"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Blind Boys of Alabama, "Way Down in the Hole"

"'Rock Box' Track of the Day" is a series of weekday posts about each of the existing songs that are streamed during the "Rock Box" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks (4-6am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Mondays and 5-7am, 9-11am and 3-5pm on Fridays). Each post provides info on a different track from the "Rock Box" playlist and points out the movie or TV series moment where the track is so effectively used.

Song: "Way Down in the Hole" by The Blind Boys of Alabama
Released: 2001
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: The gospel group's cover of the Tom Waits tune was selected by Wire creator David Simon to be the theme during his show's brilliant first-season opening title sequence, which Andrew Dignan astutely described in a Museum of the Moving Image video essay as a sequence that "announces that The Wire is not a kicking-down-doors-and-busting-heads kind of cop show. The compositions are often off-center or partly out-of-focus, conveying world weariness and tedium on both sides of the divide."

Each subsequent season of The Wire would feature a different version of "Way Down in the Hole" in the titles. Season 2 episodes opened with Waits' original version, season 3 eps opened with a Neville Brothers version that was commissioned for the show, season 4 eps kicked off with a version that was also recorded for the show and performed by Domaje, a group of Baltimore teens, and season 5 eps opted for a cover by Steve Earle, who had a small role on the show as Bubbles' AA sponsor Waylon.

The Blind Boys version--the first piece of music that ever appeared on The Wire--was also the last existing song that was featured on the show. It accompanied the montage that concluded the series finale "-30-."

John Barry (1933-2011)

My favorite element of the 007 movies--besides the women--is the score music. John Barry, who died earlier this morning at the age of 77, wrote 11 of those 007 scores and made them so enjoyable and listenable outside the context of those movies. It's hard to listen to Barry's rousing and cool On Her Majesty's Secret Service main title theme without going up to a mirror and kneeling and pretending to aim a gun--just like what Danny once did on Hustle when he rehearsed a heist to the tune of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme blaring from a stereo.

I'm sure Barry would have rather been remembered for more than just Bond, so I'll mention that my two favorite non-Bond pieces of score music by Barry are the entire score from 1965's The Knack... And How to Get It and the theme from the Roger Moore/Tony Curtis buddy detective show The Persuaders!



"Another of the great composers has left us," tweeted Bear McCreary, who's currently scoring NBC's The Cape. "I'm cranking up The Black Hole in your honor."

Besides The Black Hole (an example of great opening title theme, schizophrenic and uneven movie--when I was a kid, I thought the Black Hole coloring book was more fun), I'm also fond of Barry's themes from The Ipcress File, The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy and Game of Death.

Barry also appeared on-screen as orchestra conductors in a couple of movies he scored. He cameoed in the 1968 Michael Caine heist flick Deadfall, which Fox Movie Channel aired last week, and The Living Daylights, his final 007 project (the above photo is from his Living Daylights cameo). Barry's musical output dried up in the late '90s (his last screen credit was the 2001 WWII codebreaking thriller Enigma), but British musicians kept alive his work by sampling some of his film themes. Mono sampled an Ipcress File cue in 1996's "Life in Mono," Fatboy Slim crafted a memorable hook out of the guitar riffs of Barry's first major film theme, the 007-esque Beat Girl theme from 1960, in 1998's ubiquitous "Rockafeller Skank," and Robbie Williams introduced the You Only Live Twice theme to a new generation in 1998's "Millennium" (seven years later, another of Barry's Bond themes got a similar introduction to a new generation when Kanye West sampled "Diamonds Are Forever" in "Diamonds from Sierra Leone").

Vanity Fair's intriguing profile of Barry from two years ago offers great insight into what made Barry tick and why everyone from his Out of Africa boss Sydney Pollack to Michael Caine thought of him as a man with the Midas touch, especially when it came to music.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Harry Nilsson, "Jump Into the Fire"

Song: "Jump Into the Fire" by Harry Nilsson
Released: 1971
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in GoodFellas. Some IMDb research revealed that the track is also part of Bottle Shock, The Girl Next Door, A Good Year and a CSI: NY episode.
Which moment in GoodFellas does it appear?: It's one of six (!) existing songs in the unforgettable nine-minute "May 11, 1980" sequence that reportedly cost Martin Scorsese an arm and a leg... and a wing.

Last week, the music of Harry Nilsson--from his cover of Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'" that was made famous by Midnight Cowboy to the charming original songs he penned for Robert Altman's Popeye--was the subject of an A.V. Club "Gateways to Geekery" piece. Below the article, several commenters cited "Jump Into the Fire" from Nilsson Schmilsson as the best part of GoodFellas.

The epic and apocalyptic-sounding "Jump Into the Fire" drum solo by Derek and the Dominos member and Gotham City police commissioner Jim Gordon is a great match with the cocaine-fueled descent of gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). In the frenetic sequence (hey look, it's a young Kevin Corrigan as Henry's wheelchair-bound brother--and there's Isiah Whitlock Jr. not saying sheeeeeeeeeiiiiit!), GoodFellas music editor Christopher Brooks mashed up the kickass Nilsson track with The Stones' "Memo from Turner," a live version of The Who's "Magic Bus," The Stones' "Monkey Man," Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" and George Harrison's "What Is Life?" ("Ooh, that was an expensive scene," recalled Brooks in a fascinating GoodFellas oral history that GQ published last year). But the best piece of music during that sequence is silence. I'm referring to the ominous silence that surrounds Lois (Welker White), the smug and perpetually stoned babysitter/drug mule, as she pesters Henry about driving her home to pick up a lucky hat she can't fly on planes without, which leads him to his arrest. I love how Scorsese chose to leave that moment--the moment right before Henry gets pinched--unscored.

"He's one of the few people who knows how to match music and picture. It's not just about taking a great record and just slapping it up in there," said Scorsese fan Spike Lee in GQ's oral history. "That scene is directed, obviously, by someone who's used cocaine! Simple as that. And used it a lot. And if you've never tried cocaine, which I haven't, now I know what it feels like, after watching that scene."



All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar"
Spandau Ballet, "Gold"
Brother Noland, "Coconut Girl"
A Flock of Seagulls, "Space Age Love Song"

A teen who was in a coma from 1974 to 2008 recaps the first Star Wars prequel

By special guest blogger Sonny Gautier

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Sonny Gautier is a Fistful of Soundtracks listener from Bed-Stuy who previously wrote for this blog a review of the 2008 trailer for Star Trek because his favorite TV show was Star Trek--the '70s animated series, not the much more popular '60s live-action show the cartoon was based on. Due to brain damage caused by exposure to too many Sid and Marty Krofft shows, a then-adolescent Sonny lapsed into a coma in 1974 and didn't wake up until 2008. Sonny has had a lot to catch up on. When I suggested he check out New Jack City because it has far doper production values than the pre-New Jack blaction flicks he grew up watching, he said, "I've seen that flick so many times already." He was much more interested in a series of fantasy flicks he'd never seen before: Star Wars. Here's Sonny's recap of one of the six Star Wars installments, which he opted to watch in chronological order, from The Phantom Menace to Return of the Jedi, instead of the way most of the rest of us watched the series, from A New Hope to Revenge of the Sith.)

Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace

Holy shit.

I had never seen a movie open like that before. BLAAAAM! Horn stabs out of nowhere! It felt like a pimp kicking you in the nuts with one of his high heels. And there was no "Starring James Cagney in..." or "Pam Grier is..." It just cut to the chase and said, "Screw the opening credits. Who gives a shit about the old lady who sewed together all the robes or the sucker who shined the skinny robot's shoes? This is what you need to know about the phantom menace."

I used to play trumpet for my high school marching band, so I dug the abrupt fanfare that kicked off The Phantom Menace. Jim told me the music was written by a man named John Williams. Where was this Williams cat when I was in my coma? If he had been by my bedside and gotten together a bunch of musicians to play the Phantom Menace theme, that would have woken my ass up.

After the opening theme, an Irish priest in space brings along with him a younger priest for a mission to keep the peace in the galaxy. I forgot what exactly their mission was because I couldn't remember most of the yellow words that scrolled upward into the horizon before the opening action scene--some complicated bullshit about "trade" and "taxation," I think. I felt like I was watching my eighth grade history teacher Mr. Greenblatt try to write a screenplay about the Revolutionary War but then gave up early on and turned it into a movie about Irish priests in space.

The Jedi priests carry swords of light that buzz and can cut through steel walls. Those are some dynamite-looking weapons. The bug-eyed aliens who interfere with the priests' mission talk like the dudes who run the nearby sushi bar. Later on, a donkey who talks like a gay Jamaican ice cream man and is named Jar Jar tags along with the priests. What's up with all the accents in this movie? It's set in an unspecified future where priests pilot spaceships and arm themselves with light swords, yet the priests and aliens all sound like they're from certain parts of the other boroughs. If that shufflin' donkey's supposed to be the comic relief, he's not very funny. (The queen in whiteface who sounds like a transsexual ho cracked me up much more than the donkey or the little robots that kept saying "Roger, roger.") The six-year-old white kids in the audience might find Jar Jar funny, but I don't. I'd rather see Redd Foxx be the comic relief. Is he still busy?

Father Jinn, his "padawan" Obi-Wan and the Jamaican donkey are forced to get their damaged ship repaired on a desert planet, where they encounter a slave woman and her son, whom Jinn believes to be the Messiah because of his "midichlorians." You know it's science fiction because the slaves are a white woman and her blond son. Yet I kind of enjoyed seeing a couple of white folks in shackles. Still, that doesn't make up for the Stepin Fetchit shit with the donkey.

Father Jinn needs to stay off the, uh, gin because the kid doesn't look like much of a savior. A future leader in a star war needs to have what white folks call charisma, and this sulky little turkey doesn't. The kid must be half-robot, half-human because he only had one expression for the entire movie.

I dug the kid's futuristic car race and the sword fight between the Jedis and Darth Maul, but where's the "wars" of the title? There wasn't much bloodshed like there is in the war movies I know--and most of them don't even have "wars" in the title. I know this is only the first installment in the series, and they're building towards something monumental, but that's kind of false advertising. The Phantom Menace script comes off as boring instead of exciting, although I like how Star Wars doesn't got any overdramatic scenes of somebody shaking their fists at the sky and crying "Nooooooooo!!!"

The Irish priest looks constipated for the whole movie and then dies in the climactic sword fight. Obi-Wan takes over as the kid's mentor so that he can teach him how to make some new facial expressions. A brother named Mace Windu looks like he could whup some ass with his purple blade but isn't given shit to do in the movie. The cat who plays Mace must be one of those strong, silent types who never scream and shout in their movies.

I heard Billy Dee Williams, an even cooler dude than Mace, doesn't show up until Episode V. This is going to be one long-ass space saga. In this first movie, there wasn't enough of that Darth cat or Mace, and there was way too much of unfunny Jar Jar. Man, I feel sorry for all the Jamaican ice cream men out there who have to be subjected to this dumbass donkey.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar"

Song: "I Need a Dollar" by Aloe Blacc
Released: 2010
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's the opening title theme from How to Make It in America, HBO's recession-era New York dramedy (or is it more of a comma?). To promote his new Stones Throw album Good Things, Blacc recently performed "I Need a Dollar" on both Conan and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, where it sounded impressive live and won him some new fans at Studio 6A.

My reaction upon hearing "I Need a Dollar" for the first time on How to Make It in America was exactly like my initial reaction to American Gangster's original song "Do You Feel Me," a Hank Shocklee-produced throwback to the sounds of the period setting of the Denzel Washington film that was performed by Anthony Hamilton (and written by, of all people, Diane "My Heart Will Go On" Warren). I wondered, "Whose recording studio archives did they dig up this gem from?" Blacc's vintage soul sound was so convincing in "I Need a Dollar" that I was surprised to learn the track was new.

"I Need a Dollar" is the perfect song for both a show that's like Entourage's cash-strapped, bedbug bite-covered East Coast cousin and these shitty times. Blacc actually wrote it before the recession hit:

Complex: What inspired the concept for "I Need A Dollar"?

Aloe Blacc: No money problems. That was boom time. The housing industry was up. Everybody was happy. I lived in this house that we called the Monmouth Temple on a street called Monmouth in Los Angeles from 2003 to 2008. A lot of musicians tend to live in this house. One of the guys has a really nice record collection, and he gave me some chain gang field recordings of convicts, largely black, from the South, working on chain gangs. This was in my head at that time. It seemed to me a little bit like a spiritual. That's the way I originally made the song. I actually recorded it with my friends in 2007 at the Monmouth Temple when we were just sitting in the front room stomping on the wooden floor and clapping our hands. Kind of like a spiritual you could do it in church. So that's how I always heard it. At least the melody in my voice, that's always remained and it worked perfectly with the music that these guys made in New York.

That spiritual quality in Blacc's voice helps lend "I Need a Dollar" a certain timelessness that will outlast whatever fashion or beverage trend the hustlers in How to Make It in America will attempt to take advantage of all season long.

Blacc is one of many former rappers who have shifted towards more melodic material with tunes like "I Need a Dollar." In his pretty good remix of "I Need a Dollar," L.A. battle rapper Dumbfoundead dabbles with ease in this shift towards sung vocals that Blacc has fully embraced: