Disc 230 is...Highway 61 Soundtrack
Artist: VariousYear of Release: 1992
What’s Up With The Cover?: Not much - it is a logo for the movie and I think it works well enough.
How I Came To Know It: Most of the time when I buy a soundtrack it is because I saw the movie and liked the music. This is a bit of an odd one. I saw a video for the song "Put Your Head On" by The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir. I loved the song but couldn't find it anywhere. I even bought the one Bourbon Tabernacle Choir album I could find, but it didn't have this single.
Then I realized it was from a soundtrack to a movie called "Highway 61", so I bought the soundtrack. Flowing from that, I shortly thereafter saw the movie, which was a strange way to back my way into a pretty enjoyable little indie film from Canada.
How It Stacks Up: I have about 23 or 24 soundtracks (depending on how I'm counting them up). "Highway 61" isn't the best, but it holds its own in the middle of the pack.
Rating: 3 stars
Since I discovered the music to "Highway 61" before I saw the movie, I'll take a novel approach here, and only discuss the movie at the end of the review, instead of the beginning, as I normally would.
The music on this album is quite a hodge podge, and seems to be selected at least in part with an eye to putting together a lot of different types of music. Though there are only 13 songs, they range from rock to folk, to pop to electronic dance music, and eventually wind up with gospel and zydeco.
The crowning achievement is "Put Your Head On" by the cleverly named The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir. Bourbon Tabernacle Choir are tough to categorize themselves. They are big enough to be a ska band (and they have a requisite horn section) but really they are a mix of rock, jazz and funk. Because of "Put Your Head On" I would go on to be a pretty big fan of theirs for the two or three years that they actually existed. I'd say their rise to stardom was shortlived, except I don't think they ever did rise to stardom.
It's too bad, "Put Your Head On" is a groovy song that deserved to be noticed by more than just me. BTC (as I will affectionately call them) were an update party band, and "Put Your Head On" is a reference that basically means "straighten yourself out and get yourself a positive new outlook." It begins:
"I said are you happy, baby, you think you need an upper?
There is a difference between reality and wanting just to suffer"
So true, and yet so difficult to teach to people who always see the glass half empty.
Other standouts include a surprisingly good remake of Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" by someone named Rita Chiarelli and a very cool electronica dance song by Acid Test called "Mr. Skin". Acid Test is the only band that gets two songs on the record (the other one is OK as well) so I assume the movie makers really liked them.
Also, while I wouldn't want to listen to an entire album full of zydeco music, the one song on here "Zydeco Heehaw" by Boozoo Chavis, is very cool. It always makes me want to sing along, but the words are completely unintelligible to me. As a result, I usually find myself doing a very bad approximation of scatting for the first half of the song, and then just shutting up and letting Boozoo Chavis do their thing for the latter half. I should know better than try to compete with a band with as cool a name as Boozoo Chavis.
As for the movie, "Highway 61" is one of many good low budget Indie Canadian movies I've seen over the years ("New Waterford Girl" and "Buried On Sunday" are a couple more worth checking out).
"Highway 61" is the story of Pokey, a naive Canadian barber who meets a mysterious redhead who convinces him to drive with her (and the corpse of 'her brother') from Ontario all the way to Louisiana - along Highway 61 of course. Along the way they run afoul of a character who claims to be Satan, who makes all his money winning Bingo games in local churches and spends it buying the souls of people he meets - these people treat his offers with varying degrees of seriousness. It is a quirky movie, but a good one, and it has aged well.
As for this album, I've owned it for almost twenty years. It is pretty uneven, with a few songs that I could live without, but overall it is solid, and I'd keep it for "Put Your Head On" alone.
Best tracks: Highway 61 Revisited (Rita Chiarelli), Put Your Head On (Bourbon Tabernacle Choir), Momma's Waitin' (Jane Hawley), Mr. Skin (Acid Test), Zydeco Heehaw (Boozoo Chavis).
2 comments:
What's the fake radio announcer saying? You stopped at the colon!
That line was supposed to be deleted in the interests of brevity. I have deleted it now, but I suppose in the interests of posterity, the fake radio announcer says: "13 WKXI, the best songs, less talk and NO RAP!". I thought it funny at the time, because I hated rap, but I've since put my head on my shoulders, and realized there's lots of good rap after all. Life's funny that way.
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