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..."

Let's Talk About Dick...And By That I Mean Tracy Of Course.

Dick Tracy, the movie was a colossal miscalculation. When the public, spurned on by an unprecedented at the time marketing blitz, made Batman one of the top-grossing movies in 1989, the lesson was not to trot out 1930's era newspaper strip heores out of the moth balls and build wannabe blockbusters around them. The people who liked Batman wanted cool, moody comic book action, and instead in the following years got the pulp hero , newspaper-serial antics of Dick Tracy, The Phantom, The Rocketeer and The Shadow - none of 'em characters that would talk to a young or even semi-young person in 1990. If your target audience in 1990 were senior citizens, that strategy might make sense, but, uh, I'm not sure that was the idea, so most of these flopped pretty hard. Sure, Dick Tracy got the hype and made a ton of money (unlike those other three 'comic book movies'), but not like 'crazy money', and it didn't become a phenomenon like Batman a year before. 

Instead it will mainly be remembered as Warren Beatty's folly, a triumph of art direction, costumes and make up, but with an empty, hollow middle - one-dimensional characters in a one-dimensional, boring narrative. The crazy art direction and impressive costume and set design, as well as the elaborate latex make-up effects, and the idea to at least partly turn Dick Tracy into a musical - there are some bold and commendably crzy choices being made by director and star Warren Beatty - its was a bold swing, but a miss. Every time I watch the movie (which isn't often) I want to like it more than I do, and every time I lose interest once the unique setting and look has settled in. Dick Tracy is a bore. An expensive, elaborate, lovingly assembled bore, but a bore nonetheless. 

The maximalism and miscalculation on display in and with the film, also manifests in its peripherals. Like the music. Trying to be a carbon copy of the preceding year's blockbuster, the Dick Tracy filmmakers hired the very same composer to try and write a very familiar theme and score. There was an official soundtrack album, an exercise in overkill typical of early 90s CDs: a huge amount of bloat, notably by including a number of songs in several versions, despite none of those songs actually making it into the movie. And then of course, we needed a tie-in album from a big pop star, here obviously Beatty's paramour and film co-star Madonna.. If Prince gets to do an entire From And Inspired By' album for Batman, then goshdammit, Madonna will not settle for less. She won't get upstaged by that dwarf from Minnesota! 

And so we get the companion album I'm Breathless, which has a grand total of three songs that were featured in the movie and a nother batcch of 30's-era music pastiches (and, totally unrelated, top notch single "Vogue" attached at the end). So all in all you had to buy three Cds in 1990 for the full Monty Dick experience...and you'd still not get all the music played in the film. So, what about being more humble and condensing all this gigantism into one neat and tidy package, that could have come out in 1990 and might have beeen a better listen than the bloated, too-fat-too-float triple whammy that was proposed? Our One Buck Album will graciously try to fulfill that mission and bring you all you'll arguably need from the film in a tidy 42 minute (well, about 47 with the bonus tracks). 

That means some selections from Danny Elfman's score that is, well, an immediately identifiable Elfman score, whose "Main Title" tries hard to remind people of that other main title for that other comic book character, you know, the one who dresses up like a bat. You'd get the three Madonna songs from I'm Breathless, including "What Can You Lose", a duet with Mandy Patinkin. All of these mixed in with the songs from the soundtrack album that actually feature in the film, all of them more or less chronically arranged. That's what Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack is. 

The musical director for the sound track was Andy Paley, once one half of teeniebopper-baiting power pop duo the Paley Brothers with, wait for it, his brother Jonathan. (who might show up on this blog, sooner or later). Afterwards he turned to producing, first turning heads with his work on Brian Wilson's self-titled debut solo album. Dick Tracy project was his biggest and most high-profile gig at the time. On top of producing and assembling the cast, Paley also wrote most of the songs in a faux-1930s style, though of course the big coup of the film's music department was getting Stephen Sondheim for the torch songs Madonna got to sing. Getting back to that cast for a second: There's some relative young guns here in k.d. lang and Erasure, but mostly Paley has assembled heroes and veterans like Brenda Lee, Jerry Lee Lewis and Al Jarreau. And it is fun hearing all of them croon their way through these faux-30s numbers. 

A word on the bonus tracks: These two are from the half dozen or so songs that weren't featured in the movie. LaVern Baker's "Slow Rollin' Mama" uses the old Blues trick of seemingly innocently talking about, in this case, rolling dough, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she might not only talking about patisserie, if you know what I mean ("I need a big long rollin' pin, to get it ready and right, for my red hot oven"). Fabulously saucy stuff. Darlene Love's "Mr. Fix-It" is in the same pastiche mode as the ret of the tracks for the film, but is one of the best, so highly deserving of being included here, even if there's no trace of it in the film itself. 

And that is that. A single disc, 'has all you need' stop for a fun diversion, that in some ways is a better time than the movie itself. So check out Dick Tracy - Motion Picture Soundtrack (OBG edit) and see if you'll agree...

This is the first in a series of reworked soundtracks coming your way in the next months, often mixing songs and score for a more immersive film flashback experience...

Who Watches The Watchmen? ( ...and who listens to them?)

About three years ago - and more or less by circumstance - I did an interesting experiment. More or less simultaneously I entered not once but twice that most perilious of adventures - a sequel to Alan Moore's comic book classic Watchmen. Unlike some other lauded revisionist superhero comics of the era (here's looking at you, The Dark Knight Returns) Watchmen has held up exceptionally well. Moore's mastery of form and storytelling, as well as a knack for giving these somewhat abstract characters complicated inner lives is so complete, that usually once per year I reread bits of Watchmen, not the entire thing letter to letter, but passages I like or get sucked into. 

For years the idea of doing a sequel to Moore's lauded (and loaded) requiem for the supehero seemed an impossible task. Who would be courageous or foolish enough to try and match Moore's masterwork? The first shots were of course fired by DC, corporate greed and all that. They story of how they screwed Moore out of ownership of Watchmen is well-known, and after about two decades they decided that now it was time to do something about that old yet valuable IP. So was born a Watchmen project that included a half-dozen Before Watchmen prequel series, only to then culminate in a huge maxiseries called Doomsday Clock. Which is what I read, along with the TV sequel series called Watchmen by - oh my - one of the guys who fucked up Lost. 

Results were mixed, but not necessarily in the way I expected. Doomsday Clock had its strong points, starting with artist Gary Frank whose detailled, semi-realist pencil work I have always loved and whose work here is boss all the way through. It also has its  moments: I had fun with the new Marionette and Mime characters in the early chapters (which unfortunately build to vey little in the end), and individual characters and scenes, like Moth Man and his fate, were surprisingly moving. But there's no denying that Doomsday Clock also was kind of a slog to read. I read the trade paperback, so I could just plow on, but I imagine how frustrating it must've been to read this slow-moving series in monthly installments (not to mention that in between schedule-shifting and pushing back of issues, the series which was supposed to run its 12 issues in less than a year took two to complete!). In Watchmen, Moore designed every chapter around a character, but every chapter moved the bigger mystery further. Each chapter was both a satisfying, complete read in itself, and an important part of the puzzle. This elegance of design is something that author Geoff Johns can not imitate.

It's not for lack of trying. The imitation, that is. Doomsday Clock slavishly imitates some of Moore's storytelling devices. These installments are, like Moore's original series, 32 pages long, for no other reason than to mimic the original, much like Moore's and Dave Gibboons' famous nine-panel grids. As said, the plotting isn't up to par, though, confused and confusing, losing sights of some of its early seeming lead characters and finally ends up as everyone thought it would: a rather underwhelming confrontation between Superman and Doctor Manhattan. Doomsday Clock is beautifully drawn and presented, but a complete muddle of a story, and finally a sign of what's wrong with DC's revival of the Watchmen brand: It's pure IP management, treating the original with reverence, but itself becoming a musuem piece with nothing much to say, or add to the original, really. Par of the course, in a way, uperheroes and less than super heroes forever trapped in ember. 

Watchmen, the series, was something else, though. Damon Lindelof went about this without the staid reverence of Doomsday Clock, telling its own stand-alone story in the universe of the Watchmen. This can, especially at the beginning, seem odd. The series wastes no time establishing racial conflict as the story ctalyst, set against the backdrop of the Watchmen universe some thirty years later. It's a storytelling device that lands with astounding predictive power, considering the George Floyd protests and the subsequent Black Lives Matter-movement were just months away from the broadcast of the series. Some of the aspects of this - a white supremacist group taking Rohrschach and his at times borderline fascist behavior as their idol and patron saint - are intelligent extensions of the original text. Which really summarizes the series as a whole. Lindeloff called it a 'remix' set in the Watchmen universe, and he's right, but most of the extra material he brings in is well thought out and makes sense. But more importantly: it all feels vital.

If there is a big difference in sense and sensibility between Doomsday Clock and the Watchmen TV show, it's because one feels slavishly retro and static, while the other is constantly interesting and moving. One can argue that not all of it lands - I found some of the stuff involving a certain Asian character a little too much 'out there' - but man, is Lindelof taking big swings with this one, and there are way more hits than misses. But the difference to Doomsday Clock is right there: Where the comic book, as comic books and their publishers are wont to do, basically takes a veryl ong tour to maintain the status quo, Lindeloff rattles a bunch of foundations of the Watchmen universe to find new uestions and new answers. I'll leave it at that to not spoil, because if you haven't seen the Watchmen tv series, be sure to do so, it is without exagerration one of the best tv shows of the last years. Beware that you should have at least working knowledge of the Watchmen comic (not Zack Snyder's half-impressive half-ridiculous film) because Lindeloff bases his series on that. Otherwise the squid rain machine will leave you puzzled (...or even more puzzled!). 

All of this is a very longwinded way to get to the One Buck Record of the day, but there is some music coming, I promise! Because one part of the Watchmen tv series' vitality is its propulsive soundtrack courtesy of Mr. Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor and partner in crime Atticus Ross. These two have collaborated on a number of soundtracks - from The Social Network to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - and as usual, this is a fully electronic affair. It's also really good stuff! But stuff that wasn't originally presented very well. Reznor and Ross issued the soundtrack as three records, but there seemed to be no real guiding principle or thought put into the tracklist and sequencing. Some of the tracks didn't feature in the series, none of them were chronologically arranged and really it felt like 'here's some cool music from the show' rather than a designed soundtrack. 

Enter the One Buck Guy. I wanted to give the score by Mrs. Reznor & Ross its due, while also highlighting some of the at times great needle drops the series provides. So, mixed in with the score you will find artists as diverse as Orville Peck, Devo, Howard Jones, Desmond Dekker, Irma Thomas, Sturgill Simpson, Hall & Oates, Zambian rock band WITCH, Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton, Spooky Tooth, and, uh, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I also kept and mixed in some of the little sound bites and series dialogue issued on the soundtracks for maximum immersion in the show. The other big thing is that I present this music as a number of suites, one for every episode of the show. Some are longer, some are shorter, some have a number of needle drops, some just one (and the opening track "Summer, No Ice" none). The music is presented as chronologically as possible, and also imitates the show's use of musical themes and leitmotive, so some bits will come up several times, such as the theme of series protagonist Angela Abar a.k.a.Sister Midnight. 

The great intelligence and eye for detail extends to the musical choices of the show. Just one example: In the mid-seson episode "Little Fear Of Lightning" cop Wade Templeman a.k.a. Looking Glass (a really great Tim Blake Nelson) goes into a redneck roadside bar to hook up with a lady (but not all is what it seems) and as a soundtrack for that bar scene, any ol' country tune would have worked. But the powers that be chose Sturgill Simpson's "Turtles All The Way Down" (very recently featured in a bluegrass version on my Americana compilation) with its line about "reptile aliens made of light", which perfectly captures Tillman's defining feature, post traumatic stress syndrome after the giant Alien Squid attack he witnessed and thus his panicked fear of other alien attacks. 

If you have seen Watchmen the tv series, these nine suites will hopefully transport you back into the series. And if you haven't, they will hopefully inspire you to check that series out. And you are winning either way, because there is some very fine music in here, both from Reznor & Ross and from the illustruous group dropping in. 

So, who watches the Watchmen? Hopefully you, soon. And who listens to the Watchmen? Hopefully, you too, soon. 

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...

This Just In: Cameron's Second Still His Best...

I am currently watching The Terminator as I write this. Goddamn, what a great movie this is. I probably haven't seen this in twenty years or so. If a Terminator movie shows up on TV it's usually the sequel. Now that is also a fantastic movie, that every time I land on it wile channel-surfing I have to watch the damn thing. I usually think to myself 'Ah, I'll just watch a scene or two' and then end up watching the whole thing anyway because it's so well-made. But yeah, the first one and James Cameron's sophomore effort (after the ridiculous Roger Corman b-movie Piranha 2: The Spawning) rarely shows up on TV, so when tonight it did I had to watch it (despite, you know, owning it on DVD for more than twenty years as well...). 

Cameron might have made smoother-looking films with better special effects, but he never made a more efficient film than The Terminator. The whole film is like a well-oiled machine, constantly moving forward, like the Terminator itself. Exposition is the first half of the film is embedded into the action scenes, the movie doesn't slow down until good guy Reese is captured by the police. (Which, incidentally, is where we are now as I write this. Live commentary!). And of course Cameron did it for peanuts. Arnie's Austrian-accented Terminator just operated his damaged eye, and yes, you can see that Arnie's head is a plastic fake when we see his exposed eye, in the same way that the miniatures and stop motion effects are easy to identity now. But hell, give me that over weightless, spotless CGI any day and twice on sunday, which it is today. 

You know what's also great about The Terminator? It's unforgettable title theme. On one hand, Brad Fiedel uses a cheap-sounding synth. On the other, that makes the theme sound like one of John Carpenter's, which is a good thing! Fiedel's score was one of the first entirely electric scores, all what nowadays would probably be called darkwave. Like Carpenter's scores, it gets a little repetitive here and there, but it's a fine time capsule and a fine reminder to go watch that movie again whenever you can. 

So, while I continue watching this classic  - thus no tagging the tracks, I'm lazy tonight. Go do it yourself if you have to! I'm watching a movie, man! - have some fun with Friedel's score.