In the last month, I've been trying to expand my range from just blogging to video. In the process, I came back to what was already my wheelhouse, zombie movies. In the process, I was reminded of a few loose ends from previous posts, so I decided to make a couple new acquisitions. What I got were soundtrack CDs for the greatest zombie movies of all time, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. (See my videos here and here.) To kick things off, here's the Day of the Dead disc.
This one was a supposedly limited edition release from 2013, which I still had no trouble obtaining for under $20. After I ordered the disc, I found out that several digital albums are available from Amazon, one of which seems to have the same contents. (Another has a bonus track with Bub.) Technically, the CD album is two separate compilations, one with the full film score, the other with a version of the soundtrack previously released on LP. About half the second disc is a single track called "The Dead Suite". There's also a vocal track "The World Inside Your Eyes" played in the end credits that I only noticed recently; if you have a choice, I would say skip it. The CD also comes with a booklet on the making of the movie, with notes on the scenes for each track. (John's monologue is marked, "What Hell Is Like".) Here's a couple pics of the booklet.
Meanwhile, the one that really interested me was the Dawn of the Dead album, dated from 2004. We had releases before and since of the "official" soundtrack by Goblin, but a great deal more had come from a music library freely used by Romero. The most famous of these was "The Gonk" by Herb Chappell, played in the lead-in to Stephen's zombification and again in the final credits. Other tracks remained notorious and often mysterious, particularly the "hero" music used for Peter's escape. With this album, we got many though not all of them. Here's more pics.
With this album, we have "The Gonk" and several other tracks. The most intriguing to me were "Figment" by one Simon Park, used for the airfield segment in the film. I had never dealt with this in my previous commentary on the film, but I would nominate this as easily the most frightening sequence of the movie. Here, for once, the zombie menace isn't dependent on the overwhelming numbers of the horde. Instead, we have a complex environment where the living and undead are on something like equal terms, and still other threats emerge for both sides. The Park track is the perfect opening, mysterious and menacing without being melodramatic. In much the same spirit, we also have "Dark Earth", credited to Jack Trombey, used in the midst of the middle-act trucking scenes. Unfortunately, this isn't notated in the album. We do, however, get an insert with commentary by the mastermind of the album, Joel Martin, and publisher Jonny Trunk. Here's one more pic.
Alas, that still left one big hole with the "hero" music. The most irritating part was that I had always felt I had heard it even before seeing the movie, to the point I thought of it as the "football" music. That finally brought me back to a resource I had looked at before, a massive video compiling all the music tracks with stills and clips from the movie. Going through this, something I noted quickly was another track by Chappell, "Deserted Vaults", played when zombie Stephen comes through the door to the living area. I also realized the main reason I hadn't worked this out back when I reviewed the movie was that I had lost patience and tried skipping around without success. Listening through it, I finally pegged the track, at 3:25:09 (!!!) in the video... only, it turned out to be four. The infamous music when Peter abandons his plan to kill himself is "Action Pack", credited to Simon Haseley, per discogs one and the same as Simon Park. When he loses his gun to what I call the NRA zombie, the music switches to "Kadath" by Pierre Arvay, and the music tracks as he climbs into the helicopter are "Waiting For The Man" and "Proud Action", both by Trombey. Aaand, if you've seen the movie, you will already know this is all put together quite seamlessly!
That still left one more loose end for me, had I really heard the football hero music before? With a little more searching, I found it listed independently as music for Super Bowl X in 1976, so I may well have heard it reused for sports broadcasts. Then I looked just a little further, and found one more thing: The very first traceable appearance of the track was a De Wolfe called World Power, with music composed mainly by Haseley and Trombey. It proved to contain "Proud Action" and yet another Trombey track from the film called "On His Own". This intrigued me enough to check if there was a way to obtain or listen to the album with the tracks in their original order and context. Alas, it has only been released on LP, and it didn't turn up in the usual online channels either, though it can be bought for prices in the mid- to high double digits.
That finishes this tale, and another mystery. If there's anything I would add, it's that I myself have gone along with those who make fun of the music for Dawn of the Dead. I think the "hero" music remains the encapsulation of the whole. It was cliched at best, ridiculous at worst, but it shows how things get to be cliches. I, for one, will always be cheering for Peter. That's all for now, more to come!
No comments:
Post a Comment