10/5/23
Newsletter #479
The Crack of Dawn
The great jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson, was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1925 (at school he and his sisters were the only black students). Oscar attended the High School of Montreal. Two of his classmates were Jazz great, Maynard Ferguson, and Oscar-winning actor, Christopher Plummer.
Neil Young is also Canadian. He was born in Toronto, but grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. While attending Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, one of his classmates was Randy Bachman. Bachman, along with his fellow Winnipeg resident, Burton Cummings (he went to a different high school), formed the band The Guess Who in 1966. The Guess Who would go on to have a several enormous international hits, like, These Eyes, American Woman and Undun. In 1973 Randy Bachman formed a new band with two of his brothers and a fellow named Fred Turner, called Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Also called B.T.O., the band had quite a few gigantic hits, such as, Takin' Care of Business, Let It Ride, Roll On Down the Highway and You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet.
Given how fast this planet is presently warming (recently, the ocean was over 100-degrees off the coast of Miami), I’ve now watched a couple of shows that say two of the best places to be as it grows hotter are Detroit and Cleveland. For a long time, Detroit and Cleveland had a rivalry as to which one was the bigger shit-hole. Cleveland had bumper stickers that said, “At least we’re not Detroit.” Of course, we here in Detroit laugh at the folks in Cleveland. No matter how crappy it ever got, Detroit is Motown. In the 1960s there was the West Coast Sound, with surfing music coming out of L.A. and psychedelic rock coming from San Francisco, but you can combine those, and they don’t equal Motown. Musically, Motown was only part of what was going on here. Detroit had its own brand of rock & roll, with Bob Seger (from Ann Arbor), Mitch Ryder, Ted Nugent, Iggy Pop, Grand Funk Railroad (from Flint), and many more. Cleveland, on the other hand, has the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
In my first movie, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except, which is set in 1969, I needed a couple of songs playing on the radio. I made a list of songs that I loved from 1969 – a particularly great year for rock & roll – and as I . . .
Hold on. I put “Top rock songs 1969” into Google and this is what I got. The first five are: Come Together, The Beatles; Something, The Beatles; Hot Fun in the Summertime, Sly and the Family Stone; Gimme Shelter, the Rolling Stones; Whole Lotta Love, Led Zeppelin. Not bad.
OK, so I needed three songs as “source” music, meaning it’s coming out of a radio or a record player, but it’s not “score.” Of course you try to get your source music to have some bearing on your story, but source music is usually used (beyond filling up dead air) to set the time period and location. A good example is the use of Hank Williams’s songs in The Last Picture Show. If I made a film about my early youth it would be entirely Motown. In fact, when I was really little, like four, five my dad had Ford Falcons – a ’62, a ’64 and a ’66 – and in my young brain I seriously believed that when you turned on a Ford Falcon, automatically the Supremes came out of the radio – it was a Ford standard feature. Baby Love, I Hear a Symphony, Stop in the Name of Love. My older sister and I danced in front of the mirror and pretended to be the Supremes.
In any case, with my list of potential (and favorite) source songs sitting before me, I began calling the record companies and the music publishers to find out how much it would cost for the rights to these songs. This was 1984. The condensed version is, they laughed at me. I was speaking to a woman at Capitol Special Projects (you end up in these funky departments) and I was inquiring about You Were on My Mind by the We Five. When I explained my project about the marines wiping out the Manson family, the woman said, “Why would I possibly want my song in your movie?” She didn’t even give me a price. I was scoffed.
Being, if not a good director, at least a competent one, I did what I do best – delegate. The credit on the movie says, “Music by Joseph LoDuca,” therefore, to my way of thinking, it was Joe’s responsibility to find the source music. I said, “I need three songs that at least sound like they’re from the late ‘60s and I have a thousand dollars a song.” Joe said, “OK.” Two days later, Joe called me back and said, “Do you know Don Davis at United Sound?” I said, “No.” Joe said, “He’ll sell you three ‘60s-sounding songs for a thousand dollars each.” So, I made a deal with Don Davis and purchased the rights to three songs by the Rockets, a band that I absolutely knew. They were veterans, Jimmy McCarty and John Badanjek, from Mitch Ryder and Bob Seger’s bands. And they’re pretty good songs. They’re not from the 1960s, but actually the early ‘70s, and they work fine.
United Sound, by the way, is where quite a few Motown songs were recorded – it’s right up the street – so that kind of blows the idea of “the Motown Sound” being somehow connected to that particular building. There was also another sound studio in Detroit – Golden Sound – where a lot of Motown songs were recorded. I look at these pictures and Detroit’s a dismal-looking place.