You’ve heard Gary Portnoy’s voice a thousand times signing the song on this record—he co-wrote and sang the theme from Cheers, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.” The song just got re-released as an EP with FOUR other tracks, on beer froth-colored vinyl, so I took it down to Monaghans, our favorite watering hole on Long Island (where they do know your face if not your name) and took this shot. But back to the record—lemme tell you the story that the record sort of almost but doesn’t really tell. Back before Cheers happened, Portnoy was a struggling NYC musician who happened to sit next to Judy Hart, a young playwright, at a dinner party. During conversation, she said she’d just been hired to write a quickie cash-in Off-Broadway play, Preppies, to tie into the then-current preppie fad (some may recall the once-omnipresent Official Preppy Handbook that kicked off the trend). Portnoy suggested it should be a musical, and hey, he should write the music. It happened and lo and behold, the show was a hit. Somewhere in Hollywood, the Cheers creative team heard the opening number, “People Like Us,” and nearly chose it to be the Cheers theme before deciding they wanted an original song. They contacted Portnoy and Hart, who had to write three successive songs before they hit paydirt with the theme we all know today. So this EP collects the theme, its original demo, “People Like Us,” and demos of the two other rejected songs. Creatively, it’s fascinating to see how they progressed from the stage musical vibe through a too-on-the-nose song, “My Kind of People” that flips around the “People Like Us” concept and name drops Cheers a million times, to “Another Day,” which is a depressing step in the wrong direction. If you wanna check out a great creative songwriting journey in just 12 minutes, this is your EP.
