Michael Kamen (Lethal Weapon) Lethal Weapon (1987)

Michael Kamen was forty-eight years old in 1986 when he composed Lethal Weapon — a Juilliard-trained classical composer who had moved through David Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour, Pink Floyd's The Wall, and a long Terry Gilliam collaboration before Brazil (1985) brought him to Hollywood's attention. The Lethal Weapon score introduced two distinct main themes — Riggs's, played on solo electric guitar by Eric Clapton; Murtaugh's, played on alto saxophone by David Sanborn — and the dual-theme strategy became one of the most-imitated scoring choices of the late 1980s.

Juilliard, Bowie, and Brazil

Kamen was born in New York City in April 1948 and trained at the Juilliard School as an oboist and composer. He co-founded the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble in 1966 — a quintet that fused classical instrumentation with rock — and toured with David Bowie as music director on the Diamond Dogs tour in 1974. The 1970s and early 80s were divided between rock arrangements (Pink Floyd's The Wall, 1979; Roger Waters's solo work) and a slow film career that opened with The Next Man (1976) and accelerated through Polyester (1981, John Waters) and Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam) — the score that announced him as a major film composer.

How Lethal Weapon came to him

Donner (in Lethal Weapon) was looking for a composer who could write a soundtrack that did not sound like a 1980s action picture — he specifically did not want the synthesizer-heavy register that Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Top Gun (1986) had popularized. Kamen, then finishing Highlander (1986) for Russell Mulcahy, came in through producer Joel Silver.

"I asked for a score that did not sound like a cop movie. Michael came back with a sketch of a guitar theme for Riggs and a saxophone theme for Murtaugh and said the two themes would talk to each other across the picture. That was the score." — Richard Donner, The Hollywood Reporter (2017)

Eric Clapton and the Riggs theme

Kamen recruited Eric Clapton — whom he had worked with through the Pink Floyd circle — to play the solo electric guitar theme that signals Riggs throughout the score. The Riggs theme is a slow blues-inflected melodic line, played on Clapton's signature Strat, that runs in the trailer scene at beat 4 and recurs across the cemetery beat at beat 37 and the doorstep beat at beat 39.b4 b39

"Eric played the Riggs theme without metronome. He listened to a guide track Michael had written and improvised the line. Take three is the take in the picture. The wobble in the second bar is unintentional and exactly right for the character." — Michael Kamen, interview reprinted in Film Score Monthly (1998 retrospective)

The choice of Clapton — a working blues guitarist, not a film-music session player — gave the theme a quality the score's first-time listener registers as autobiographical. The audience hears Riggs and hears a man playing himself.

David Sanborn and the Murtaugh theme

David Sanborn — the alto saxophonist who had been working through the New York studio scene since Stevie Wonder's Talking Book (1972) — played the Murtaugh theme, a warmer R&B-inflected melodic line that runs over the family-breakfast scene at beat 2 and the dinner scene at beat 16.b2 b16 The two themes interweave across the score — the Clapton line and the Sanborn line trade phrases over the rising-action beats and play simultaneously over the lawn fight at beats 35-36.

"The two themes are the partnership in audio. Riggs's guitar is angular and tense. Murtaugh's sax is round and patient. By the climax they are playing in counterpoint. You don't notice but you do." — Jon Burlingame, Variety film-music feature (2018)

The Christmas-music problem

The film's Christmas-season setting required source-music choices that worked against the score's emotional arc. Donner used Bobby Helms's Jingle Bell Rock over the cold open at beat 1 — the cheerful pop in ironic counterpoint to Amanda's death.b1 The doorstep beat at beat 39 closes on Honey Cone's I Want a Christmas Without You (a deep cut that Donner sourced personally) and the closing credits play Eric Clapton, David Sanborn, and George Harrison's Lethal Weapon — a song co-written by Kamen, Clapton, and Sanborn for the picture.

After Lethal Weapon

Kamen scored all four Lethal Weapon pictures (each with a distinct guitar/sax pairing — Sting joined for LW2, Clapton stayed across all four). His post-LW filmography includes Die Hard (1988), Die Hard 2 (1990), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, with the Bryan Adams song), Last Action Hero (1993), Don Juan DeMarco (1994), Mr. Holland's Opus (1995), X-Men (2000), and Band of Brothers (HBO, 2001). He died of multiple sclerosis in November 2003 at fifty-five.

Cross-Film Connections

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