Peter Fonda's hired hand and The Hired Hand

If you have never seen Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, you should probably rectify that omission. It is a fabulous and unique movie, part of the wave of revisionist Westerns that the New Hollywood brought with them, and yet it's own thing entirely apart. It was directed by one of the spearheads of the New Hollywood, coming freshly off Easy Rider, with a blank cheque for his directing debut, yet it has no signs of hipness or appealing easily to the counter culture the way Rider did. Of course it was a disaster to market, bombed and got taken out of cinemas almost immediately. Its failure alienated Peter Fonda from the Hollywood industry for years. It is a Western unlike any other. 

Part of its otherness, even within the genre, is the screenplay by Scot author Alan Sharp. Here, men aren't stoic and stay cool in every situation, the stereotype of the Westerner. When men die here, they wince and are afraid, they cry for their mother, or for a friend. "Hold me, Arch." Women aren't just there to support the men of action around them, they are their own boss. The decide what they do with their lives, with their bodies. When Peter's sister Jane watched the film, she told him that he'd made a feminist film. She isn't entirely wrong. 

Another part of its otherness is the outstanding work by DP Vilmos Zsigmond and editor Frank Mazzola. Especially in the first half of the movie - more impressionistic and less plot/dialogue-heavy - they create a Western unlike any other. Zsigmond's outstanding filmography - often only using natural light - was amplified by Mazzola's editing, with freeze frames and impositions, to create painterly tableaus that you haven't seen like this. Fonda wanted to make a film about the elements, and it shows, even if he had to be convinced at first to keep the stunning sequencees Mazzola created out of Zsigmond's fantastic images.  

And the last part of the otherness is Bruce Langhorne's music score, for which he played dozens of instruments, including unexpected ones like Sitar or flute. A true one man band. A review described his music as "both earthy and ethereal", which is right on the money. The earthy part are the choice of instruments, inspired by what instruments really were played at the time. The ethereal part is the music itself, which is extrememy beautiful, but also ghostly and otherworldly at times, perfectly supporting the slightly off-kilter atmosphere of The Hired Hand, especially in genre terms. 

It's maybe fitting that Bruce Langhorne himself is somewhat of a hired hand - a studio musician who would lend his acoustic fingerpicking skills to many a folk artist from the 1960s, most prominently Bob Dylan. It is by established by the man himself that the title character of "Mr. Tambourine Man" is Langhorne himself. The Bobster himself said "'Mr. Tambourine Man,' I think, was inspired by Bruce Langhorne. Bruce was playing guitar with me on a bunch of the early records. On one session, (producer)Tom Wilson had asked him to play tambourine. And he had this gigantic tambourine. It was like, really big. It was as big as a wagon-wheel. He was playing, and this vision of him playing this tambourine just stuck in my mind. He was one of those characters...he was like that. I don't know if I've ever told him that."  Like the inscrutable title character of Dylan's tale, Langhorne jingle-jangled, and played, and continued playing, never drawing much attention to himself. A true hired hand. He never made a solo record until 2011, an album that never came out on a label. It was called Mr. Tambourine Man and featured Langhorne and his big-ass tambourine the size of a wagon wheel. 

The Hired Hand, the movie is a total mood piece, and so is The Hired Hand, the music score. In keeping with that I worked the score into a single long piece, a sort of mixtape that keeps all the magical parts of Langhorne's score, mostly in chronological order, and eliminates a couple of minutes of more incidental music.The original score wasn't very long to begin with, around 25 minutes, and you'll get a little more than 17 minutes of that here. Just the best for the readers of One Buck Records, same as it ever was. 

                                  Now that is a grown man's tambourine right there...

Let Langhorne whisk you away for a magical quarter of an hour, then go and find out how you can see The Hired Hand. You will regret neither.