Jump in My Car
Long before the era of the YouTube ‘mash-up’, a friend of mine set himself an unusual task: to find the perfect piece of music to replace ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in Apocalypse Now. Everyone knows the famous scene where Robert Duvall fires up some Wagner on his helicopter-mounted reel-to-reel, having determined it to be the perfect tune to accompany the low-level firebombing of a small Vietnamese village. ‘He’s wrong,’ said my friend Neil. ‘The theme from Hawaii Five-O works way better.’ As Neil was a radio engineer and had unlimited access to a sixteen-track recording studio, it wasn’t long before the proof was forthcoming. Several lunchtimes were spent completely reconstructing Walter Murch’s intricate soundtrack to the sequence, minus the music. Then the fun began. Literally hundreds of alternative choices were auditioned, from ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head’ to ‘The Stripper’, but, for mine, none worked better than the Muppet Show version of ‘Mah Nà Mah Nà’.
Several years later, I would wake Neil up with a drunken late-night trans-Tasman phone call to suggest a follow-up project: to find the perfect movie in which the end music could be replaced with ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. Several filmmakers have played this most desperate of cards, attempting to salvage a dismal comedy by shamelessly rolling out Bobby McFerrin’s a cappella novelty hit under the end credits. Even our own Bill Bennett tried it with The Nugget. (The song was equally ineffective when The Nugget’s investors fired it up in the car on the way home from the premiere.)
Early on, Neil and I realised that it was going to be pretty hard to top Schindler’s List (it works a treat – try it yourself), although the insufferably cheerful ditty also played well under the end credits of Witchfinder General, An Inconvenient Truth and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Earlier today, I found myself wondering whether Lars Von Trier’s AntiChrist might be a good candidate for ‘Don’t Worry’, but given that the ever-slappable Dane himself decided to, with typical subtlety, whack ‘Young Americans’ under the ending of Dogville, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already there.
While I accept that this ‘hobby’ may not be to everyone’s taste, I’m sure that most readers would have expended at least a few minutes trying to find the perfect piece of ‘driving music’; the perfect track to crank up in rush hour just as the clotted Punt Road artery finally bursts and launches you into the teeming South-Eastern at glorious gathering speed. For me, it’s always been Ray Charles with ‘What’d I Say (Parts I and II)’, but I know people who swear by Boom Crash Opera’s ‘Great Wall’.
I used to work with a bloke who’d play only The Cure’s ‘Primary’ for even the briefest of journeys. If we reached our destination before it finished, we’d have to ‘circle the airfield’, as it were, till the song finished. In Auckland, I briefly lived with a man who made everyone who climbed into his Hillman Imp join him in the chorus of ‘Sunday Boys’ by the now-forgotten Screaming MeeMees. People actually began to look forward to it, although when he eventually moved on to Van Halen’s ‘Panama’ there were – surprisingly, in my view – fewer takers.
In the late eighties, I found myself the ‘designated driver’ for a group of fairly heavy drinkers, the leader of whom insisted that the night hadn’t begun until we’d cruised (in my Laser Ghia) through the centre of Melbourne to Roy Orbison’s ‘Uptown’, with its promise of ‘a big car, fine clothes’ and unlimited access to ‘penthouse number three’, blasting from the tape deck. It was track four on Orbison’s Greatest Hits and God help me if, at its conclusion, I let the tape drift on to track five, ‘It’s Over’, the most depressing song this side of Joy Division’s Closer. If this occurred, we’d have to go all the way back to the beginning of ‘Uptown’ and ‘reset the mood’. Finally, after three months of Orbo’s ghostly caterwauling, I floated a new ‘theme tune’, Danny Elfman’s main title music to the then-upcoming Batman. At the first lights, the team leader fled the vehicle, claiming that ‘The angst!…The angst!’ had cast an irreversible pall over the entire evening. It was back to ‘Uptown’ or, for a brief period, ‘Love Shack’.
In recent years, I have devoted many hours to finding the perfect piece of music with which to score a journey through the car wash.
Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it yourself.
The idea is that the track should kick in just as you enter the ‘tunnel’ and, with careful research and preparation, end just as the process concludes. If you time it right, your passengers, assuming that they are sympathetic to the idea in the first place, will be blown away and say things like ‘That was awesome, dude’ (not all of them will be able to pull this off) and ‘This is better than the “Star Gate” sequence from 2001 on Blu-Ray!’. Of course, others, less convinced, may have tried to flee the vehicle mid-way through; not everyone appreciates a visionary.
I’ll let you discover for yourselves which tracks work best in the car wash. But if you’re worried about the wastage both of water and petrol that such a project entails, just try it once with ‘Two Tribes’ at top volume and thank me later.
In the meantime, my ultimate ‘driving music’ dream remains, as it has for three decades, to pilot a small open-topped sports car around a winding coastal road en route to the Monte Carlo casino, to the accompaniment of ‘El Bimbo’ by Bimbo Jet. (Here it is on YouTube, if you’re not familiar).
And before you ask, yes, I do have a girlfriend.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). He is currently directing new episodes of ABCTV's ‘The Librarians’.
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