‘Miami Vice’: The Stylish Soundtrack Of The 1980s
The show’s innovative use of music changed the sound of television, and its echo is still being felt today.
There had never been a TV show that looked – or sounded – like Miami Vice. The crime drama premiered on NBC on September 16, 1984, with its pilot episode, a two-hour TV movie, Brother’s Keeper, and was an instant phenomenon. Before Miami Vice, the big TV cop shows of the early 80s – Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey – focused on real-life social issues and were heavy on grit and deeply flawed characters. Within minutes of Miami Vice exploding onto screens, it was obvious that things had changed.
The police officers stalking the streets of Miami for drug cartels and gang violence were a long way from the stuffy, doughnut-munching cliches that audiences had grown accustomed to. Undercover cop Detective James “Sonny” Crockett (played by Don Johnson) was a glamorous loose cannon, a former college football star and Vietnam veteran with an eye for the ladies and a penchant for pastel sports jackets and white linen suits. He also lived on a boat with his pet alligator and refused to wear socks. Meanwhile, his partner, Detective Sergeant Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), was a smooth former NYPD officer who’d swapped coasts in pursuit of the drug dealer responsible for the death of his brother. Rico was also irresistible to the opposite sex, drove a 1964 Cadillac Coupe de Ville convertible, was partial to a double-breasted jacket and narrowly avoided death several times throughout the show.
Order the Miami Vice soundtrack now.
Miami Vice was every bit as stylish as its central characters, thanks to budgets unheard of for TV at the time, especially for a new show. From the very beginning, creator Anthony Yerkovich and executive producer Michael Mann were determined to make their show stand out visually. “[Mann] said, ‘No earth tones,’” NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff told the New York Times in 1984. “He said the colors are different from everything you see on television. With other action-adventure shows, the producer tells me: the storyline. Here, Michael Mann says no earth tones.”
Miami Vice also used rock and pop music like no TV show before it. “One element of my concept was the pop-culture phenomenon of music videos and MTV,” Yerkovich told the Television Academy. “I wanted to set the story to music in a dialectical fashion so that it commented on the narrative and characters, and vice-versa.” Tartikoff later claimed that he wrote “MTV cops” on a napkin and presented it to Yerkovich, who took the idea and ran with it. Yerkovich has vehemently denied the story, but the phrase is about as succinct a description of Miami Vice imaginable. Not only were the look of the show and its editing inspired by music videos, but Miami Vice was pioneering in its use of contemporary songs as a plot device. Over the last couple of decades, from The Sopranos to Stranger Things, from Mad Men to The Bear, needle drops have become an integral part of TV – Miami Vice got there first. The show also had a cutting-edge score from synth pioneer Jan Hammer, who perfectly captured the glossy spirit of the times.
Jan Hammer
Back in the early 80s, soundtracks to TV shows were much less common than they would become in the 90s. Again, Miami Vice (Music From The Television Series) was pioneering. In October 1985, a month after the premiere of Season 2, a soundtrack album featuring Hammer’s instrumental themes, along with key songs used in the show, was released. It soared to No 1 on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart and spent 11 weeks at the top, selling four million copies by February 1986. It remained the most successful TV soundtrack album of all time until it was overtaken by the 2006 soundtrack to High School Musical.
The success of the soundtrack album was echoed by Hammer’s iconic “Miami Vice Theme,” which reached No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in September 1985 and won Grammy Awards in 1986 for Best Instrumental Performance and Best Pop Instrumental Performance. “Miami Vice Theme” sounded like the future – all pulsing synths, thudding drum machines and distorted guitar shredding – perfect music for chasing down gangs of criminals in open-top sports cars. “That was the kind of music I was making at the time,” Hammer later told BlogCritics. “It just really worked, because it had this sort of a dark edge, and it was driving. But it also had a very rhythmic element, including percussion like congas and things, which really fit nicely with the whole idea of Miami, and the whole Latin culture, and how the pulse really works there.”
It was all a long way from Hammer’s musical roots. Born in Prague, Czechia, in 1948, Hammer began playing piano at four and looked set to follow in his jazz musician parents’ footsteps. When the Soviet Union invaded his home nation in 1968, he left for the US, where he won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. After graduating, Hammer toured with Sarah Vaughan before joining the original line-up of The Mahavishnu Orchestra and playing keys and synths with Joni Mitchell, Jeff Beck, Santana and many more. He was dabbling in film scores when a chance meeting set him on the path to Miami Vice. “I had some time to kill, and a friend of mine said, ‘Let’s drop by and visit Michael Mann,’” Hammer told the New York Times in 1985. “He had been aware of other stuff I’ve done; from my records… This was like early ’84, and they were still casting, nothing was shot yet, and Michael just started saying that he would like to make sure that this ‘doesn’t sound like TV’ [laughs]. I understood exactly what he meant, because I was one of the people who just got sick of it. I mean, how many times can you do the same run-of-the-mill, white bread TV score?”
Pop stars and Miami Vice
Another example of Mann’s off-the-wall thinking came when the music video for Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues” inspired a Miami Vice episode of the same name (season one, episode 16). And not only did Frey’s blistering blues track make it onto the soundtrack album, but the former Eagles frontman also made a cameo appearance in the episode, playing Jimmy Cole, a burnt-out, guitar-wielding pilot who flies Crockett and Tubbs to hunt for a murderer. Frey wasn’t the only musician to guest on the show, with unlikely appearances from Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, James Brown, Little Richard, Barbra Streisand, Leonard Cohen, Willie Nelson and more. Also included on the soundtrack is Frey’s “You Belong To The City,” a smoldering power ballad written specifically for the two-part season two opening episode “The Prodigal Son,” which reached No 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Phil Collins was another star musician who appeared on Miami Vice, playing Phil “The Shill” Meyou, a con artist who rigged a local TV show to pocket the prize money in Season 2, Episode 12. Collins was already linked to the show after his 1981 debut solo single and worldwide hit “In The Air Tonight” was used in the pilot episode. “[Director] Thomas Carter came up with the idea of using the Phil Collins song when Don calls his wife from a phone booth on the highway, with this neon sign in back that says ‘Bernay’s Café,’ pilot editor David Rosenbloom told the Television Academy. “It was almost surreal. It captured most of what the series might become. That song went on to be the one most associated with the show.” Naturally, “In The Air Tonight” made it on to the Miami Vice soundtrack, alongside another huge hit, Tina Turner’s empowering rock anthem “Better Be Good To Me.”
From Collins to Turner, Miami Vice made pop music as essential to its storytelling as its characters or plot. The songs turned every chase and heartbreak into something operatic. The show’s innovative use of music changed the sound of television, and its echo is still being felt today.
