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Kennedy ended with Skeeter Davis’s mysterious and mournful “The End of the World.” The pilot used Vic Damone’s nearly operatic reading of “On the Street Where You Live,” and the episode dealing with the assassination of John F. From the start, “Mad Men” took great pains to design its closing-credit songs. That producer, Matthew Weiner, went on to create his show, “Mad Men,” in the favorable wake of “The Sopranos”-the first episode of the former aired just a month after the finale of the latter. Before the show’s fifth season, Chase hired a producer who had written a pilot about the golden era of American advertising. David Chase, the show’s creator, felt so strongly about the role of rock music in his characters’ lives that he made it the subject of his first feature film, “Not Fade Away,” a drama about an aspiring rock singer in nineteen-sixties New Jersey.Ĭhase’s love of music, and his penchant for using it tactically and thematically, had a direct legacy. The show used pop music consistently, and powerfully, throughout its run: the Rolling Stones’ beautifully menacing “Thru and Thru” after the second season finale, or the inspired mash-up of the “Peter Gunn” theme and the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that accompanied the scenes of the feds trying to tap Tony’s basement in the first episode of the third season.
#Baby blue song in breaking bad series#
Sometimes that music has been memorable (“Hawaii Five-O,” “Sesame Street”), but it has tended to take the form of brand reinforcement rather than editorial content or commentary, and those series that made music part of their charter (“Miami Vice,” “Gilmore Girls”) did so overtly.īut what about the trend of capping a realistic drama with an iconic pop song? The most famous example of this, at least in recent memory, of course, is Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which played over the enigmatic final scene of “The Sopranos,” in 2007. Pop music has been a valuable part of film for years, but television, as a result of smaller budgets and the repetitious nature of a series mentality, tended to make its own music-theme songs, composed scores.
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“Baby Blue” was a nearly perfect thematic fit, but it’s also the latest in the growing trend of letting classic pop and rock songs do some of the heavy lifting for high-quality dramatic television. The only surviving member, Joey Molland, spoke to the press, and was predictably surprised and gracious.
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The “Baby Blue” moment on “Breaking Bad” should have been triumphant-the song has rocketed up the iTunes charts and seen a nine-thousand-per-cent increase in Spotify plays-but there was almost no one left to interview.
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Two members committed suicide: Ham and Tom Evans. Though they started as promising Beatles protégés, recording Paul McCartney’s “Come and Get It” for Apple Records, and followed it up with a half-dozen hits, a nightmare soon settled on Badfinger. “Baby Blue” carried an extra payload of sadness, both because the song is melancholy and because Badfinger, the band that recorded it, is one of the most star-crossed groups in rock history. The show had used blue songs before, most notably “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” by Tommy James and the Shondells, which hit the trifecta of meth-dealing keywords (crystal, blue, and persuasion). On “Breaking Bad,” it was a forlorn love song, too, matched to the moment when Walter White gave a last caress to the meth cooker that had served him so well: his blue meth, his baby. This past Sunday, to mark the end of Walter White’s career as a meth kingpin and, not incidentally, his life, “Breaking Bad” went for a twisting crane shot set to Badfinger’s “Baby Blue.” The song was originally on the band’s 1971 album “Straight Up,” where it was a forlorn love song written by Pete Ham for his girlfriend, Dixie Armstrong.
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