Gutbrain Records

Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Bloodbuster seems to be a really cool shop in Milan. At least their website has a Milan street address. They also publish some interesting movie books under the banner of Bloodbuster Edizioni: Tutto il cinema dalla B alla Zeta! I guess that means everything cinema from B to Z.

The latest Bloodbuster book, following the intriguing Contaminations: Guida al fantacinema italiano anni 80 (a guide to fantastic Italian movies from the '80s) and Cinici, Infami e Violenti: Guida ai film polizieschi italiani anni '70 (a guide to Italian crime movies from the '70s) is Segretissimi: Guida agli spy-movie italiani anni '60 (a guide to Italian spy movies from the '60s).

The book is in Italian only, but I bought it anyway. With a dictionary I can probably get a rough idea of many of the movie plots.

"C'è una banda di trafficanti di LSD da sgominare. Ci pensa l'agente segreto Rex Miller. Fine." That makes a certain amount of sense.

There are lots of illustrations in the books, movie posters and stills, all in black and white, probably to keep costs down. Segretissimi is limited to 500 copies, hand numbered.

The book begins with a quote from a song by Italian singer/songwriter Paolo Benvegnù: "L'uomo prega Dio ma preferisce Giuda...", which I think translates as "man prays to God but prefers Judas...".

Emma Peel makes an early appearance in the book, which is surely a good sign.

There are spreads on different series of films and a rogues' gallery of actors.

Klaus Kinski is there, all the way on the right, in the middle of the column. Here he is again.

Most of the book presents synopses of the films with reproductions of movie posters and a few stills.

Matchless has a great Ennio Morricone score.

The pictures look better in the book than they do here. These are from lazy snapshots I took with my camera. When I look at the text, Italian seems to be a pretty inviting language. "L'agente segreto americano Kurt Jackson è inviato a Singapore…" seems pretty clear to me.

Books that focus on just one particular shadowy corner of pop culture are a favorite of mine. I'm very pleased to have Segretissimi on my shelf! (My copy came from Screen Archives Entertainment.)

Monday, 08 March 2010

Soundtrack of the Week #103 is Joe Harnell's music from The Bionic Woman episodes "Doomsday Is Tomorrow Part 2" and "The Martians Are Coming, The Martians Are Coming".

The Bionic Woman was my favorite TV show when I was in elementary school. After moving into my first New York City apartment in 1991, I was delighted to find out that it was being shown on TV at three in the morning every Monday. It would be followed at four by Mission: Impossible. I stayed up every Sunday night to watch it.

The music was always great and I sometimes recorded it directly off the TV to listen to later. Jerry Fielding's theme for the show is still one of my favorite pieces.

Joe Harnell, whose beautiful theme music for The Incredible Hulk television show also haunts my memory, scored several episodes, including the second part of "Doomsday Is Tomorrow", a thrilling mixture of plot devices from The Andromeda Strain, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove. This fan-made trailer is great—except for not using the music originally in the show.

The CD begins with Joe Harnell's unused theme for the show. It's excellent and should be familiar to Bionic Woman fans as Harnell frequently worked it into the music for episodes he scored.

After that is music for "The Martians Are Coming, The Martians Are Coming", which mixes slinky funk/disco rhythms with synthesizer and delay freak-outs and the Blaster Beam, an electronic instrument much cherished by sci-fi soundtrack composers.

The CD liner notes point out that "While most people associate the first use of this device with Jerry Goldsmith's score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where it was used as the voice of V'Ger, Joe actually used the Blaster Beam nearly a year before in this episode of The Bionic Woman".

(According to the liner notes of Film Score Monthly's CD of James Horner's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan score, the Blaster Beam was invented by Craig Huxley, who also played it for at least the first two Star Trek movie scores. Huxley also appeared in two episodes of Star Trek when he was a child, and was William Shatner's musical director for a while.)

After "Martians" there's an 11-second commercial bumper, then the music for "Doomsday", which is alternately eerie and driving, suspenseful and marital.

Again the liner notes point out some things worth knowing:

"While Joe was very confident with his dramatic instincts as a composer, he never passed up an opportunity to wink at the audience. To represent the ALEX 7000, Joe chose to write a theme that was essentially Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" from 2001 but backwards as an in-joke for fans who would make the connection between ALEX and HAL 9000. In the track called "Father and Son", Joe quotes from the Ernest Gold theme to Exodus when David Opatoshu, a star of that film, hugs his son, after he discovers that his actions have started the doomsday device.

After "Doomsday" come Harnell's unused end credits music, bonus alternate tracks of music from both episodes and some very cool "music effects" tracks that could be great sample fodder for people who are into that sort of thing. (One of them includes that haunting solo piano from The Incredible Hulk.)

I got my copy of this excellent CD from Joe Harnell's website but it's also available from Screen Archives Entertainment.

Friday, 05 March 2010

Later that week, Tommy saw the lethal combination of heavy-duty barbiturates and alcohol with which Hank was dosing himself. He also saw how Perdue and Marshall had worked out a procedure that would enable their meal ticket to make the show, but at a terrible cost. Hank was allowed a few beers after he woke up, then Marshall injected him with a drug that made him vomit up the beer. Then they would pour black coffee down him, hand him some Dexedrine tablets and point him toward the stage. After the show, he'd be allowed some more beers and put back to bed with some downers.

—Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography

Wednesday, 03 March 2010

Hank Williams had an interesting history with marriage. He and Audrey were married, then divorced. Then the divorce was annulled and they got married again, then divorced again.

Hank then married Billie Jean Jones a few times. They got married in public at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans, charging $1.00—$2.80 for tickets. You could attend the the 3:00 or 7:00 shows.

But Hank and Billie Jean got legally married the night before their public weddings. Legend has it that Audrey threatened to show up and disrupt the ceremony, so they made sure all the legal, official business was done before show time.

According to Colin Escott's Hank Williams biography, about 14,000 people saw Hank and Billie Jean get married. Some of them bought this program for 50¢. (This one my mother got on eBay and gave to me as a present.)

Monday, 01 March 2010

The one hundred and second Soundtrack of the Week is Gil Mellé's The Andromeda Strain.

I've admired some of Mellé's television scoring, particularly for Columbo. Mellé also made some great small-group jazz records in the fifties and sixties, for Blue Note and Prestige. For one of the Blue Note sessions—October 25, 1953—he recorded an arrangement of Miklós Rózsa's Spellbound theme. The group was Mellé on tenor sax, Urbie Green on trombone, Tal Farlow on guitar, Clyde Lombardi on bass and Joe Morello on drums. You can hear it on Gil Mellé's The Complete Blue Note Fifties Sessions.

The liner notes to Intrada's new Andromeda Strain CD tell us that Mellé was "First signed to Blue Note Records at the age of 19" and "supported himself by painting album covers for the likes of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. After studying modernism under one of its greatest proponents, Edgar Varèse, Mellé's own experimental interests took an electronic turn in 1959. Mellé constructed his own instruments and was adamant that they should be their own electronic beasts, rather than replicate already-existing sounds".

The Andromeda Strain is a masterpiece, one of a handful of scores that make me think that avantgarde concert music lags behind some of the music created for film and television.

It was apparently for the Andromeda Strain score that Mellé created the Percussotron, "the world's first percussion synthesizer", according to Intrada's liner notes. "He also recorded a wealth of organic sounds, from pins being knocked down at a bowling alley to buzz saws in a lumber mill. Mellé even ventured with [director Robert] Wise to tape the inner workings of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California".

Listening to it, I was reminded occasionally of Miles Davis's electric bands of the '70s, of Raymond Scott's electronic music, of Toru Takemitsu, of Xenakis and Stockhausen, of free jazz, of Lee Perry, of Vangelis and Tangerine Dream. But it doesn't actually sound like any of that. There are only occasional moments of sympathy with those other musical worlds.

Mellé's work is breathtakingly original. This is a record that benefits from close listening with headphones. Stereo separation and "panning" from left to right and from right to left are aggressively deployed here.

It doesn't make me want to see The Andromeda Strain again, but it does make me want to see the Bionic Woman episode "Doomsday Is Tomorrow" again. That was a two-part episode that combined elements of The Andromeda Strain, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove. Jaime has to fight a super-computer to prevent it from causing nuclear war. "May the best—'one'—win," says the HAL-like computer.