| AS ORIGINALLY PRINTED
IN RHYTHMS MAGAZINE
HEARD A GOOD MOVIE LATELY?
Surely it wasn’t just me, while kicking back for some dumb
fun watching “Shrek 2 “ that spilt their vat of coke
& bucket of pop corn when Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’
“People Aint No Good” came booming out of the speakers.
What the !? No one would begrudge the Melbourne bard a wealthy superannuation,
but a cartoon! A strange miscegnation for the most human of singer
songwriters whose exploration of his, & somehow our psyche,
has examined the subtle nuances of his emotional life in emphatic
detail, of what it’s like to be, or struggle to be human.
And it got me thinking about the putting of image to song, or visa
versa, of how music & film have been matched & mimatched
over the years.
After the golden age of cinema soundtracks by
people like Bernard Hermann & his orchestrated counterpoints
to Hitchcock’s nailbiting suspense, Ennio Moriccone’s
popculture pastiches & Nino Rota’s lusty accompaniment
to Fellini’s visual celebrations, it was 2 movies that set
the blueprint for matching contemporary rock music to cinematic
images that has been followed to this day.
In 1969 Peter Fonda & Dennis Hopper revolutionised
the movie world with Easy Rider, made for less than $500,000 &
grossing more than $20 million, the first film to sympathetically
& somewhat realistically reflect the counterculture growing
all over the world & showing the big wigs in Hollywood that
there was a previously untapped audience for a new style of cinema.
Whilst editing the movie Dennis Hopper was listening to radio &
cassettes & decided to cancel a soundtrack he had commisioned
by CSN&Y & decided instead to collage the sounds he &
the future audience were hearing all around them. But it was not
released for some time after the movie, because it was an unknown
innovation. Would the cinema going audience buy a soundtrack such
as this? The album was further delayed by copyright problems with
The Band’s version of “The Weight” used in the
movie, that was eventually substituted by Smith, a bar band, their
one & only moment in the sun. The album’s runaway success
amazed the music industry, making the Top 10 & going gold, as
the movie had surprised the film industry with it’s success.
It was the sound people were hearing on their radios & record
players bleeding into the cinema for the first time. And the die
was cast.
The following year European director Michaelangelo
Antonioni made his only American movie, “Zabriskie Point”,
a failed attempt to depict the socio/political revolutionary movement
of the time, a young Sam Shepard was one of several scriptwriters
involved. Unlike Hopper’s approach, Antonioni commisioned
a soundtrack from Jerry Garcia & Pink Floyd especially for the
movie, their tracks still unavailable elsewhere, along with snippets
from The Grateful Dead, Kaleidescope & others, the closing sequence
of exploding houses & consumer goods matched with Floyd’s
adaption of “Careful With That Axe Eugene “ still one
of the emblematic moments of the era.
As it’s been observed people came to Woodstock
& left as a demograph.
And the same goes for movies since. These days the soundtrack album
is often seen as part of the movie merchandising by the accountants,
along with the toys & lunch boxes. You get the uncomfortable
feeling while watching some movies that the soundtrack is being
advertised to you, a thrown together update of a K Tel compilation
& the sense that it’s wallets & not minds that are
open behind the scenes.
Of course there have been some notable exceptions,
directors who are music lovers & see the soundtrack as an intergral
part of their artistic vision. Music fanatic & college radio
dj before directing,Wim Wenders has seamlessly melded the music
& the visuals throughout his career, while Martin Scorsese uses
music almost like a Greek chorus indelibly intensifying the images
in movies like “Good Fellas” & many have sensibly
bought in guitarist Ry Cooder, who along with his musical career
has chalked up almost 20 diverse soundtrack albums.
Neil young cohort the late Jack Nitzsche began
his lengthy & Academy winning soundtrack career as musical director
with the psychedelic noir of Performance in 1970, combining people
like Cooder & Randy Newman with found sound from a variety of
sources & inventing a new role in the musical/visual nexus another
link in the creative chain.
Since then people like Graeme Revell one time
member of Sydney experimental band SPK has curated numerous score
in a similar fashion, David Holmes with the success of both film
& album of Oceans 11 & 12 is the hot new kid on the block
reaching deep into his arcane vinyl collection.
It’s become a crucial role, NIN’s
Trent Reznor somehow managed to make a far more coherent & interesting
soundtrack to “Natural Born Killers” than Oliver Stone
did a movie . It’s all in the ear of the beholder, but the
trivialisation of music that people have often found deeply moving
& intensely personal can often make one feel that the integrity
of the material & it’s creator has been diminished by
insensitive placement for crass capital gain. Rooting the wonderfully
ephemeral nature of music to a particular image or series of images
can forever change the experience, a responsibility best left to
the artists rather than the businessman.
Oops, too late.
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