Don Ralke

Stan Ross, co-owner of Gold Star Recording Studio, once characterized producer, arranger, and composer Don Ralke as “the most well-known unknown in the business.” For more than four decades Ralke remained a steady presence inside Hollywood’s recording facilities, shaping material that ranged from chart-oriented pop to star-driven vocal projects and his own cult-favored exotica albums.

Born July 13, 1920, in Battle Creek, Michigan, Ralke completed a master’s degree in music at the University of Southern California and, according to his SpaceAgePop biography, also trained under expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg. Much of his early studio work took place at the low-budget Crown label, which specialized in quick replicas of current hits; nevertheless, collectors prize his Crown contributions for their consistent quality and singular character.

After the favorably received Jazz Heat, made with reedist Buddy Collette, Ralke issued Bongo Madness, the first of several percussion-oriented releases that drew the attention of Warner Bros. The label signed him for two 1960 albums: But You’ve Never Heard Gershwin with Bongos and the jungle exotica classic The Savage and the Sensuous.

During his Warner period Ralke joined composer Warren Barker on the jazz-flavored score for the television series 77 Sunset Strip, later issued as a best-selling soundtrack LP, and produced and arranged the novelty single “Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb” for cast member Edd “Kookie” Byrnes. He is also remembered for supervising a string of “golden throat” recordings by television and film personalities attempting pop crossover, among them Lorne Greene’s On the Ponderosa, William Shatner’s The Transformed Man, and The Many Moods of Murry Wilson, featuring the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson’s father and manager.

Additional commercial successes under Ralke’s direction include Jewel Akens’ “The Birds and the Bees,” while in the late 1960s he collaborated with engineer Brad Miller on a series of easy-listening albums released under the Mystic Moods Orchestra name. Throughout the 1970s he concentrated on television, scoring producer Garry Marshall’s sitcoms Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and he closed his Hollywood career with the soundtrack to the 1987 comedy Takin’ It All Off. Ralke died January 26, 2000, in Santa Rosa, California.