Spenser says: "Over the past five years, I've been on a very small scale strange campaign to get my father a bit of the limelight for his very offbeat and colorful music career of the late 1950s. He made some wacky instrumental albums that were some of the first to employ the emerging technology of stereo sound and mix jazz, pop, and experimental titter-tats with playful pinache.
It has a kind of offbeat intellegence you readers would like, and his story crosses paths with everyone from Mae West to Van Dyke parks, with 3000 commercial jingles in between…"
For his final LP, "The Sound of Speed," and in a sort of orchestral punkish act of rebellion, Thompson made an album entirely based on the noises of modern transportation. But it would be many years before the album, filled with jazz harmonies and swing arrangements, would be fully appreciated and understood.
Thompson's most successful music was heard by millions of people every day, even though most of them never knew who he was. From 1961 to 1978, Thompson recorded the scores to more than 3,000 television commercials, from "Get That Great GM Feeling" and "Go-Go Goodyear" to "King Cobra — Silver!"
