For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and ‘Goldfinger’ Part 4
by Leo GrinIn 1964, little-known actor Michael Caine was being evicted — again — and needed a place to stay — again. His friend Sean Connery, starting out in similar circumstances, had reached the pinnacle of the acting world as James Bond. But here Caine was, unable to pay the rent.
In desperation, he temporarily moved in with his pal John Barry, the music composer for the Bond series. Barry was a regular patron of London’s tony clubs and discotheques, and so Caine fully expected to have some good times while staying over as a guest. What he got instead was being kept up night after night by a strange tune Barry was tinkering with: two blaring notes in the key of F major, followed by a trailing melody in D flat, repeated over and over like a villainous echo:
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
Decades later, music critic Terry Walstrom would marvel at how this famous introduction “arrests the attention and stuns the ear,” with the unorthodox key transition being akin to “opening a carton of fat-free milk and pouring out a glass of vodka. Entirely without precedent.”
Unknowingly just a few months away from his own stardom courtesy of 1964’s Zulu (another film scored by Barry), Michael Caine lay in the dark listening to the haunting melody of “Goldfinger,” little guessing that the song would one day be judged one of the finest of the last fifty years, with its young composer becoming the greatest British purveyor of movie music in the twentieth century.
John Barry Prendergast was the great-grandson of famous bare-knuckled boxing champ Jack Sullivan, but no hint of “the sweet science” filtered down through the family tree to him. Born in 1933, his father owned a chain of cinemas and his mother was a concert pianist. Barry took piano lessons from the age of nine (with one teacher whacking his fingers with a ruler whenever he missed a key), and fell in love with movies while working in the projection booths of his Dad’s theaters. Soon he had every intention of becoming a classically trained film composer.
Then, as Barry tells it, “When I was fifteen, I met totally different music. My brother was crazy about swing: Goodman, Ellington, Herman, the Dorseys, Harry James and the rest. I was horrified. Then, secretly fascinated. Then openly fascinated.” Against all common sense given his film aspirations, Barry found himself forgoing his piano studies to learn the trumpet, while devouring every jazz record he could find. “I was a big, big fan of Stan Kenton’s,” he says.
I wanted to listen to the early Kenton stuff — that brass sound was predominant, both the high brass (they said he had five trumpets, five trombones) and also the low brass sound, a rich, low sound. I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque, sharp attack; extreme ranges, top Cs and beyond, and on the low end you’d go right down to the low Fs and below, so you’d have a wall of sound. The typical thing, that Bond thing, is very much this brass sound.
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
Managing military bands during his compulsory national service convinced Barry that bandleader was the greatest job in the world. Problem was, the big swing bands were on their way out — too big, too expensive, too old-style. They were being replaced by rock ‘n’ roll groups featuring a smaller mix of brass, percussion, and newfangled instruments like electric guitars.
Barry took advantage of this changing of the guard by recruiting some ex-Army buddies and local musicians into a new group he called The John Barry Seven. Instead of Benny Goodman it was Bill Haley who inspired these kids. Decked out in matching light-grey suits and sporting practiced dance steps to go along with the music, they soon were a regular feature in British music halls and on TV.
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
In 1957, the respected UK pop-music newspaper Record Mirror said that the John Barry Seven were “mainly on a rock kick, but if you can stand that, then the act is excellent. They are faultlessly turned out, perform with slickness, precision and abandon. An act produced with professional thoroughness, an object lesson to the youngsters in the business.” Barry and his band toured with Paul Anka, jump-started the career of British teen idol Adam Faith, and played in the first Royal Variety Show in 1960. Perhaps the high point of that early period was Faith’s 1959 breakthrough hit, “What Do You Want?”
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
As the Fifties gave way to the swinging Sixties, Barry began scoring films as a side-gig. His first was 1960’s hilariously bad contribution to the teen-rebellion genre, Beat Girl. But even as he wrote music for a schlocky picture with lines like “My mother was a stripper. . . I wanna be a stripper too!”, he was still pining to graduate to his first love: serious composition for cinema. “You knew he had another agenda,” Adam Faith later remembered about his early collaborations with Barry. “He used pop music as a platform — a jumping off platform. Almost from the first day that I met him, John’s ambition went beyond making a few pop records.”
Barry began recording orchestral demos for his budding film-scoring career, and his arrangements became progressively grander in scale. One Friday in June 1962 he got a call from Noel Rogers, the head of music publishing at United Artists in London. There was a movie rushing into theaters, a picture based on the famous James Bond books, and the producers weren’t happy with the main theme. Would Barry consider reworking the existing melody into something hotter and hipper?
The composer knew vaguely of James Bond but had never read a single line of Ian Fleming’s prose, nor did the producers have time to let him screen a rough cut of the picture. It was a rush job: he was offered two-hundred pounds, given the basic melody as written by Dr. No composer Monty Norman, and ordered to turn in an updated arrangement of the main theme by the following Wednesday. Knowing only that the Bond series featured spies, gunplay and girls, Barry decided to use Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” and Nelson Riddle’s “Untouchables” theme as primary models for his own effort. “It was very Dizzy Gillespie,” Barry said later in an interview. “The bridge of the James Bond theme — it’s totally be-bop. It was this crazy mixture of stuff. . . really a ragbag of ideas.”
Gathering together the current incarnation of his John Barry Seven, he padded them out with additional players until he had a streamlined, lean-and-mean “orchestra.” There were nine pieces of brass (five saxes, plus trumpets and trombones), a bit of percussion for rhythm, and no strings at all aside from the ones attached to the sinister, growling electric guitar of Vic Flick, a young impresario who had joined the Seven in 1959. It was Flick who suggested creating “a more ominous feel” by playing his bit an octave lower, starting on the sixth string rather than the fourth. “We tried it,” says Flick, “and it turned out to be very effective.” Have a listen and judge for yourself:
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
The film’s producers liked the theme so much that they added it not only to the main titles, but to a number of other scenes in Dr. No as well. When released as a single later that year, “The James Bond Theme” became a huge hit on the radio, cementing the character of James Bond in the popular culture. “The Bond Sound is made up of two different elements,” Barry says, “the pop guitar sound plus influences from people like Bill Russo and Stan Kenton. The pop side made it very accessible, and the jazz side gave it a size and feel that was different. Fred Astaire said, ‘Make it big, give it style, and give it class,’ and that’s the bible on which I worked.”
Right on the heels of Dr. No’s success came the first Bond sequel, From Russia, With Love. Previously limited to rearranging Dr. No’s title track, Barry was hired this time to score the entire film, with one crucial exception: the movie’s theme song, written by Lionel Bart and crooned by Matt Munro. For a second time, therefore, he found himself in the somewhat unenviable position of giving someone else’s preexisting melody his own jazzy, brassy “Bond Sound.”
But once again, the producers liked what he turned in so much that they made the decision to track one of Barry’s instrumentals over the opening credits, relegating the vocalized version of the theme to the end of the film:
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
Barry also used From Russia, With Love to introduce an all-new, multi-purpose Bond action theme called simply “007.” It proved popular with fans, and ultimately was used again and again throughout the series:
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
It wasn’t until Goldfinger in 1964 that Barry was entrusted with penning his first Bond theme song, complete with lyrics and a vocalist of his choosing, and he was determined to make the most of it. One of his favorite Sixties haunts, The Pickwick Club, was owned by the lyricist Leslie Bricusse. Barry asked him and fellow song-smith Anthony Newly to provide lyrics for the tune, but when they first heard it they were astounded by how unconventional it was. “What the hell do I do with it?” Newly asked.
“It’s ‘Mack the Knife,’” Barry replied. “A song about a villain.”
That was the key, and from there Bricusse and Newly were able to find words that lived up to the brazen, audacious, subtly creepy melody:
Goldfinger!
He’s the man.
The man with the Midas touch.
A spider’s touch. . . .
Such. . .
a cold finger.
Beckons you
to enter his web of sin.
But don’t. . . go. . . in. . . .
Tony Newly, an accomplished singer in his own right, recorded a version of “Goldfinger” that ultimately went unused in the film, but which focuses the mind on the exquisite silkiness of the lyrics, freed as they are here from the wailing brass of the “James Bond sound”:
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
Once the music was on paper, and while Bricusse and Newly were still penning the words, Barry went on a hunt for a singer capable of doing justice to the sheer outlandishness of the piece. He settled on a beautiful, full-throated pop diva of mixed African/English heritage named Shirley Bassey, who heralded from Wales. As soon as she swung by the studio and listened to Barry’s haunting melodies, she was entranced. “Just hearing the opening bars convinced me that this was no ordinary song,” Bassey later gushed, “and I told him ‘I don’t care what the lyrics are like — I’ll do it!’”
Bassey’s incomparable voice was the final necessary ingredient in the potent “Goldfinger” musical brew. “She just whammed it out with so much conviction,” Barry later marveled. “[Her voice] was feminine but she had a metallic quality in her voice. An absolute metallic edge. So the whole thing worked. It wouldn’t had been what it was had Shirley not sang it.” At one concert with Barry in 1964, Bassey hit a high note so powerfully that, as she tells it, “my dress strap broke and out popped my left boob! I didn’t miss a beat as I kept my hand there and. . . finished the song still holding on.”
Small wonder she’s never been invited to sing at the Super Bowl. . . .
While the movie was growing into a cultural phenomenon, the soundtrack album for Goldfinger went on a rampage of its own, knocking The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night out of the top spot of the US charts, and ultimately hanging around on the list for seventy weeks. Two million copies were sold in just the first six months, and the title song became a #1 hit as far away as Japan. “The end result worked just perfectly,” says the composer with pride.
John Barry’s involvement with James Bond stretched over a quarter-century, until by 1987’s The Living Daylights he felt he had “exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible. It was a formula that had run its course. The best had been done as far as I was concerned.” Goldfinger remains his favorite Bond score, a magic convergence of talent and execution that comes along maybe once or twice in a lifetime.
By no means is Barry only known for Bond. He has won five Academy Awards during his long career, bringing his stately, elegant, and lush compositions to bear on films as varied as Born Free (1967), The Lion in Winter (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), King Kong (1976), The Deep (1977), Bruce Lee’s Game of Death (1978), Disney’s The Black Hole (1979), Somewhere in Time (1980), Body Heat (1981), Out of Africa (1986), and his magnificent crowning achievement, Dances with Wolves (1991). But it’s the pulsing, soaring, jazz-and-brass Bond efforts for which he’ll be remembered best. And among that group of scores, Goldfinger reigns supreme.
Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the amazing production design of Goldfinger, and the endlessly inventive man who dreamt up the larger-than-life look of Bond’s world.
Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”
FURTHER READING and VIEWING
The (near-)complete Goldfinger soundtrack. Like many albums from the period, the original 1964 Goldfinger contained only a small portion of the total music from the movie. Many other cues languished unreleased for decades, until they began appearing on other compilations during the CD era. In 2003 a digitally remastered edition finally combined all of this material onto a single disc. If you pick up a copy of Goldfinger, make sure it is the 2003 version.
John Barry: The Man With the Midas Touch by Geoff Leonard, Pete Walker, and Gareth Bramley. The definitive Barry resource, presented in a fine cloth-bound edition by a trio of fan/scholars. Over two-hundred photographs and a detailed filmography supplement the meaty and well-written biographical chapters. Skips over most details about the composer’s personal life (at Barry’s request, apparently) but more than makes up for it with rare information about his career. A recommended addition to any decent library on cinema or music.
Vic Flick, Guitarman: From James Bond to the Beatles and Beyond by Vic Flick. The musician’s 2008 autobiography, featuring his stint with the John Barry Seven, his memorable guitar playing for “The James Bond Theme,” and his storied later career as a much sought-after session player.
Tony Newly with Shirley Bassey on TV in the UK. Watch both the lyricist and singer of “Goldfinger” — several years removed from their future collaboration with John Barry — as they tease an appreciative 1961 TV audience with a medley of their early hits.
YouTube -- click here to watch in full-screen
John Barry conducts “Goldfinger” and “The James Bond Theme” in concert. This was filmed in 2001, almost forty years after Barry wrote the music, but the old man shows he still has the Midas Touch:
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69 Comments
The first film music I ever noticed was Bernard Herrmann's "Beneath the 12-Mile Reef" and John Barry's Zulu, both courtesy of television. After that, when anyone said, "You're not supposed to notice film music," I thought the person was daft.
Great article! I'm sort of a film music buff so anything written on this site about film composers is a must-read for me.
What's amazing (and ridiculous) is that John Barry was never recognized by the Academy for his Bond scores and songs, but both Marvin Hamlisch and Bill Conti were (for The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only, respectively). George Martin and Michael Kamen also scored Bond films (Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill).
The Bond CD reissues were produced by Lukas Kendall who's best known as the founder of Film Score Monthly, which he started as a small newsletter in 1990 while in college. It later became a hardcopy magazine available in bookstores and stopped publication in 2005. It is now a subscription-based online publication. From what I've been able to gather, there wasn't enough time or money so only a handful of the Bond scores are legitimate expansions. Others (The Spy Who Loved Me) are not. And due to various legal issues, some of the original LP programs had to remain intact with the expanded material tacked on at the end.
Many film music and Bond fans are hoping Mr. Kendall and Co. will be able to revisit the Bond scores one day (there's enough Thunderball material for a 2-disc set). Also, Licence to Kill was not a part of this expansion/remastering project since the album rights are with another company so we're hoping one of the other specialty record labels will produce an expanded LtK album, in memory of the late Michael Kamen.
FSM is also a record label itself and has released (as of this writing) 209 albums. For a list, click here: http://filmscoremonthly.com/cds/list.cfm?sortby=r...
Can't wait for next week's article. (Sir) Ken Adam is quite the character.
Nice work, Leo. No doubt about it, John Barry was the right man at the right place, to make Goldfinger unforgettable. And Newley and Bassey filled out the perfect team. Bond would be a pallid whimper of himself without the strong scores of John Barry.
Barry totally warped my musical development, and for that I'll always be grateful. I was six years old when I got the Goldfinger soundtrack album, and a year or two later Thunderball. I still have both of those old LP's, in fact. I didn't understand it at the time, but I wondered why much of the traditional major key pop music I was listening to – Beatles, &c. – was so much less interesting to me than Barry's jazz-based stuff. It wasn't until years later that I learned that jazz came out of the blues, where the I, IV, and V chords are all dominant sevenths, and those dissonant harmonies free up the melodic elements so that many more colors are available… but I'm geeking out.
Fabulous series of posts, Leo.
What a great post! Thoroughly enjoyed it. Made my day.
It's not a Bond movie without those opening notes. They as much announce Bond as the Lone Ranger was defined by William Tell. Partly my age, but while I've moderately enjoyed the more Modern Bonds, I'm continually amazed at how crappy the theme songs have become. Funny how the Bond theme has now become better than the movies it's in, just as the Mission Impossible theme was the only thing in those horrible remakes.
You think you don't notice things as a kid…
Goldfinger. I was five…
To this day, I hear it, and I stop and listen to it…40+ years later…
I don't do that with any other piece of music I hear…
Thanks, Mr. Barry…
Brilliant score, the pinnacle of spy cool.
Topped by his score for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, imho.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U7XV_nrEeY&fe...
After treading this I have come to realize that it was the music as much as Connery and the writing that made Bond the cultural phenomenon.
And with a tip of the hat to Leo and going back to one of his earlier subjects, Hal Needham, if you watch the Cannonball Run – with Roger Moore spoofing his Bond Persona, they play the Bond theme just off key a bit – Hal said that they were on the verge of being sued for copyright infringement but it was just off…enough.
Y'know, THE most spine-tingling moment in the Casino Royale reboot is the scene at the *very end* when for the first time in the movie, we hear Barry's sinister ostinato: the moment the neophyte Bond *becomes* 007.
Leo, your the main reason I get up early Saturday morning, that and go to the bathroom of course.
Jaws.
"The name is Grin, Leo Grin."
Mr. Grin, your contributions to this website are such knockouts, I can't help thinking of what Sean Connery asked Pierce Brosnan when P. B. was playing James Bond: "Are they paying you enough?"
nolotrippen says,
"When anyone said, 'You're not supposed to notice film music,' I thought the person was daft."
I agree completely. And the craziest part is that it's usually film composers who say it, using the logic that they are supposed to blend in and complement the native soundtrack of cars rumbling and crickets chirping or what have you, and not overwhelm it. Whereas the truth is that their job is to write music so perfectly in tune with the mood of the film, and so pleasing to the ear when pulled from the film and played as a concert piece, that the director will want to do the opposite and replace the other soundtrack in favor of the music, secure in the belief that the inner worlds exposed by the composer are far more illuminating than the realistic, ambient soundspace.
Steven Spielberg once estimated that at least 25% of the success of his films was due solely to John Williams, and in my opinion he's underestimating the deal. Sound is just as important as the visuals, and is just as susceptible to mediocre mismanagement and cliche. An article a few years back had this to say about John Barry's opinion of modern film music:
The music critic I mentioned in the piece above, Terry Walstrom, has another article online about action movie music that is worth reading. In it, he goes through the evolution of film music, touching on the styles of many of the industry's most famous composers (e.g. "Bernard Herrmann would repeat a small phrase modulating downscale with large or small choirs of instrumental colors. Or, he'd expostulate brazenly with large percussion canons and flourishing brass stings."). Then he ends with the following perceptive comments on modern film music:
In another article he comments on how composers try to ineptly mimic Barry's Bond style:
I agree with that totally. Movie music today is too often the sonic equivilent of the dreaded shaky-cam, just a inpenetrable wall of rhythm and bass, an aural thunderstorm without any sense of classical form or orchestral personality. You can tell within a few bars which composers are classically trained versus which learned their stuff on synths and keyboards.
That main theme still sounds fresh, new, and exciting. I don't think it will ever get old.
NutsnBolts says,
"Bond would be a pallid whimper of himself without the strong scores of John Barry."
I was remiss in not adding a great John Barry website to the FURTHER READING section:
http://www.johnbarry.org.uk/
This is the companion website to the book I mentioned, and has tons of excellent information on the composer. Well worth browsing through the articles if you like Bond and Barry and want to learn more.
Seymour Goldfarb, Jr., heir to the Seymour Goldfarb girdle fortune…
Her: "Oy! Where did I go wrong?"
Him: "You know something, Mother? You're too Jooish, (to beat out the parser)…"
Man how right you are Leo – where would Star Wars have been without the music? One composer I thought knocked it out of the park was Jerome Moross in his score for the Big Country (1958) – the main theme is still played 52 years later.
A composer that many may not think of readily is George Fenton who wrote the score for Mrs Henderson Presents.
When you have the O'Brien sisters singing "Babies of the Blitz" if your feet aren't moving you are more dead than alive.
Last night I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's (Audrey Hepburn) and then listened to an interview with Producer Richard Shepard of the ICONS Radio Hour.
Moon River was composed by Henry Mancini for that movie – and Shepard was saying that there were a couple of people who wanted to take that out of the movie – to which both He and Audrey Hepburn said "Over my dead body". Moon River was composed for Hepburn's character who was originally from Tulip Texas.
Occasionally you have a dull movie with a great score – the music lives on while people have forgotten the movie. Have a great screenplay, great acting and directing and a great score and you have a classic remembered for many years.
You beat me to the answer!
Loved the scene with the Walther pistol.
Hucbald says,
"Barry totally warped my musical development, and for that I'll always be grateful."
One of the only things I'd deign to call a "great tragedy" in my life is that I never had any "musical development" worthy of the name (any knowledgeable-sounding, nuts-and-bolts musical comments in the post above were gleaned from the books and articles of far better men than I). My folks, God bless 'em, didn't want any ineptly-played musical instruments blaring in the house. Now I find myself chock-full of all sorts of pent-up emotions — "soul-music," I guess you could call it — but with no musical language with which to exorcise them and drag them out into the real world. Very frustrating.
One of the reasons I write is because there is a distinct musicality to well-written words. In a sense, they're the only "music" available to an otherwise clumsy, uneducated ox like myself (uneducated, that is, in the classic, masterly sense of the word, the sense of being conversant in Latin, Greek, or — in this case — music, things that in the past any self-respecting person took pains to achieve).
I was 8 yrs old when I saw Goldfinger. I remember the thrill of the opening theme song. I was transfixed. I don't recall any other movie from that early in my life, but Goldfinger, the music, and the entire experience is permanently burned in my mind. It's as if my mom dropped me and my buddies off at the theater for the early Saturday matinee this morning. Thanks for the memories.
How about when Frasier, Niles and Martin sing it, at Martin's request, while at a lounge?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcJdgHhQDL4
Koomo says,
"Topped by his score for On Her Majesty's Secret Service, imho."
To each his own. I always found the OHMSS theme just a bit off, as if Barry never found the exact notes he needed to make the melody click. It sounds, for all its virtuosity and invention (fuzz-box guitar, cool synth, et cetera), like a pastiche and not an original.
I remember hearing John Williams in an interview saying how excruciating it was finding just the right notes to make a melody click and feel "inevitable," as if it was some preexisting musical theme just waiting to be discovered and unearthed. He said writing a full two-hour score was comparatively easy, the hard part was sitting at the piano for hours on end, tapping different keys in thousands of combinations, looking for that absolutely perfect series of notes that would become the Star Wars theme or the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme.
For me, the original James Bond theme, and the theme for Goldfinger, have that quality of inevitability and perfection. It's hard to imagine them any other way. OHMSS, on the other hand, I find myself resisting. It sounds cool, but there's something about the notes, as if you keep wanting them to come out one way and they keep subtly veering off somewhere else. Hard to explain. But as I said, to each his own. Barry's left enough great music for everyone!
Bill_Brandt says,
"Moon River was composed by Henry Mancini for that movie — and Shepard was saying that there were a couple of people who wanted to take that out of the movie."
A surprising number of musically-inclined people don't like that song, judging it pap. I've participated in several conversations where, when "Moon River" is mentioned, the knowledgeable composer-types all groan and jeer back with things like, "'My huckleberry friend?' Oh, come on!"
When John Barry approached Leslie Bricusse and Tony Newly about writing the lyrics to a James Bond theme song called "Goldfinger," Breakfast at Tiffany's was still in the public consciousness, and so they teased Barry by responding with: "OK, here you go: 'Golddddfingerrrrr, wider than a mile. . . .'"
One of the best new composers has to be Bear McCreary. Listen to the work he's done on Battlestar Galactica and tell me he shouldn't be working on big budget films.
Movies are two things – sight and sound. And if you don't have the sound, there goes half the film. Much as I love the awesome sight of 'Zulu', it's the music that haunts me most. Man, I could (and do) play that music over and over and over (and over and over). It's just incredible. Oh, and 'Out of Africa' and 'Dances With Wolves' are the same. But that 'Zulu' soundtrack is simply to die for.
Thank you so much for giving me the background to the genius who composed it. Awesome!
Carolyn says,
"Much as I love the awesome sight of 'Zulu', it's the music that haunts me most. Man, I could (and do) play that music over and over and over (and over and over). It's just incredible."
For those of you who haven't heard it, here is the music Carolyn is talking about, written by the same guy who did Goldfinger, and in the same year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQD5zhS045o
How much of Michael Caine's career, therefore, is owed to Barry, considering that without Caine's breakthrough performance in Zulu, fueled by John Barry's music, he might never have achieved stardom?
Great job, Leo Grin! You have the Midas touch.
Never saw that one before…
Okay…that version I'll skip on….
Mine was how the girls just appeared and disappeared…
Finally he gets down to the biker chick that thinks he's George Hamilton…
The "ejection seat" gag was pretty good, too…
My fave in the movie…if there is any real fave other than the WHOLE movie…was the "ripping canvas" sound of a V-12 Countach blazing by…wings, ducts, and all…and I adore Tara Buckman…
Thank you so much for this lovely post, Mr.Grin. And fellow readers, don't neglect the Shirley Bassey/Anthony Newley medley video: positively sublime.
Not to mention the three-piece suit and the MP-5 SD…
I do wish he'd get rid of that sissy PPK and get the new PPS in .40 S&W…
I just looked at Walther's website…someone finally showed some sense and did the P22 in .380 ACP…
I've got to figure out somehow a way to buy one…
Me too…
Great article Leo. The writing on all of Andrew's BIG web sites is exceptional. Keep up the good work.
My apologies to the shade of Anthony Newley for managing to consistently misspell his name in my post.
I believe I've heard Caine say he had a hard time being considered for working class character roles right after Zulu came out. HIs posh upper class accent was so convincing people thought he couldn't possibly play a working class or Cockney guy. (Ironic, since his international fame really came with 'Alfie' & Harry Palmer). I oncesaw a riveting video of him giving an acting master class. He's a master communicator & raconteur, as well as a great actor.
Point taken about the lyrics, Leo. But then if you listen to a lot of "classic" pop songs the lyrics can be nonsensical. Listen to some of the Door's lyrics and I swear you have to be on acid – or something – for them to make any sense.
The melody is what is so beautiful about Moon River. And it did win an Oscar.
But then if I were taking the contrarian point of view I'd mention that "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" also got an Oscar
Moon River lyrics are evocative, not logical.
So much great music from him. His singing on the other hand… : )
I like the Bond music and Somewhere in Time music by him or the Roger Williams version.
For the longest time. Barrys's brassy "Goldfinger: was my ringtone. It was not uncommon for everyone in earshot to paise for a second and look around when my cell phone rang.
I will admit, it was totally cool that my ringtone could silence the mindless chatter for a second or two…
I LOVE James Bond. I love all of it, and the music is a HUGE part of it.
GREAT series of posts Leo…
Great posting! My favorite Bond theme is the end title of 'You Only Live Twice'–a much more subtle arrangement than the opening title. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU2_UCT_bOM
What was Roger Moore's character's name in Cannonball? Recall running joke in the movie of his mom berating him with a dweeby real name and he insisting he was Roger Moore instead.
(This might appear twice)
Great article! I'm sort of a film music buff so anything written on this site about film composers is a must-read for me. What's amazing (and ridiculous) is that John Barry was never recognized by the Academy for his Bond scores and songs, but both Marvin Hamlisch and Bill Conti were (for The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only, respectively). George Martin and Michael Kamen also scored Bond films (Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill).
The Bond CD reissues were produced by Lukas Kendall who's best known as the founder of Film Score Monthly, which he started as a small newsletter in 1990 while in college. It later became a hardcopy magazine available in bookstores and stopped publication in 2005. It is now a subscription-based online publication. From what I've been able to gather, there wasn't enough time or money so only a handful of the Bond scores are legitimate expansions. Others (The Spy Who Loved Me) are not. And due to various legal issues, some of the original LP programs had to remain intact with the expanded material tacked on at the end.
Many film music and Bond fans are hoping Mr. Kendall and Co. will be able to revisit the Bond scores one day (there's enough Thunderball material for a 2-disc set). Also, Licence to Kill was not a part of this expansion/remastering project since the album rights are with another company so we're hoping one of the other specialty record labels will produce an expanded LtK album, in memory of the late Michael Kamen.
FSM is also a record label itself and has released (as of this writing) 209 albums. For a list, click here: http://filmscoremonthly.com/cds/list.cfm
Can't wait for next week's article. (Sir) Ken Adam is quite the character.
(This might appear twice)
Great article! I'm sort of a film music buff so anything written on this site about film composers is a must-read for me. What's amazing (and ridiculous) is that John Barry was never recognized by the Academy for his Bond scores and songs, but both Marvin Hamlisch and Bill Conti were (for The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only, respectively). George Martin and Michael Kamen also scored Bond films (Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill).
The Bond CD reissues were produced by Lukas Kendall who's best known as the founder of Film Score Monthly, which he started as a small newsletter in 1990 while in college. It later became a hardcopy magazine available in bookstores and stopped publication in 2005. It is now a subscription-based online publication. From what I've been able to gather, there wasn't enough time or money so only a handful of the Bond scores are legitimate expansions. Others (The Spy Who Loved Me) are not. And due to various legal issues, some of the original LP programs had to remain intact with the expanded material tacked on at the end.
Many film music and Bond fans are hoping Mr. Kendall and Co. will be able to revisit the Bond scores one day (there's enough Thunderball material for a 2-disc set). Also, Licence to Kill was not a part of this expansion/remastering project since the album rights are with another company so we're hoping one of the other specialty record labels will produce an expanded LtK album, in memory of the late Michael Kamen.
FSM is also a record label itself and has released (as of this writing) 209 albums. For a list, click here: http://filmscoremonthly.com/cds/list.cfm
Can't wait for next week's article. (Sir) Ken Adam is quite the character.
Watching Anthony Newly with Shirley Bassey in that video with them easily singing their songs. Does anyone know of any of todays big name singers (country excluded – they have to be able to play and sing) that do not need computer enhancement?
Shirley Bassey voice… such a big sound from her.
I grew up in the 60d and hated MOON RIVER as a kid…possibly b/c it was being covered by everyone in very lame versions, many over produced, most lacking the simplicity of the Audrey Hepburn original.
"Huckleberry friend" – the lyric is by Johnny Mercer. Many of his lyrics contain rural/Southern references. He was from the South – Georgia, USA. "Huckleberry" here is likely a Huckleberry Finn reference. Most slobs today would think "Huckleberry Hound" hence their artless, kneejerk reaction.
ps – Same over kill to the "Theme from Dr. Zhivago" aka "Somewhere My Love" aka "Lara's Theme". Hundreds of recordings within a few years in the 60s. It took me years to appreciate the song.
Add on – "the knowledgeable composer-types all groan and jeer back with things like, "'My huckleberry friend?' Oh, come on!" ".
Impossible for them to be "knowledgeable" with a response like that.
Very true. Awesome singer and amazingly cute, if I may say so.
"Well chin-chin … do carry on with your mud pies."
The Star Wars original soundtrack double album was my first record ever. You could relive the whole movie throught he music in those pre-video years.
You are not alone. Millions march along with you. "Music Appreciation" was already vanishing from school curriculums in the 1960s. Most post Baby Boomers have little or no knowledge of any classical music or of any classic American music except for what was foisted on them by 'record sellers'.
If you want to open your ears, it is as easy as buying some CD series called "Greatest Classical Hits of All Time". As stupid a title as that may sound, those collections are all great introductions to 'the classics'.
You also might want to introduce to what in recent years has been defined as the "Great American Songbook" which, even to a stickler like me, is as good a title as any. DO NOT bother with the reinterpreters of these current days. They are way too off the mark….and most of them can't sing. You need to hear the great songs and artists of the 20s through the 40s and somewhat into the 50s (but not much). Youtube is a great place to begin and I will be happy to name a few artists….and you will be encouraged by the posts there for music performed 60 or 70 years ago with kids saying "This stuff is the shit!" (a compliment) or stuff like "Yeah, well, umm…I usually listen to heavy metal and goth, but this stuff is like relaxing out on the back lawn. all mellow and shit with birds singing…." Hahaha! And get some CDs of great American composers, bands and vocalists from that period, too. It will give you the voice you are seeking.
L.B. "Oscar" Mayer says,
"'Music Appreciation' was already vanishing from school curriculums in the 1960s. . . If you want to open your ears, it is as easy as buying some CD series called "Greatest Classical Hits of All Time" . . . You also might want to introduce to what in recent years has been defined as the "Great American Songbook."
Music appreciation isn't the problem I was alluding to, I've done plenty of that over the years. It's reading sheet music and being able to intelligently express my thoughts in terms of keys, chords, pitch, timbre, et cetera that bedevils me.
L.B. "Oscar" Mayer says,
"Impossible for them to be "knowledgeable" with a response like that."
They're plenty knowledgeable, just snobs. And maybe a bit jealous.
best score…"Chinatown" but then again I am biased.
Then it is just a matter of taking some classes to learn the terminlogy.
I surprises me that they can be "knowledgeable" when they don't know a simple fact about one of the greatest and most famous American composers and lyricists – Johnny Mercer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mercer
I = It
L.B. "Oscar" Mayer says,
"Then it is just a matter of taking some classes to learn the terminology."
If only it were that simple. Yes, it would be an easy matter to "take some classes" with a bunch of bored housewives at the local community college, thereby achieving enough of a raw vocabulary to fake the requisite understanding of the concepts involved for future essays. But it's real fluency I'm after.
To put it another way, after a few classes I may be able to tell you the dictionary-definition difference between the keys of C major and D flat. If I was really trying, I might even be able to listen to "Goldfinger" and tell you which key appears where. But no way would "taking some classes" allow me to divine, as the music critic I quoted above does, that the jarring key changes in the opening bars of "Goldfinger are "entirely without precedent," like “opening a carton of fat-free milk and pouring out a glass of vodka.” Just as taking a few classes of Latin would hardly give me enough proficiency to judge one translation of The Aeneid against another. But those are the insights I'm after.
I do consider such glaring fundamental gaps in my upbringing a tragedy (again, there was a time when any self-respecting college graduate would have been expected to know these things), but I try not to lose too much sleep over it. Sure, as an adult I could rearrange my life in order to throw myself whole-hog into the study of something like music or Latin. But then I must ask what other areas of knowledge and understanding would be commensurately reduced,and whether the trade would be worth it. Whereas, as a child, I had plenty of time to master an instrument or a dead language, had the current degenerate school system encouraged kids to study such things instead of how to put a condom on a banana.
Oh well, life is short, and you can't know everything about everything. All the more reason to follow Herzog's advice, given in my last series of essays, to avoid letting television suck up one's waking hours.
Well, if it weren't in "Moon River", and if it weren't at that exact spot in the song, it would be a fairly dubious choice. Certainly, I can see it not being to everybody's taste as a choice of wording. But it works where it is.
Bear is AWESOME. Yeah, he should be doing big flicks, but I'd rather him work on making good TV better for a while longer — mebbe someday he can do music for a BSG and/or Caprica movie [!!!!]
DUDE! u can get gold-finger as a ring-tone? via what site?
Buckaroo9,
Verizon Wireless had their own site, it was the only ringtones I could get. This was like 2005 thru 2007 time frame.
I had 3 different parts of the song, one for calls, one for text, and one just for my boss's calls…
I would do it again in a second. I should try to figure out how with my new phone…
Buckaroo9,
Verizon Wireless had their own site, it was the only ringtones I could get. This was like 2005 thru 2007 time frame.
I had 3 different parts of the song, one for calls, one for text, and one just for my boss's calls…
I would do it again in a second. I should try to figure out how with my new phone…
He's the kind of guy who can compose some really haunting, awesome melodies, and also pulse-pounding orchestra for action scenes. I've got each Battlestar season OST, and the one thing I notice is that music kept getting better and better.
L.B. "Oscar" Mayer says,
"It surprises me that they can be 'knowledgeable' when they don't know a simple fact about one of the greatest and most famous American composers and lyricists — Johnny Mercer."
The people of whom I speak knew and worked with guys like Johnny Mercer (and "Bernie" Herrmann, "Jerry" Moross, "Hank" Mancini, not to mention more obscure gents like, say, Lud Gluskin and Leo Reisman). They usually have CD/cassette/album collections filled with all their stuff. They've forgotten more about these people than latecomers like me will ever know.
It's not a lack of knowledge that's their problem, it's snobbery. They find "huckleberry friend" an insipid formulation — to them, it drowns the listener not in overwrought and ham-handed country-bumpkin cheese. Too precious, more of a city-dweller's fantasy idea of how a Southerner would pine for home, a cheap-and-easy greeting-card visual, the lazy way out for a songwriter. Picture Marlene Dietrich trying to warble "Moon River" and maybe you'll start to see it the way they do.
They're wrong, of course, but that's how they think. Not uneducated, just snobbish and pedantic and jaded.
Thank you for the explanation. I don't know what to say. It's not my favorite Mercer lyric simply b/c the word "huckle" sounds funny, so 'huckle' anything isn't going to work for me. Plus you have "berry" – another amusing word. I would not have used them, but it gives the song a distinction. And he was Johnny Mercer and I am not. I bow to him, disagree with him on this point, but would never act snobbishly over it. He was a giant.
otoh – I have never liked his LAURA lyric, either.
Great article! I'm sort of a film music buff so anything written on this site about film composers is a must-read for me. What's amazing (and ridiculous) is that John Barry was never recognized by the Academy for his Bond scores and songs, but both Marvin Hamlisch and Bill Conti were (for The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only, respectively). George Martin and Michael Kamen also scored Bond films (Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill).
The Bond CD reissues were produced by Lukas Kendall who's best known as the founder of Film Score Monthly, which he started as a small newsletter in 1990 while in college. It later became a hardcopy magazine available in bookstores and stopped publication in 2005. It is now a subscription-based online publication. From what I've been able to gather, there wasn't enough time or money so only a handful of the Bond scores are legitimate expansions. Others (The Spy Who Loved Me) are not. And due to various legal issues, some of the original LP programs had to remain intact with the expanded material tacked on at the end.
Many film music and Bond fans are hoping Mr. Kendall and Co. will be able to revisit the Bond scores one day (there's enough Thunderball material for a 2-disc set). Also, Licence to Kill was not a part of this expansion/remastering project since the album rights are with another company so we're hoping one of the other specialty record labels will produce an expanded LtK album, in memory of the late Michael Kamen.
FSM is also a record label itself and has released (as of this writing) 209 albums.
Can't wait for next week's article. (Sir) Ken Adam is quite the character.
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