I'm continuing with my disastrous efforts to get a full five posts this week, and this time I had no idea what to do. As necessity begets invention, I finally decided to follow up on a loose end from my non-depressing Christmas playlist. In the course of that post, I mentioned having one of the infamous Meco Star Wars albums at the family estate. Since I had absolutely no better idea, I dug through a cache of records that there hasn't been a player for in about a decade. Here's the first of two specimens I unearthed, photographed with my phone on the Couch Mark 2.
This is the original Star Wars soundtrack album, released in 1977. It's obviously not much to look at, but things are better in the back, which is the pic I opened with above. It's a two-record set that runs about 80 minutes total. You might think I ran this into the ground as a kid, which isn't wrong. The wrinkle is that I literally couldn't operate the record player when we did have one, so my family recorded the whole thing onto a 90-minute cassette that I played for the next few decades until I lost track of it. At any rate, the format meant there's an interior that they filled out with photos. Here they are in full glory.
This artifact is a perfect snapshot of why the audiophile trend/ craze left me behind. As alluded, my choices of media formats were dictated by my terrible eye-hand coordination, so it was cassettes all the way through high school. I can still muster some nostalgia for the days when you could record music directly off the radio and pass it along on a mix tape, but I have absolutely no fondness for the tech itself. What really was good about an album like this is that it's polished enough to sound like a concert performance instead of being broken into a bunch of short sound clips. If I could get it back on a playable format, I would definitely prefer it over the Star Wars digital album I got a while ago, but it just doesn't matter quite enough to go out of my way. And with that, here's the real main exhibit...
Here is the Star Wars Christmas album, which incidentally has nothing to do with the Star Wars Christmas special. It was released in November 1980, which I got wrong when I listed a track from it as from 1979. That means that it technically came out after Empire, released in May of that year, but I strongly suspect the new movie had little if any effect on the final form of the album. I can kind of remember hearing it as a kid. However, it was the album cover that made by far the strongest impression, in fact a painting by concept artist Ralph McQuarrie. Here's a couple closeups. R2D2 looks... chunky.
When I started this post, I finally listened to the majority of the album. I can say without hesitation that it doesn't come close to living up to the McQuarrie art. Its most redeeming quality is a certain informality that was already seeping out of the franchise. In and of itself, however, it barely holds its ground between tolerable and intermittently amusing. To spare you the trouble, here's the most worthwhile track besides the one with Jon Bon Jovi,
"The Odds Against Christmas", which seems to reference the asteroid segment in Empire. It actually raises an intriguing angle on just how much of an accident our celebration of Christmas really is, which of course isn't explored. And yes, these are absolutely the high points.
With that, I'm wrapping this up. For once, I've made pretty good time and still covered what I want to do. It still leaves plenty I might come back to sooner or later. That's all for now, more to come!
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