Don't Give This Guy A Ride! (...This Album, However...)

As a kid I liked all kinds of movies. My dad installed a love for Westerns, and like most kids I liked action films and comedies, everything that moved and entertained. But the first genre I discovered for myself, because no other family member would have a taste for it, was horror movies. For a long time, with a single TV in the house, occasions were rare, and had to be seized. Several factors had to combine: I would have to watch a movie with my dad, while my mom would go to bed and read if the film didn't interest her. Then I would wait until my dad would inevitable fall asleep and snore happily away at one point, at which I could either wait for the late night horror film or quietly switch channels to get to my bounty. I distinctly remember watching The Thing on low volume, with my dad's snoring the background noise to Kurt Russell squaring off with the shapeshifting beastie - still the best horror movie of all times, folks. 

Another horror classic from my younger days is, obviously, The Hitcher. Man, that movie was a shock to the system. A variation on the slasher films of the time, the film's seeming realism that slowly gives way to something else - not quite supernatural, then definitely something leaving all senses of reality behind, which made this probably more disturbing than the clearly fantastic Nightmare On Elm Street series. The Hitcher, more than a slasher, is truly a nightmare movie. When Jim Halsey's nightmare (ha!) starts as he stops to let the mysterious John Ryder in his car, he says "my mother told me never to do this" with a geeky smile that will soon disappear, you understand that The Hitcher is essentially a scary but instructive story that the brothers Grimm couldn't have imagined better. And even though there is no Freddy Krueger here, the film has more of a nightmare feel to it than the increasingly operatic grand guignol spectacles involving the burnt-to-a-crisp undead child murderer.

Some critics didn't get it, obviously, and not only those that have prejudices against horror-themed films. It's true that at some point people will inevitably go 'eh...but Ryder can't possibly be here at this moment in time', because as Halsey's nightmare continues, it truly takes on the hallmarks of a drzam...or a nightmare, where space and time are not functioning as in the real world, getting bent out of shape, making sudden jumps in location or illogical chronology ,ot a bug, but a feature. If you're wondering why things are not adding up, you're watching this film wrong. As director Robert Harmon, who weirdly disappeared fropm the face of the earth after this film - said "You either get it, or you don't". As a film that shows how something that looks realistic, if admittedly improbable, slowly morphs into something entirely impossible, with the viewer losing all sense of real-life logic. The film logic, that The Hitcher and John Ryder impose on people trump the suspension of disbelief. 

You know what's really helping a film that emulates a dream and its logic? Why, a score that gives you tghe feeling that the real world and its restrictions are slowly melting away for example. And it so happens that Mark Isj=ham's score is exactly that kind of music. Entirely synthetic, the score was Isham's attempt to use and master then new cutting edge technology to his bag of tricks, adding the Prophet 2000 keyboard to his arsenal of old school synths like the ARP 2600 he had worked with for years. The brought in two drummers, but then proceeded to only use sampled drum sounds. And while all this sounds like the score to The Hitcher would sound awfully of its time, that's not really true. If anything the music sounds out of time, seemingly existing just on that fine line between reality and dream. 

The score to The Hitcher is one of the finest examples of a synth soundtrack from the high time of that particular type of soundtrack. Action-driven, incidental numbers like "Cars And Helicopters" are rare, most cuts here are incredibly atmospheric and just there to set a mood. And frankly, if you're coming for moodsetting - and you definitely shoud - you will not be disappointed here. I kept the soundtrack as is, as a bonus tracks there is an 'ambient suite' version of The Hitcher theme, which was of course more impressive before I knew that a simple push of the Paulstretch function in Audacity could create the ambient soundscapes of extremely slowed down tracks. Still, if you got nothing better to do, or listen to, it will give you atmospheric background music in spades. 

So, The Hitcher. If you can catch it somewhere, go and (re)watch the movie. And, of course, listen to this fantastic piece of business by Mark Isham. 

Of Saints & Sinners - A Kick Ass Movie With A Killer Soundtrack

 

A couple of weeks ago Sinners made history by becoming the first film to ever be nominated for 16 Academy Awards (a.k.a. the Oscars). Even if we discount a new category this year (Best Casting Ensemble), it would still have beaten out former record holders. This alone should give you a good idea what an achievement the movie is on a purely technical level alone. First of: it's an absolute joy to watch. In this ear of shoddily assembled blockbusters with awful CGI, that is not Marvel-ous at all, Sinners clearly stands out. Set Design, Production Design, Costume Design, Photography - everything here is absolutely top notch. 

This movie also literally looks like no other. When I saw the first scene, I scrambled for the blue ray cover, frantically checking for information on the film's aspect ratio that wasn't there. I was sure that the movie was in scope, but the first scenes were not. In fact, director Ryan Coogler elected to film with the loud and unwieldy I-MAX cameras to allow a fluent change between different aspect ratios, sometimes within the same shot (where the black bars on the top and the bottom slowly disappear). Now, all of these technical achievements would be laudable, but for naught, if the movie wouldn't be any good. But it is, great even, if you keep an open mind. If you haven't seen Sinners yet, do so as quickly as possible, and then get back to this write-up. From here on, there be spoilers !

During it's first hour it's not entirely clear where Coogler's film wants to go, taking it's sweet time to set up its story of two twin brothers trying to create a juke joint from nothing in the 1930's Mississippi Delta. Then the movie pulls off the old From Dust Till Down-gambit going from one type of movie to a complete differently one in its second half, and like the former also somewhat surprisingly becoming a vampire movie. This abrupt swerve into genre fare turned out divisive, to say the least. I, as a horror film fan, loved it, but some viewers caught up in the descriptions of the hard life for black folks in the 1930's obviously expected something different. Still, you have to admire the huge and confident swings Coogler takes with this movie.

A movie about a juke joint better have some great music to really sell its premise, and boy, does Sinners deliver.  It features both a fantastic score by Coogler's frequent musical collaborator Ludwig Göransson and an equally brilliant selection of songs on its soundtrack album. However, there is a lot of music to go through, perhaps too much. Both albums taken together run up to almost 150 minutes of music, which is just overkill in one sitting. Enter the One Buck Guy. As with my previous reworked soundtracks for Dick Tracy and Donnie Darko I combined songs and score cues from the film in chronological fashion, to give the Sinners a real sense of how the film develops musically. The word Edit in OBG is to be taken quite seriously: I edited the absolute hell out of this one, shortening almost every score track, throwing off songs which were not featured in the movie, stitching and medley-ing together, and so on and so forth. Now the 150 minutes behemoth is a much more listenable sub-70 minutes compilation.

The music of Sinners is not only great, it also tells its own story, which this added subsequently tries to retrace as well. As the first hour of the film establishes the twins' recruitment of personal for their juke joint, the first half of soundtrack & score is very heavy on blues licks, both from Göransson and special guests like Bobby Rush. Just before the film's big thematic set piece of all timelines and musical eras falling and folding  together, set to Miles Caton's "I Lied To You", there is the first apparition of what I call the vampire theme - you know it when you hear it. 

The appearance of the initial trio of vampires also changes the musical landscape, heavily influenced by lead vampire Remmick's background as an Irish immigrant, trading the predominant blues music for a folk/bluegrass mix of traditional tunes. Their version of the old Irish folk standard "Will Ye Go, Lassie Go ?" (better known as "Wild Mountain Thyme") is not only one of the finest version of this oft-covered tune, but has haunted me for days after seing the movie. A bit (o.k., a lot) earlier I mentioned Ryan Coogler's big swings, and I think none is bigger than the big musical set piece of dozens of vampires, including most of the turned black folks, singing and dancing to classic Irish folk tune "Rocky Road To Dublin", with head vampire Remmick performing Irish stepdancing like a deranged lord of the dance. This was clearly the point of no return for some movie watchers, but again, I absolutely loved the pure chutzpah of it.

In its back third the film's music becomes heavier in support of its action set pieces and show downs (and makes ample use of the aforementioned vampire theme), with Göransson drafting in Alice in Chains' Jerry Cantrell, Metallica's Lars Ulrich and blues power guitar player Eric Gales, before culminating in the double climax of Miles Caton's wordless vocalizing in "Free for a Day" and the film closing song "Last Time (I Seen the Sun)", a duet between Caton and Alice Smith. Like those vampires, it's been a good long while since I've seen the sun in all its splendor, and like for those vamps, music pulls me through.

You might guess from the unusually long write up that this Sinners project is really heartfelt for me. I think this alternate album edit is one of my best editing job and I am very proud of it. I hope you will enjoy this musical journey through the back country of Sinners as much as I've enjoyed making it.Take this write-up as my endorsement of Sinners for tomorrow's Academy Awards, although I don't think it will win the big one. The Academy might have changed quite a bit since the peak Oscar bait years, but 'audacious vampire musical with a mostly Black cast' doesn't necessarily scream Best Film winner, and One Battle After Another seems to have an insurmountable lead. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though. 

In the meantime, enjoy this killer piece of music I have vampired Frankensteined together. It truly has something for everyone: Whether you like Blues, Country, Gospel, Bluegrass, Soul, Folk, Heavy Rock, even Hip Hop...you'll find something to like, or love, here. Or just tick 'all of the above' and  take in that big-ass bad ass musical gumbo that is Sinners - Movie Soundtrack & Score - The OBG Edit, as the gods and ol' OBG intended...

There's Bob Dylan's (Hired) Guns Across The River, Tryin' To Pound You...

The Billy The Kid Sessions outtakes have been around for the better part of forever, but they always were a frustrating listen: Reflecting the shambolic nature of the sessions itself, there's tons of false starts, both musically and vocally, as well as talking to the engineers in the sound booth, people laughing and caughing through the music, and lots and lots of dead space. I compiled a version of these many years ago, notably before I discovered Audacity, and it remained a frustrating listen, despite the many fun, even slightly revelatory moments coming from the sessions, as it was hard to - you know - concentrate on the music in the middle of all the detritus. So, finally I got down to do something about it: The music of Dylan's Billy The Kid Sessions, and only the music. No bullshit. No talking until strictly necessary. No time wasted. Music, all I hear is music..

As said above, the sessions from whence this music came were anything but sharp or concentrated. Dylan - already in a writing drought for the better part of two years - had ambled down to Mexico to also play in Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garret & Billy The Kid, in a performance that didn't make him out to be a future star of the silver screen. His mostly silent role as henchman Alias is mostly (in)famous for Dylan's big scene being the one in which his character reads labels of canned food. Somebody get that man an Academy Award! ASAP! Tasked with producing a soundtrack, there was a whole lot of aimless jamming, a few unsuccesful stabs at songs such as "Goodbye Holly", "Sweet Amarillo" (later sung on Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour in a more finished form by Cindy Bullens) or "Rock Me Mama" (outfitted with new lyrics and finished by Old Crow Medicine Show in 2003). 

The soundtrack that finally emerged from these sessions was decidedly a minor work that showed Dylan's somewhat mitigated concentration, as well as his continued inability to come up with tunes. He only completed two real songs - the classic "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" and "Billy", a ballad about the title character present in three different versions, arguably to take up space on the album. The rest were instrumental score pieces, even though, well, if you hire Dylan, you don't really hire him for a score. Here's the leading lyricist of his generation, staying relatively speechless, not to mention that his compositions are missing the dynamics of a trained score composer. So Dylan's Pat Garret & Billy The Kid wasn't a particularly satisfying listen, but the whole thing was treated as a minor side project anyway, with Dylan rebounding with Planet Waves six months later. 

All of these factors make the music on the Billy The Kid Sessions both fascinating and frustrating. You wonder what would have happened to the aforementioned song fragments and abandoned songs had Dylan concentrated on finishing them. There are a ton of moments - some admittedly fleeting - in this bootleg, where the music perks up and risks to become more interesting than what ended up on the album,  but just as often suddenly ends, as the music sputters out or some other incident stops the take. This stop-and-go pattern was undoubtedly one of the biggest frustration with listening to this set, and so the idea to streamline the music was born. Historical the bootleg might be, where you hear Dylan mucking around in the studio, but it was simply an awful way to listen to the music. 

Now that only the music was left, I was still left with a dilemma of sorts: Does all of this stuff deserve to be heard? How much wordless (and, let's be fair here, sometimes tune-less) vocalizing from the Bobster is too much? Is the often repetitive nature of the tunes endearing or annoying? I am genuinely of two minds about what's better: a slightly repetitive 55 minute version that gathers pretty much all of the worthwhile music from the sessions, or a more streamlined, 'could have come out on vinyl' 46 minute edition. So, I'll do something Solomon-ian that's a first for this here blog: I'll leave you the choice.

If you are a semi-casual listener (because let's face it, if you are here and intersted in outtakes from an obscure Bob Dylan soundtrack, you might not  be a casual listener) the vinyl version of this should suffice nicely, if you want to dig even deeper inton the scraps, you can go for the CD edition. The biggest differences in the set list are the loss of several "Billy" variations, including "Funky Billy" - the third version of "Billy" on this album, where they try out the song with a markedly funkier guitar riff, that was both interesting as well as slightly incongruous -  and a number of reprises in the shortened vinyl edition. 

No matter which edition you choose (choose your own adventure here at OBG's!), there's some fine music to be found in the midst of the murk, and I am happy to present you these moments in what I think is easily the best way to listen to this music. So take it away with Billy The Kid Sessions, and a still searching Dylan wandering the wilderness, down some interesting dusty backroads...

The Full Monty...ah...Whoops, No, I Mean The Full Donnie...

The problem with starting, like, half a dozen or so loose series of themed albums is that it's easy to forget them and then, only a couple of months later say, 'oh, I wanted to post a follow-up to that'. When I posted my rejiggered version of the Dick Tracy soundtrack back in *checks archives* July I promised a series of reworked (and thus hopefully)improved soundtracks, then promptly forgot about posting a second album for a cool six months. But here it is, and it is a doozy, folks. A great score and some, uh, interesting pop music cobined to give you the whole Donnie Darko experience. 

Speaking of interesting. That is probably the word that comes easily to mind when thinking about Richard Kelly's debut film. Weird, fascinating, overwrought, (over)ambitious - lots of other adjectives come to mind. Truth is, though, when that movie came out in 2001, there was nothing like it. People will of course remember the dark, winding, weird and finally relatively impenetrale story of doomed teen Donnie Darko's adventures including a pedophile self-help guru, a scary-ass 6-foot+ rabbit (well, a scary-ass six foot+ dude in a rabbit suit), wanton destruction and arson, a plane crash, time travel and, uh, the end of the world. Donnie Darko came out as part of a series of mindfuck films around the millenium, none of course bigger or mindfuck-ier than Fight Club. Where is my mind? 

Now, it's been a good long while since I last saw Donnie Darko - at least twenty years ago. And I wonder whether it'll hold up, as so many of his mindfuck movie brethren fail to, once you know their story secrets. But I suspect it might, even if the crazy-ass story becomes less important than the look and feel of the film. Donnie Darko had a number of intriguing surface features: the moody cinematography courtesy of veteran Steven Poster, the acting by a young Jake Gyllenhaal in the title role, joined by produceer Drew Barrymore and Patrick Swayze playing against type. And it has a distinctive setting - the fall of 1988; with Michael Dukakis' disastrous bid to beat Bush the Elder being the background for the film's crazier adventures. And sometimes these surface features make all the difference. That's why a film like The Sixth Sense still holds up even if you know the twist - it's just so well designed and shot - back when Shyamalan wasn't synonymous with charlatan. Or why The Usual Suspects still works, even if you know who the hell Keyser Soze is - the fun-as-hell actors and surehanded direction make the film worh a revisit either way. 

But maybe the most stunning was the use of music: Michael Andrews' beautiful, or suspenseful (mostly) piano miniatures alternating with a number of 80s pop and alternative rock? I remember how the film immediately hooked me when Echo And The Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon" played over the opening of Donnie riding his bike. Both the score and the soundtrack album got released, but they missed out on what made the music of the movie special: It was the mix of Andrews' score intermingled with these 80s tunes. So this OBG-reworked soundtrack of Donnie Darko tries to do right by this intoxicating mix of the classical and the classics from yesteryear by mixing them up in the chronological order in which they appeared in the film (with one major excdption). As such, you get a sort of mind's eye version of the film, spurred on by the music, with most of it being simply fabulous. Maybe not, you know, Duran Duran's "Notorious", but it was part of Donnie Darko and is largely compensated for by the presence of The Church, Joy Division and 'Til Tuesday.

So, here you get the music the way it was in the movie, and the way it was supposed to be heard: Andrews' sometimes unsettling, sometimes sweepingly beautiful score rubbing shoulders with the 80s tunes that worked so well and felt so fresh in the early 2000s. Now, almost a quarter century later, too many films have gone to that well too many times, but back then Donnie Darko was one of the first - and best - to do it.  ow, about that big exception: The soundtrack of Donnie Darko actually spawned a hit single - the slowed down, elegiac version of Tears For Fears' "Mad World" as sung by Gary Jules. I seem to remember that a couple of weeks ago someone commenting over at Jokonky's called that version the biggest travesty or some such thing, but I couldn't disagree more. In Tears For Fears almost cheerful synth version the downbeat lyrics bounced off the beat in a rather incongruous way. In Michael Andrews' and Gary Jules' version the song sounds like its sentiments. Whether that makes it more or less attractive, I'll leave up to you. Not wanting to wait until the very end to listen to the song, I frontloaded it, then put the alternative version at its natural place towards the very end.

So, enjoy this improbable but intoxicating mix - as improbable and intoxicating as the film itself. One of these days I have to get back to revisit Donnie Darko, but in the meantime we can all revisit its splendid soundscapes...

PS. The Michel Gondry-directed video to "Mad World" is definitely worth a rewatch if you haven't seen it in 24 years...

From The Spiderweb-Covered Attic: Still The Ass-Kickingest Horror Music Compilation You'll Ever Hear...

Halloween, baby, time to bring out the scary again. This time with real emphasis on the word again. Long-time followers of the blog will know Best Of Horror Vol. 1 already. But hell, a little repost from time to time hasn't hurt anybody and it has been two years since I originally posted this, when this blog was still in its infancy and fighting to slowly crawl into triple digits , so a number of you might not have this, but should get it. 

I lacked time - and, let's be honest here - motivation this year to compile another compilation of music from horror films. And, being honest, and a little full of myself, again, why would I? I recently listened to Best Of Horror Vol. 1 again, and that compilation still holds up splendidly. Those suites that I did for the Friday The 13th series, and John Carpenter's The Fog and Prince of Darkness? Still an excellent way to get the strongest moments from those scores all in one place. 

classic film, classic poster

But since we're not all in on the lazy recycling business, here's the kicker for collectors: A special, exclusive, only on this edition, unavailable elsewhere BONUS TRACK (What, too much?!). Yup, even here on One Buck Records, we go for collector's bait. Actually, this morning in the school where I work, during class breaks, we were, ahem, celebrating Halloween. Lights out, scary sound effects and music on the comm system, that kind of thing. And, completely unbeknownst to my two bosses, on one of the scary music Cds that they no doubt picked up completely at random there was...the main theme from Suspiria! Good choice, compilers of unknown Halloween-themed CD. So, that gave me an idea. 

I have never liked Goblin's soundtrack to Suspiria much. I know it is held in high esteem by both horrorfilm score and prog rock fans, but I find the whole thing a taxing experience, with the prog side of Goblin meaning that they often stretch out the music unnecessarily, which goes into the straight up annoying when they do yelling witch voices and such. The tracks on the album are reminiscent of the ones in the film, but not quite the same. So for the extra special bonus track, I mixed two tracks ("Suspiria" and "Witch") together to approximate the feel of the score that's playing in the opening minutes, during Suzie's taxi ride through the forests to the dancing academy. It has to be said, that Suspiria's opening is its pièce de résistance, and one of the most stonishing sequences ever put to film. It's an assault on the senses - sound, music, color - that Argento never did again in such concentrated form. That first reel of Suspiria is so outstanding, that unfortunately the rest of the film can never really match it, and the finale is sadly kind of a dud. But that opening, man, even as a short film, that thing is killer, literally and figuratively...

The inclusion of "Suspiria Witch" means that I'm breaking a rare principle, as I also break the 80 minute plane with that track included. If, for some crazy reason, you would want to burn this to disc, you'd have to kick something off or overburn. But then again, the tiniest percentage of you is even thinking 'CD', so I'm probably worrying for nothing. 

Anyway, here's the 2025 special bonus track edition of Best Of Horror Vol. 1. Have a happy All Hallow's Eve everybody...

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 always 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 besides "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 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...

P.S.: There is a sequel of sorts, a bonus EP with more Queen/Highlander music that you can chcck out here.

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.