A guy reviewing a 4K restoration of Natural Born Killers reminded me how obsessed I was with the soundtrack, and how it followed me up until my thirties. I was standing on a station platform after a bad day at work waiting for a train, listening to Shit List by L7. (But Rock and Roll N-word just feels so uncomfortable to listen to now.) I've glossed over how I had to "watch" and access films as a kid. My brother stayed up one night to tape Batman off TV. No, we didn't have a VCR, he had a cassette player, and he'd sussed out that the two local TV shows were also simulcast on the radio on specific bands. This was how we got our music too, by the way. Saturday mornings, tuned into the ABC, watching Rage, trying to remember the chart order of songs so we could tape them. (This wasn't new either, tape recorders were responsible for recording music off the TV when it was a big reel to reel with a handheld microphone). So my access to songs I like was already hindered by time and not being by a radio when you needed to hear a song. It was hard enough missing episodes of shows, or not being able to stay up watching movies. The only way we could experience this shit sometimes was via a fucking cassette player. Logically, you only get sound. Also, you would've gotten the censored for TV version.
I rented videos, hoped for a day I could get the place to myself or I wouldn't be bothered, and played the movie while I recorded it onto a 90 minute cassette tape, my cassette player's tiny microphone sitting on a footstool up against the single speaker on our wood laminate Rank-ARena TV. And yes, I had to pause the movie and line it up with side B as seamlessly as possible. I also did this with one episode of the X Files, purely because David Duchovny was kinda hot he had a hot voice, and since it was only 40 minutes I used a tape that had recorded songs already on it, so it was sandwiched between songs. Blank tapes were something we were gifted often. (That was also how I ruined my science teacher's day by knowing how many chromosomes people have. I think about that a lot but I wonder if she remembers it and just hates me to this day). I would then listen to these tapes on the way to the big city on vacations, or I'd listen to my mix tapes or the tapes I got as presents. But with those movies, I also cut certain scenes, like the basement scenes in The Breakfast Club. I think I taped Grosse Pointe Blank off the radio and I was either about to leave school or had left. I did have our old TV in my bedroom at one point. I think by then I also had access to a VCR so I borrowed the Last Unicorn then made a cassette tape of it. Because of that, I also knew a lot of movies purely by heart, and by sound. The images wouldn't be accessible until I had money and could buy DVDs. I have fewer VHS tapes as these were about to be phased out, but sadly there's some shit I wish got released on DVD and never did.
Anyway, I also liked the Crow but could only watch the movie when we rented it out once. I loved most of the songs, particularly the closing credits song which everyone hated. But I new it well by the time I saw the film. Otherwise, I really liked the soundtrack and listened to it a lot in high school. Natural Born Killers came out in 1994, I'm pretty sure I had a copy of the soundtrack before the end of high school. And all the tracks were very artfully interlaced with audio clips from the film, which I know fucking backwards, however I don't know the film in its entirety nearly as well. And, I kinda prefer the soundtrack over the movie. It falls off a little towards the end, but I found the CD when I was in uni for about ten bucks from the market stalls that showed up on weekends. I've few and far between good memories of uni and that was one of them. I was on my own and I'd buy singles and listen to them off my Performa in my room while I studied. I also kept the same tape player I had since I was 9, and this went through some fucking shit. I miss it, I really do. The antenna snapped off it, the handle broke off it, but I could still tune into the radio and I'd wake early in the morning and put it on to wake up to and get ready for school. I didn't even want a clock radio. I fell asleep beside it waiting for Tori songs to play, I still tried to record songs off it, sometimes I did top 40 nights on the commercial network. I also had it on stupid late at night before we had access to Triple J the local commercial station played easy listening hits so I got to learn the words to the Pina Colada song. I had a weird fondness for that tape player, and I even tried to record my Storybook stories from it onto my iPad. I tossed it out eventually but I loved it to death.
It recorded all the shit I liked, I still have tapes I wanted to transfer, and even though I found all the songs off all the mixed tapes I made (and remade) through painless waiting and searching the internet, I cannot bring myself to throw these things out.
I was also the tool that bought soundtracks for that one song. When one of my tapes got twisted, I had a warbling version of Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes (mislabeled as the song Say Anything from Say Anything... it was a cheap knockoff compilation tape that used huge hit movies on the covers so you'd buy it only to realise they were covers basically, and I couldn't prove that, but I knew). And my only reference to this movie was this tape, and a reference in Leonard Maltin's compendium of movie reviews. You'd only get a star rating and a brief opinion and these books were fat. I didn't get to see the movie until my senior year. I didn't tape it from memory, but I also didn't know it was THE song Lloyd plays on the stereo. You hear it in the love scene, but it's iconic from that scene. According to Crowe, it was off some wedding tape he heard, it wasn't entirely vital or significant to him. The song actually playing is by Phish, from memory. But from that stupid compilation tape, I found my way to that film and wound up loving it. Many, many years later, I found the CD soundtrack at a market then stupidly never copied it to my harddrive, so, insanely, the actual main song of the movie isn't even possible to find on iTunes. I had to download a bunch of songs I liked from it and this one is like nowhere. And it was supposed to be the "hit" of the movie. It's perfect for the closing credits. But that fucking song is also the reason I own the Benny and Joon soundtrack, because my 12 year old brain thought the song was sung by Sting and HAD to be on the soundtrack from it being on the trailer. No internet existed for me to verify this and save forty odd bucks. It only had 500 Miles by the Proclaimers, which is fine, I liked it enough, and the rest was the score. Which has some pretty songs. But it also inspired my dance teacher to make a whole crazy future clowns in a playground routine for our end of year performance. So, In Your Eyes plays such a big role in my music history. I even remember finding So... in a university library, discovering the song was on there, then having to negotiate buying it off my mother from somewhere because we had a deal she could purchase something we couldn't afford then we save up to pay with our birthday money or pocket money. (Which, now I think of it, the pocket money was technically her money so we were just paying her back.) I loved So... but again, that one song and me go way back. My only experience of Say Anything for a long time was a bad cover of In Your Eyes. (It didn't go on my wedding soundtrack by the way).
Another soundtrack I stupidly owned was for Encino Man, I liked a remix of PM Dawn's Set Adrift on the movie, not on the soundtrack of course. But we were allowed to listen to CDs in art class and some guys liked to put it on for some reason. It had some okay songs. When I was broke, I ripped off three tracks, including Why'd you Want Me? by the Jesus and Mary Chain. The Clueless Soundtrack was just a good one to own but I don't have all the songs ripped. I think I sold it... (I might be lying, I stashed some CDs in a box in the cupboard). Singles was another good soundtrack but I remember liking the Hendrix song more from the movie, and this was one I saw a lot in high school so I loved Chloe Dancer to fucking death. (My theoretical future daughter would've been named Chloe after the song). Labyrinth was also my only access to that film until the end of high school when I taped it off TV. My nostalgia for that movie is overblown but some of the orchestral songs and Bowie's love songs are infectiously good.
What was amazing recently (as in the last five years or so) was finding Henry Fool and Amateur, both of which I adore on their own as well. Owning legitimate copies is important to me. I coped hard off Henry Fool. Also, for some weird reason, I was obsessed with the cartoon adaptation of Soul Music, it got me through my first exams, and there was a beautiful song in the last episode which just became another tiny snipped I kept on a tape from the TV to hear whenever. My ridiculous love of Caribbean Blue (which led to me owning other Enya CDs because I didn't know the name of the song and bought the wrong ones) led to me taping a snippet off an episode of Northern Exposure. I have a dumb love of LA Story only because her songs are in it.
Music makes a film, so if a soundtrack can kind of exist on its own and be heard and enjoyed separately from the film, it's special. They weren't just compilation albums. Finding the Heather's score off iTunes was interesting, they don't sound exact but having a polished version of the small fragments I stole off the TV and listened to endlessly, these became part of my collection. It's a HUGE reason I just don't believe in Spotify or any streaming. It doesn't have what I crave. I can't make a playlist that includes all my weird, eclectic songs from soundtracks and radio. I can play my random bootlegs. I'm very precious about how it's been stored, I panic if I can't find a copy of some songs. It was just too important to me. Those soundtracks and audio movies kept me afloat, my only misery was not having them all encased in a single box I can carry everywhere like I do now.
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