He's The Voice. He Is Whispering Jack Phantom. He Is...John Farnham.

Forty years ago, an Australian showbiz vet dropped an album that not many people believed in. But the few that did really believed in it. The album was Whispering Jack, and the artist was John Farnham. A small team of people believed in him, like his manager Glenn Wheatley. Wheatley mortgaged his house to get the budget to record the album, and it was issued on his own label. With a relatively meager AUS$150.000 budget, Farnham couldn't go for a fancy producer, not that one proposed himself, so live sound engineer Ross Fraser became the album's producer, and stayed Farnham's producer throughout his career. Whispering Jack wasn't a sure thing, hell, for a while it looked like it wasn't even a thing. 

The artist formerly known as Johnny Farnham was mainly remembered for the 1967 novelty hit "Sadie, The Cleaning Lady" that somehow became the most popular Australian song by an Australian artist of the 60s, and years as a teen idol singing lightweight pop fare. By the late 70s he was touring the oldies and cabaret circus and was doing musical theater. He had dropped a comeback solo album in 1981, Uncovered, that showed him now operating as a smooth AOR singer, leaving the oldies circuit middle of the road stuff behind. It was produced and mostly written by Litte River band's Graeham Goble, with many of the band members playing on it, so when Glen Shorrock left the Little River Band, Farnham was drafted in as his replacement.

My, are we having fun or what...and we're all super duper good friends for life...really!!!

The union was more of a marriage of convenience than true love: Farnham wasn't sure he was the right fit for the band, and some of his Little River Band band members felt the same way. While Farnham's debut with the band, The Net, had been a decent sized hit, the follow-ups Playing To Win and No Reins had dropped off considerably, charting in the lower 70s and 80s in their native Australia, where every other album had made the top twenty. So when Farnham left after No Reins in spring of 1986, he wasn't much further advanced as a solo star than five years earlier with Uncovered. No record labels were lining up to propose him a solo album deal. Thus the home-spun deal with borrowed money that could have ruined his manager. Given the song material they had gathered, Farnham and his team felt that Whispering Jack would do pretty well. 

You could say that Whispering Jack did pretty well. You could also say that World War II was a minor disagreement. When the album dropped, no one expected it to essentially become the second-best selling album down under, outselling every album in Australian history but Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell (huh!?), though his second place was later usurped by * checks notes* Shania Twain (gulp!). One of the crazy things about Whispering Jack is how freakin' ordinary it is. It's an album of its time for sure, combining the prevailing AOR sound with some very light synth, soul and funk touches. Other than that it is as 80s as an album gets: boomy drum machines, keyboards everywhere, the works. The closest comparison would maybe be something like Steve Winwood's almost contemporary Back In The High Life Again, also a very slick and polished album by a veteran. Then again, sign of the times, in 1986 no one wanted something edgy or new, instead something unassuming and comforting would do just fine. Just ask the almost twenty million people worldwide who bought Brothers In Arms a year earlier. 

The biggest album you've never heard of...or heard...

So Whispering Jack doesn't stick out in the way a sales sensation like Thriller or Born In The USA did. Those albums essentially had no album tracks, and for good reason. Whispering Jack, like most albums, does. It's fine, but uneven and not too memorable outside of its singles, and certainly nothing that would make one think it'll create a frenzy. And yet a frenzy it did create, and incredibly many fellow Aussies could agree on it, sending it to the top of the charts for a combined 25 weeks and 24x platinum sales down under.  To say this was unexpected is an understatement. Farnham had planned a tour of pubs and small concert halls to support the album, and I gotta say, it must have been a trip to see Farnham sing in a pub in late 1986 while "You're The Voice" and Whispering Jack were starting to tear up the singles and album charts, respectively. Seeing how those dates didn't nearly satisfy demand, Farnham and band booked a tour of much bigger venues for 1987, the Jack's Back tour, which was another huge success. 

So why am I telling you all this? First of all, if you are an American One Buck Head - and you guys are statistically the biggest visitor group - John Farnham and his huge success oceans away might have passed you by completely. In the U.S. he isn't even a one-hit wonder, with the worldwide smash "You're The Voice" creeping to a measly 82 for his only chart position. How is this posssible I ask of you? "You're The Voice", the inofficial anthem of Australia, was everywhere on the radio in late '86 and early '87  - certainly in my neck of the woods - and a staple of mainstream radio for years to come. Well, everywhere except in the U.S., obviously. The other reason to have a post on John Farnham, despite his music possibly not all that interesting for a number of the One Buck Heads, is that for once I want to get ahead of the curve. You know, dead man's curve. 

The man, the mighty mullet and the manager who mortgaged...

It annoyed me mightily when back in September musicians kept dying and I kept obiting. Not this time! Not with Johnny! I will post John Farnham music while he is still with us, dammit! I have reasons to worry, and hurry, though. In September there was a huge tribute concert to him in Sydney, but he couldn't attend, with his family releasing a health update to explain his absence. Having survived throat cancer an accompanying reconstructive jaw and face surgery in 2022, Farnham is now wheelchair-bound and needs constant oxygen. A photo from not too long ago has him looking dangerously fragile. So, The Voice will never sing again, except in things like this little retrospective I have put together. And by 'little' I mean 'certainly oversized for a lot of people', because three discs worth of stuff from someone who in most (non-Australians') books is a one or one-and-a-half hit wonder seems excessive. But hey, you know the One Buck Guy likes to get excessive sometimes. 

And I'm not gonna lie, Farnham isn't the kind of guy where you find dozens of fascinating deep cuts to go along with his popular mainstream songs. The farthest we go into deep cut territory is unearthing a couple of unusual covers from the man. You would expect Farnham - back in his Johnny MOR days - to cover Elton John, and he does so, reasonably well, but it's more interesting to see him tackle songs by AC/DC, Alice Cooper, ZZ Top and Led Zeppelin, as well as The Band. Now, "It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll)" is at least half tongue in cheek, but he really throws himself full-throated into harder rock numbers like "Black Dog" or "Legs", just to wash the "Sadie" stink off. 

The artist in his "Sadie" teen idol days...

The other thing I realized when putting this together was how many soul and soul-influenced songs Farnham sang and issued. I had never really put him in the dreaded blue-eyed soul category, but he acquits himself just fine on covers of chestnuts like "Tryin' To Live My Life Without You" or "You Don't Know Like I Know". And make no mistake about it. People calling him The Voice was of course a play on his biggest hit, but Farnham really can sing the hell out of almost anything. It's not subtle, but who needs subtlety all the time? Crank up the speakers, and let The Voice belt out something anthemic. You'll definitely have a bunch of those in these fifty tracks collected from his work spanning 1971 to 2011.

So, if you don't, or barely, know John Farnham, check this out. If you do, you'll probably still find a bunch of worthwhile stuff on here anyway. So, yeah, everyone hear should check The Voice - A John Farnham Anthology to hear The Voice. 

All Pearls No Swine 45: Let's Check What We've Got Here...

Dear customer, in the name of our new and improved customer service program, our R & D and Quality Control departments will now allow you to verify yourself the quality of our products before pushing the download purchase button!

Please go down today's All Pearls No Swine checklist, to see if volume 45 is truly complying with the standards you expect from this beloved series:

- 20 tracks? Check!

- Mostly unknown and underappreciated songs and artists? Check!

- Some private press items? Check!

- A variety of genres? Check!

> If so, please specify:

prog rock: Say hello again to Ragnarok, whose borderline candidates I couldn't find a place for on my fabulous compilation of the band's work will find their way into APNS volumes, including this comp's opener "Caviar Queen". And in true bookends style, we also close with some prog from down under, with  S.J.C. Powell's "Governor Lane".

country rock: An obvious must for any self-respecting APNS compilation from the 70's, we have indeed included a number of gems, including Santa Fe's "Tomorrow's Gone", Hal Paris' "Cool Country Breeze" and Wayne Parker's old school weeper "I Can't Stand Country Music" (but you do, Wayne, you do!).

folk and folk rock: a couple of prime spots have been reserved for the purveyors of delicate sounds, such as Stephen Ambrose and his lovely ode to a "Gypsy Moth", Brian Reeves' slightly jazzy "Nuance", Gallery's "Let No Man Steal Your Theme" and David W. Peters' "Joy Once Was". My favorite, though, is the wonderful "40 And Getting Colder" from Gayland Titus & Paul Wehling. 

rock'n'roll: we sure have a couple of rockin' tunes on this one, thanks for asking, courtesy of Captain Beyond, who by the time of their last album Dawn Explosion had morphed into a hard rock band, a long ways away from the prog rock group they started as, but "Do Or Die" - clichéd title aside - is a fine little rocker. So is "Justa Nother Teenage rebel" (yup, that's really how they spelled it, these outcasts rascals), from Northern Irish punk band The Outcasts (below). Red Wilder Blue build up a pretty mean groove on "Orange County Jail", as do Ten Wheel Drive on "The Pickpocket" and Weight on "Mr. M, Mr. N, And Mr. C (With A Help From Mr. D)".

- volume equalizing and declicking for improved fidelity and enjoyment? Check!

- so, any questions?

What if I'm a psych fan, like, uh, Psychfan? 

Oh, we got you. The two tracks just mentioned, as well as the aforementioned "Let No Man Steal Your Theme" and "My Only Love" from French outsider folkie Dominiqe Droin (yes, Dominique is a dude's name over here!) have some definitive psych influences. 

- and, uh, (lowers volume), what if I'm secretly into (lowers volume some more) soft rock? 

(softly): Don't worry, we won't tell anyone that you enjoy Nasty Road's "She Lit Up My Eyes" or the B. Mello Band's "Kona Country Song"!

-so, any other business? No? 

Then I ask you gently to proceed to the check out line, this volume of All Pearls, No Swine has passed all quality control tests. Enjoy your purchase here at All Pearls, No Swine One Buck Records! 

Is It Pop Music? Well, Kinda Sorta, Sometimes. Is It Iggy Pop Music? Oh, Yeah...

 

Well, some of y'all know me by now (cue: If you don't know me by now...). So it should not be a huge surprise, that once I turned my attention to James Newell Osterberg a.k.a. Iggy Pop, I would not only leaveiat at the Popster's French Chanson adventure. That was fun, and I posted it because there's a pretty big chance it wasn't something in your collection, but as usual, once I get involved with an artist, I get involved. Thus was born Pop/Osterberg, a highly personal collection of favorites from the man. And I say the man, because there ain't no Stooges to be found here. Firstly, I'm just not a big fan of The Stooges' noisy stuff, what are ya gonna do. Proto-punk this, classic that - I just can't really get into The Stooges and probably never really will - c'est la vie, as even Mr. Pop/Osterberg might say with his charming French accent. 

Instead you get nineteen tracks from throughout the man's career. There are obviously some of the big songs from The Idiot and Lust For Life, and I do have a penchant for the New Wave-ish music he turned to in the late 70s and early 80s, notably from New Values and Party. The latter one is especially hilarious, with Pop trying to embrace new trends and writing quote-unquote commercial material, then ending up singing "I'm gonna squeeze you like a tomato/ I'm gonna peel you like a potato", as on "Pleasure". I'm not sure whether we should laugh with Iggy or at him here, but it's all good fun either way.

FUBARed or secretly brainwashed by the music of my childhood, I of course have a soft spot for Iggy's stabs at commercial success with big, simple AOR rock like "Cry For Love" or his cover of "Real Wild Child (Wild One)", and listening to the latter, I'm amazed how much of a carbon copy Ric Ocasek's version for the Pretty Woman soundtrack is, maybe because they couldn't license the original? I'm also on the record for liking his songs from Brick by Brick, notably "Candy", the duet with Kate Pierson that might be hands down my favorite pop tune, uh, I mean Pop tune. Just marvelous stuff. 

This isn't some crazy deep dive, nor throwing together tons of rarities or what not, just a simple and personal collection of stuff I like from Iggy. Now, there is one song that you definitely haven't seen or heard before like this, whether that's a good thing or not I let you decide. Let's just say that I liked some of the poetry stuff he did with Tarwater, and one of such bits shows up in an unexpected place. Did I also mention that while the song rules, I always found the interminable - here's one that's decidedly not for the Tik Tok kids of today - intro of "Lust For Life" a little annoying? So, you do the math. Let's just say, there's a 141 2/3 % chance that these two ideas will collide. 

Considering Pop's eclectic tastes, having him to poetry readings amidst that minimalist music with Tarwater is not a big surprise. Having him, a man as fiercely staring down old age and mortality as anyone, read Dylan Thoma's classic "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" to a lonely jazz trumpet and an electroncic backing isn't either. But it would hve been to easy to let him and the reader get out of Pop/Osterberg on that note of calm defiance...so I programmed it as the penultimate track, leading straight into "Frenzy", an appropriately frenzied number from Every Loser, all piss and vinegar, like back in the days of yore. Pop warns us not to go gently into that good night, then doesn't, instead spitting out "I got a dick and two balls, that's more than you all" as the opening line, then leading a chorus with "I'm in a frenzy, you fucking prick/ I'm in a frenzy, you goddamn dick". Juvenile? Absolutely! Unbecoming of a senior citizen ? You tell me! But, you know, all chanson-loving, wine-drinking and poetry-reading aside, that's the way Iggy would wanna go out, I felt, so that's the way Pop/Osterberg should go out. 

So, some pop, some rock, some New Wave, and a lot of Pop with a Capital P. What's not to like? 

Say Hello To The Smoothly Singing Scumbag...

I discovered David Alexander Hess like a lot of people discovered him : As evil psychopath rapist and all around piece of shit Krug Stillo in Wes Craven's exploitation classic The Last House On The Left. Take one look at Hess' mug: It's not so much a case of “only a face a mother could love” as “lock away your daughters and wives (and not in a seduction type of way)”. Hess was typecast as a scumbag because, well, he looks like one. That wasn't always the case. In the late-60s, while he rather unsuccessfully trying to make a career singing sunshine pop and almost-novelty songs, with a handlebar mustache and flowing locks - somewhat looking like he tried to out-Lee Hazlewood Lee Hazlewood - Hess looked positively goofy. But when he curbed those locks a bit and traded the mustache for a five-day beard he looked...scummy. So scummy indeed, than instead of just hiring Hess to provide the soundtrack for his upcoming exploitation/horror movie, Wes Craven gave him the role of lead villain. 

The Last House On The Left is a real product of its time, and its DIY, cheap-as-hell filmed on 16mm look would uncomfortably look like someone's home video, if it weren't for some extremely stagey performances and Craven's ill-advised decision to include comic interludes with a pair of bumbling cops including young future genre film stalwart Martin Kove. I'd argue that that cheap, 'it could be your neighbor filming' look intensified the sense of unease of the film, in the same way that almost contemporary The Texas Chainsaw MasscreT's extremely grimy look did for that film. Both movies aren't nearly as savage in their blood and gore scenes as their grisly reputation suggests, especially from a modern point of view, but the lived-in look that evades studio artifice makes them hit closer to home. The Last House On The Left looks terribly dated today, and it's fair to say it hasn't held up particularly well, but you can still see why the film caused quite the stir in 1972...

The way most people met David Hess...talk about first impressions

Craven used the bumbling cops-plotline as a cutaway from the main action and a way of relief from the quickly growing dark main narrative, but it wasn't his only means of juxtaposing that story's nastiness. The other was: David Hess's other main contribution. Its soundtrack. From the snatch of a song illustrating the opening titles, the audience had the soft, folky sounds of an obscure songwriter that also turned out to be Hess, who I believe was hired as a musician first before director Wes Craven and producer Sean S. Cunningham (future director of the original Friday The 13th) decided that he would also make a pretty convincing psychopath. The use of Hess's music in the film is quite jarring, even a little off-putting – it's either ironic or illfitting, depending on the point of view. Murder and mayhem scenes are offset by sweet, orchestral balladry - something Quentin Tarantino stole 1:1 for The Hateful Eight, when he took Hess's Last House track “And Now You're All Alone” for the scene of the murder of the young black store assistant - , the bad guys are introduced with a comic hony tonk tune, murder scenes are offset by bleeping synthesizer experiments.

The Last House On The Left could get you interested in David Hess's music, but you would have had trouble finding it in stores: Hess couldn't capitalize on his new-found movie fame (or, rather, notoriety) for his music career, as he simply couldn't find someone willing to distribute his songs. So an album called Wait For The Rain doesn't exist as such, it's my stab at what a David Hess album from the early to mid-1970s could look and sound like. The music covers the early 1970s until (at least) 1975 when he recorded, or possibly re-recorded, “The Ballad Of Potato Fritz” for an odd Euro-Western of the same name. What these tracks have in common is, generally speaking, their folk-rock sound. As said, Hess had dabbled in the sounds of the time in the late 1960s, recording sunshine pop and slighly psychedelic ballads, then went in a more folkie direction in line with the rise of the singer-songwriters of the 1970s.

Hess as Hazlewood...groovy, baby!

The songs on “Wait For The Rain” come from two sources, the aforementioned The Last House On The Left soundtrack and a grab bag of unreleased vintage late 60s to early 70s Hess tracks called (Climbing Up) The Sunshine Path. The songs that were from Last House itself presented a challenge, as most of them were little more than sketches rather than fully fledged songs. So in order to have a halfway reasonable presentation of the signature songs from The Last House On The Left, I had to get my editing gloves on, a challenge the One Buck Guy doesn't shy away from, obviously. 

As said, most of these were simply not satisfying songs. Take “Wait For The Rain” for example. The original version is an odd duck: It starts with a minute and a half of an orchestral theme before pivoting into a mainly acoustic guitar groove for a single verse and then go back to an orchestral version of the melody before finishing up in two and a half minutes. The title line and accompanying chorus that everyone who had seen Last House remembers aren't even in the song! So, in order to turn it into a more classically structured (and hopefully more agreable to listen to) song I took the chorus from the Last House opening titles, they lead straight into the verse, then the instrumental outro leads into a repetition of the chorus. The long orchestral intro was lopped off and is now it's own song, the reprise as the closing track of the album, topped with a snatch of the chorus that was originally tagged on the absolute tail end of the end credits. 

Pensive...yes...sensitive...NO..this guy's thinking of MURDER!

The other Last House track I absolutely wanted to include had its own share of problems. It's the aforementioned honly tonk number that describes the plot's murdering villains in comical terms. It's called "Baddies Song" on the soundtrack, but that's honestly a terrible title, so I renamed it "Krug And Company" after one of the film's alternative titles. Oh, speaking of terrible.  It started with a long instrumental section dominated by – of all things – a freakin' Kazoo. Seriously, nothing screams “comic vaudeville tune” quite like a fuckin' kazoo. Did I mention that some found the music ill-fitting? And that I hate, hate, hate comic use of kazoos. Children, always remember the first rule of this blog: no fuckin' kazoos on One Buck Records! 

We jump thus right into the song and its two verses. There is a third verse, but, alas, it wasn't part of the same song, but rather of the end credits that reprised it. That version was played at a different, quicker speed so I had to lower the speed to adjust to the rest of the song. You will still easily make out the seam between the two parts, though, because - while I think I got the speed about right -  unfortunately the sound quality of the end titles is quite a bit worse. I wonder whether they lost the master tape of that one and took that song from a video transfer or something of that sort. With just the three verses the song was still a bit on the shortish side, a little over a minute and a half, so the instrumental intro to the end credits version became the song's outro. Got all that? Complicated you say? Well, sure, but as usual the One Buck Guy tries everything he can to improve the music at hand. 

The artist as a very young (and decidedly less scummy-looking) man...

The aforementioned “The Ballad Of Potato Fritz” is named "Promised Land" here, as it was on the Left House soundtrack where it was finally issued, but it does sound like a song for a movie, having a wonderful widescreen production, including orchestration and female choir vocals, and its lyrics openly pointing to a Western tale. A definitive highlight of this album that never was. Elsewhere, on cuts like "Sweet, Sweet Franziska", "Daddy, Put Your Coat Of Many Colors On" he shows his gift for balladry, while upping the tempo on the r'n'b-flavored "Mississippi Fantasy". 

Overall, it's hard to claim that Wait For The Rain is the equivalent of some sort of lost classic that never existed, but it's probably also fair to say that this music deserved to be heard back in the day, and it deserves to be heard today. Many will remember David Hess as a violent, volatile villain, but maybe we can also remember David Hess the sensitive folkie? The One Buck Guy is doing his part for that, and you can do yours by checking out Wait For The Rain...

Edge Of Seventeen: The Bluegrass Chartbusters Continue To Come Of Age

Easy to come up with goofy pop culture references while this series is in its teens, so I take what I can get while the getting's still good. It's probably tougher finding one for, say volume 26 or so. Yes, we continue our collection of cool Bluegrass covers, because that's what we do around here. Now, with this series, you know what we do, so let me just quickly point out the usual notables: newcomers, faves etc. We will also bid farewell to the Sawtooth Bluegrass Band, who open things here with a real neat version of "Ring Of Fire" and graced a number of these early volumes...thanks, guys. 

As for the new blood...well, there's new blood, and there's, uh, old new blood I guess. Then new blood includes Blue Horyzon, which was a group of British (!) youngsters that lit up a couple of musical festivals in 2011 and 2012 with their remakes of popular songs, and then seem to have vanished...joining the mainstream workforce, maybe? Anyways, a couple of cool covers from them survive, including this take on Outkast's "Hey Ya!". The Petersons have normally cornered the 'kinda religious trad bluegrass family band' on this series (though not on this volume), so let's add the Ebbing Family Band, who are, well, a religious trad bluegrass family band. They don't do tons of non-traditional or religious numbers, so having them do a great version of the Dixie Chicks' underrated classic "Travelin' Soldier" (destroyed charts-wise by the then-current 'Saddam's Angels' controversy) was a find I was particularly happy with. 

Robyn Adele Anderson is doing all kinds of retro covers in a number of styles, often promoted with fitting videos. Her version of "Seven Nations Army" is the best bluegrass version of the White Stripes classic that I could find. Branches is a progressive prog band that did the occasional cover song, such as their take on psych classic "Somebody To Love". 

As for the old new blood? Well, Jim Gaudet & The Railroad Boys have been around the block for a while, as they all seem to be in their fifties or older, playing a self-described 'hillbilly rock'n'roll' and mostly doing original work. Again, they're not above the occasional cover, and seem to be some real Southern good ole boys, bringing a redneck hick vibe to "Walk Of Life" that is pretty irresistible. Daniel Grindstaff has showed up already two volumes ago, but brings with him two guest stars in Paul Brewster and the one and only dearly departed Dolly Parton. God bless Dolly, may she stay "Forever Young", at least in our minds. 

Add in a cool cover image and the usual vets of this series bringing a number of cool cover versions  and we've got ourselves another winner here. If you like progressive bluegrass, check out what The Brothers Comatose are doing on the extended closing number "No Quarter". I also love Iron Horse's take on Modest Mouse's "Dramamine" and Bourbon Revival's take on "Wrecking Ball", the only Miley Cyrus cover of the series. Like I said, cool stuff all around. Which I will now let you get to without any further ado. 

Dead Dance Disco!

Thanks to internet pal Jonder (see our exchange in the Phantasm thread), here's a little bonus extra repost, too late for the Halloween party, but early enough for the day of the dead, if you are still in spooky mode. Dance With The Dead on the day of the dead, baby!

Phantastic Phantasms, Pholks!

Call me a phan, pholk. I love the Phantasm series with all my heart, but I had a weird roundabout way to see Don Coscarelli's beloved cult horror series. The original Phantasm was in a media rights package picked up by one of the big national chains who didn't put that many films into their programming, and when they did, putting a curious, ultra low budget film from the late 70s on probably wasn't on their agenda. So that film never ran on TV. Phantasm II, the only Hollywood-backed major release, was in a rights package that went to a private channel, and since they had to fill hours of programming without having their own programming they stuffed their schedule with American TV series and films. So Phantasm II was on at least once a year, if not more. Instead of falling in love with the original, that's the one I fell in love with. It's not a bad entry. It is weird as hell, but not as inscrutably weird as the original film, which is often a literal 'what the fuck just happened' experience. Phantasm barely has a plotline and almost no inner logic. Rather than a coherent film, it's more a collection of little horror vignettes involving the same people, with Scenes pretty much coming and going in seemingly arbitrary order.  

Part of this was of course it's production history, with Coscarelli basically rounding up a bunch of friends and filming the movie on weekends over an entire year, then spending months trying to put this footage into shape in editing. And the other part is that it's just a profoundly strange picture, with Coscarelli giving in to any whims and the oddest of inspirations (putting his finger through a styrofoam cup inspired him for the scene with the Tall Man's severed but moving finger), and scrapping a linear narrative for surreal dream imagery and just plain oddness. Compared to that, Phantasm II is a model of narrative clarity, though that was the price of doing business with a major studio. 'No dream sequences' was the edict which was (almost) followed, so the story is more streamlined, while still keeping enough odd moments so as not to confuse it with cookie-cutter studio ware. It does what sequels usually do, going bigger and (depending on your point of view) better: more evil dwarfs that still look like the Jawas from Star Wars, more evil henchmen, more elaborate evil spheres that drill their way through people. 

Whoah, now that's a mouthful...

I had the (mis-) fortune of also seeing Phantasm III on TV, but it's easily the weakest of Coscarelli's films, with him seemingly taking inspiration from Sam Raimi's increasingly comical Evil Dead series and Bruce Campbell's cult hero Ash, modeling series stalwart Reggie - the ever-horny, thus always trouble-finding ice cream vendor turned Tall Man-hunter - after Ash's overly confident but slightly incompetent anti-hero. That alone would've been fine, but Coscarelli want way too far in the frenetic horror-comedy direction, allowing a trio of cackling zombies that are Deadites in all but name to take over parts of the film. Add to that a black lesbian ex-marine and a precocious kid with killer traps (a perverted or possibly more honest Home Alone?!) as Reggie's sidekicks, and Phantasm III is a miscalculation. 

Phantasm OblIVion came out in 1997 after a number of attempts to make a bigger, more ambitious (and thus more ambitiously budgeted) movie fell through, Coscarelli called up the gang and decided 'fuck it, let's make a movie'. It's a truly slimmed-down low-budget affair, with a grand total of five speaking roles! Then again, the idea that the Tall Man is emptying the earth, one small town after another, kind of invites this reduction, doen't it? Coscarelli also reduces the budget by reusing a couple of scenes that didn't make the cut of the first Phantasm. And while some of these do feel shoehorned in, others are marvelous fits. Phantasm OblIVion is a definite slow burn, more of an abstract meditation on the themes of the serie sequential sequel. And in that way, very true to the spirit of the original as a bunch of distinct vignettes that hang together relatively well. It has probably my favorite shot of the entire series, shot guerilla-style on Wilkshire boulevard one Thanksgiving morning. And it ends on a marvelous scene, another outtake from 1977/1978 that mixes dialogue from 1997 in. "It's the wind...just the wind". No third sequel to a cheapo horror series has ever ended in such a poetic and wonderful way. (You can see the movie right here and the scene in question starting from the 1.23.30 mark. It's a spoiler, and it isn't. Nothing ever ends in the world of Phantasm, and evrything does.)

All right, no more ice cream for you...and you...and you...and you

Seeing the lights of Reggie's ice cream van slowly disappear in the darkness is the absolute best way to leave the series, as the belated follow-up Phantasm RaVager - not coincidentally the only film not directed by Coscarelli - is a bit of a disaster. A fan project that grew into a feature film, but can never disguise its origins as a bunch of short films, making RaVager the most incoherent film in the entire series, which really is quite the feat! Most sequences feel barely connected, and while accepting the limits of low budget constraints had alwas been part and parcel of being a phan, the awful CGI is an eye soar, it's like watching video game cut scenes from a decade earlier. Truly hideous stuff. While there is a certain pathos and satisfaction in seeing the gang go out there one more time for the hell of it, including Angus Scrimm who was a cool 86 when they filmed it, the film is just not good, or good enough. Yes, it is heartfelt, but I'd still stick to those red tail lights fading. And yet, I can't hate on it, checking in with these same actors, and these films, over a span of almost 45 years is like seeing old friends again, and you love them, even the obnoxious ones...

I don't know if you came for a retrospective on Phantasm, but hey, once you get me to talkin', I ain't stoppin' 'til I had my say. As usual, there is of course a musical reason for this as well. As Halloween is upon us, it feels just right to bring out my love for horror films, togethetr with another horro-film related treat for your ears. The music score for Phantasm was a collaboration between veteran Fred Myrow (who had scored "Soylent Green" before) and Edward Seagrave, and was inspired by Dario Argento favorites Goblin and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" extracts as made famous by The Exorcist. The latter will be obviou to anyone listening to the Phantasm theme, which is a pretty bald-faced rip-off of "Tubular Bells", but hey, I dig it more than Oldfield's tune.  

Yo Fred, we won't get sued over this, huh?! 

Today's offering are two suites, one for the original film, and one for its sequel. The score by Myrow and Seagrave has its moments - notably any time the main theme is involved, but also a lot of incidental music that isn't much without pictures (and, sign of the times, a horrid disco tune), so I basically edited the best moments together for about a vinyl side's worth of atmospheric music from Phantasm. The suite for Phantasm II was actually a bonus program for the score for Phantasm when that album was reissued by Silva Screeens in 1991. It is a rerecording, slightly synthetic-sounding, that I just tightened up a bit and relieved of its stupid, ultracheap and cheasy explostion sound effects. That score, co-written and performed by Christopher L. Stone (who would take over scoring of OlIVion and RaVager), gives a good feel of the more action-oriented nature of Phantasm II. 

An additional bonus is my improved extra edition version of Best Of Horror, a now somewhat classic compilation around here, that someone asked for and I'm happy to re-up in its proper thread. Hell, I'll also throw in 2024's offering, a sampler of music from Italian horror films and giallos, 'cause these guys know their creepy music. Features classic tracks by Goblin, Ennio Morricone and Claudio Simonetti, as well as a rare track, an outtake medley by Keith Emerson, lovingly assembled by yours truly, same as it ever was. 

Now, all that should cover your needs in atmospheric, spooky and creepy music from the movies, for Halloween or any other time of the year, really...

So, Happy Halloween if you're celebrating that, and happy listeing either way if you don't...