David L. Hamilton, who co-founded and played keyboards for the prog-rock group Pavlov’s Dog before pivoting to a composing career and earning an Emmy nom, has died. He was 74.
A rep for the family said he died June 20 but not give provide a cause or place of death.
Born on May 4, 1951, in St. Louis, Hamilton studied classical piano while attending Macalester College in St. Paul before attended the University of Stirling in Scotland on an English lit exchange fellowship. While there he continued studying piano at at the Royal Academy of Music in Edinburgh.
After returning to St. Louis, he co-founded Pavlov’s Dog, a seven-piece progressive rock band with which he would record a pair of albums for Columbia Records. The group toured with the likes of Journey, ELO and Kraftwerk but couldn’t break through commercially. Its albums Pampered Menial (1975) and At the Sound of the Bell (1976) did sell in Australia, both cracking the Top 40 there. Pampered Metal dented the Billboard 200 stateside, fueled by the single “Julia,” which Hamilton co-wrote.
He left the band in 1976 and later relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a composer. His first job was writing the music — and script — for the 20-part KOCE instructional series The Photographic Vision, which won him a Los Angeles Area Emmy Award for Best Music.
Hamilton continued to write music for TV and penned to score for Orleans, a short-lived CBS legal drama fronted by Larry Hagman, in his first starring small-screen role after Dallas. The series lasted only a few months but earned Hamilton a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series.
His next project was scoring Waco: The Rules of Engagement, about the ill-fated 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian cult in the titular Texas town. Directed by William Gazecki, the film earned a Best Documentary Oscar nom and won the 1997 IDA Award from the International Documentary Association. Hamilton then composed the score for Thanks of a Grateful Nation, a scripted Showtime drama about the Gulf War that starred Ted Danson, Brian Dennehy and Jennifer Jason Leigh and won a Humanitas Prize.
Hamilton also had about a half-dozen scripting credits and later worked on Till the Rivers Rise, a Heartland-set musical project for which he wrote the book, music and lyrics.
“To know him was to love him,” Hamilton’s family wrote in a statement. “He had the remarkable ability to make everyone feel valued and special — no matter who you were, or where you came from, he was your instant friend, and he was genuinely interested in your well-being and your story.”
He is survived by his wife, Janet Muswell, and daughter, Lily.
