While his assistant investigated future projects, O'Quinn returned to Albert Glasser's guest house, where the composer operated a ham radio among boxes of his own musical history. "That was his playpen," recalls O'Quinn, "and he had all these tapes and discs and things... He showed me some of this stuff and played me some of it, and at this point he trusted me pretty thoroughly... He loaned me a lot of his masters to take to New York," where O'Quinn and a colleague listened to every cue, and carefully deliberated over several months on the right approach to tackle Glasser's massive output. The team knew that none of Glasser's scores were written for big movies, and O'Quinn felt that, "If you put out the album to that movie, six people were going to buy it.'"

At the time, B-movie music released by Varese and Citadel Records were often restricted to the Republic archives - mainly music composed by Victor Young, or a very young Elmer Bernstein - with the odd offshoot album, such as a compilation of songs by the Sons of the Pioneers. Some of Citadel's early Hans J. Salter albums for the composer's Universal films also enjoyed distribution through Varese, as Salter was a lesser-known but respected contemporary of Miklos Rozsa, Alfred Newman, John Green, or Roy Webb - composers with similarly long associations with major studios like Warner Bros., Twentieth Century-Fox, MGM, and RKO.

For B-film composers, however, their own studio affiliations didn't offer much clout in the recording market; Republic Pictures was the major among the minors, leaving lesser companies, like agglomerate Allied Artists, with its back catalogue of old Poverty Row titles. During the Sixties and Seventies, fellow indie and B-movie factory American International Pictures [AIP] eventually released a handful of soundtrack albums via Capitol Records, or on their own AIR label, but most were early pop compilations from the Beach Party series, or pop/rock/psychedelia albums - with an occasional original score cut.

Continues O'Quinn: "I decided that what we really should do is do a composite of all of the best scores that Albert Glasser had done, [so] we put out The Fantastic Film Music of Albert Glasser Vol. 1 – which was the first time the man had been recognized in any way. He was a part of the Rocketship X-M album… but that wasn't his music, and I wanted to do something for him because I thought he was one of the ‘invisible heroes' of cheap science fiction shows over the years – Attack of the 50-foot Woman and all this stuff that he'd done. There was some really fun music in there, so we put out that composite album."

Composite or compilation albums are a safe way for labels to also test the market and see exactly who (and how many) will open their wallets and test the works of a lesser-known composer.

For years, re-recorded themes and suites tended to be the only way one could enjoy vintage B-movie music, and one of the most well-known albums among collectors was Dick Jacob's 1959 album, Themes from Horror Movies, which offered fun versions of bug-eyed monster music "in Ghoulish High Fidelity." In 1978, Varese reissued the album without the gimmicky sound effects & dialogue, and reissued the album on CD, in 1993.

Other notable (or to some, infamous) efforts to re-record exploitation movie themes were the multiple albums performed by Neil Norman (and his Cosmic Orchestra), produced and released via Norman's GNP Crescendo label. Basically updated versions of classic TV and movie themes, the albums, perhaps subversively, reflected Norman's own love of this special genre music that, at the time, was too pricey to release in complete form. It would take another decade for labels like Monstrous Movie Music to perfect the re-recorded suites & themes concept album into something that was actually faithful to the original recordings and intentions of the actual composers, but during the late 1970s, genre music was still a rare foray for struggling film music labels.

Varese 's own real stab at original B-film music came in 1995, when producer Bruce Kimmel assembled selected cues for the CD Not of This Earth: The Film Music of Ronald Stein (an album that was also a labor of love). A rare commercial tribute to a single composer, it would take another six years before indie label Percepto would mine Stein's excellent music again, and release complete original scores for AIP's Edgar Allen Poe and bug-eyed monster movies on CD.

Kimmel's CD for Varese, like O'Quinn's Glasser album, contained suites of indexed themes forming compact impressions of their respective films, and the Stein CD reflects the same boyhood glee and sense of fun that resonates from O'Quinn's tribute to Glasser.

"Sometimes I'd create a suite of the soundtrack music myself," recalls O'Quinn, "which wasn't the kind of thorough approach that I had done on X-M, but it was an introduction to a man that people needed to know about and that I wanted to spotlight." A second volume of planned music never materialized, but like Percepto Records, it took a few more years and another producer with dedication and affection to give some of Glasser's music another showcase. Packaged in a pair of beautifully designed albums by Craig Spaulding, Screen Archive Entertainment's first productions were the Cold War cheapie Tokyo File 212, and Glasser's music for the Philippines-based drama, Huk! (based on Sterling Silliphant novel). Spaulding, also an art director, followed O'Quinn's example by treating each album as a top quality production.

With a discernable regret in his voice, O'Quinn adds how Glasser "was a treasure trove of material and information," but a number of market realities with Volume 1 made a second album a far riskier venture. "There was only one stereophonic score on that first album," he explains, "and at that point [Quadraphonic sound] was just appearing, and everybody was concerned that the technology of recordings be ‘high fidelity' and stereophonic... We were coming out with this old stuff that was anything but that, and [it] was a detriment... and made people not want to buy it, especially when it was about a man that they'd never heard of. ... It wasn't a huge hit, but it did okay. Again, I wasn't doing it for money; I was doing it because I wanted to do it."

Tastefully assembled with lavish vintage poster and promo art, The Fantastic Film Music of Albert Glasser contains a transcription disc of Glasser's famous theme for the Cisco Kid from 1948, and moves through later TV and film work, culminating with a lengthy 17+ minute suite of stereophonic cues from The Boy and the Pirates. Alongside Rocketship X-M, O'Quinn's Glasser compilation remains unreleased on CD.