There Can Be Only One...And A Half, Finally!

Just as the quickening never really arrives (or is retroactively written out) in the Highlander films, it never really seems to be over here on One Buck Records. Or so it seems! Really, this little addendum project came together after I had finished my reworked 'lost' Queen soundtrack for Highlander. Specifically I realized that the version of "Who Wants To Live Forever" is the classic version featuring both Brian May and Freddie Mercury on lead vocals, but in the film the version is sng by Freddie Mercury alone. So I looked to find that version, and in searching Highlander-related Queen content I came upon a couple of goodies which will now form this bonus EP to the Highlander soundtrack.  

We start off with an alternate, early version of "Princes Of The Universe" which starts in a familiar way but becomes quite different in its second part, once Brian May cuts across proceedings with a trademark guitar line. The song is also still without the "born to be kings..." countermelody that would be added later. Then we have the beautiful piano-led version (played by Brian May himself) of "Who Wants To Live Forever", entitled "Forever" and at the time attached as a bonus track on the CD editions of the A Kind Of Magic album. The song that would close out side a of this EP is a real curious find, the first demo of what would become "A Kind Of Magic". At this rudimentary stage the lyrics don't make references to the word magic, instead Freddie sings about "One Vision". Which would promptly push Queen to form two songs from this demo cut in August 1985. One would retain the melody and most of the lyrics and become "A Kind Of Magic", but the band would then make a whole new song around the phrase "One Vision", their only single release of 1985 in November. That song finally ended up on the Iron Eagle soundtrack.  

Side b opens with an unused track tracked early (together with the alternate version of "Princes Of The Universe") called "Battle Scene", which hints at the idea that Queen were originally supposed to do more score music for the film instead of the heavy reliance of Michael Kamen's orchestral score in the final film. Then comes the aforementioned Freddie only-version of  "Who Wants To Live Forever". Honestly, its' an interesting find, but I still like the version with May's lead vocals better. There's a fragility in it that Mercury can't deliver, and I like how May's sweet vocals do the first verse and then Freddie's more showy vocals duitably come in once the song gets darker and more dramatic, matching the intensity of Mercury's vocals musically. And then we end with an a capella edit of "A Kind Of Magic", just in case anyone has forgotten what a great singer Freddie Mercury was!

So, Highlander bonus round, Queen bonus round, and of course as things are prone to do with one thing leading to another, this is not the last time Queen will appear on this blog. But for now, once more back to the mid-80s, and a kind of Queen magic... 

Bring out the dead...bring out the stone cold...classics!

Well, the musician deaths start to pile up again. Roberta Flack is gone, but so is Rick Buckler, drummer of the inimitable Jam. So I planned on posting something different, but as usual when the grim reaper reaps, plans change. I don't have anything specific for Flack, but I probably at some point would have posted All Mod Cons anyway because it's such a great rock'n'roll album. Some might prefer In The City for its pure Who-esque attack, and there might even be some who prefer Setting Sons' sophistication (no one in their right mind has Sound Affects as their favorite). But for me, The Jam's masterpiece is All Mod Cons, a building block of every respectable rock'n'roll record collection.

All Mod Cons clearly shows the influence of Ray Davies and the Kinks on Paul Weller's story songs about "David Watts" or "Billy Hunt". The latter's frantic rhythm, the delicate balladry of "English Rose", the snarling, punk-ish "(Didn't We Have) A Nice Time" - this album is classic after classsic after classic. Not a minute wasted, not a bad song on the album - what more can you ask for? 

So, without much ado, maximum rock'n'roll from PaulWeller and the gang...

Get excited...for more Excitable Boy of the excitable Warren Zevon

I didn't necessarily plan on doing an alt version of Excitable Boy, because there is no real reason to do so. Excitable Boy is an excellent album from top to (almost) bottom, so it doesn't obviously need a do-over, but then again Warren Zevon didn't need one either, yet I was happy to try to strengthen its thematic undercurrent in transforming it into Manifest Destiny. But the work on that Zevon album led me - as usual - down the road of doing a re-listen to most of his discography and finally I did some minor work on Excitable Boy. 

It's hard to beat the one-two punch of Warren Zevon and Excitable Boy. They are both great albums, but they are great in different ways. I have a theory of what makes an album great, and now you will obviously be obliged to hear it. Obviously, the ground rule is that you will needs lots of great songs and no bad ones. Then, there are two ways of being great. You either have a coherence in sound, sensibility and possibly themes, which Warren Zevon has in abundance. Or, you can simply have a batch of killer songs, which is the case of Excitable Boy. Excitable Boy doesn't have much coherence in between the songs - in stark contrast to its predecessor - but it essentially plays like a Greatest Hits record, proposing a bunch of memorable songs in different styles. 

And yet, things could have been quite different, as told by guitar hero Richard "Waddy" Wachtel (and co-producer of Excitable Boy) in the Zevon oral history biography I'll Sleep When I'm Dead. Deep into the work on the album, co-producer Jackson Browne called him up to invite him top a replay party, to which a fluxommed Wachtel replied: "Don't you need a full album for that?", to which Browne replied that they did and the work was done. At that point, during the first 'final set list' of the album, Excitable Boy included two ballads from way back when to essentially fill up what was already an exceedingly short album. "Tule's Blues", a beautiful ballad written for his then girlfriend Marilyn 'Tule' Livingston, was already almost a decade old at that point, while "Frozen Notes" dates from the early 70s. 

Rock'n'roller Wachtel famously hated these quote "boring, folky" numbers, then noted that the audiences yawned their way through these two numbers at the playback party, with the proposed first version of the album running a ridiculous 24 minutes. It's closer to 27, but point taken, it still was a rather slim and sketchy proposition that wouldn't have allowed the album its instant classic status. So Wachtel pulled Zevon and Browne out of the room, told them they don't have a record yet and get to work dammit while he was on tour for two weeks. By his return, Browne and Zevon had co-written "Tenderness On The Block" and Zevon had come up with the classic "Lawyers, Guns And Money". And the Excitable Boy we all know (hopefully) and love was born. 

So, what do to with Excitable Boy? "Veracruz" is off the album in the One Buck Records alternate universe, but I really wanted to put the very short, very charming a capella "I Need A Truck" on it, which is the perfect preamble for things to follow. And then I needed another track from the leftovers. I agree with Wachtel that that new version of "Frozen Notes" is a snooze, inferior to the first version he cut in the early 70s, but I think his revised version of "Tule's Version" is a worthwhile addition. The first version was lost adrift on Zevon's misshapen debut album Dead or Alive, even if it served for hinting at something deeper to Zevon's songwriting. But really, what makes this new version is Zevon's lyrical revision of the ending of the song, which changes the perspective to his young son Jordan, the kid he had with Tule, and that he basically didn't see for his entire early childhod - the song's final line "does he ask if I'll be coming home soon?" quietly breaks your heart.  

Which brings me to how this version of Excitable Boy is different from the original. On the surface, not that much has changed: one song out, two other songs in and a different, but not too different sequencing. I wanted "Truck" to segue directly into the familiar opening beat of "Werewolves Of London", pushing otherwise excellent album opener "Johnny Strikes Up The Band" to side two opener. The ballads would make obvious side closing numbers. Otherwise, the biggest issue was were to hide "Nighttime In The Switching Yard". That's right, I said hiding, because NITSY is the clear fly in the ointment here, a song that isn't outright bad, as it is filler, and at almost five minutes by far the longest number of the album, which makes its disco-funk somewhat tiring. Another issue for me was the cover art, which isn't befitting a classic album. I agree with art director Jimmy Wachtel, brother of Waddy, that Warren "looks like a corpse" and "a fifteen-year old boy" due to the abundant retouching of the pictures. Photoshopping before photoshopping! I used the inner sleeve art as new cover art, after playing around with the 'Willy On A Plate' back cover, but results for that one were inconclusive (see below). 

What really sets this edit of Excitable Boy apart from the original is the feel that the two new numbers give it. In its original form, the album was a great example of third person narrator storytelling. Unlike the sometime clearly autobiographical songs on Warren Zevon, none of these songs are specifically about Zevon, making the jolly tales of necrophilia, headless phantom assassins and waitresses working with the Russians a little easier to digest (the merry backing vocal arrangement of "Excitable Boy" really disguises its darker-than-dark tale as a happy singalong moment). Yet, the naked autobiography in "I Need A Truck" and "Tule's Blues"add a bit more Warren into proceedings, from his womanizing and drug and alcohol abuse ("I need a truck to haul all the wimmens from my bed", "I need a truck to haul my percodin and gin") to his role as an absent father in "Tule's Blues".    

Whether Excitable Boy needed more Warren in its tales is for you to decide, but I believe both of the newly added tracks deserve to be heard and appreciated, and surrounded by its A grade colleagues, that is easier and more agreeable than ever. Maybe even...exciting? Take it away, excitable boy...

Yup...you know what time it is...

Having used my Ipod and its shuffle extensively over the last week of holidays - my wife's fancy Musk mobile doesn't accept USB sticks or such, so bluetoothing an Ipod is the only way to get our music in that thing - I thought, hey, let's roll out the random shuffle again, to the applause of one and a half One Buck Heads clapping.

You know the rules by now, folks, if you have a music playing device that can be put on random, do so and list the first ten songs it comes up with. If you don't, just list the last five albums you've listened to. Or, you know, the last three songs that randomly popped in your head. I don't care, just list something music-related. 

As usual I will start things off, so in the comments you'll find my top ten random shuffle. 

And then add to the fun by adding your own. 

Alice Cooper + Hollywood...yup, that works...

Oof, our little Ruckus At The Movies series has been laying dormant for a while, but comes back in 2025 with a bang! Unlike our former participants and noise merchants providing a ruckus at the movies, Vincent Fournier a.k.a. Alice Cooper actually had a bunch of ties to the movie world other than the occasional soundtrack contribution. Given his ample theatrics during his legendary stage shows it seemed only natural that Fournier would also step onto the silver screen. 

The first time I have seen him as an actor was in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, where he was the leader of the homicidal homeless surrounding the church where, uh, the devil is hiding in an oversized lava lamp. Kindasorta. It's actually a pretty good movie that has tons of great Carpenter traits. Title song "Prince of Darkness" is of course featured here. The other Cooper track I distinctly remember is "I Am The Future" from The Class Of 1984, also a great track that set the tone for the film to follow. The Class Of 1984 is deeply silly in some respects - but was also terribly prescient about the rise of violence in high schools and in society in general. 

Hey man, you got some spare change?...or a couple of spare organs to give..?

The tracks of this compilation are split between tracks he submitted for movies - sometimes  commissioned - and tracks for films in which he was acting and thus a logical contributor to the film's soundtrack. This of course means that the films Cooper provided music for include some real howlers and oddities, including Monster Dog and 1974's almost completely forgotten Flash Fearless. Two tracks apiece come from those, erm, classics. One film isn't a howler in the technical sense, but still regularly shows up on 'Worst of..'-lists, and that is the misbegotten musical adaptation of Sgt. Peppers, for which Cooper worked with the Bee Gees (!) on "Because". Like the film, it's an interesting curio, but probably better enjoyed as an abstract concept rather than the musical material itself. 

One track doesn't come from a movie, but was obviously intended for one. Cooper wrote "The Man With The Golden Gun" for the James Bond movie of the same name, yet it's unclear whether that was 'on spec' or whether any of the Bond people really approached him. You have to appreciate how Cooper clearly appoached some of the dynamics of a Bond theme song, including use of brass. It probably wasn't in any serious consideration, but it's an admirable effort and probably better than Lulu's final version abnyway, yet you can see why Cooper's reputation in the mainstream might have the Broccolis shying away from him.

"Uh, sorry to have bothered you, sir, I think I'll stop hitching and take the greyhound...uh, right now..."

He was commissioned to write a title song for Friday The 13th VI - Jason Lives!, though, and delivered. "He's Back (The Man In The Mask)" is featured twice here, both as a demo and the final track in the movie version - both are quite enjoyable and surprisingly good. Kind of like the movie it came from, easily the best fifth sequel to a horror film series - there admittedly aren't that many contenders - but also a genuinely worthwhile slasher with witty, ironic underpinnings. There is also a new version of "Under My Wheels", recorded with 3/5 of Guns'n'Roses for Penelope Spheeris' doc The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II - The Metal Years. 

Cooper's music for film is a bit like the man, or rather the character he plays: a little hoary, a little obvious, but a whole lot of fun. So join Mr. Fournier while he is causing another ruckus at the movies...

 

The French Connection: Présente La Vraie Rockollection!

Et maintenant pour quelque chose complètement différente, comme disait les Monty Python. 

Hey there, possibly francophile One Buck Head! Do you remember "Rockollection" or have ever heard of it? No? Well, you haven't missed much. "Rockollection" is a 1977 single by French artist Laurent Voulzy that does what Bob Seger was doing in the U.S. - selling baby boomers their first big wave of nostalgia. The song runs down all the things from your youth and teenage years you become nostalgic about: the cute girl with the poneytail, the summer camp, the motorbike you had, that kind of thing. And of course the music that was the soundtrack of your youth. Maybe Voulzy had seen "American Graffiti"? Anyway, in between the verses Voulzy injected ever changing choruses the refrains of known English-language classic rock and pop songs from the 1960s: "The Locomotion", "A Hard Day's Night", "I Get Around", "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Gloria" (the full album version adds another four).  "Rockollection" is a piece of kitsch and sentimental pap and an easy way to get the audience on your side - having the easiest and most memorable choruses of songs that even folks with very limited English knowledge - and at that time that was presumably about 99% of the French population - could yell out in front of a radio. "Rockollection" was a pure crowd pleaser - and crowd pleasing it did. There's even an English language version. Take it away, Laurent:

What does that have to do with our One Buck Record of the day? Absolutely nothing! How's that for a surprise. Basically, I just stole the name for the mixtape that makes up today's offering: La Vraie Rockollection. Because unlike Voulzy's nostalgia trip for the 60's, this is a different kind of nostalgia trip, taking you back to the mid-80s to late 90s. Meaning my youth, but also the wife's. I didn't know any of these songs before moving to the country of frog, snail and smelly cheese-eaters. My wife, though? Knows all of the songs, has most artists in her not particularly extensive CD collection. 

Télephone, Les Negresses Vertes, Les Rita Mitsouko, Matmatah, Louise Attaque, Noir Désir - you name me a big name from the rock-oriented charts, it's sure to be on here. And then of course there is Jean-Jacques Goldman ("Quand La Musique Est Bonne"). How unbelievable is it that the country's biggest (and internationally most unknown) superstar is called Jean-Jacques, French name to end all French names? Before arriving here In France I had never heard of this guy, but he is essentially France's Phil Collins and Bruce Springsteen rolled into one. He is regularly voted "Most popular French personality", with the gallic people characteristically forgiving of the fact that after retirement Goldman was suggardaddying it with a teenage bride, seemingly a French sport for a certain type of well-known star (see: Halliday, Johnny or Besson, Luc). A little icky, JJ, but obviously not enough to put a dent into most popular star status. 

Is it my mullet...or is it my body? 

The other monster group on here, if only by how long they lasted, is Indochine, represented here by two songs, including opener "Bob Morane". Indochine started out as 'The French Depeche Mode' (and actually supporting them during early French tours), but much like their role model they grew out of pure synth pop, incorporating rock elements and becoming elder statesmen of French popular music. Selling in excess of 13 million records, they are the French band with the most record sales in the world. They also broke the attendance record in France's biggest stadium, filling the Stade de France with 97 036 spectators and are of course runner-up to Jean-Jacques Goldman as the second most popular stars of the country.  

Rock band Noir Désir became arguable France's biggest band in the 90s, but are of course and unfortunately known for one thing: Lead singer and songwriter Bertrand Cantat beating his then girlfriend, French actress Marie Trintignant to death in a drunken rage and going to prison for three years (having been condemned to eigth) in the middle. The bans reformed afterwards but after Canta's wife comitted suicide and Cantat then denied any wrongdoings in both deaths while claiming that his bandmates profited from his notoriety, guitar player Serge Teyssot-Gay quit the band, quickly followed by the rest of the group. 

Psycho Killer...qu'est ce que c'est? - you better run run run run run run away...

I haven't even mentioned Télephone, the biggest French rock band of the late 70s and early 80s, until the usual proverbial musical differences did them in! Or Brittany's Matmatah who proudly incorporated traditional instrumentation from the region - meaning Celtic influences - into their music. The La Vraie Rockollection megamix ends with the group led by the impeccably named Benny Bonvoisin (Benny The-Good-Neighbour, and it's his real name!) and his hard rock troupe Trust with their signature song "Antisocial". Bennie and the Boys became fast friends with AC/DC when meeting them at the same record studio while recording their debut album. Bernie's political, critical lyrics show a real alignment with the punk rock of the era. 

So, place à la musique, n'est-ce pas, around 45 minutes of French rock and rock-ish classics from the 80s and the 90s, for francophile rockers and those that want to become ones...

Full Track List:

Bob Morane – Indochine

Partenaire Particulier - Partenaire Particulier

Quand La Musique Est Bonne – JJ Goldman

Ca c'est vraiment toi – Télephone

L'homme pressé - Noir Désir

Je t'emmene au vent – Louise Attaque

L'apologie - Matmatah

Daniela - Elmer Food Beat

Zobi La Mouche - Les Negresses Vertes

Andy – Les Rita Mitsouko

3 Nuits Par Semaine – Indochine

Il Suffira D'un Signe - JJ Goldman

Antisocial – Trust  

Regatta De Blanc: Jah, let these white folks feel that reggae rhythm...for they know not what they do...

The idea to do a white guy reggae album actually came from an unlikely source: Grooving to Men At Work's original version of "Down Under" I realized how reggae that whole thing sounded, albeit with a weird outback hillbilly vibe. I filed away the idea with other things always taking precedent. But running through a couple of albums in my collection recently, I kept stumbling over the little reggae genre exercises these white groups and artists were doing, so I said "OBG, get your shit together and do that white guy reggae album you wanted to compile". 

And so I did, and here we are. This is in no way, shape or form some sort of exhaustive overview of that particular sub-subgenre. There were of course also tons of white guys (and gals) doing ska and dub, so if you really want to deepdive into that it'll open up buckets of worms...and the knowledgeable folks at Jokonky's are probably better authorities on that. No, I really just wanted to make a fun sampler of white folks more or less well-equipped fo that doing short musical vacation trips to Jamaica and back. And that's what Regatta De Blanc is: 15 slices of white folk reggae. 

Let's see...sunglasses...check...colorful shirts...check...yup, we're ready to go to Jamaica, boys...

One of the things that amused me was the realization that the whiter the dudes, the more prone to reaggae they were. I mean, show me a whiter band than The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, then without the nitty gritty in their name or their music, covering Claude King's country & western standard "Wolverton Mountain" as a cod reggae song with an exagerrated fake Jamaican patois that has to be heard to be believed. When the spoken bit comes in, you really suspect this is a send up, especially when the narrator goes on about real estate opportunities on Wolverton Mountain and buying a condo in redondo but either way, it cracks me up. Cringy as fuck, sure, but also pretty droll. 

Other white boy soft rock with folk/ country rock leanings groups that dip into the reggae rythms are America with "Lovely Night", Orleans with "Give One Heart" (immediately covered by Linda Ronstadt) and The Pousette-Dart Band proclaiming "Yesterday Is Not Today". And of course, as the probably most mainstream of country groups The Bellamy Brothers, who had a slightly hippie-ish look (longhairs!) and demeanor when they first started, but quickly became a Nashville mainstream act, which probably means that a lot of white good ol' boys might've first heard reggae when the Brothers implored them to "Get Into Reggae Cowboy". 

Dem reggae boyz livin' it up...

The Police lent this collection its name, but not a title song, as "Regatta De Blanc" isn't particularly reggae. "Don't Stand So Close" sure is, though, and represents white reggae boys' most insistent law enforcement. Couldn't really do a comp on this and leave out Sting & Co. I also had to include ol' Slowhand as one of the first white star musicians to play reggae. If we're being less charitable, one could say that he traded ripping off one black music tradition for another despite basically being a racist dipshit, which the last years between Covid and Brexit only confirmed. But well, like the art, not the artist I guess. Other Brits dabbling in reggae despite that really not being in their wheelhouse: Led Zep and their trip to "D'yer M'aker" and One Buck Records hero Danny Kirwan serenading "Mary Jane" (ahem). 

When I first listened to Blondie's Panic Of Girls (delivered with a copy of the Rolling Stone, back when veteran acts desperately tried to find ways to get their records in the public eye and thought bundling them with newspapers or magazines was a way to go) I was pleasantly surprised to hear them take on Sophia George's 1985 one-hit wonder "Girlie Girlie", which gave me a rush of notalgia. "Girlie Girlie", together with Musical Youth's "Pass The Dutchie" were my first exposure to reggae, hearing them on the radio when I was a kid. 

They didn't get the note about dressing in colorful Jamaican garb

If we thought The Dirt Band's "Wolverton Mountain" was a piss-take on the genre, then what about hipster satirist pranksters 10 CC  coming up with the timeless travelogue "Dreadlock Holiday"? "I don't like reggae...oh no-ooo...I love it!....oh yeah", while starting out with a musical phrase that sounds 100%  like Bob Marley's "Could You Be Loved?". Those little rascals.   

And for something that not everyone has heard before: How about the Boss himself doing the reggae thing? Our old pal Farq got a lot of mileage out of clowning Springsteen's possible genre excursions after his admittedly ill-conceived soul album, but the Boss did dip more than a toe in the genre when he guest starred at one of New Jersey-based reggae artist Jah Love's concerts to sing a reggae/dub version of "Born In The U.S.A." which has to be heard to be believed. And I don't mean that as an insult. Incongruous, maybe, but strangely entrancing.  

Lemme sing some reggae to ya, baby...

So, friends and neighbours, let these white folks get in the rhythm of the island and take you away for about an hour...Regatta De Blanc!

One Album Wonders: Try Some Cayenne, It's Good Stuff...

It's been a while since we've been in the world of the one album wonders, time to get back and do it in the way old school One Buck Heads like C in Cali know me with my rootsy proclivities to go: the country rock route, obviously!

Cayenne were a country rock group from the Bay area, gigging and occasionally recording throghout the early 70s, mainly between 1973 and 1795. They finally took up a residency in McGowan's Wharf Tavern on San Fancisco's Fisherman's Wharf and finally self-released (via their label Bucksnort records) their eponymous and unfortunately only record. 

One of the issues was timing. The time it took for Cayenne to lay down these ten sides - noted on the sleeve as being a 'demo' rather than a 'master' recording, but sounding perfectly fin eand professionally recorded and engineered - the country rock boom was over. In 1973 the Eagles' eponymous debut came out, but by 1975 , when Cayenne finally came out, Henley & Co. were openly courting the disco crowd with "One Of These Nights" and had otherwise tried to move to a rock sound. Other presumably country rock outfits like Firefall were openly moving into soft rock. So, really, the fine but unassuming country rock of Cayenne didn't stand much of a chance of making a local, much less national splash. 

Cayenne follows the country rock model of having several songwriters and singers in its ranks: both guitar players John Salz and Clair Louis Hinton (who also adds banjo and harmonica)  as well as drummer Ajay Avery. Salz is the most active with half of the tracks here, while Avery has my favorite track with the bluegrass-styled "2 Months In Red Bluff". The sound reminds you of Poco or The Pure Prairie League or latter day Moby Grape on closing cut "Things Get Better". 

Before relistening to this for prepping the write-up I had also forgotten how crunchy the lead guitar can be, as on opener "Make Your Move". The track list had a tiny soft spot in the middle, so I did some resequencing for a better flow of Cayenne. 

This album won't change your life, and it isn't a hidden classic like George Law's selftitled album or Luke Gibson's Perfect Day But it is a damn fine album with all of country rock's hall marks like the close vocal harmonies that you associate with the genre. It sure as hell deserved better than selling a couple of copies via Jim's Used Record Store in San Fran and obviously not enough people sent their five bucks to Bucksnort Records to make Cayenne a continuing thing. 

But thankfully the internet never forgets, so let's pretend to go to Fisherman's Wharf in the early 70s and being attracted by some fine country rock coming out of one of its bars...

There Can Be Only One...Queen Soundtrack to Highlander!

Queen was one of my first favorite bands, together with The Beach Boys, for pretty much the same reasons: Massive choruses that couldn't be denied with words simple enough that you could sing along, even when English wasn't your first language. Queen also fell out of my music rotation completely at times for that reason. The choruses are massive, but so is everything else, except, you know, subtlety. So, getting older discoverering more subtle musical expression, I often left Queen behind, but never for good. Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. 

Our latest One Buck Records came together as a byproduct from my work on my musical tribute to David Lynch, In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land. Being in the mood for some film music I picked up the soundtrack for Highlander - and that got things going. Soundtrack to Highlander you say, but there never was an official soundtrack to that film, I hear you say. And you're right, there never was. All soundtracks are unofficial grey market (at best) releases, often combining Mark Kamen's orchestral score with the handful of Queen's song that graced the soundtrack, not aways with the greatest flow. But despite such a promise in the end title credits, there never was a soundtrack album proper. Instead Queen reworked the songs and then put the tracks on 1986's A Kind Of Magic. 

That cartoon cover is goofy as hell...and captures every Queen member absolutely perfectly

I can not swear it, but I'd imagine that A Kind Of Magic was among the first ten albums that were mine. For better or worse, a building block of my music collection. It's also entirely possible that I asked for the album which I presume was a birthday gift, because I had seen Highlander. Seeing that movie when you are a kid is a trip - I remember watching it, secretly, in the dark, and being completely baffled by it. This was probably one of the first nights home alone - which meant having the TV for myself. My parents weren't much of genre film watchers. My dad was a fan of Westerns, so I inherited that love from watching Westerns with him, but anything fantasy, sci-fi or (gasp!) horror was usually off the table. (So obviously I secretly developed a love for those genres, especially the last two). I profited from having the TV for myself by watching Highlander, but not having much background in fantasy and its tropes, the constant cross-cutting between eras and admittedly bumpy narrative left me impressed, but confused. There was, however, one aspect to the film that imediately caught my attention: the music from Queen. 

When re-checking the film, specifically the Queen sequences (I was tempted to rewatch the movie, but remembered that I was kind of disenchanted during my last rewatch, and the sequences I did rewatch looking for the Queen soundtrack did look cheesy as hell) I realized that the music plays a relatively minor part in the movie, much smaller than I remembered. "Who Wants To Live Forever" plays out for a good bit, but title song "Princes Of The Universe" and "Gimme The Prize" are merely getting a  minute or so of screentime, "One Year Of Love" runs as background music in a bar scene and "A Kind Of Magic runs over the end titles. Ironically it's the one song not germane to the Highlander soundtrack that might be the most prominent behind "Forever" in the film itself. Being short of another rocker for the scene where the weird special forces guy stalks the immortals (a scene that left me completely baffled, again), Queen repurposed the last single from The Works, "Hammer To Fall". 

Find the odd man out

That song isn't on the One Buck album of the day, but all other mentioned are of course. Now, you can't fault Queen for not bringing out a Highlander soundtrack album, especially after their legendary gig at Live Aid raised their public profile considerably: instead of bringing out a soundtrack to a film few people finally saw they reused almost all Highlander tracks for a new studio album.  That album is, as one can imagine, not a very coherent listen, but more of a dog's breakfast, the highlights of which were for me always were the title track and the the 'mini Highlander album ' that is the original vinyl side b. And of course they had the right instinct in reworking "A Kind Of MAgic", the song that sounds the most different in its original Highlander version. Smelling a hit, they made the song faster and snappier (literally!), adding the finger snaps and backing vocals that really made the song work and the Highlander version, consequently, to look like a first draft.

So, Highlander - Motion Picture Soundtrack imagines what an album that Queen brought out in 1986 as a soundtrack would and could have sounded like. One issue of course was that the band didn't quite have enough music for an album. Not counting "Hammer To Fall", which I also decided not to use, they had six songs from the Highlander score. Variations of "Princes" and "Forever", titled "Kurgan's Theme" and "Heather's Theme", respectively, fill up the album, as does a variation on the Taylor-penned synth & percussion track that's the sort-of theme music for Kurgan drives like a madman through New York ("Wild Ride"). A variation of that track, outfitted with (ill-fitting love) lyrics for A Kind of Magic as "Don't Lose Your Head" was brought out as a b-side under the equally odd title "A Dozen Red Roses For My Darling". I fused that instrumental, here titled "City Streets", with the snatch of "(Theme From) New York, New York", as it plays in the movie. Said snatch was never officially released by the group and was taken directly from the movie. 

"Gimme The Prize", one of the heaviest songs the band ever recorded (and a track roundly despised by Deacon and Mercury for its heavy metal leanings) loses the cartoonish movie dialogue and sound effects of the Magic version, an ultra-curious choice considering the album wasn't marketed as a soundtrack. I imagine it was to fill out the spaces in a relatively simple, melodically barren song, but they overdid it. The uncluttered version here is a lot clearer than the muddled Magic counterpart. 

Still, even with those track additions, the album would run short. So, in an uncharacteristic display of magnanimousness, Queen cede a track to score composer Michael Kamen, with whom they had collaborated on the orchestration for "Who Wants To Live Forever". They are asking him to produce a sort of 'medley' of score highlights, which Kamen promptly does in creating the "Highlander Suite". In real life, it was of course ol' OGB who did the deed. Soundtracks, especially various artist type collection, would often throw a bone to the score composers by including a track or two, so there would at least be some representation and royalties coming their way. So, Queen decide here to do the same, ending the soundtrack in a suitably dramatic and operatic fahion, which one imagines Freddie Mercury especially would have appreciated.  

So, do like me and dive in the past, somewhat fittingly considering the movie concerned, and get back to some very solid work of Queen from the mid-80's. Nostalgia probably has a good part in my appreciation, but some of these songs still work like gangbusters today. Here they were, born to be kings, the were the princes of the universe...

You Want A Bit Of Everything In Terms Of Pearls, Sir, but Absolutely No Swine - Did I Get That Correctly?

Well, of course you do, 'cause that's what's on the menu today, lovingly cooked up as usual by le chef lui-même. For our latest adventure in All Pearls, No Swine land we go back to the 80s, and if you thought that past editions from that period could be eclectic, whoo boy, do we have some eclecticism for you in store today. All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 24 really has a bit of everything, starting with the slightly jangly underground pop of The Mahoney Brothers' "Don't Freeze Me Out" and ending 78 minutes later with Geoffrey W. Newhall's ambient/new age instrumental "Butterfly". In between you get an unlikely reggae-soul hybrid from Dede Higgins with "One Thing For Certain", atmospheric new wave from Jackie Leven and his cohorts in Doll By Doll with "Under My Thumb", groovy rock from beloved vets Little Feat via an outtake from Down On The Farm, throwback 60's-style garage rock from The Optic Nerve, and Christian folk-pop by Aina. And that's just the first seven songs! 

So, yeah, diversity is the name of the game here, no doubt about it. We also get some Oz rock courtesy of Australian Crawl (below) immortalizing the "Daughters Of The North Coast", country-pop from The Maines Brothers' having lovely "Dreams Of Desirée", hard to categorize (outsider folk rock?) but really cool stuff from virtual unknowns The Freemasons, moody rock from Uncle Friday and the return of power popper de luxe Jonathan Kupersmith! 

And the list goes on and on. We have some mainstream-ish artists making an appearance like Spirit with their remake of "1984" and the Go-Go's with their demo of classic "Lust For Love". And then there's new wave/electro-poppers Commuter with the bubbly "Young Hearts" (Cobra Kai influence, natch!) and Canadian's Depeche Mode Strange Currencies with the beautiful and uncharacteristic (acoustic guitars!) "This Island Earth", as well as one of Britain's premier alternative rock outfits, The House Of Love. 

When they say there is something for everyone here, what that sometimes means is that there's nothing for no one. But not with our All Pearls, No Swine, of course, where treasure hunters will be rewarded with a ton of cool music and acts with varying degrees of being known. So, dive into this veritable smorgasboard of cool-sounding goodies from the decade that gets better with every year in the retrospective mirror...

This Just In: Alright, she finally got her mantlepieces...

Yippee, Yahoo, jubilation and celebration in the land. Queen Bey finally did it. The question of when Beyoncé was finally going to win a Grammy for Album Of The Year (and not Record Of The Year which she had already won) had become a recurring phenomenon with a bunch of mor or less well done discussions including a bunch of subtext about race, racism, musical genres and a ton of other stuff attached. Not to mention that her miss in that category in 2010 being the spark that ignited the infamous Taylor Swift - Kanye West feud. So, now she finally got the one price she - or at least her fans - most craved. Good on her. 

The Grammies of course totally suck at being any kind of arbiter of taste, usually going with the safest choice, which - even if they embrace what the kids these days listen to, as evidenced by victories by Billie EIlish and Harry Styles - they usually go with what sells. Which made the 2001's Grammies one of the funniest when it seemed all but certain that Eminem would win for The Marshall Mathers Album with a historic first victory for a rap album, only to see two sarcastic middle-aged gentlemen walk on stage and celebrate the upset win of Steely Dan's Two Against Nature. But yeah, Beyoncé took chances last year with Cowboy Carter and it paid off and that's a nice happy end for her.  

Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter also won Best Country Album, a historic first for a black woman in what feels at least partly like a political decision, considering the unease with which the country community reacted to Beyoncé's genre overtures and being shut out at the CMA Awards last year for that very album. The now Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter is still messy and  unwieldy as all hell, that's why I take this news item as a way to hawk my improved (via substraction) version of said record, Saddle Up. The original write-up is here, but a new link will be below. Saddle Up focuses on the country part of the genre-crashing original and is also a lot more digestible, running for half of the original's unreasonable 78 minute running time.

I'd venture most of you aren't huge Beyoncé fans and guess what, neither am I, but I still thought it was worth to take a shot at improving her country album. Now it's up to you (if you didn't back in April 2024) to give this a shot. Get your six guns and saddle up with Beyoncé. 

 

In Dreams...And Nightmares...He Walked With Us

When I posted my first little tribute to David Lynch, I could post something the moment I heard the news because the album had already been edited, and so had the album art, so I just needed to do my write-up and post the whole shebang. But I wasn't quite done, as with Françoise Hardy last year, where I did a stopgap release when I heard about her death, then got to work to do a home-cooked compilation. Though I must've had much more time then, as both posts were just 24 hours apart. It took me a good while longer to do a David Lynch project that would do the man, his work, and most of all the music in it justice. 

I wanted to do essentially a mixtape-style compilation  of the songs and score tracks I mostly associate with Lynch, in a sequencing that would hopefully weave and waver like Lynch's films did. Then, when I had a whole 25-track comp ready to go - tagged, bagged, artwork-stacked - I realized I had not included Connie Stevens' "Sixteen Reasons", a track featured in Mulholland Drive, but not on its soundtrack. So I went back to the drawing board, recovered a couple of other things from the cutting room floor and finally arrived at this, a 30 track, 78-minute trip through the musical mind and imagination of David Keith Lynch, In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land.  

In dreams, David Lynch walked with us, but even moreso in nightmares. In the last weeks I rewatched two of his most lasting dreams-turned-nightmares (or nightmares-turned-dreams-turned-nightmares-again), Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, with interesting results. I hadn't seen Lost Highway in about 25 years, so I barely remembered anything besides freaky as shit Robert Blake, the fact that Bill Pullman transmorphs into Balthazar Getty and, for some reason, the tailgating scene, where gangster Mr. Eddie beats an asshole driver into a pulp because the one thing he can't abide is tailgating. But I had completely forgotten about the video tapes that start the, uh, mystery plot, for example, and realize that maybe Michael Haneke nicked these for Caché. So, while there was a ton of cool stuff to rediscover, the movie still makes not a lick of sense in any traditional way. But man, if Lynch can't keep your attention with the moving lurking camera in the first twenty minutes, or with a piece of pure cinema, set to This Mortal Coil's amazing version of "Song To The Siren". I can't embed a Youtube video here since it's NSFW stuff, but it's this scene. 

The rewatch of Mulholland Drive was a bit of a letdown, though. I, like many, had it tagged as Lynch's masterpiece, as when I first saw it, it blew me away, and kept its spell even on a second viewing. I don't know, maybe I wasn't in the mood, but the magic didn't work this time. Don't get me wrong, the movie is still an amazing salvage job by Lynch, to turn what was an open-ended mystery full of non sequiturs into something making sense and holding up pretty well. But it can not hide the fact, that it is a shaggy dog story. And while that makes a wholelot of sense considering Mulholland Drive's production history, I realized that after the relatively stringent and cohesive (by Lynch standards) Blue Velvet, every Lynch film apart from The Straight Story is a shaggy dog story. That's just how Lynch functions, he has no use or need for conventional plotting. Which of course makes him the 'take it or leave it'-proposition he is for most folks. 

In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land covers every Lynch movie besides The Elephant Man and Dune, both of which aren't real Lynchian Lynch movies and whose scores I felt didn't mingle well with the rest, despite quite liking Toto's work on Dune. And of course I included a bunch of stuff from both Twin Peaks series. Despite being a mild dispappointment on rewatch, Mulholland Drive is the most represented Lynch project here with a whooping six selections, followed by the original Twin Peaks series with four, not counting spoken word segments. Yes, friends, I smuggled two recordings from Dale Cooper to Diane into the mix. 

Angelo Badalamenti, Lynch's musical mstermind and partner in crime, is of course all over this collection, as the first thing that comes to mind for me when I think of Lynch's projects are Badalamenti's inimitable and lush synth scores. Hell, I even indulge Lynch's weird and thankfully shortlived romance with industrial rock/heavy metal in the mid-90s that was all over the soundtrack of Lost Highway. As the representative of that kind of music I have a snatch of Rammstein's "Rammstein", but only a snatch. Rammstein feels like the kind of band that's better to listen to as instrumentals, and I quite like the creeping menace of the song's intro, because as soon as Till Lindemann's teutonic rolling R's come around I usually switch the channel. Like a lot of score cues, "Rammstein" has been edited, this one more brutally than others, though, for only a taste of Lynch's weird indutrial periods. Most other edits are score cues running a little long for my tastes concerning the flow of the selection, thogh I did edit two tracks from Lost Highway together as a little medley, Badalamenti's "Fred's World" and Bowie's "I'm Deranged". And I did a ton of work on transitions, fade outs, etc. to have a continuous and nicely flowing musical landscape.

In Dreams I Walk With You - A Musical Journey Through Lynch Land inhabits that sweet spot (I think) between Lynch's obsession with 50's and early 60's music (which no one could make sound as sinister as he did) and the lush scoring of Badalamenti, with a dash of Lynch's penchant for sultry female vocalists and retro rockabilly-era crooners. If I did my job right, and I think I did, this should take you away into Lynch Land for about an hour and twenty minutes. 

In dreams and nightmares, Lynch walked with us. Walk with him for a while...