was still recognizable as the Plan 9 theme. Then, apparently having nothing better to do, I kept adding parts to it, mainly horn hits, until I had a piece of music that ran a little over a minute. To that, I added an 80 BPM (beats per minute) drum loop.

The track still didn't feel "complete" to me, so I added some second-hand vocals to it. The monologue at the beginning ("Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time..") comes from "Maggot Brain," a classic 1971 track by Funkadelic. The rest of the vocals come from "Dead Wrong" by The Notorious B.I.G. I chose this track for a couple of reasons—the ghoulish title, most obviously, and the fact that it was released posthumously on the Born Again (1999) album. I suppose I saw a parallel between Ed Wood patching together a Bela Lugosi movie and Bad Boy Records patching together a Biggie Smalls album.

Was I done yet? Nope. I still needed to make a video for the track. My video-editing skills are limited at best, but I did what I could with some borrowed clips from Plan 9. And thus was born "Plan 9 from Bed-Stuy (Featuring the Notorious T.O.R.)." That title, by the way, is a reference to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, aka the home of The Notorious B.I.G.

I realize this is a lot of explanation for a silly, minute-long video, but sometimes I feel like overexplaining myself. Here's the video, if you haven't seen it. Enjoy or don't. Either way, it's free. (Remember, you get what you pay for.)

Biggie Smalls, the everyday struggle, and me

Biggie Smalls a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G.

Biggie or Tupac?

It's one of those great pop culture debates, like "Beatles or Stones?" or "Partridge Family or Brady Bunch?" (For the record, my answers would be the Beatles and the Bradys, even though "I Think I Love You" is a great record.)

When it comes to the two slain 1990s rappers, I have a clear preference for the work of Christopher Wallace a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls. What on earth could I, a meek Caucasian man from the Midwest, possibly find in the musical output of this rapper whose violent, hardscrabble life began in the Bedford-Stuyvesant  section of Brooklyn? I don't know exactly, but I get a kind of solace from Biggie I don't get at all from Tupac. 'Pac's vocal skills cannot be denied, but something about him seems insincere to me. Look at pictures of Tupac, and you'll notice his chiseled physique and arrogant smirk. Then look at pictures of Biggie, like the one at the top of this article. You'll see haunted eyes, a worried brow, and a face stained by sadness. I think an important factor was his weight. His physical body gave him an outcast's perspective on the world. The sadness seeped into his lyrics. This was a man who began a song ("Suicidal Thoughts") with these brutally self-critical words: "When I die, fuck it, I wanna go to hell. 'Cause I'm a piece of shit. It ain't hard to fuckin' tell." That's my kind of rapper!

(Side note: I also just like the sound of Wallace's voice -- that inimitable, deep rumble which emanated from him. "My slow flow's remarkable," he once bragged in one song. I was even moved to create a crude homemade mashup of Biggie's vocals for "Juicy" with the instrumental for the song "I Yam What I Yam" from the movie Popeye. I called the creation "Juicy Yam," and Matthew "Slug" Brown played it on his podcast once. I recently got a Facebook message from Slug in which he says that "Juicy Yam" still comes up at least once a week in shuffle mode on his iPod.)

The Biggie song which has been running through my head today, though, is "Everyday Struggle." The reasoning is simple: My life is now an everyday struggle. I mean, everyone's life is, but I'm more focused these days on just getting through the routine activities of each and every day. My medication keeps me calm and centered, but that doesn't make it "easy." This was my first full week back at work, and I got through it without incident. That's a major victory in my book. 

P.S. - It is true that Biggie's lyrics contain sentiments which I cannot possibly condone. I think that's healthy, though. I don't need to agree with everything which comes through my headphones. It's just another person's perspective on the world. We should be shocked by ideas from time to time. Besides, agreeing with people all the time gets boring. I think many people feel they now have an inalienable human right to never be offended by anything ever. That's a lot of nonsense, in my opinion.