In this mini-series of articles we turn our attention to music that accompanied movies released in the year 1970. In future articles in the series we will focus on well-known film composers on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first episode let us look at movies that promoted the use of popular music either by documenting it or featuring music by artists from the rock idiom. We start this review with the soundtrack of the film about the most iconic of event in popular music history.
In May of 1970, several weeks after the release of the movie, the triple-LP album ‘Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More’ was released. Two weeks later it was a certified gold album. The movie, made to the budget of $600,000, grossed $50m worldwide. Not bad for the organizers who actually lost money on the event, but recuperated their losses with the visual and sound artifacts that followed.
So many words have been written about Woodstock that I will not bother you with trivial information. Just how rich it was with talent can be gleaned from the list of performers who DID NOT make the cut in the final movie: The Incredible String Band, Tim Hardin, Ravi Shankar, Melanie, Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Band, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Johnny and Edgar Winter, Paul Butterfield and more. Mind you, most of them were top acts or at least quite popular artists in 1969 and 1970. So let’s tell the story of one band who in August of 1969 was virtually unknown and with no album on the market prior to the festival. The band’s performance became THE visual moment of Woodstock. If anyone remembers one video clip from that movie, it is Santana performing Soul Sacrifice.
After playing a gig at the Catskills, Santana stayed in Woodstock for a week before the festival was scheduled to start. They were booked to play on the second day, and after learning about the traffic mess on day 1, decided to get up at 5am and were flown over with a helicopter. Carlos Santana remembers watching the festival site from above and seeing, “a carpet made of people—flesh and hair and teeth.” The band arrived at noon, thinking that they were scheduled to play later that night. Santana met Jerry Garcia who casually handed him mescaline. He accepted, thinking, “I’ll have time to enjoy this, come back down, drink a lot of water, get past the amoeba state, and be ready to play by tonight. No problem.”
With all the logistical problems plaguing the festival, many bands were late to show up and at 2pm Santana were called to get on stage, now. They climbed the stairs to the stage as the drug was kicking in, and as they started playing, Carlos Santana remembers that his guitar, “turned into an electric snake, twisting and turning, which meant the strings would go loose if it didn’t stay straight. I kept willing the snake not to move and praying that it stayed in tune.”
One of the stars in Santana’s performance was drummer Michael Shrieve, who at the age of 20 was one of the youngest to play at the festival. His passionate and exciting drum solo is one of the movie highlights. Interestingly, he humbly said later that he was nearly clueless about playing Latin rhythms: “I had a book that I did some practicing out of, a very basic Latin rhythm book by a man named Ted Reed. But I had no experience whatsoever and you can hear it in the music, because I play so inauthentically. I just tried to fit in with them in a way that felt good. Even when we do Latin rhythms, I’m always swinging like a jazz drummer on the cymbals.” He remembers his reaction when the Woodstock movie came out: “It was really an incredible experience and then when the film came out that was a whole other dimension: First of all, seeing ourselves like that in a theater—we hadn’t seen any rough cuts or anything so seeing it was really amazing. And then, of course, the way that has imprinted in people’s hearts and minds and stayed that way over all this time is amazing.”
Here is the famous split-screen clip with the band playing Soul Sacrifice:
Next is another documentary and concert movie, this one including a chronicle of an event that came to symbolize the exact opposite of Woodstock and the end of the 1960s. Gimme Shelter is a movie by brothers Albert and David Maysles who together with Charlotte Zwerin created a film in the style of Direct Cinema about the Rolling Stones in 1969 and 1970. Using hand held cameras and without any narration, the film offers an unfiltered view into the life of the bad boys of rock n’ roll, including the infamous performance at Altamont.
In many ways, the Maysles’ earlier film, ‘What’s Happening! The Beatles In The U.S.A.’ and Gimme Shelter are bookends to the 1960s, featuring the decade’s two iconic bands. Albert Maysles talked about the first film: “The Beatles represented an age of innocence. We hadn’t, in 1964, gotten fully into the Vietnam War yet. The Beatles were fun. There were wonderful poetic moments in their lyrics.” The second film was a different story altogether: “The Stones—just by accident, because they did not cause the events, with their lyrics, Sympathy for the Devil and Under My Thumb, were a near perfect match for what was taking place.”
The Maysles brothers met with the Rolling Stones at the end of the band’s 1969 US tour in November and December of that year. They filmed the shows at Madison Square Garden in New York City at the end of November, the same shows that contributed the music to the album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!. The film also includes footage from the band’s visit to Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama, where they recorded the songs Brown Sugar, Wild Horses and You Gotta Move that would be included in their next studio album Sticky Fingers. But throughout the film there is a pervading sense of impending disaster. Albert Maysles commented that, “It was Alfred Hitchcock who said, ‘In a fiction film, the director is God; in a non-fiction documentary, God is the director.’ That was the idea: let it happen.” And happened it did, on December 6th 1969.
A good amount of Gimme Shelter is dedicated to images of the Rolling Stones watching the raw footage of what has been filmed at Altamont. David Maysles: “The Stones hadn’t seen the material and when they asked to see it, it seemed like a good idea to film them reacting to the film rather than interviewing them.” The film features no narrative and relies on direct images captured by the hand held cameras to convey people’s feelings and the unfolding of events. Albert Maysles: “After doing all that shooting we thought the film needed a much more simple line. Within that line the Stones had in some way to express their feelings about what happened. They don’t react with anything more than their expressions in a very simple fashion because they can’t explain it any more than we can.”
I’ll spare you the scenes from Altamont that captured a brutal scene far removed from the well-known flower-power images from Woodstock just four months earlier. The whole day is full of violent scenes, pictures of disillusioned youth and rock stars trying helplessly to calm everyone down. In an ironic twist, the song the Stones were playing when the stabbing of Meredith Hunter occurred under the stage was ‘Under My Thumb’.
Instead, let’s watch one of the bright moments from the movie, with the Stones listening to what they recorded at Muscle Shoals. Albert Maysles: “My father would play classical music, and I would just look at his face. That was my music appreciation course. So I’ve always been conscious of faces and music. In Gimme Shelter, there’s that beautiful scene where the camera goes from one face to another during Wild Horses.”
We move from the Rolling Stones to a Rolling Stone. In 1968 Mick Jagger co-starred in a Warner Bros production of the directorial debut of Nicolas Roeg, collaborating with Donald Cammell who wrote the script. The studio execs at Warner thought that they have a swinging London film in their hands featuring a rock star. Sort of a Rolling Stones spin on A Hard Days Night, a light entertainment for all to enjoy. What they got, a movie titled Performance, was far removed from their expectation. A dark gangster movie full of violence, drug use, sex and ménage à trois, Mon Dieu! The movie sat in storage for two years until it was finally released in 1970.
Jack Nitzsche was recruited to oversee the music for the film, and he went on with the experimental feel of the visuals to score music that featured exotic sitar sounds, singers wailing, eerie choir music and blues. He also used various sonic effects that sound like amplified sheet metal. He later explained what he was looking for: “I was trying to capture the effect of taking one breath in and letting two breaths out – it creates an uncomfortable feeling in the viewer.”
Nitzsche was very familiar with the Rolling Stones, having worked as arranger on a number of their early records including Rolling Stones, Now!, Out of Our Heads, December’s Children and Aftermath, not to mention his piano work on their hit Paint It Black. However by the time he was assigned to write the score for Performance, the good vibe he had with them in the studio was gone: “I think Their Satanic Majesties Request was when they all started changing a lot; they took a lot of acid. I wasn’t there, I didn’t work on any of that, so I missed that whole period…and the next time I saw them they were different people. They’d become more, well, decadent. Whole different attitudes – it wasn’t loose and friendly anymore. It was all of a sudden real affected, I thought.”
Towards the end of production on Performance, Nitzsche was in London to watch an early screening. He recalls: “Mick was going to come by my apartment and take me to the screening. He appeared at my door wearing lipstick, eye shadow, a ruffled red shirt, black tights, and a mink stole draped around his shoulders – just like Turner in the film. We got into his white Rolls and he sucked in his cheeks like a model and didn’t talk much the whole way there.”
The film’s soundtrack also features contributions from a number of excellent musicians including Randy Newman, Ry Cooder and singer Merry Clayton who would later deliver the iconic vocal on the Rolling Stones hit Gimme Shelter. Nitzsche would go on to write many soundtracks, among them The Exorcist and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Here is one beautifully orchestrated track from Performance:
One band that experimented with soundtracks around that time was Pink Floyd. In 1969 they wrote the music for the French film More by director Barbet Schroeder. A year later famed Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, impressed by their track’ Careful With That Axe, Eugene’, approached them about working on his film Zabriskie Point.
Many scenes from the film were shot in Death Valley, California, one of the hottest places in the world. The film had a large budget, backed by MGM who were planning to capitalize on the counterculture youth market. $7m went into the making of the film, a huge amount at the time, and five times the budget that went into Antonioni’s previous film, Blow Up. It proved to be a financial disaster, bringing in less than $1m.
The film ended up featuring music by The Grateful Dead, John Fahey, and only a few tracks by Pink Floyd. The band spent a month in the studio, recording material that was mostly rejected by the director and left unused in the final film. Roger Waters Remembers: “We could have finished the whole thing in about five days, but Antonioni would listen and go ‘eets very beautiful, but eet’s too sad’, or ‘eet’s too strong’.” Drummer Nick Mason adds more details in his book Inside Out: ‘A Personal History of Pink Floyd’: “The problem was that Michelangelo wanted total control, and since he couldn’t make the music himself he exercised control by selection. Consequently each piece had to be finished rather than roughed out, then redone, rejected and resubmitted – Roger would go over to Cinecittà to play him the tapes in the afternoon. Antonioni would never take a first effort, and frequently complained that the music was too strong and overpowered the visual image.”
Pink Floyd’s rejected pieces were not wasted. As Nick Mason explains, “Continuing our policy of recycling anything remotely useful, we quietly gathered up all our out-takes. There was sure to be some opportunity to use them in the future.” Some of the music found its way into future Pink Floyd albums. A good example is the music that was originally planned for the ending explosion scene, then named ‘The Violent Sequence’, which became Us and Them on Dark Side of the Moon.
The track that did make the cut to accompany the movie’s memorable final explosion scene was called ‘Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up’, a re-working of Careful with That Axe, Eugene. The track was first released in 1968 as a B-side single and then on the band’s 1969 double-album Ummagumma. It fits perfectly as a powerful ending to the film, accompanying the slow motion explosion:
Our last artist had an illustrious career as a songwriter, record producer and musician in popular music but has written one and only soundtrack to my knowledge. By 1970 Al Kooper had already amassed quite a list of projects and collaborations with the likes of Bob Dylan, Blood, Sweat & Tears, The Blues Project and Don Ellis. But he was not prepared when asked to work on a film score. He remembers: “I had just agreed to score a major Hollywood motion picture and I didn’t have the slightest idea even how to begin. I needed help; that much I did know. I enlisted one of my favorite gurus—Charlie Calello. Charlie was the arranger on all The Four Seasons and Lou Christie hits, and had been involved on I Stand Alone. We had a wonderful working relationship, and most of all, he knew how to score films!”
The film was Hal Ashby’s directorial debut, the social comedy The Landlord. It offers an interesting take on racial relationships surrounding a tenement building in New York. Ashby wanted to use a compilation of songs by Neil Young to accompany various scenes in the movie, but at the time Young did not own a majority of the rights to his own music. Al Kooper was next in line, and he talks about composing and recording the music: “I went off to Los Angeles and rented a bungalow at the very bohemian Chateau Marmont for a month. I wrote music there every day and had access to a screening room to make notes and refer to the film for reference. I then returned to New York to record the score. After all, the film took place in New York City. The music was to be organically extracted from musicians who had that ‘New Yorkness’ in their approach to playing. Paul Griffin on keyboards, Chuck Rainey on bass, Eric Gale on guitar, and Bernard Purdie on drums were the core members of the band.”
The film opens with the Brand New Day, a song Kooper wrote about the sociological changes in America at the time, thinking it would be appropriate for the film. He wanted the gospel and R&B family singing group The Staple Singers to perform it. After he called to propose the song, he was invited to their house in Chicago during a layover in the city on a trip from Los Angeles to New York. Kooper remembers vividly his experience working with the father patriarch Roebuck Staples and his gifted family: “Borrowing Pop’s guitar after dinner, I played them the song, and just as I had anticipated, they assimilated it in five minutes as if they had been singing it all their lives. Mavis sang the verses and Pop sang the choruses. It was wonderful. Off I went, back to the airport, full of too much cornbread, with a huge smile on my face.”
Sources:
The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light, by Carlos Santana
Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd Paperback, by Nick Mason
Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock ‘N’ Roll Survivor, by Al Kooper
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