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Lorenzo Music, whose tones also spoke for other pop culture icons of the past 27 years, dies of cancer.
Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 9, 2001
LOS ANGELES -- He swore he didn't know Garfield the Cat from Charlie the Tuna. Nevertheless, the former folksinger and comedy writer with the voice once described as "kind of cutely stupid" became television's animated Garfield.
Lorenzo Music, also the unseen voice of Carlton the drunken doorman of the TV series Rhoda as well as those of a crash dummy and a pig Latin-spouting tout for the Queen Mary, has died. He was 64.
Music died Saturday at his Los Angeles home of lung cancer that had spread throughout his body. He worked until about a month ago, when he recorded Garfield's voice for an automobile advertisement, his wife, Henrietta, said.
Garfield creator Jim Davis chose Music as the orange cat's sardonic voice for the comic strip's first animated television special in 1982. Building on Garfield and the popularity he had achieved as the unseen Carlton on Rhoda from 1974 to 1978, Music became something of the pet rock of vocal commercial advertising.
He could earn hundreds of dollars uttering merely three words -- "Hello adoring fans" in the guise of Garfield, for example, welcoming tourists to Universal Studios or urging a stop at McDonald's.
Music played a crash dummy in a public service ad urging automobile passengers to buckle their seat belts and collected a cash court settlement from Universal Pictures after the likeness was used without permission in the 1987 film Harry and the Hendersons.
"Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever get so overexposed that no one will want me," Music told the Los Angeles Times in 1987, a little embarrassed by his success. "But it seems that the more you do in this business, the more people want you."
Music never became overexposed in pictures, and that was by design. On the rare occasions he allowed himself to be photographed, he carefully hid his face behind hat brims, sunglasses, coffee cups or other props and his scruffy beard.
"Anonymity works for me," Music said. "That way I never grow old."
Born Gerald David Music in Brooklyn, N.Y., and raised in Duluth, Minn., Music studied at the University of Minnesota.
While in college, he met Henrietta and performed with her for several years. In 1976 they had a syndicated variety program, The Lorenzo and Henrietta Music Show.
Music took the name Lorenzo for spiritual reasons, his wife said.
Music was a folksinger working in San Francisco when he met Tommy Smothers, to whom his voice has been compared. Smothers hired him to write for The Smothers Brothers Show, his TV series with brother Dick.
The show earned Music an Emmy in 1969, and he went on to write and work as story editor for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show. Music and his wife also wrote the theme song for the Newhart show.
Working on the Mary Tyler Moore spinoff Rhoda with partner David Davis, Music had no intention of acting in it. But producers who liked his unusual voice asked him to try it, and he became Carlton the Doorman.
Music is survived by his wife and their four children, Roz, Fernando, Sam and Leilani.