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RICHARD WOLF
This year, the SESAC composer won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition & Direction for the animated WB series Static Shock. His involvement in the project was a segue from creating music for Scooby Doo and the Cyberchase (Warner Bros.). Explains Wolf, “I wrote songs that were featured montages in the movie. I was writing to storyboards, which I’d never done before.”
At seventeen, the native New Yorker was signed to his first record deal while attending college in Washington D.C. He gravitated to the west coast and was a member of the Capitol Records rock band, Crimson Tide, but the growing sameness of the genre sent him searching for something else. “Rock seemed like the same five pieces, not going anywhere.” He divined her missing inspiration from the street-savvy beats and deft wordplay that heralded the first generation of rap. “Doug E. Fresh, KRS-1, EPMD, they were the best; witty, clever, talking about serious issues. It had a real sense of adventure and experimentalism and it still has.”
In Los Angeles, Wolf was mp1oyed by a post house to edit music for television, including The Tonight Show. In 1986 he wrote the theme song for the Rodney Dangerfield film, Back to School and began contributing to a roster of big screen projects notably producing Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes for the #1 box office Karate Kid II sequel, and penning a song for the Madonna vehicle, Who’s that Girl? As an arranger, songwriter and producer, he developed extensive credits in R&B and pop with artists including New Kids on the Block, Nona Gaye, Bell Biv Devoe and female rapper, MC Lyte, and he pumped up remixes for Seal and Prince. Wolf was well ahead of the curve when he produced the artist Laquan rapping over an instrumental track for the compilation The Rebirth of Cool Vol. 1, acknowledged as the first project of the budding Acid Jazz genre.
Despite his admiration for the potency of rap, Wolf drew the line with inflammatory messages. “I turned down Eazy-E when he was knocking on our door for music. I said, ‘If you promise not to write misogynistic, homophobic, violent lyrics we’ll give it to you,’ He laughed, we became friends, he hung at the studio, but I wouldn’t give him tracks. You have to watch who is using your music and set ethical and moral boundaries.”
Since 1999, Fox Sports has utilized Wolf’s pulse-pounding themes for almost two dozen network sports programs. Wolf understands how to pump the necessary drama into his presentations. “People expect those big, victorious horns that hark back to ancient times,” he notes. “My frame of reference is more Richard Wagner than Alexander the Great, or Hannibal, marshaling his elephant army.”
Wolf invariably returns to what he likes doing best: writing music. “Scoring is, relatively speaking and depending on the project, totally creative. You’re the artist. Of course you’re working within a framework that’s imposed on you, but within that framework there’s freedom—it’s like marriage. When you produce a record, and start fine tuning and fixing, it’s drudgery, but I love the creative part, working with artists and writing songs.
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