They have now released a live record, Fools Face Live at Last (Talk, 2005) that is among the greatest rock recordings ever made. The recording is superb, the audience is electric, and the music itself is timeless fist-pumping power pop, song after song after song.

I have seen the Rolling Stones, McCartney and Wings, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Santana to name a few, and I have sought live recordings of all of them. Live At Last ranks with the very best, apart from the reasons stated above, precisely because they are a relatively unknown band from the heartland. The record’s unexpected nature only enhances its greatness. 

Like Duke Ellington’s legendary Live at Fargo, 1940, this recording captures master musicians at the height of their powers.

“To Be Someone” leads with poignant bittersweet power chords like those used by their Midwestern brethren the Hawks and Spooner.

“American Guilt” should be the national anthem. It has a massive hook and invites sing-alongs. “Cherokee persuasion, Navajo town, got my reservation for the burial ground…Tell America her heart is in the right place, tell America be sure not to hate, tell America to move at her own pace, tell America it might be too late…when push comes to shove and we don’t have love…”

Guitars foam and snarl throughout. Listen to the guitar break on “Diamonds and Pearls.” It gave me a nosebleed. “Land of the Hunted” is a masterpiece of propulsion combining the urgency of 20/20 with the musical sass of the Buzzcocks. Brian Coffman and Jimmy Frink repeatedly hit an exquisite harmony that would have pleased the Everly Brothers. The recording was made in 2000 when these guys were in their forties and fifties. For anyone who loves rock this record will plunge you deep into your youth for sixty minutes.

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:

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.

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.

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?”

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:

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:

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:

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”:

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”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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.

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:

Let’s start with the cast:  James Stewart.  George C. Scott.  Lee Remick.  Eve Arden.  Ben Gazzara.  Even Big Hollywood’s own Orson Bean in a supporting part as a doctor who plays a key role in the story.  If you love movies, you only needed to get to the word “George” before you were adding it to your NetFlix queue.

The plot is simple.  Small-town lawyer Paul Biegler (Stewart), who is more concerned with fishing than his practice, is talked into meeting Army lieutenant Fred Manion, who is sitting in jail for the murder of the man the soldier claims raped his wife Laura (The hotter-than-hot Remick).  Beigler takes the case, and faces off with Claude Dancer (Scott), the ace prosecutor sent in from the big city to chalk up yet another conviction.   There is much more to the story – the movie is a brisk two hours forty minutes long – but there’s no sense in going into the details here.  You just need to know this:  Jimmy Stewart goes up against George C. Scott in court.  Case closed.

The sparks fly in the courtroom under the direction of Otto Preminger, the enfant terrible of 50s and 60s Tinseltown, but the interesting part (at least for a lawyer) is that the film covers all aspects of the trial, in and out of the courtroom.  Cases are often won not in front of the jury but hunched over a dusty book of old cases (or, today, in front of a computer screen looking at precedent online), and Anatomy doesn’t hesitate to show the hard work involved in putting up a defense. 

That sounds dull as dirt, but Anatomy is anything but.  Stewart is helped by his burned out, alcoholic mentor Parnell, played perfectly by Arthur O’Connell.  His character is funny, irascible, sad and, in the end, redeemed.  O’Connell even manages to steal scenes from Jimmy Stewart while snagging a best Supporting Actor nomination for himself (Stewart and Scott both earned Oscar nominations as well).

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Preminger was known for the pushing boundaries, and he does it again here.  This was 1959, and audiences must have been in for a shock not only hearing a frank discussion of topics like sexual climax and seminal fluid on the big screen but hearing it come from the mouth of George Bailey himself.  But it’s not exploitation – it’s reality, and there is nothing wrong with adults viewing adult subject matter.  If only films today were brave enough to put forward an ambiguous character like Laura Manion – perhaps a rape victim, but perhaps something else.  They’d be picketed by bitter, snarling feminists furious over the movie’s rejection of easy archetypes and easier answers.  And almost no studio today would risk the ending either – an ending that is a perfect fit for what comes before. 

The beauty of Anatomy is how it never treats its audience like children.  Its characters are fallible – sometimes they drink to excess, smoke, have questionable morals and lie, but the movie expects the audience to understand that human beings are not purely black and white.  That audience had come through three terrible wars and the Great Depression.  They knew something about real life even if most of what Hollywood was putting out was sanitized and saccharine.

If Anatomy was being remade today, those twit studio suits would probably try to push Josh Hartnett as Beigler, Scarlett Johansson as Laura, and some kid from a CW TV series about vampires as the accused.  It’s sad that there are so many mediocrities out there today, and sadder that the suits don’t even realize it.  No matter how hard she tried, the pretty but vacant Johansson could never get anywhere as close to down and dirty as Lee Remick does here.   And there’s no comparison in life experience – Stewart flew B-24s over Dusseldorf; Harnett looks like he bursts into tears when he runs out of his Axe body spray. 

The only problem with Anatomy in my book is the music.  It’s jazz, and aficionados of that art form hail Duke Ellington’s soundtrack as a masterpiece.  But if you feel that jazz is like a colonoscopy for your ears, the musical interludes can be downright painful.

It’s been a summer of sequels to lumbering blockbusters that should have never been made in the first place, twee romances between self-consciously awkward 20-something nerds, and big screen adaptations of “graphic novels” that demonstrate why generations of parents past declared comic books a pernicious waste of time.  Now give  Anatomy of a Murder a look – it is a reminder that not all films are aimed squarely at the half-wit demographic.