FEATURE:
The Greatest Movie Soundtrack Ever?
The Incredible Pulp Fiction at Thirty
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EVEN though it was not released…
in the U.S. until 14th October, 1994, Pulp Fiction was shown at Cannes on 21st May, 1994. I am marking its upcoming thirtieth anniversary by looking closely at its soundtrack. One of Quentin Tarantino’s earliest and best films, it went on to win eight major awards from a total of twenty-six nominations. Pulp Fiction won for Best Original Screenplay at the 67th Academy Awards. One of the greatest films ever, it still really holds up after thirty years. Even if Tarantino’s acting cameo in the film is pretty awful, his direction and writing is masterful. Suffering a little bloating and need of editing – one of the curses of most Tarantino films -, it is s sharp, funny and iconic film that I hope gets new celebration and showing on its thirtieth anniversary. It must have been exciting for audiences at Cannes seeing the film thirty years ago. The soundtrack from Pulp Fiction is almost as iconic as the film itself. Tarantino is brilliant when it comes to great needle drops and pairing perfect music with iconic scenes. Someone who must spend hours sifting through vinyl and meticulously looking for the right song for his movies, I wanted to argue that Pulp Fiction is one of the greatest soundtracks ever. It may be the very best. The soundtrack was released in September 1994.
As the film was first shown thirty years ago on 21st May, I want to bring in a few features that go deep with one of the finest and most memorable soundtracks ever. American Songwriter investigated the Pulp Fiction soundtrack a couple of years back:
“Composition and Track Order
Comprised of 16 total songs, the Pulp Fiction soundtrack featured a wide array of musical styles and hit singles. It also featured sections and skits from the movie, which was one of the most popular in the entire 1990s, so that when you put on the record, you’re back in the movie. In your car? You can still hear the actors and the dialogue about foreign hamburgers (Royale with cheese!).
But the real meat of the album is the music. The soundtrack, thanks to writer-director Quentin Tarantino, introduced music lovers to handfuls of great, specific, nuanced tunes. Songs like “Jungle Boogie” by Kool & the Gang, “Let’s Stay Together” by Al Green, “Lonesome Town” by Ricky Nelson, “Son of a Preacher Man” by Dusty Springfield, and more.
All of these songs became favorites amongst people now in their late 30s and early 40s. But there’s more! Like “Flowers on the Wall” by The Statler Sisters, Dick Dale’s rendition of “Misirlou” and “Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon” by Urge Overkill.” What gems.
Origins
The movie itself has no traditional film score. Instead, it was an eclectic group of songs that could be heard on either AM or FM radio—songs director Tarantino loved. In total, there are nine songs from the movie on the LP and four tracks of dialogue bits, which are then followed by music. There are three tracks of dialogue alone, as well. Seven songs featured in the movie were not included on the original 41-minute soundtrack.
Upon its release, the album reached No. 21 on the Billboard 200, and Urge Overkill’s cover of the Neil Diamond-penned “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” peaked at No. 59.
Tarantino chose surf music like Dale’s track because, he said, “It just seems like rock ‘n’ roll Ennio Morricone music, rock ‘n’ roll spaghetti Western music.”
According to legend, many of the songs on the soundtrack were suggested to the director by musician Boyd Rice, via their mutual friend Allison Anders, including Dale’s now-infamous track. Others were suggested to Tarantino by friends Chuck Kelley and Laura Lovelace, who were relied on as music consultants. (Lovelace also appeared in the movie as Laura the waitress.)
Legacy
In 2002, a two-disc collector’s edition of the album was issued. The first disc contained the songs, including four more tracks. And the second disc was a spoken-word interview with Tarantino.
The soundtrack has since been certified platinum in Canada. And by November 1994, total sales of more than 1.6 million had accumulated. By 1996, two million units had been sold. In 1995, the soundtrack reached No. 6 on the charts.
The success of soundtracks like the Pul Fiction offering, helps to bring to light songs that may have been lost to time. In this way, they were like tangible playlists, showing light on songs that were popular historically but that then earned a resurgence, like “Jungle Boogie.”
One reason why the soundtrack was so beloved was because of the curatorial flare Tarantino (along with music supervisor Karyn Rachtman) had as an artist. Wrote a critic in The Orange County Register, “Unlike so many soundtracks, which just seem to be repositories for stray songs by hit acts regardless of whether they fit the film’s mood, Tarantino’s use of music in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction exploded with a brash, Technicolor, pop-culture intensity that mirrored the stories he was telling.”
Wrote Billboard, “Pulp Fiction…successfully spoke to those attuned to the hip, stylized nature of those particular films.” Adding, “In some cases, like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, which were not geared toward any specific demographic, the soundtracks were still very focused albums,” said Kathy Nelson, senior VP/general manager at MCA Soundtracks. “In both cases, the body of work—both the music and the film—has a specific personality.”
To this day, the genre is popular and one of the kings of surf rock, Dick Dale, has songs in commercials that sell everything from food to toothpaste”.
In 2014, to mark twenty years of Pulp Fiction, Medium wrote how Quentin Tarantino’s curated classic changed the way we watched movies. I think it has inspired so many other film soundtracks. I am not including all of the feature, though I wanted to bring most of it in:
“The Rebirth Of Cool
The songs used in the film give it a timeless quality, a sense that events on screen are happening in an alternate reality. The action seemed to be set in the present day, but the characters remain blissfully unaware of the period’s dominant forms of music: grunge, hip-hop and electronica. In their world, it is perfectly normal for John Travolta’s Vincent to be doing Adam West’s bat-dance to Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell,” or for The Revels’ “Comanche” to be the song of choice for Marcellus Wallace’s soon-to-be-living-the-rest-of-his-short-ass-life-in-agonizing-pain rapist.
Divine Intervention
Prior to Pulp Fiction, the standard methodology behind a major film soundtrack was to simply “play the hits” (if you had the budget), as Forrest Gump did that same summer of 1994. Releasing a high-profile double-disc set—a collection of massive hit records from earlier eras, including Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” CCR’s “Fortunate Son” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”—it sounded as if they ordered a copy of Freedom Rock and jammed to it in the editing room.
“What I don’t want to do, and I’ve seen it done in a lot of movies, is they turn up the soundtrack to create a false energy. Or in particular, to create a sense of period,” said Tarantino in a 1994 interview, included on the 2002 expanded reissue of the Pulp soundtrack. “‘Okay, it’s the 60s. We’ll play a lot of 60s songs and that will create the period.’ To me that’s cheap, it’s annoying, and like listening to the radio and watching a movie at the same time. They don’t really go together… I try to avoid that.”
Neither Pulp nor Reservoir Dogs had the Forrest Gump-sized budgets to splurge on your parents’ favorite songs, so they had to make-do with more obscure selections. Quentin Tarantino had little interest in going after the obvious big hits, so he picked a series of more off-the-beaten-path numbers when writing the screenplays for both films.
Tarantino’s original music supervisor on Reservoir Dogs told him that it would be impossible to get the rights for some of the songs written into the screenplay, so their only option would be to use “muzak” covers or cheap copies. Lucky for Tarantino, music supervisor Karyn Rachtman had a different plan. Without her, both Pulp and Reservoir may have sounded very different.
“He had a music supervisor on the film, who told him that he couldn’t have any 70s songs, because they couldn’t afford them,” Rachtman told Cuepoint. “So they had to get 70s sound-a-likes, to like, make up 70s songs, so it sounded like 70s songs, but ones you didn’t know. And he was devastated, and most devastated about ‘Stuck In The Middle With You,’ he wrote that scene to that song.”
Karyn, who hadn’t yet been hired for the job, was determined to see Tarantino’s vision through; that is, to see Mike Madsen’s Mr. Blonde severing the ear of a bloody, bound and gagged cop, to the accompaniment of Stealers Wheel.
“They had, I believe, $10,000 allocated for all the music in the film. And [Quentin] said, ‘Help me get ‘Stuck In The Middle With You.’ What can you do?’ And I was like, ‘I’m going to go get it.’ And it was a hell of a hard job, I’m going to reach out to Joe Egan and Gerry Rafferty (of Stealers Wheel), at the time whom weren’t speaking. [Producer] Stacey Sher and I put a plan together and explained about how we were paying homage to “Singin’ In The Rain” in A Clockwork Orange, and that it’s a violent scene. Here we are, asking for a song for no money, and to a violent film, and for a filmmaker you’ve never heard of,” she said.
“So it was a tough job, but needless to say, I got the song and it took up the entire music budget. And Quentin was like ‘Thank you so much, what can I do for you now?’ and I was like ‘You can fire your music supervisor and hire me.’ And he did,” she remembers fondly.
Rachtman, who would later help round out the soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, worked closely with Tarantino to see that what was written on the page would be heard on the silver screen.
“Especially in Pulp Fiction, Quentin was a horrible speller. He really wrote most of those key songs to that film in the script. But he would make up titles for them that didn’t exist, and spell things wrong. And I’m like, ‘I can’t find this song.’ Of course it would be a lot easier today with the internet and all that kind of stuff, but that was a tough job. Quentin very much writes to music.”
It’s something that the recent chart-topping Guardians of The Galaxy soundtrack quite obviously took a cue from, building the film around a series of semi-obscure, retro tunes. Marvel Studios’ latest even uses one of Tarantino’s original selections from Reservoir Dogs, with Blue Suede’s “Hooked On A Feeling” lifted right from K-Billy’s Super Sounds Of The 70’s playlist.
“When I heard about the Guardians Of The Galaxy soundtrack, I got a little jealous. I have an 18-year-old and 24-year-old, and they were telling me it’s pretty cool,” said Rachtman.
Hopefully they realize that their mother’s work on both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs laid the groundwork for the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack. In the Tarantino style, the music of Guardians plays a central role in the new film, but like Forrest Gump, it still “plays the hits.” While it is largely built around the obscure 70s tunes, it also relies on obvious, overdone crowd pleasers like Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” Tarantino didn’t go for this. Like a good DJ, he defined what the hits would be and what the next trend would be.
The soundtrack of Pulp Fiction is largely built around 60s surf tunes, most notably the opening credit sequence track, “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. The song is so synonymous with the film that many just refer to it as “The Pulp Fiction Theme.” However its origins are much deeper: the song originated as a 1927 Greek rebetiko composition, was made popular by Dale’s cover in 1962, and again by The Beach Boys a year later for their Surfin’ USA LP. The song has been covered dozens of times throughout the last century, and most recently was sampled for Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It.”
What Tarantino has referred to as “rock & roll spaghetti western music,” the surf rock resurgence exploded into 90s pop culture as of a result of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and simultaneously with Portishead’s hit single, “Sour Times,” released that same year. However Rachtman largely credits the origins of the comeback to Link Wray, who many view as the pioneer of the power chord.
Inevitably, what Quentin wrote in the screenplay was not always attainable from the rights holders. “I remember ‘Locomotion’ by Carole King was refused,” recalls Karyn.
“At one point I thought of using ‘My Sharona’ for the sodomy-rape sequence. ‘My Sharona’ has a really good sodomy-beat to it, if you really think about it,” Quentin revealed in the soundtrack interview. “Apparently part of the band was for it, but one in the band was a Born Again Christian who just wasn’t for it and was like, ‘No, I’m not interested.’”
Says Karyn, “Quentin’s mother came on the set when we were at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, and she said, ‘Why is Quentin using [Chuck Berry’s ‘You Never Can Tell’]? Why did he chose that song? I used to listen to that song all the time when I was pregnant with him.’”
Among the myriad surf tunes and twangy guitars are a few funk and soul classics that belong to the gangster Marcellus Wallace and his crew. The first of these is Kool & The Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” which acts as the backdrop for Vincent and Jules’ oft-imitated car-ride conversation — it plays on the radio while they discuss the finer points of Amsterdam’s McDonald’s menu. Later in the film, perhaps referencing that earlier moment, Sam Jackson’s Jules uses the band name as a substitute for the word “cool,” telling Tarantino’s bath-robed Jimmy character, “Hey, that’s Kool and the Gang. You know, we don’t wanna fuck your shit up!”
Marcellus has his own theme song, Al Green’s soul classic “Let’s Stay Together,” which plays when we are first introduced to the back of his bandaged head. It’s implied that Marcellus prefers this kind of slow, romantic baby-makin’ music. Perhaps Jules didn't know just how prophetic he was being during his Big Kahuna Burger interrogation, telling Big Brain Brad, “And Marcellus Wallace don’t like to be fucked by anybody except Mrs. Wallace.”
While the Pulp soundtrack is built on retro tunes, its biggest hit was Urge Overkill’s newly-recorded remake of “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon,” which first topped the charts in its original Neil Diamond incarnation in 1967. This cover version was the only modern-ish song on the album, released as its lead single. The song was recorded as a throwaway in 1992, for the band’s vinyl-only Stull EP, primarily to fulfill their previous record label contract before signing with Geffen Records in 1993. Ironically it would end up being the band’s biggest hit.
“The movie was such a global hit, as was the soundtrack,” Urge Overkill’s Nash Kato told Cuepoint. “One doesn’t necessarily guarantee the other. You can have a hit movie, but nobody buys the soundtrack, or vice-versa. But both were such big hits. That three minute cover that we pulled out of our ass took us around the world.”
With so many of the soundtrack’s songs taken from yesteryear, why didn’t Tarantino just use Neil Diamond’s original 1967 version? Supervisor Rachtman recalls, “I had never heard that [Urge version] before, and Quentin just loved that, and I had nothing to do with it, except for making the deal on it. It was just something that Quentin was just a huge fan of, and he had to have that version. And I remember Neil Diamond’s publishing company was being very difficult, but afterwards I think he was very grateful.”
“The thing is, our version is really so squishy. Everything’s a little of out of tune. There’s no solid meter. The drums speed up and slow down,” says Urge’s Nash. “Everything that was so wrong with that take became so right for that pivotal scene in the movie, where everything turns to shit. [Mia] snorts all of that heroin, which she thinks is coke, and then all of a sudden she overdoses. They used it in the narrative, it wasn’t incidental music. She walks over to the reel-to-reel and this is the song she wants to hear. I don’t think he would have bothered licensing that tune if it had been any more correct, you know?”
As legend has it, Uma Thurman picked the song from a handful of options that would animate her drunken solo dance scene and shortly-to-follow heroin overdose. “The story we got from Quentin is that it was a pivotal scene. He had it down to three, possibly four tracks. So since it was Uma’s scene, he was going to bounce it off her and let her choose,” recalls Nash. “I don’t know what the other songs were that we were up against. So apparently when she heard ours, she was like ‘This I can do.’ She sings and dances to it, and… O.D.’s (laughs). So it better be the right song!”
However the greatest tale surrounding Urge’s hit cover is how Quentin’s hobby of vinyl crate-digging led to his discovery of the track, which he allegedly found in a used/discount bin, somewhere in Europe.
“This was a long running gag for us, for a while. Because some poor fucker thought that we sucked, or this record sucked and cashed it in for a dollar or two, or something. And then Quentin Tarantino, an avid record collector, picked it up for 50p or whatever the currency is,” laughs Nash. “We’ve always wanted to find the guy who thought the record sucked and changed the trajectory of our musical career.”
“And film history, at that,” adds Eddie”.
There are other great features like this, that look at the amazing songs featured throughout Pulp Fiction. You can buy the soundtrack here. I think that it is the greatest soundtrack ever. The way the dialogue sits alongside the songs. I know some soundtracks concentrate on songs without any dialogue clips. Not only is the range of the songs phenomenal. The way the songs sit in the scenes. Some are integral to the action and moment. Others more in the background. There is a mixture of well-known tracks with some that many people would have discovered through the film. A beautiful blend of genres and artists! You can hear songs from the soundtrack and they are synonymous with scenes from Pulp Fiction. The power of Quentin Tarantino’s writing and music love. The passion he put into selecting the songs. As Pulp Fiction premiered at Cannes on 21st May, 1994, I wanted to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary by saluting its soundtrack. It remains, in my view, the greatest…
MOVIE soundtrack of all time.