Took a look at the trailer for this early Taylor Hackford thriller, as well as the oft-aired video for Phil Collins’s Oscar-nominated, Grammy-winning title ballad, to see if that might jar any memories of actually having seen this loose ‘n’ lusty remake of Jacques Tourneur’s film noir masterpiece ‘Out of the Past.’
File this one under Soundtracks to Shows I’m Unlikely to Ever See alongside David Byrne’s backdrop for ‘The Catherine Wheel’ and his interludes dubbed ‘The Knee Plays’ and probably any quality productions of Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ or ‘Chess,’ the musical composed by Tim Rice and the men of ABBA that gave the world ‘One Night in Bangkok.’
Hate sounding like skipping wax when I yet again insist I’m as eager as anyone to hurl my #TuesdaysWithJerry survey of A&M Records firmly into the era of Cat Stevens and Peter Frampton, to say nothing of the Police and Squeeze and scads more who arrived toward the end of that decade.
First: yes, I have decided aural replicas of long-demolished Disneyland attractions qualify for installments of #SoundtrackSunday.
This once-buried treasure from August ‘77 is the very definition of a cult classic, like Skip Spence’s Oar or Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos. The sole solo album from the least significant (yet still considerably talented) Wilson brother, Pacific Ocean Blue has been expounded upon aplenty. Much of that revisionist praise hits the mark, but boasts of ‘you must hear this before you die’ strike me as overinflated.
We’re still inching our way toward the ‘70s, a stylistically packed decade that will see A&M Records (the focus of this #TuesdaysWithJerry offshoot of #VinylTwosDays) swing from soft pop to hard rock to new wave by the time that era’s glittering New Year’s Eve ball dropped into 1980.
Now that I’ve undertaken this #SoundtrackSunday project, do I wish I’d started my A-Z rundown of those we own a month earlier, so that this second installment could have appeared shortly before Halloween? Maybe a little.
Shooting from the hip here, so feel free to kindly counter this claim in comments, but I suspect there was no more prolific group on either side of the Atlantic in 1969 than Fairport Convention, and only Led Zeppelin achieved more impactful strides within those 12 months.
FC is the subject of this installment of #TuesdaysWithJerry, my journey through A&M Records’s past, in tribute to that label’s late co-founder Jerry Moss. I’ll get to why you’re as likely to find UK editions on Island Records as stateside pressings.
I’ve long considered contributing cinematic wax to the weekly roundup that is #soundtracksunday, hosted by (who else?) @soundtracksunday.
First off: Could they have picked a more distant, boring, pointless photo for this thing?
The frenetically blurry pic adorning the original Live back in December ‘80 said everything. This poorly framed glimpse taken from Loge 57 Row Z says absolutely nothing beyond ‘these are the five people in this band.’ The shot of them embracing inside the gatefold would have made a much better cover.
