"True Blood's" music supervisor, Gary Calamar, reveals how the show's music soundtrack comes together.
HBO's "True Blood" is great TV for many reasons, not least of which is it's music, and the dangerous, swampy vibe it often amplifies. Much of the music compliments the show's main location, and music supervisor Gary Calamar even employs local musicians from Louisiana like Allen Toussaint and C.C. Adcock to lend the show an authentic regional sound. When not working on the soundtrack for "True Blood," Calamar, who also was behind the music of "Six Feet Under," music supes for other shows like "Men of a Certain Age," and "House M.D." He's also a working DJ who has had a nighttime show on KCRW for something like 13 years, spinning pop, roots rock, blues, and soul. As you can imagine, he gets a lot of soundtrack ideas for his day job, during his night job. He's a busy man, but he found the time to get down with me recently about the impossibility of using Led Zeppelin in TV, the cultural importance of the record store, and of course, the music of "True Blood."
What is the sound of Bon Temps?
It's got a few different sounds. I mean, it's got the sound of Merlotte's, which is a little bit more, upbeat bar music, rockabilly, southern Rock. And then in the first season we had some music for Sookie playing at her house, which was like the Watson Twins covering The Cure and stuff like that. But, yeah, all of it has sort of a dark undercurrent to it like a lot of New Orleans blues seems to have. Those classics Slim Harpo, Willie Dixon, and Howlin' Wolf. Those are what really kind of speak to me as the sound of Bon Temps.
I heard [series creator] Alan Ball say a rule of his was to "Never use opera music" in a vampire show, one of the things he decided early on along with not giving them cheesy contact lenses...
I don't remember Alan actually saying that to me. But I think his goal was to have a non-traditional kind of sound to the show. And not use, you know, sort of overly dramatic types of music that have been used in vampire series in the past, or movies in the past.
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