Let me get this out of the way first: with a track list that includes the Bob
Seger System, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, Paul Revere & the
Raiders, and Deep Purple, this soundtrack is 100% Sharon-bait. Throw in The Mamas
& The Papas and Neil Diamond and I’m set. All of this is to say that
henceforth critical distance will not be maintained: this is going to be a
love fest, pure and simple.
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
is one of Tarantino’s most personal movies, and you can tell by the specificity
of the soundtrack and the role played by radio. Radio is the key. The music isn’t
just an ode to AM Radio: that would be an altogether different animal. This soundtrack,
filtered through Tarantino’s own childhood memories, is a love letter to KHJ Los
Angeles’ Boss Radio. Radio is the thread that connects the characters
throughout the movie, and the majority of the music heard in the movie is
through a car radio, a transistor, or the built-in radio in the home stereo
console. Weaving together the music with actual aircheck tapes from KHJ,
Tarantino improves upon his Reservoir Dogs soundtrack concept with something
that’s much less of a nostalgia stunt show and much more of a personal history.
For me, it’s this concept that makes the entire soundtrack work; the commercials and weather updates and the
music all feels not just specifically 1969, but specifically Los Angeles in a
way that’s not alienating to someone who didn’t grow up with it; I was born 10
years later on a completely different continent yet it draws me in, lending the movie a real warmth
and a sort of, I dunno, inherited familiarity?
But it’s not just the KHJ specificity; it’s of course the songs
themselves; the choices made by Tarantino and his longtime music supervisor
Mary Ramos are endlessly intriguing to me. I decided to wait until after
writing this missive to read in detail about the reasons behind the music
choices – so most of what I’m writing here is my own interpretation of how the
ways the various songs work with the movie and my own guesses as to the reason
behind the choices.
Anyway. Onto the music. “And awayyyyy we go….”
Early in the film there’s a really playful musical choice that stuck
out to me. Cliff drives Rick back to his Cielo Drive home and swaps Rick’s
cream-colored 1966 Cadillac DeVille convertible for his own dirty blue 1964
Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible, which he starts up in a cloud of smoke, right
as Billy Stewart’s “Summertime” kicks in: Stewart’s gleeful “RRRrrrrrrrrrrr” a cappella
exclamations seem to mimic the little car’s shuddering start and burbling motor,
then the summery horn-laden groove kicks in as Cliff adeptly swerves and fishtails
the nimble car back down through the hills on his way home to the Valley. It’s a great cut – especially when you listen to
the whole track and realize they had to identify just the right moment clip the
song start to finish. I don’t know for sure if they did it to match the car but
god I hope they did. It sure feels that way.
Hand in glove with radio, cars and car music are
essential to Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. This is a time when car
travel was cool, and Los Angeles the ultimate car city, routes and freeways
innate to the city’s personality. All of
this is baked into the music. On his drive home, Cliff nimbly weaves through
the downtown traffic to tracks like Joe Cocker’s “The Letter” and as the pedal hits metal on
the the freeway here comes the glorious bottom-heavy crash of Bob Seger System’s
‘Ramblin' Gamblin' Man’. As Cliff takes off from Cielo, so too Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, dressed in
their dandiest partying clothes tucked into Polanski's jaunty 1962 MG TD, take off to the Playboy Mansion to the deeply heavy, deeply groovy sounds of Deep Purple’s “Hush".
One of my joys of the movie is Margot Robbie’s portrayal of Sharon
Tate, and through her character's obvious delight in music and dancing she’s used as our way into various songs. Resplendent
in yellow she dances her heart out Michelle Phillips and Mama Cass to ‘Son of a Loving Man’ by the Buchanan
Brothers in the Playboy Mansion backyard; as she walks into the Village Theater to watch
herself in The Wrecking Crew, she can’t
help but groove to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels ‘Jenny Take a Ride’
playing over the CC and Companyr trailer on
screen; and, most iconically for me, Sharon at home dropping the needle on Paul Revere and the
Raiders ‘Good Thing’ as she un-selfconsciously dances around her bedroom while she packs for
a trip. The way the music delivers us these
small, joyful, wonderfully human moments are true delights, for me primarily because it’s Sharon Tate; a woman whose name is not tied to happiness or joy, but visions of victimhood and murder.
Paul Revere & The Raiders get not one but three shots at the
soundtrack with “Good Thing”, “Hungry” and “Mr Sun, Mr Moon”. I was initially a
little peeved by this; surely Tarantino could see fit to squeeze in at least
one Tommy James and the Shondells track in lieu of one of the THREE Paul
Reveres? But then I remembered that history is why Paul Revere earned their
rightful place. There's a Charles Manson connection; the band was
produced by Terry Melcher. Invoked by Tarantino (and Manson himself) in the movie but unseen, Melcher
was a primary target of Charles Manson’s single-minded, obsessive quest for musical
fame and one of the many convoluted “inspirations” behind the Manson Family’s
terrifying murder spree. Melcher was also the former tenant of the Tate home, and a good friend of Dennis Wilson and I could be here all day talking to you about Terry's illfated intertwinings with old Charles. (Also: the son of Doris Day. Ok I'll stop.)
Cliff crossing paths with a Manson Girl provides a couple
of good/interesting musical moments that I really liked. Over the excellent opening lines of Neil
Diamond’s ‘Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show’ (the song itself a wry opposite-day nod to
Manson and his cult), Cliff spies Pussycat, one of the Manson girls, thumbing for a ride. He pulls over and
agrees to drive her out to Spahn Ranch. Having flirted from afar twice before, in the car now the flirtation dial is alllll the way up to eleven, even though her vibe is immediately a little...weird. As the Cadillac sails down the on-ramp onto the freeway, Dee Clark's 1959 "Hey
Little Girl" kicks in, a bouncy little ode to, well, getting it on with
highschoolers. Such were the times. Between all the eye-fucking going on between Cliff and Pussycat and the song choice, I assumed that Cliff picked up Pussycat for sex reasons and curiosity.
But the song tricks you; when she casually offers to "suck his cock while
driving," Cliff, though amused, doesn’t take the (jail)bait. Can she prove
she's over 18? She cannot.
Hey *little* girl.
Not that this makes him a great guy (he's a wife-killer
after all), but the script-flip of the song cue serves the Cliff Booth
mystique. Just who the hell is this guy?
I can’t quite string the rest of this into a cohesive
narrative so I’ll just effuse over some other moments.
One of my favorites
is the unmistakable string intro of "Out of Time" by the Rolling
Stones kicking in as Rick and Cliff arrive at the airport after 6 months of
shooting Spaghetti Westerns in Italy. It’s
a bonafide “radio” song for one thing; I
swear it was still getting radio play on our local station in Australia in the late
70’s when I was a kid, it’s that much of a classic. But thematically there's a lot of signposts
working here if you want to start getting literal; we already know from the off
that Rick and Cliff are both men out of time culturally, and the movie has just
established that Rick and Cliff's working relationship is out of time because
Rick can no longer afford to keep him employed; but also perhaps a trick being
played here too; with the date emblazoned on screen the nerdier among us know (or
think we know) that Sharon Tate and her friends are tragically, literally out
of time.
Also it’s just cool because it’s a goddamn great song.(Sadly not included in the official released soundtrack).
Like Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Mamas and the Papas
get three spots on the soundtrack; and like Paul Revere and their Melcher
connection, the choice has everything to do with history. The short-lived quintessential
“LA hippy” band had many links to Sharon Tate & Roman Polanski and the
murders; Sharon, Michelle Phillips and Mama
Cass had a social connection, Polanski had an affair with Michelle and post Sharon’s murder
even accused John Philips of committing the murder as revenge for the affair (wtf dude); and
notoriously, the sheet music for their song “Straight Shooter” was one of the items found by
police in the Cielo Drive house the morning after the murder. (And all of this
drama is really saying something because the group was a wall-to-wall soap
opera *without* their connection to the murders.)
Dispensing with the happy summer vibes attributed to the
Mamas and The Papas, Tarantino starts deploying the music at the precise moment
when the tone of the movie darkens. First, Jose Feliciano's elegiac cover of
"California Dreaming” scores Cliff's drive away from Spahn Ranch. Here
Feliciano seems to pine for a lost idea as the inherent ‘wrongness’ of Cliff’s Spahn
Ranch excursion has at the very least forever poisoned his fond memories of shooting
Bounty Law there, and these raw, desperate hippies surely leaves the unflappable Cliff even more
uncertain of the future.
6 months later as the movie sets up for its violent
finale, Cliff returns home from "a good old fashioned drunk" with
Rick. He takes Brandy for a midnight walk down Cielo Drive; as he fades from
view, the headlights of a beat-up Ford Galaxie crest the hill; cue the opening
verse and chorus of my favorite Mamas & Papas song, "12:30 (Young Girls
Are Coming Into The Canyon)". Hunkered
inside the vehicle are the Manson Family’s Tex, Sadie and Sofie, full of ill-intent
: maximum portent for those in the audience who know that these are the three
who initiated the Tate murders. John
Phillips’ beautiful hippy paean to …groupies… provides perfect contrast to the slow
build of dread (hilariously cut short by a drunken Rick in his robe and
slippers waving a blender full of frozen margarita demanding these hippies get
their “mechanical asshole” off his private street).
Simultaneously at around midnight this same evening, just
next door at the Tate home, Abigail Folger entertains Sharon, Jay Sebring and
Wojciech Frykowski with a solo piano rendition of "Straight Shooter”. It’s
not a musical gut punch unless you know. But if you know? Oof.
A brief musical moment that I loved was as Cliff's encounter with the Manson Family begins ramping up, we cut to Rick Dalton,
drunk on margaritas lounging in the pool with his radio, singing along at the
top of his voice to "Snoopy and the Red Baron" by the Royal Guardsman It's a hilarious scene that
cuts the rising tension briefly; made even funnier if you recognize this
classic novelty song (kids of the late 60’s and 70’s surely delighted at the very
existence of a song about Snoopy. I know I did!). And as a character moment, it deftly
underlines the simplicity of Rick Dalton while also illustrating that
novelty songs are best enjoyed at the top of your voice when you are drunker
than shit.
Cliff and Rick's bloody finale is underpinned by Vanilla
Fudge's freak-out cover of "You Keep Me Hangin' On" As Cliff starts
to peak from his acid-dipped cigarette, he tunes the radio to KHJ and Fudge’s
slow psychedelic wall of sound builds to a roar. Portent reaches full climax as
the Manson Family come a-creeping into…. Rick's house. From there it’s
mayhem. The long, insane crescendo of Vanilla Fudge’s incredible cover matches
the long, insane crescendo of the violence on screen and feels a little bit
like Tarantino finally (maybe) getting one up on Paul Thomas Anderson's iconic
deployment of "Sister Christian" in Boogie Nights? Maybe? Musical
insanity matching on-screen insanity one-to-one, this moment is hard to beat.
(And as a nerdy aside, I love that along with garage and pop and folk we get
gnarly heavy late 60’s rock, starting out with early Deep Purple and ending
with the legendary Vanilla Fudge. According to Ritchie Blackmore, when Deep
Purple started out, they intentionally set out to be clones of Vanilla Fudge.
Which hey, there are worse bars to set for yourself. Hail Fudge!)
So. Obviously I loved the movie and the soundtrack to a
ridiculous degree. And I didn’t even talk about Los Bravos, The Box Tops or
Maurice Jarre! I could go on forever but also I honestly don’t know how to even
finish this deep dive! Ugh!
The end.
