More movie soundtracks should have dialogue tracks between songs, I mean that’s why the teenage me bought this, the soundtrack to the first (and best) Farley/Spade vehicle, which was a ubiquitous presence on cable tv in the 90s. “Fat Guy in a Little Coat” comes up every winter when I’m getting ready to leave the house, and “malted hops and bong resin” pops into my head with curious regularity.
The songs on the album range from rap rock to college rock to pop punk, with a soft rock classic and 1973 Eurovision runner-up thrown in for kicks. For a movie that includes a scene where Rob Lowe is electrocuted via urination, there isn’t much filler, and only 1 band that seems to have completely disappeared.
Phunk Junkeez “I Love It Loud (Injected Mix)"
Is this a good song? No. For the movie, when it introduces Tommy at a frat party, is it perfect? Absolutely. Phunk Junkeez predate the mainstream explosion of rap rock, but their obnoxious sound is the perfect soundtrack for white boys to drink to. It’s really a cover of Kiss’s Creatures of the Night song of the same name, a concert staple despite the album failing to bring KISS back to their former glory. What strikes me the most about this song now is how the singer’s vocals are incredibly compressed and pushed forward in the mix, to the point where it’s almost like ASMR. I can almost hear the saliva in his mouth. Distasteful.
I took 4.5 years to graduate college (due to a semester spent abroad where I earned almost no credits) so this one stings a little.
Paul Westerberg "Silver Naked Ladies"
I wonder if even this song’s author wondered why a trad rock throwback was chosen by the music supervisor, maybe it just worked for the movie’s road trip scenes? The rest of Paul Westerberg’s debut solo album (after All Shook Down, which was a solo album in everything but name) is fairly laid back country-tinged rock, with the exception of single “World Class Fad”, an exercise in keeping The Replacements fanbase happy. The follow-up album, Eventually, is so named because evidently back then taking 3 years between albums was cause for concern.
If you’ve never done this with your head close to a fan, you’re a liar.
There’s a couple distinct eras of Primal Scream: the jangly beginning, the rave-influenced Screamadelica classic, and this, their poorly-received attempt at throwback rock n roll. The album, Give Out But Don’t Give In, is in the pantheon of Hated Brit Rock Follow Ups, along with The Stone Roses Second Coming, lambasted not only for their stylistic change, but for the baffling choice to abandon a successful formula to indulge their love of American rock n roll. The big difference between Mick & Co and Primal Scream is that The Rolling Stones were legitimate scumbags, and Primal Scream seem like fairly well-behaved boys. The band would return to the sample-based sound with Vanishing Point, but the common thread throughout their career is that Bobby Gillespie’s lyrics have always been pretty bad.
"How Do I Look?"
To be honest I cannot remember this quote. Forward!
The Goo Goo Dolls "Wait for the Blackout"
While it was years before I heard The Damned’s original, I still prefer Goo Goo Dolls stripped down cover, full of the buzzing guitars that the original band had nearly abandoned at this point in their embrace of a Goth Rock sound. While The Damned’s studio experiments would eventually bear fruit with 1996s Anything, “Blackout” is choked with unnecessary overdubs, including a particularly annoying acoustic guitar. The Goo Goo Dolls play it like a Buzzcocks song, which reveals it to be an aching ode to love, not the lusty horror vibe Dave Vanian was going for.
"Bong Resin" (This isn’t on YouTube for some bizarre reason)
To be fair, Tommy’s brain cells were just dead. A head full of malted hops and bong resin would probably make him smarter.
Shaw Blades "My Hallucination"
What is this boomer nonsense? Tommy Shaw (Styx) and Jack Blades (Night Ranger) were moonlighting from Damn Yankees long enough to eke out two albums, including this tour through white middle class suburban Classic Rock, like “We Didn’t Start the Fire” without a sliver of self-awareness (Billy Joel’s song is also unaware, but only at his denial of Boomer’s complicity in the century’s atrocities). They threw in the riff to “Sunshine of Your Love” just to make me hate it even more.
Every major label soundtrack has a couple bands that came and went without much notice, forever recorded for posterity between much more successful acts. Besides some college radio airplay and a lone major-label full-length, Seven Day Diary didn’t make much of an impact, though at the time their revved up melodic alternative rock sound was so common that it was easy for them to fall in the cracks.
I say this every time I put on a coat. Every time. Since 1995. I am nothing if not predicable.
Delaney and Bonnie’s oft-covered standard is a soundtrack staple, though I’d forgotten just how depressing the verses are, wallowing in despair until that giant chorus opens up. Soft Rock has a pretty dark undercurrent that deserves further investigation, not just because this song ended up serving as an epitaph for Karen Carpenter’s untimely death. Bonus fun fact: Sonic Youth’s version pops up on its fair share of soundtracks too, with the added pleasure of knowing Richard Carpenter singled it out for particular derision.
I say “Buddy Whack It” probably more often than is healthy.
Soul Coughing "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago"
Besides the movie’s climax taking place in Chicago, there’s not much reason for this song to appear here. To be honest, Mike Doughty’s treatment of his former bandmates kind of soured me on a lot of his work. Onward!
This scene starts off as a parody of the famous diner scene in Five Easy Pieces, but transcends mockery by using it as a springboard for Tommy to finally figure out what his skills are as a salesman.
Dexys Midnight Runners "Come On Eileen"
This song isn’t really fair to evaluate, it’d be like criticizing ancient Roman architecture, or saying the Washington Monument’s too tall. In the pantheon of Western Popular Music, “Come On Eileen” is just there. It existed before us and it’ll exist after us, for eternity, regardless of fads or well-intentioned ska-punk covers. What do you expect me to do, make fun of it? I’m sure there’s a few misguided souls out there who hate this song, but they just hate the situation they first heard it, or the person it reminds them of. The song is unimpeachable. Poor, poor Johnny Ray.
R.E.M. "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"
Coming back to “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, Michael Stipe takes us on a different kind of journey through the problems of the late 20th century, hitting the highlights of the Cold War, Iran Contra scandal, and uh... celebrities whose initials are L.B. The McCarthyism reference is actually the 2nd on the album this originally appears on, with “Exhuming McCarthy” also despairing how the political climate in the 1980’s wasn’t much different from the 1950’s. R.E.M. are an institution now, so it’s easy to forget how political they got during their middle years. They started out with environmental songs like “Fall on Me” and “Cuyahoga” on Life’s Rich Pageant, quickly moving onto the more concrete protest songs on Document, culminating with Green’s bitter odes like “Orange Crush”. The band rarely got so boldly political in their songwriting after that, though they used the old longbox design of follow-up Out of Time to incorporate a Rock the Vote postcard asking the buyer’s senator to support a bill that allowed people to register to vote at the DMV, a bill that, as anyone who’s gotten a driver’s license can attest, passed.
The Eurovision Song Contest isn’t a big deal in America, but for the rest of the Western world it’s appointment television, with country’s respect at stake. This 1973 runner-up was a surprise crossover hit in the US, when its dulcet tones fit snugly with the Formica countertops, sunken living rooms, and Naugahyde couches of middle America. In the movie it’s part of the road-trip montage as the guys race the clock to get to Chicago. I think the humor was supposed to be that they both knew the words, but it was a big hit in it’s day, why wouldn’t they?
Yes, this is dumb, but who cares. Richard is a shithead, but he gets his comeuppance in having to see Tommy in his underwear.
My first memory of this overlooked pop-punk band was a Guitar World sidebar about how the band was 3 brothers and their friend on drums, and 2 of the brothers were these huge intimidating guys. The 3rd brother, Josh Caterer, helped make the blueprint for the type of ultra-melodic pop punk that got real popular in the early 00s; unfortunately, the Smoking Popes were about 5 years too early. Signed during the earlier punk boom of Green Day & Rancid, the Popes didn’t have their snarl, just the overdriven guitars and fast tempos. Josh Caterer’s vocals reach back to the early days of pop music, as exemplified in their album of show tune covers, The Party’s Over. That album also served as their goodbye to Capitol Records, who rejected the album and released the band from their contract. After hopping around some indies, and Josh Caterer’s departure, the band re-formed and found a much more accommodating home in pop-punk mainstay Asian Man Records.
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