I swore I heard a couple of bars of Mission: Impossible motifs when Sidney was getting into the White House elevator at one point.
I'm watching now... By Jove, you're right! It's just after he gets 'paged' in the men's room. And later, when he's ducking into the rock band's RV parked next to the Cafe Wha?. The rat-a-tat martial snare drum in several of those elevator shots is also a common
M:I element. Well, it's certainly appropriate, given the conceptual similarities between
M:I and
TPA.Regarding the original post:
I sure don't hear any cheezy rock-style electric guitar "all the way through"-- it's in a couple of spots in the musical montage under the opening credits, but seldom anywhere else. And I don't think it's all
that cheezy. A lot of late-'60s rock bands had "acid rock" soloists who sounded no better than that, and sometimes worse. (As for who the actual player was, my personal guess would be session guitarist Joe Beck, but who knows?)
As for Clear Light's outdoor performance: That drum part sounds
awfully crude, but I do like the arpeggiated electric guitar. Lotsa energy.
The thing is, if you dig into the (sometimes clandestine) credits of well-known '60s pop and rock songs that we thought were a product of 'our generation', many were actually written by seasoned staff writers and/or performed by not-so-young session players, so the dividing line between "real" and "imitation" was not as clear as one might assume.
That said, the OP has a point, even if it may not apply here. I cringe at many
Mannix scenes set in nightclubs/discotheques, where people are dancing to alleged circa-1970 "rock & roll" that resembles an older generation's impression of early-'60s surf music. Didn't Schifrin, and/or the music editors choosing from archives of generic 'library' music for such scenes, realize that a vast swath of their audience would immediately read those 'groovy, up-to-date' sounds as being hopelessly corny? Perhaps, but time and budget restrictions likely prevented them from investing in truly hip stuff.
The Firesign Theatre... ah, yes! This movie dovetails quite nicely with Side Five of "Waiting for the Electrician". I'm sure the 4 or 5 Krazy Guys must have seen it and enjoyed it. In fact, even in '67, when they were just getting started, they could have
written it, if anyone had asked.
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[email protected]
9 years ago
Music library archives must be a great listening experience. I bought a CD of selections from the Capitol library (most widely heard in the 'Ren & Stimpy' cartoons)and would love to have a collection of 'groovy' nightclub/radio stock tunes.
While there was never a soundtrack album for this movie, Lalo Schifrin did a curious lp around this time, with the punny title "There's a Whole Lalo Schifrin Going On", that invoked some of the feel of it. In a previous album he'd incorporated Baroque themes into jazzy instrumentals, here he pulls some oddball stuff like a piano break that is a random angry assault on the keyboard, insurance contract jargon sung like a pumped up gospel choir, backgrounds of murmuring crowd vocalese that slowly rise to agitated shrieking...as a bonus, two selections are re-scored versions of tunes that show up as the blaring Tijuana Brass-style 'Total Sound' in the Quantrill car.
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urgeking
9 years ago
Wow, that Schifrin album sounds like it would be my cup of tea. Only in the '60s would a major label have been willing to release something like that.
(A few years earlier, the CRI 'classical' label had issued an LP that included a quasi-Baroque chorus singing an excerpt from the U.S. tax code. "Mother-in-law, mother-in-law, you can deduct your mother-in-law...")
It's now possible to hear a lot of vintage library music in its original form. Back before music blogs got (indirectly) shot down by the Federal download police, dozens of those albums were being featured online. And some have seen their first commercial releases-- for example, the Strut label has put out numerous compilations. I'd had no idea how big the library-music business was in the '60s and '70s, particularly in Britain and in Europe in general. Only recently did I discover that the 'Music by DeWolfe' mentioned in the credits of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" referred to one of those companies, not to a composer. Many well-known musicians were moonlighting by composing and performing entire albums sold only to TV/radio/movie production companies while we members of the public who were fans of those musicians never even heard about it.
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