Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood: How Do I Love The Soundtrack? Let Me Count The Ways

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.