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...
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.
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.
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 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...
Wait For The Rain
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What's your favorite horror film from the early-mid 70s?
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