![]() Where a more conventional score would normally underline the tension, the soundtrack here is silent. Those Southern boys sneak up on the sleeping trio at night and beat George to death. ‘Uh oh.’ It’s a wonderful moment.”Ĭambern’s radical editing, with its lightning-fast flashbacks and flash-forwards, also included cutting on the less obvious “kick beats” in the music - rather than the strong beats - in order to keep viewers on their toes.Įqually interesting is where there is no music. we’re in the wrong place, guys,’” Cambern says. ![]() “That song set up that whole sense of: ‘Oh, God. The good vibes smash-cut to a shot of the Long-Allen Bridge taking the characters into the South, scored by Hendrix’s syncopated, acidic “If 6 Was 9.” The song viscerally conveys this place of danger where, according to George, the natives hate what Billy and Wyatt represent: freedom. “It was a continuum of a good feeling, of discovery of the land they were going through,” Cambern says. “Don’t Bogart That Joint”) by the Fraternity of Man. “What could be better? I think that scene really was the platform for him moving on, in terms of getting more roles.”Īnother laugh arrives when George tries his first joint one night, and the following ride through horse country is cut to “Don’t Bogart Me” (a.k.a. “I mean, that’s Nicholson,” Joel Sill says of the song by psychedelic-folk group the Holy Modal Rounders. One of the film’s forays into humor comes courtesy of the goofy, honky-tonk “Bird Song” (“If You Want to Be a Bird”), which underscores the first ride with Jack Nicholson’s ACLU lawyer, George, grinning giddily underneath his gold football helmet. Our heroes pick up a hitchhiker and travel through desert and mountain country to “The Weight” (“Take a Load Off”), a sunny singalong performed by the Band. The second joyride is set to the rambling, uptempo strains of “Wasn’t Born to Follow” by the Byrds, which reprises during a playful scene of skinny-dipping with members of the commune - briefly morphing from acoustic folksiness into electric psychedelia. Steppenwolf’s raucous anthem “Born to Be Wild” plays over Billy and Wyatt’s first ride during the opening credits. “We wanted music that would contribute to the meaning of the story as they were traveling.” The film is structured around several cross-country montages, and “each ride really was a story unto itself,” Cambern says. So there was joy - tremendous amount of joy.” ‘The Pusher Man.’ Followed by the grandeur, out on the highway, of this wonderful country that we were living in. “The first one was a comment on the hold of drugs that was beginning to take hold in the counterculture. “When the first song really hit, it turned into two things,” Cambern says. The first song heard is “The Pusher” - a bluesy, explicitly drug-minded song by Steppenwolf - which accompanies a montage of Billy (Hopper) and Wyatt (Fonda) hiding drug money inside their motorcycles. “‘Easy Rider’ opened that whole conception of thinking that a song really needs to be placed for its narrative value, as well as its playability in a scene - that is, its contribution.”īut there are no Monkees songs in “Easy Rider.” The radical road movie, which doubles as a travelogue of America with its winsome Laszlo Kovacs photography, moves to rougher rhythms. Schneider and Rafelson continued the trend of “jukebox scores” with “The Last Picture Show” and “Five Easy Pieces,” and the rest of Hollywood took notice.įilmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, John Hughes, Wes Anderson and, famously, Tarantino carried on the tradition of using existing songs in a sophisticated, story-driven way - but there’s also been a 50-year wave of more crass, marketing-motivated imitators. “Easy Rider” wasn’t the first film to use rock music - “Blackboard Jungle” was a pioneer, and “The Graduate” was set to the songs of Simon & Garfunkel - but it was arguably the first to use a curated playlist in place of an instrumental score. “And we kept listening and culling, and listening and culling, and finally getting to the point where we had really worked out, over a long period of time, the music that we felt would be appropriate,” says “Easy Rider” editor Donn Cambern. It was expensive to hire a composer and an orchestra, so as they edited the film they “temped” it with songs from a pile of roughly 200 records. The choice by Fonda and Hopper, the latter of whom also directed, to score the film with rock songs of their generation was as much economical as it was artistic. Produced for around $350,000 by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, the film was one of the first hits made outside of the studio system.
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