Song: "The Party" by the L.A. power pop band The Wondermints Released: 1996 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: For the Henry Mancini tribute album Shots in the Dark, which is best known for featuring a Scream-era Rose McGowan on its artwork, The Wondermints covered Mancini's psychedelia-lite main theme from The Party, the mostly improvised 1968 Blake Edwards comedy that thumbs its nose at Hollywood douches and SoCal stuffed shirts. (They didn't call anyone "douches" back then, so what did they say instead? "Hey, don't be such an un-groovy female sanitary napkin!"?)
Although I really like the brilliantly directed silent movie-style slapstick in The Party, especially any set piece involving the practically mute waiter who gets himself plastered (Steve Franken, cousin of Sen. Al Franken), I can't get past Peter Sellers' aggravating brownface act (even though his docile Indian outsider character was written to be one of the few sympathetic and likable people in the movie, it's still brownface). The late Edwards was full of odd contradictions as a filmmaker. For instance, he'll emasculate Asians in one movie (either in Breakfast at Tiffany's or, to a lesser extent, in The Party) but then give an Asian American a pretty progressive role for its time in another (James Hong's dramatic role as a surgeon wrongly accused of murder in 1972's The Carey Treatment, a much-maligned but interesting and Roy Budd-scored whodunit that Edwards disowned after directing it for MGM).
The 1996 Shots in the Dark take on "The Party," which is slightly updated with '90s production trickery and opens with a clip of the film's most quoted line, is a faithful rendition of one of Mancini's most underappreciated themes. In '96, Brian Wilson's future backing band was about to get some recognition the following year for its Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery song "Austin Powers."
This is the final "'Rome, Italian Style' Track of the Day" post. The "Rome, Italian Style" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon.
Song: "Her Hollow Ways" by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi Released: 2011 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: This lush instrumental from Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's Rome album sounds so much like a theme from some late '60s or early '70s Italian drama about either star-crossed lovers or a sexually repressed housewife who masturbates in the bathtub a lot that you can practically see opening credits in white like "Musica composta, orchestrata e diretta da Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi" as you hear it.
Some YouTuber took "Her Hollow Ways" and added it to a slideshow of vintage photos of elegant '50s and '60s ladies from Life magazine's Web archives for some reason. It kind of works.
Song: "James Bond Theme (GoldenEye Trailer Version)" by Parodi/Fair Released: 2002 (it was recorded in 1995) Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The "Rome, Italian Style" block focuses on how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret '60s and '70s film and TV music. Former Arsenio Hall Show band keyboardist Starr Parodi and her husband Jeff Eden Fair, whose film and TV scoring work as a duo has included the mid-'90s United Artists logo music and the Lifetime cop show The Division, are hardly outsiders, but their arrangement of "The James Bond Theme" from 1962's Dr. No is my favorite cover of that theme that never appeared in a Bond film.
On this date in 1963, "The James Bond Theme" (composed by Monty Norman and arranged by John Barry) entered the American pop charts. It captured the danger and allure of Bond's universe so well that every Eon Productions Bond film since Dr. No has featured it, and every non-Eon Bond film that doesn't feature it is, musically, kind of dickless without it--like Never Say Never Again or The Rock, which I like to think of as a sequel to the Sean Connery 007 installments because Connery was clearly playing Bond again, despite being named "John Mason,"(*) a safe-enough name choice to keep the Ian Fleming estate's lawyers away.
(*) If one likes to think of the name Bond as a mantle that's assumed by many different male MI6 agents instead of Bond being the same orphaned bachelor (and later, widower) from 1962 to 2002 despite five different faces, heights and accents(**), then that was a great way to explain why MI6 replaced the anonymous Scotsman who assumed the Bond identity from 1962 to 1967 and then briefly again in 1971: the U.S. government imprisoned his arse.
(**) Maybe Bond is really a Time Lord. All those STDs he picked up must have caused him to regenerate four times.
In 1995, United Artists recruited Parodi and Fair to do an updated version of "The James Bond Theme" for the GoldenEye teaser trailer, months before filming was completed on Pierce Brosnan's first movie as 007, which was also the first movie in which Eon enlisted Martin Campbell, the New Zealand-born director of the classic British miniseries Edge of Darkness, to rescue the hit-or-miss 007 film series from one of many periods of creative (and this time, also legally related) doldrums.
"We were in a unique and exciting situation because we had been given the assignment of bringing the Bond theme into the 90's," recalled Parodi and Fair on their official site. "Fortunately we were given lots of artistic freedom because the picture of the GoldenEye Teaser was to be edited to our music arrangement. We wanted to give the theme a sense of mystery and tension that would break out with tons of energy that suits the action that Bond films deliver."
The duo succeeded. Their nifty, trip-hop-influenced take on "The James Bond Theme," which constantly changes tempos, announced so effectively to the world during the GoldenEye teaser trailer that Bond was back in action again. It recaptures the danger and allure of Bond's universe in a way that Marvin Hamlisch's fun(***) but not-as-alluring "Bond '77" cover from The Spy Who Loved Me doesn't. Maybe it's due to the trip-hop sound, which is better suited for 007 than the disco sound of "Bond '77" because trip-hop is so influenced by Barry's spy movie scores, and artists from that genre are so fond of sampling those scores too, which is what Parodi and Fair did with the original 1962 recording of "The James Bond Theme" in their teaser trailer music.
(***) It's mostly because of the cowbells.
In 2002, it was nice to finally be able to have on disc the teaser trailer music, which became a staple of MGM/UA's trailers and ads for the Brosnan films. The trailer music made its CD debut on the Best of Bond... James Bond compilation, which Capitol released to mark the film series' 40th anniversary. At that time, the series was stuck in yet another creative rut (Brosnan's films did well at the box office but were becoming increasingly slipshod, script-wise). It wasn't able to come out of this rut until Eon enlisted Campbell again to helm what ended up being the best--and least juvenile--Bond film in decades. Mr. Bond, you have a nasty habit of surviving.
Song: "Lovely Head" by Goldfrapp Released: 2000 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?:Trouser Press came up with a good shorthand description for "Lovely Head," the first single off the duo Goldfrapp's debut album Felt Mountain: "If Lee Van Cleef had ever romanced Shirley Bassey, 'Lovely Head,' which sounds like a score in search of a Sergio Leone film, would have been their song."
Ennio Morricone's influence on Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, which they acknowledged in the Felt Mountain liner notes with their shout-outs to Morricone and Leone, is most evident in "Lovely Head." There's whistling, harpsichords, percussion reminiscent of Il Maestro's Sicilian Clan main title theme and a vocal effect that's as bizarre as the coyote howls in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly score, but it's more of a Goldfrapp touch than a Morricone touch. Goldfrapp, who provides the whistling during "Lovely Head," makes her voice sound remarkably like a theremin(*), with the help of a synthesizer that distorts her vocals (her theremin-like howls also turn up during another Felt Mountain cut and "Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day, "Pilots").
(*) In his intro for theTCM Essentials Jr.broadcast of the theremin-filled Thing from Another World a couple of days ago, host Bill Hader said, "Transformers would be so much better with a theremin." True that.
"Lovely Head" also channels the grandiose sound of the secondary themes John Barry composed for either 007's love interests or the foreign destinations where 007 would shag those love interests. The Bondian strings and drums of "Lovely Head" inspired a YouTuber to replace "All Time High," one of Barry's weakest Bond ballads, with "Lovely Head" in the Octopussy opening titles.
I gave myself an assignment for the entire month of July: I've been writing one post per weekday in which I say a few words about a selected track from A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" block of imaginary soundtrack music and covers of '60s and '70s film and TV themes. Sometimes, I've found myself not being able to say much more than "It's dope" or "It's shiny," and other times, the TV series where the piece of music originated from is a more interesting subject to write about than the music itself, which is the case with today's post. The "'Rome, Italian Style' Track of the Day" series concludes this Friday, but the block will continue to air Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon on AFOS.
Song: "The Avengers" by The John Gregory Orchestra Released: 1961 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's a faithful cover of the other Avengers theme, the lesser-known one from the British spy show's pre-Emma Peel seasons that was composed not by Laurie Johnson, but by the late British jazzman John Dankworth. Those rarely seen (due mostly to the British TV networks' love of throwing their archived shows away) and shot-on-videotape first three seasons were more serious in tone, and Dankworth's crime-jazz theme reflected that harder-edged tone.
A show that's turned 50 years old (!) this year, The Avengers started out as a total sausage fest, with Patrick Macnee's John Steed partnered with Ian Hendry's David Keel, a doctor seeking vengeance on the drug dealers who murdered his fiancée. When leather-clad anthropologist/judo expert Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) arrived as a replacement for Keel (Hendry, the show's original lead actor, decided to bounce after the first season to pursue a film career), the once-grim procedural gradually evolved into the eye candy-filled, sexy and playful spy-fi classic we know and love today.
"When the women came, it coincided with the rise of women's lib. So women were totally excited to see, in what was after all a comic strip type show, a woman [who] actually does things," said Macnee in 1998, when he was promoting his memoir The Avengers and Me. "At that time, to see a women like Diana Rigg, with that beautiful auburn hair throwing men over her shoulder, then tossing her hair out of her eyes, smiling and saying 'Where do we go next?' was highly attractive--particularly to young women. And to young men, particularly with the clothes, because they were... err, revealing and interesting. Suddenly a woman was vibrant in a medium in which [that] normally didn't happen."
Song: "Spy School Graduation Theme" by the Canadian band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet Released: 1993 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: I love this '60s spy score-style tune by Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the now-defunct instrumental rock band best known for composing the Kids in the Hall theme tune "Having an Average Weekend" and declaring that "We're Not a Fucking Surf Band."
In his series of season-by-season reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD, blogger SamuraiFrog says he always wanted to see a Trek TV spinoff that was set at Starfleet Academy. On a similar note, I always wanted to see someone create a show about spy school, although the USA show Covert Affairs is kind of fulfilling that function, but with the field serving as the new classroom for its inexperienced but plucky heroine Annie, who was pulled out early from the CIA's "Farm" and immediately promoted to field work.
Song: "It Takes a Thief" by The John Gregory Orchestra Released: 1972 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: British bandleader/arranger John "Chaquito" Gregory's cover of Dave Grusin's slick It Takes a Thief theme lacks the funky bass playing and urgent percussion that I love so much about Grusin's third-season arrangement of the theme. But Gregory's rendition is the only cover of the theme that's available (it's also the only recording of the theme that's available), so it'll do.
The It Takes a Thief theme is my favorite Grusin tune. It's the perfect opener for a '60s espionage procedural I've often found to be more enjoyable than most '60s American spy shows because it has a criminal as its hero, which is more interesting to me than the company man types who were frequently the leads in '60s spy shows. Plus, as Alexander Mundy, Robert Wagner was the epitome of cool and quite skilled with the show's moments of light, not-too-campy-like-the-worst-seasons-of-U.N.C.L.E. comedy. This ease with comedy was a skill that the future Number Two later put to great use when he literally made a mess of his debonair image in the funniest thing he ever did, the 1989 SNL "Sloppy Eater" sketch (Parks and Recreation has got to find a way for Rob Lowe to work in his amusing and dead-on Wagner impression, which he's done in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and on talk shows).
In 2006, Universal announced that Will Smith was attached to a big-screen version of It Takes a Thief, which hasn't been made yet. Nah, I can't see him playing a smooth thief like Mundy. Smith is more entertaining when he's playing a fish-out-of-water hero like in the original Men in Black and Hancock and is less entertaining when he tries to be suave. Mundy is more of a Taye Diggs or Idris Elba role or a role for Michael Weatherly, whose onscreen dad on NCIS happens to be Wagner himself.
Then again, why make an It Takes a Thief movie when the USA show White Collar is currently doing a better job at channeling Wagner's old show than whatever the movie version would have attempted to do?
Song: "An Italian Story" by film composer Daniele Luppi Released: 2004 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The imaginary soundtrack Rome isn't the first time Luppi paid tribute to '60s and '70s Italian film scores with the help of many of the veteran musicians who performed on those scores. In 2004, Luppi released An Italian Story, which featured original music that he wrote to salute not just Ennio Morricone (whom Luppi feels doesn't get enough props for his more avant-garde material and his work with early synths), but also Nino Rota, Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni, Armando Trovajoli and Stelvio Cipriani. All of them are composers Luppi has admired since his childhood in Italy.
"Like the films themselves, the music of the era was shiny and exuberant, filled with unusual flourishes and surprising turns," wrote Italian Story liner notes author Dan Epstein about the '60s and '70s sound Luppi recaptured. "It was the joyous sound of 'la dolce vita'--a newly prosperous nation springing back to effervescent life after the forced dreariness of the Mussolini regime and the grim period of poverty and austerity that followed World War II."
For the album's breezy title track (and another track on the album, "Fashion Party"), Luppi recruited Alessandro Alessandroni--the whistler/guitarist/virtual one-man band who was responsible for many of the bizarre noises during Morricone's scores--to whistle, of course.
"I will always remember the smile on [Alessandroni's] face when he first heard [the title track]," recalled Luppi in the liner notes. "It was like, 'Here I am, playing with these great musicians once again!'"
That feeling of being reunited with old friends is also experienced by us while listening to "An Italian Story." To those of us who have dug Italian film scores since the first time we saw either Once Upon a Time in the West or maybe The Sicilian Clan, Alessandroni's whistle is like an old friend.
Song: "Sanford & Son Theme (The Streetbeater)" by Count Basie and His Orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald & The Tommy Flanagan Trio Released: 1972 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's a cover of Quincy Jones' classic Sanford & Son theme that I was recently made aware of by The Smartest Man in the World podcast host Greg Proops' funny reenactment of two different Ella Fitzgerald concerts he saw: first in the '70s, when the Sanford & Son theme was part of her and the Count Basie Orchestra's set list, and then about a couple of decades later, when Proops and his wife watched the audience of predominantly "75-to-80-year-old women who are wearing hats" chew out Fitzgerald's security guard for being too slow to help the frail singer sit more comfortably in her chair onstage. "The people in front of us who haven't stood on their own in 14 years are standing now!," recalls Proops, who then busts out his best cranky old New York lady complaining-about-the-prices-at-Talbots voice. "'She's not comfortable! Get her a seat!'"
This portion of The Smartest Man's "Counts" episode includes a great description of Basie as a Frank Sinatra bandleader in comparison to Neal Hefti and Nelson Riddle. "The dynamic [between Basie and Sinatra] is fucking wild, right?... That's how the band was: shrieking horns, scintillating trombones... 'Angel trumpets and devil trombones,' right?," Proops says. "And then Count Basie would go, 'Pink!,' in the middle of everything, in the middle of fury. In the middle of a hurricane, Count Basie would hit one white key. 'Pink!'"
The dynamic between the Basie band and jazz singers like Sinatra and Fitzgerald is on display in Fitzgerald's live cover of "The Streetbeater" from her Jazz at Santa Monica Civic '72 album. "Minger's on trumpet!," says Fitzgerald, who's referring to trumpeter Pete Minger during his solo. I like the way Fitzgerald, Minger, saxman Jimmy Forrest and the other band members play off of each other here, and the musical dialogue Fitzgerald carries on with the band's guest soloists is even doper during their electrifying rendition of "C Jam Blues" at the end of the same album.
This is a snippet of an illustration I did for my currently-in-the-works book I Suck at Math: A Trio of 10 Articles About Pop Culture. The illustration speculates what it would have been like if Redd Foxx starred in The Phantom Menace, a movie that happens to feature the voice of... Greg Proops. Circle of life!
Speaking of jazz, Fred Sanford's insults to Aunt Esther are like jazz.
Aunt Esther: This old heathen want me to pay him for comin' in here!
Fred: He oughta tip me just to look at you!
Boom!
Aunt Esther: When I was born, my body was blessed by Mother Nature, honey!
Fred: And as you got older, it was cursed by Father Time!
Bam!
Aunt Esther: Fred Sanford, I have the feelin' of Christmas!
Fred: And the face of Halloween!
Woof!
Aunt Esther: Woodrow and I are going to have a baby.
Every weekday from July 1 to July 29, the "'Rome, Italian Style' Track of the Day" series of posts provides info on the tracks from A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, which focuses on how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret '60s and '70s film and TV music. The one-hour "Rome, Italian Style" block airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11am on AFOS.
Song: "A Town Called Big Nothing (Really Big Nothing)" by The MacManus Gang featuring actor Sy Richardson Released: 1987 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's one of my favorite artists, Elvis Costello (recording under his real name Declan MacManus), doing a spaghetti western-style tune, with a voiceover by Lite from Repo Man. I can't pass that up.
Costello, who did only backup vocals on "A Town Called Big Nothing," wrote the tune for a film he had a bit part in, Repo Man director Alex Cox's recently recut 1987 spaghetti western homage/spoof Straight to Hell, which stars Richardson, whose most noteworthy role outside of Cox's films was in the cult favorite Pushing Daisies (as the surly coroner with an unexplained grudge against Chi McBride's P.I. character Emerson Cod).
Listen to Costello do the British cowboy thing--decades before Daniel Craig in Cowboys & Aliens.
Song: "Walk on the Wild Side" by master Hammond B-3 organ player and Beastie Boys "Root Down" sample source Jimmy Smith Released: 1962 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: I first took notice of "Walk on the Wild Side"--not to be confused with the Lou Reed classic of the same name--when I heard it during Martin Scorsese's Casino. I later discovered that Smith's exhilarating instrumental was a cover of a movie theme, Elmer Bernstein's theme from the 1962 New Orleans bordello drama Walk on the Wild Side, which starred Laurence Harvey, Capucine and Jane Fonda (that was an interesting way for Scorsese to insert a shout-out to Bernstein, whom he previously worked with on Cape Fear and The Age of Innocence: he needle-dropped a cover of one of Bernstein's earlier compositions).
The instrumental version of Bernstein's Walk on the Wild Side theme accompanies one of legendary movie title designer Saul Bass' best opening title sequences, which, unlike most of Bass' other sequences, doesn't use any animation and is simply footage of an alley cat, cleverly edited to the tempo of Bernstein's slinky-sounding theme. The catfight at the end of Bass' titles pits a black cat against a white cat. It's like a Real Housewives of Atlanta fight scene with better acting.
Though its lyrics contain gospel-style references to the promised land of heaven, it's odd how this theme from a then-risque '60s movie about New Orleans hoes has become a gospel standard. It's like if Blondie's "Call Me" from American Gigolo got rewritten as "Call Me (Hello Lord)" or something.
Walk on the Wild Side star Jane Fonda models Timbuk2's new "Hitchhiking Ho" line.
Song: "Pilots" by Goldfrapp Released: 2000 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's like the 007 theme song Goldfrapp always should have gotten to write and record (I don't know what Eon Productions thinks of Goldfrapp, but if I were one of the Broccolis, I'd sign up Goldfrapp to do the next 007 theme). Besides its John Barry-esque sound, "Pilots" is on the playlist because... well, I'll let Alison Goldfrapp describe "Pilots" via an excerpt from an interview she did for LAUNCH in 2000:
"'Pilots' is my sci-fi image, a dream about being inside of this huge black bomber. Rubber radiators for clouds! This idea of feeling very small in the big scheme of things: 'What the f--k am I?' The idea of machinery being your friends. In a city you can hear people everywhere--upstairs, next door, downstairs. But if you're always worried about who's looking in your window, it can be a bit much. But there probably is somebody looking at you from somewhere."
Goldfrapp also captured that feeling of smallness in the big scheme of things in their elegant-looking video for the "Pilots (On a Star)" remix. Too bad I can't embed the video, which is set at a futuristic airport--if it were designed in the '60s by vintage 007 set designer Ken Adam. My favorite part of the video is the hot stewardesses on kick scooters.
Song: "Deep Down" by Mike Patton Released: 2010 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: When I first learned that for his '50s and '60s Italian pop music tribute project Mondo Cane, Patton recorded a cover of "Deep Down," Ennio Morricone's wonderful theme from the 1968 Mario Bava cult favorite Danger: Diabolik, I was worried that Patton's version was going to be overly kitschy. A 2009 video of Patton and his Mondo Cane orchestra giving a soaring performance of "Deep Down" in concert put that worry to rest (see the video below).
The Faith No More and Mr. Bungle frontman is a Morricone fan who once released a compilation of his favorite atonal Morricone score cues on his Ipecac label and who, like myself, wishes that more people would notice Morricone's non-spaghetti western compositions like "Deep Down" because, as he once noted in Spin, "Many people think of him only in terms of spaghetti western music." During "Deep Down," Patton and his orchestra honor the material with a non-kitschy take that's a worthy addition to the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist. Their cover is the opposite of that occasionally amusing but otherwise terrible Mystery Science Theater 3000 series finale where Mike and the Bots wrongheadedly trashed Danger: Diabolik, one of the best comic book adaptations ever filmed, as if it were a crime against humanity like the previous--and much more deserving--MST3K target Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Double O Section, a blog that reviews films and shows from the spy genre, said "[MST3K] did a grave disservice to cinema in general" with that Diabolik episode.
"The film has been tagged unfairly in the pop-consciousness as trash/camp," said the SpyVibe blog. "As much as I enjoy their riffs on bad-but-fun flicks, Mike and the robots had no business dragging Bava's Diabolik into that campy pigeonhole."
"When it turned up on [MST3K] as a turkey to be laughed at, I thought they were missing the point, it's supposed to be fun," said Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright in his entry on Diabolik for Time Out's "50 Essential Comic-Book Movies" list. "It made me really angry!"
Mr. Wright, whenever you get angry again because you're reminded of MST3K's shabby treatment of Diabolik, do what I do. Listen to Patton's calming and respectful cover of "Deep Down." It's like all is right with the world again whenever I hear it.
Song: "The Big Bamboozle" by imaginary soundtrack producer Barry Adamson Released: 1995 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: Adamson's "Big Bamboozle" crime-jazz instrumental is so seamy-sounding it would have been perfect as music during Kiss Me Deadly (a classic noir that, by the way, finally got the Criterion treatment on Blu-ray and DVD this summer).
I like "The Big Bamboozle" so much that when I edited together episodes of A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series, I frequently used it as an instrumental bed for segments where I spoke.
Each post in the "'Rome, Italian Style' Track of the Day" weekday series (July 1-29) provides info on a different track from A Fistful of Soundtracks' "Rome, Italian Style" playlist, which focuses on covers of '60s and '70s film and TV music and imaginary soundtracks like Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's Rome and Adrian Younge's Venice Dawn. The mission statement of the "Rome, Italian Style" block is basically "how musicians outside the film and TV music world interpret '60s and '70s film and TV music." It airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11am on AFOS.
Song: "Erotico (The Burglars)" by avant-garde composer John Zorn Released: 1985 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's a cover of Ennio Morricone's "Ma non troppo erotico," a down-and-dirty score cue (from the 1971 Jean-Paul Belmondo/Omar Sharif action flick The Burglars) that's an example of the Morricone sound at its sexiest and has been described more than once as great music to knock boots to. If you ever wondered what the Italian blues would sound like, listen to "Ma non troppo erotico," which features Morricone's excellent vocalist Edda Dell'Orso. Zorn's version of "Ma non troppo erotico" on his 1985 Morricone tribute album The Big Gundown is missing the horn stabs, pounding drums and Dell'Orso vocals that made the original such a cool track, but the cover compensates for their absence with electric guitar riffs by Bill Frisell and batshit crazy--and of course, towards the end, erotic-sounding--howls by vocalist Laura Biscotto.
Song: "1969 Organ" by Adrian Younge Released: 2000 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's my favorite track off Black Dynamite editor/composer Adrian Younge's imaginary soundtrack Venice Dawn, a long-out-of-print homage to '60s and '70s Italian film music from 2000 that Younge and Wax Poetics Records reissued as a free download earlier this week.
"It is well documented that American soul expanded the thresholds of contemporary music and influenced composers around the world. Classically trained European composers, such as Ennio Morricone, loved the sound of soul and synthesized this compositional style with his music," said the self-taught musician, film editor and former hip-hop producer to Wax Poetics. "Ennio Morricone is by far one of my favorite composers."
Younge is also fond of the Italian band Goblin of Suspiria fame and similar-sounding psychedelic soul acts, and their sounds also influenced Venice Dawn (I also detect a little Jerry van Rooyen in the organ riffs in "1969 Organ"). Like Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi's Rome project, Venice Dawn is a score written for an old movie that doesn't exist. At the time of Venice Dawn's initial release, Younge pretended Venice Dawn was a real piece of Italian cinema and punked everyone.
That mischievous spirit was carried over by Younge and director Scott Sanders into Black Dynamite. The 2009 blaxploitation homage is one of the funniest and most effective comedy films of the '00s because its approach to spoofing blaxploitation flicks is refreshingly timeless (unlike the lazily written and instantly dated pop-culture references of the Epic Movie/Disaster Movie/Meet the Spartans spoof franchise) and the actors in Black Dynamite play everything straight--just like the Leslie Nielsen who was completely dead-serious and stone-faced during the brilliant and short-lived Police Squad! TV series, not the Leslie Nielsen who went completely broad and resorted to mugging to the camera in the Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! movies.
While we await both Younge's score music for Adult Swim's animated version of Black Dynamite in spring 2012 and his Wax Poetics album Something About April, which is scheduled to drop in September, he's offered us an appetizer to Something About April in the form of the newly unearthed Venice Dawn--an EP that can now be sampled during the "Rome, Italian Style" block of imaginary soundtracks and covers of '60s and '70s score music from Monday to Thursday at 11am on A Fistful of Soundtracks.
Song: "007" by Count Basie and His Orchestra Released: 1966 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's Basie's big-band cover of the recently deceased John Barry's "007," complete with the legendary jazz pianist's trademark "plink, plink, plink" at the end (although it's actually more of a "da-dee-dee, plink, plink"). Not to be confused with the much more famous "James Bond Theme" (which was written by Monty Norman and arranged by Barry), "007" is a secondary theme for the Bond character that Barry introduced in 1963's From Russia with Love, the first film in the Bond franchise that Barry scored from start to finish, or rather, from gunbarrel to final makeout session, presumably on a raft. This North by Northwest-style, stately-sounding action motif turned up frequently during the Sean Connery era of the series--the era when the Bond installments, particularly From Russia with Love, most closely resembled North by Northwest--and rarely appeared in the series again after Connery's departure. The Basie Orchestra's rendition of "007" is taken from Basie Meets Bond, an album in which the band made its debut on United Artists Records by recording a tie-in to United Artists' biggest cash cow at the time and covering its most signature themes, including, yes, "Underneath the Mango Tree."
Song: "More [Theme from Mondo Cane]" by Frank Sinatra and Count Basie Released: 1964 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: It's my favorite version of "Ti guarderò nel cuore," a theme Riz Ortolani wrote for the score to the 1962 Italian movie Mondo Cane (the movie's title is Italian for "Dog World," so I guess that means "Doggy Dogg World" would be "Mondo Caney Cane"). Mondo Cane is an example of what was known as the "exploitation documentary" genre, which had documentarians capturing shocking and appalling behavior that later turned out to have been staged for the camera. Today, we call that Jersey Shore.
The most famous thing to come out of Mondo Cane is "Ti guarderò nel cuore." Lyrics were added to the instrumental, the tune was retitled "More" and the rest is history.
Plus, this cover of "More" has Sinatra together with Basie, with Quincy Jones as conductor and arranger. That's like the '60s big-band equivalent of Phil Jackson coaching Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. (So who'd be Dennis Rodman? Basie's drummer Sonny Payne?)
Tomorrow's "Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day is another film music cover by Basie.
Song: "Utopia (New Ears Mix)" by Goldfrapp Released: 2000 Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: The original version of "Utopia" sampled one of Ennio Morricone's Sicilian Clan score cues, but even without that sample, the ethereal New Ears Mix of "Utopia" maintains the original's Morricone-esque feel. Alison Goldfrapp's mostly wordless vocals totally channel Edda Dell'Orso in this version. The New Ears Mix would make for a great opening title theme for a scripted show about parapsychologists or Dark Shadows-esque, non-wimpy vampires or something. In fact, when I wrote a brief treatment for an idea for a paranormal drama set in Amityville, New York, one of my notes said, "The opening theme should be Goldfrapp's 'Utopia (New Ears Mix),' from Café Del Mar, Vol. 8."
