Days Of Thunder, The Driver And The Last Note Of Freedom

Yup, as foretold in the write-up to Reid's Digest - The Music Of Terry Reid, we're not quite finished with Mr. Reid yet. I'm going to deep dive a bit into what basically amounts to a tiny footnote in Reid's long and storied career - but you know what they say: to some it's a tiny footnote, to others it's an enigma wrapped in a conundrum. Actually, no one ever says that, because I just made it up, but yeah, even an ultimately insignificant thing can be of great interest to, well, me, and possibly by proxy some of you. Or I'll waste my time writing this, because a ton of you don't even bother with the write-up and go straight to check out the download. Anyway, it's not like you can stop me or anything, so here goes.

Thursday I talked about my first run-ins with the music of Terry Reid, but the biggest surprise was, when I finally checked out the rest of his discography about eight years ago or so. When I got to The Driver - the album - and to "The Driver" - the song - my mind was blown, almost as soon as the first notes came up. Waitaminute, I said to myself, that's the opening of Days Of Thunder's 'title song' "The Last Note Of Freedom", as sung by Mr. David Coverdale. I hadn't known until then that there had been a first stab at a title song for the movie courtesy of Mr. Reid, nor was I ready for the song itself. Having been brought up with "The Last Note Of Freedom" for , oh, the last 30+ years, "The Driver (Part 2)", as its called on the album blew me away with its enigmatic, elliptic lyrics. Just take the opening stanza: "Wake up alone and find / it's the wheels just rollin' in my mind / Can't stop to think or see / is this really what God cut for me?" And from there, the song gets only more mysterious with its reference to "the old boys / runnin' in the night / cross the borders, between their own headlights". What. The. Hell. 

The perfect cover art for Reid's album...you can almost imagine the movie in your head. In black and white, of course. 

The story of the twice done title song of Days Of Thunder became a little bit clearer after the internet snooping. Reid had bumped into Trevor Horn around 1987, and, maybe surprising given hi proclivities as artist in The Buggles (and BugglYes), Horn was a fan of Reid's work and told him he's love to work with him. Horn then also introduced Reid a year and a half or so later to a young German composer who had recently hit town to take over the baton from former German Hollywood transplant Harald Faltermeyer and was starting to make a break in movie scoring. Little did Reid or Horn know at the time that younh Hans Zimmer was to become one of the most well-known and dominant film scorers of the last two and a half decades. Zimmer and Horn had worked together almost a decade earlier, when Horn was in The Buggles and Zimmer did some collaborative work, even briefly showing up in the hugely influential "Video Killed The Radio Star" video clip. Zimmer had just had his Hollywood breakthrough with the lauded score to Rain Man, and was now developing the music for another picture starring Tom Cruise, the stock-car racing action drama, or, as it was informally known 'Top Gun with cars'. 

Zimmer had just worked up a keyboard melody as the title music for Days Of Thunder, and proposed Terry Reid write some lyrics for it and finish the song. Which he did, cue "The Driver", produced by Horn. To say that this was not what the soundtrack producers were expecting is probably an understatement. "The Driver" uses Zimmer's melody effectively, but the song is decidedly not what you'd want as a lead song for a big, dumb summer blockbuster. It's too interior, too enigmatic, and frankly, way too weird. So "The Driver" got rejected for consideration as the Days Of Thunder title song in a somewhat fitting, if sad, twist that recalls Reid's career. So, it was back to work for Zimmer. He had relished the chance to work with Jeff Beck for the Thunderv score, so the new title song was clearly going to have a more hard rock bent. New lyrics were commissioned by noted Shakespeare-ian British scribe William Broad a.k.a. Billy Idol, and The Cruiser himself asked David Coverdale personally if he could come in and sing the new title song, "The Last Note Of Freedom". 

Also b& w, but no film with this. At least none I'd want to watch.

Now, music snob logic would dictate that I hate the dumb hard rock "Note" and favor "The Driver". But here's the twist: I love "The Last Note Of Freedom". As an example for L.A. AOR rock of the late EIghties, you can hardly do better. Beck riffs on guitar, Coverdale wails on vocals - it's all good! My favorite moment is actually the quietest in the whole song, when midway after a dramatic break, the music comes on as an acoustic guitar strum and Coverdale sings "You know the suffering will end, my friend, when the last note of freedom is rung throughout the land." The suffering will end, my friend, I always found that little phrase comforting. The ladmittedly sometimes jibberish lyrics of "The Last Note Of Freedom"- other than working in the movie title in one of its lines - are not about racing and could just as well be used for a historical drama about struggling for freedom. The fit is of course in the music and the sound of "The Last Note Of Freedom". That song sounds like it belongs in a Tony Scott film - it's big and brash and shiny and built for maximum effect. "The Driver", inversely, is none of that. Reid's song sounds like it should accompany a Monte Hellman film, an updated version of his cultish Two Lane Blacktop (starring James Taylor and Dennis Wilson) maybe, an existentialist, downbeat drama about a guy broken by his obsession with driving. Come to think of it - I'd watch that movie. Yo, Cruiser, you want another run at an Oscar - how about The Driver, where Cole Trickle is now an old, washed-up, borderline sociopathic guy who can't go without racing, even at senior age, somehow looking for redemption, perhaps in the arms of a good woman? Just thank me in your Oscar speech, Tommy Boy... 

As a song, "The Driver" is better than "The Last Note Of Freedom" - it's more intense, personal and doesn't deal in clumsily glued together clichés, but it was simply the wrong song at the wrong place at the wrong time. So while I protest that Reid's song has somewhat fallen into oblivion, I can not fault the Days Of Thunder people to want to go with something else. At least they offered Terry Reid a consolation price: For an action scene involving drivers voluntarily bumping into each other, they used The Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'", but instead of also licensing it for the soundtrack, they asked Reid to record a cover version, again produced by Tervor Horn. And even if it was a consolation price, they worked hard to work up some royalties for Reid, issuing it as the b-side of both singles taken from the soundtrack. And it's a pretty fun version of the song, with Reid as usual singing the hell out of what's in front of him. But it isn't "The Driver".

If you have downloaded and listened to Reid's Digest - The Music Of Terry Reid, you will be familiar with my 'Pray For Headlights mix' of "The Driver". Normally my little reworkings don't necessarily need some annotation, but I feel I should say a word or three about it. The original plan was to avoid the akward Part 1 and Part 2 set up of the album, so I wanted to combine the two parts, but needed some sort of concept that makes sense. So I had the idea of a car crash towards the end of the full-fledged version leading into the short acoustic part as a sort of faint echo in the afterlife once the driver perished in that car crash. I don't know if anyone read that song's structure like that, but that was the thinking behind it.

Oh boy, this is getting long, so I wasn't lying when I said 'deep dive', but it's also plain to see why this stuff wasn't a good fit for thursday's piece. Now of course you know more then you ever wanted to know about either title song of Days Of Thunder. So, quickly off to today's download, because yes, there is one. The Crashing Thunder EP alternates Reid's and Zimmer's/Coverdale's contributions to Days Of Thunder, giving you the two parts of "The Driver", the original album version of "The Last Note Of Freedom" and its instrumental arrangement, as well as Reid's "Gimme Some Lovin'". And for the music lover who has everything, a short piece of Jeff Beck working out the guitar riff for "Note". And I end with the Pray For Headlights mix of "The Driver" which made sense to me, but which you can delete if you already have Reid's Digest and don't want double versions in your music collection. 

So, deep dive over, and for now we're done with Mr. Reid, and our regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly. In the meantime, rock and roll - especially the latter - with some driving music from 1990..."but the wheels just bearing down..."