One of the less familiar Burt Bacharach/Hal David movie themes. Featuring harpsichord and sneaky chord changes, it appeared the year after What’s New Pussycat. It plays during a candy-colored animated intro and includes comical interjections by leading man Peter Sellers in between the Hollies’ lead vocals. More appreciated today than in 1966, the After the Fox movie serves as a cineaste’s field day with its numerous industry in-jokes.

The Hollies (with Peter Sellers) – “After the Fox” (1966)

What springs to mind when this Let It Be song plays: 1) Its spiritual poetics, as if it were a hymn to Lennon’s imaginative Ono and her home continent’s mystic heritage; 2) evidence that the Maharishi era enhanced the Beatles’ artistry; and 3) that Lennon was a craftsman to the core.

Some Beatle versions you can choose from: 1) The official Let It Be one with Phil Spector’s overzealous angels; 2) the earlier version (on Past Masters) with bumble bees and horses; 3) The Anthology version where Lennon has trouble controlling his breath; and 4) the Let It Be Naked version, which is possibly the best one, although it omits the ascending eight notes reinforcing the outro on the familiar Spector version. Sigh.

Recently my teenage son asked me about the 1998 movie Pleasantville and I couldn’t quite articulate why my memories of it were so negative. So we watched it and near the end I thought, well that wasn’t so bad. Then Fiona Apple started up her moaning sick-bed rendition of “Across the Universe” and my memories made sense.

The Beatles – “Across the Universe” (1970)

I was watching the 1970 Airport movie a few nights ago and it struck me again during the scenes featuring Helen Hayes: she reminds me so much of James “Danno” MacArthur. The official biographies all assert that Hayes is his adopted mother. Some suggest that her husband Charles MacArthur was the real father while some speculate on James actually being the son of MacArthur family friend Lillian Gish. I’m not agitated enough about this to conduct any serious snooping, and I understand that family secrets are family secrets. But I have to admit to being puzzled that none of the theories about his birth origins I’ve come across acknowledge MacArthur’s uncanny resemblance to his adopted mother nor any willingness to consider the possibility of her being his real mother. Does no one else see the resemblance?

I remember feeling frustration when I saw the 2005 documentary Haack: The King of Techno (about synth pioneer Bruce Haack) because only the briefest glimpse of the legendary synth pioneer’s 1968 appearance on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood made the final cut. The entire segment has since turned up on YouTube, and you can take it in via Dangerous Minds where you can also read more about Haack.

I watched Medium Cool again, one of those classic bummer films of the late sixties. It’s about dispassionate journalism and the end of the sixties and is famous for being filmed in the midst of the real-life mayhem at the ’68 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The car crash at the end, though, uses the standard-issue sound effect first made famous by Nervous Norvus in his “Transfusion” single from 1956 and subsequently used in a number of records and TV shows. There’s a high-pitched male-voiced squeal at the end of this sound, and I always figured it was the voice of Nervous. Whatever the case, that goofy, familiar sound clashes with the somber, cinema verite vibe of the film, serving as a sort of buzzer handshake. Was this intentional? If so, it’s a better film than I thought.  Update 6/10: Just watched It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and heard the “Norvus squeal” in Jimmy Durante’s opening car crash.

Clips:
Nervous Norvus – “Transfusion” (1956)
Scatman Crothers – “Transfusion” (1956)
The Cadets – “Car Crash” (1960)
Jan and Dean – “Dead Man’s Curve” (1963)
The Shangri-Las – “Leader of the Pack” (1964)
Medium Cool (1968)

I got talking with Kendell Kardt about his pre-Rig days in New York City and he again made my head spin somewhat when he talked about a folk group he played in called “Forever Children” that included his friend Paul Giovanni (other members included Ronnie Gilbert, Joyce Aaron, and Mike Poznick). This is the same Paul he writes about in his private, online memoir – a guy he gave guitar lessons to and who performed, along with the aforementioned Ms. Aaron (Kendell’s girlfriend at the time), in an experimental troupe called the Open Theatre. Paul and his partner, the British playwright Peter Shaffer, eventually (and benevolently) flew Kendell out to London during an Open Theatre stint out there circa 1970 so he could reunite with Ms. Aaron.

That’s pretty much the end of Kendell’s own story with Paul, but the memory drive in my head kept clicking over the familiar-sounding name, and I remembered it was the same name listed as composer on the opening credits of the the 1973 Wicker Man cult film (performed by a group called “Magnet”). So I dug up an album cover by the group Side Show, that I since found out Giovanni had also belonged to, and Kendell said, “yes, this is Paul, second from the left.” I then told Kendell about The Wicker Man and have now replaced the long standing encyclopedia listing in my head that read “Paul Giovanni: Forgotten British folkie who composed a one-off soundtrack to a singular movie” to “Paul Giovanni: New York actor, composer, and old friend of Kendell’s who also happened to write the music for a singular movie.” Giovanni passed away in 1990, but although this New York Times obituary makes no mention of it, that enchanting soundtrack alone will keep his memory alive and well.

(Another friend of Kendell’s, by the way, recently sent along this piece from the Guardian about a Rocky Horror-style Wicker Man singalong that just took place in London…)

Magnet – “Corn Rigs” (1972)

To: Wes Anderson
Re: Pointless pop records in your movies

After watching The Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m requesting that you please drop the classic pop record shtick you’ve used for every single one of your movies for the following reasons:

1) The records mostly don’t work. All those records you shoved into Rushmore, and even The Royal Tenenbaums were fun in a head scratching sort of way, but having just seen The Fantastic Mr. Fox, I’m getting the distinct impression that you’re now subscribing to Quentin Tarantino’s hobbyhorse method of tossing favorite records into a film willy nilly just to be cool.

2) More often than not, the records hurt the movie. “Heroes and Villains,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Old Man River,” and, especially, “Let Her Dance,” add nothing to the singular visual experience you’ve offered viewers with The Fantastic Mr. Fox. In fact, they jerk viewers out of the wonderland you’ve coaxed them into by introducing clashing contexts, like you did with the Clash in The Royal Tenenbaums and the distracting David Bowie material in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Your insistence on overplaying Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” in The Darjeeling Limited added unnecessary pounds of dead weight to an already sluggish situation.

3) More often than not, the movie hurts the records. I’m of the opinion that the visual images movie makers ask viewers to associate with certain songs is no trifling matter, and a song’s appearance in a movie can do irreparable damage to a song. I understand the argument that pop songs are essentially commercial entities that are, in a way, consigned to an existence of eternal molestation merely for being what they are. But damage is still damage.

Illustration A: Sarstedt’s song, a UK no. 1 hit in its day, has already been around the block. But the distinct image that unfortunate viewers of Darjeeling are now forced to associate with it – Jason Schwartzman moping around with his iPod and a bored, anorexic Natalie Portman – has undoubtedly murdered a certain element of that song’s je ne sais quoi.

Illustration B: When the Bobby Fuller Four’s “Let Her Dance” crashes in for the closing credits of Mr. Fox, viewers are asked to associate the emotionally complex classic with animals dancing in a supermarket. I felt my heart sink when I heard it play, realizing that a song that made me lose my breath the first time I experienced it would now be remembered by my own kids as an incidental soundtrack item in an animal movie. The song hurt the scene and the scene hurt the song.

4) Movie directors have a unique opportunity to introduce new music to audiences. Here’s one thing about your latest movie that makes me think you have it in you to change your ways. The very best musical moment in this film was the song you had the animated Jarvis Cocker do. That was so magical that I wondered through the entire film why you didn’t just get Cocker to do the entire soundtrack. It meshed with the rest of the film in a way that none of those records did.

This is my basic counter argument for those who say “the music biz survives on movie and commercial tie-ins nowadays and you might as well get over it”: Movie directors, advertisers, and TV people would be doing the music biz a lot more good if they commissioned more original music. It would also make them look more inventive and less like those lazy minded types who devised the CSI intros featuring recordings of the Who as opposed to commissioning original theme music. (Spike Jonze, to his credit, used freshly composed music for his Where the Wild Things Are; to his discredit, the soundtrack and movie both turned out utterly cheerless. But still.)

Thanks for reading. Here’s to future days, future movies, and future original soundtracks.

I keep a list of all the movies I’ve seen and I realize that one of the main reasons I do this may be to translate such a blatantly recreational activity into something that appears constructive. But when I look at my list I’m always surprised over how many movies I’ve seen but don’t remember anything about save for a few stray words, songs, and images.

I occasionally undertake this little exercise that excavates whatever I can remember about a movie in one sentence. Below is a sampling from the W section. Note: Movies I really like (Wattstax), movies I especially dislike (Garden State), and movies I’ve seen more than once (Waiting for Guffman) don’t seem to work well for this exercise.

Waking Life (2001): A young man wakes up in a cartoon nightmare world in which all the inhabitants worship the sounds of their own voices.

Waking Ned Devine (1998): An old pig farmer cycles nude to the sound of bagpipes, all for some fried chicken.

Walkabout (1973): Rod Stewart narrates this story of a broken, nudist desert family in the heart of Australia.

Wanderers, The (1979): A little girl breaks greasers’ fingers at a bowling alley, then runs off with Bob Dylan.

Warriors, The (1979): Street gangs with baseball bats do choreographed battle to the music of Joe Walsh and the catcalls of Sean Penn.

Watcher in the Woods (1980): German Shepherds and talking mirrors spread nasty rumors about Hayley Mills in the middle of a forest.

Watership Down (1978): Several hundred cartoon rabbits find ways to tell each other apart against the ethereal backdrop of Art Garfunkel.

Way We Were, The (1973): A woman’s efforts to sing ballads in the voice of Bugs Bunny can’t keep the man she loves from leaving.

Weird Science (1985): Two high school boys use electricity, beakers, and underpants to disrupt an Oingo Boingo concert.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996): After getting kicked out of her brother’s organ/sax combo, a homely young girl forms a city choir.

What Lies Beneath (2000): Harrison Ford’s laptop flashes gibberish messages, prompting Michelle Pfeiffer to dump both of them into a lake.

posted by Kim Simpson

It’s hard not to get completely enamored with Love. The first time I actually held a copy of Forever Changes in my hands, back when I was a used record shop-burrowing teen (no real changes there, other than the teen bit), I couldn’t take my eyes off of that back cover photo. And the music, of course, tossed me into the cauldron of kaleidoscope potion the way it does to everyone. Just sat there, listening and listening. Da Capo had the same effect, with its fascinating b&w band collage – the king, Arthur, at the fore, and his six magical friends, including faithful tagalong Snoopy with his eyes fixed upward. For hopeless fans like me, the new Love Story documentary by Chris Hall and Mike Kerry feels like a very special reward, because:

–It’s got loads of interview footage with Arthur Lee not long before he passed away (in 2005). When you watch it, you realize that the man never, ever stopped being Arthur. He was relevant, cool, and powerful until the very end, and as the show progresses you’ll get that same feeling of gratitude you got when you first saw one of his live comeback shows and/or heard his live recordings. Some revelations: Arthur felt bashful for a long time about Forever Changes when he later hooked up with the non-classic fur ball Love lineups, hence the seemingly longstanding about-face. Also, he regrets filling side 2 of Da Capo with “Revelation.”

–It’s got great footage with John Echols, who’s quite the charismatic, well-spoken figure. Revelations here, too: As he tells it (in the bonus footage), he is solely responsible for the darkly famous lyrics of “Hey Joe.” According to him, Love had been doing raveups of the Billy Roberts/Dino Valenti song pretty regularly and when members of the Leaves asked him for the lyrics, he mischievously scribbled out some words about “shooting my baby down” with a “blue steel .44″ which he knew would never fly – that is, until the Leaves ended up scoring with the first Top 40 hit version of the song using John’s own lyrics.

–It’s got other live interviews with: Snoopy (with some hard-to-forget footage of him doing some of his own songs); Michael Stuart-Ware, whose Behind the Scenes on the Pegasus Carousel is essential reading for Love fans and a smart rock memoir; taped audio interview footage with the late Ken Forssi; and live footage with the late Bryan MacLean, whose Sundazed compilations and solo CD, finished just before he died in 1998, are also crucial if you want to understand just how charmed the ingredients were that the short-lived band had at its disposal.

posted by Kim Simpson

Goin’ Down the Road was an influential Canadian film about two Nova Scotia young bucks who drive a cool 1960 Chevy Impala to Toronto in hopes of snazzing up their floundering lives. It’s pretty much a bummer, like most movies at that time were. But it was a worthwhile bummer. Particularly worthwhile was the soundtrack by a young Bruce Cockburn, the venerable Canadian singer-songwriter who was only one album into his career back then. No soundtrack LP ever appeared because Bruce, apparently, insisted on not releasing something commercially that didn’t reflect his direct experience. Too bad. Anyway, I loved the theme song so much when I first saw this (still do) that I propped up a tape recorder by the TV, merging the opening first few verses with the closing verse that plays at the end.

Bruce Cockburn – “Goin’ Down the Road”