Soundtrack Collection (‘Burbs through 2010)

May 7, 2010 Jeffrey Graebner1 Comment

Introduction

I have been collecting movie and television soundtracks, mostly instrumental scores, for around 30 years and have a collection of more than 1,100 albums. My first purchase was John Barry’s score to The Black Hole in 1979 when I was 10 years old. Ever since, film music has been the dominant style of music that I listen to and purchase.

When I first started buying soundtracks, it was mainly as a souvenir from movies that I really liked. In time, though, my purchases became more for the music itself. I am very familiar with the most important film composers and will purchase music from favorite composers in much the same way that anyone else will buy albums from favorite artists. Because of this, I have many albums from movies that I have never seen. Some are from movies that I don’t even have any interest in seeing, but I still enjoy the music.

With such a large collection, there are quite a few albums that I have only listened to a handful of times. In some cases, I probably have only played them all the way through one time. I do regularly use shuffle play features against my entire collection to essentially create my own radio station, which does mean that I periodically hear individual tracks from pretty much everything.

In order to re-acquaint myself with some of the music that I haven’t heard recently, this week I started listening to every soundtrack album in my soundtrack collection in alphabetical order. As I listen to each album, I am writing up a few sentences (sometimes more) about each. I often listen to music while at work as well as occasionally playing music at home on weekends, but I still suspect it will take at least a year, and possibly much longer, to get through the entire collection. As I get enough notes on albums to make a decent post, I will periodically upload them to this blog. I’m not yet sure how often these posts will be, although I suspect at least once a week is likely.

As much as possible, I am going to make each album title (and the album art) link to somewhere that the album can be purchased. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state that in many cases it will be an affiliate link to Amazon.com that returns to me a small percentage of any sales for the referral. Quite a few film scores are released as mail-order only limited editions, so those will often feature a link to the label’s online store or a soundtrack specialty retailer. In a number of cases, the albums are now out of print (or, if limited editions, sold out) and may be difficult and/or expensive to obtain. A few may be completely impossible to come by now.

My music player of choice (MediaMonkey) places albums that start with symbols or numbers at the start of the list (and ignores articles like “The” or “A” as the first word), so that is where I will begin. I may occasionally back-track as I get new albums from earlier in the alphabet. This first batch may seem to start in a strange place, but the first two titles actually start with symbols (an apostrophy and an asterisk), which is why they were the first that I came to.

Billy Joel and Elton John, Honda Center (Anaheim), 3/28/2009

March 29, 2009 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

One of the very best concerts that I ever saw was Billy Joel and Elton John at the Ohio State University Stadium in Columbus, OH during their first tour together back in 1994. When I found out that they were touring again this year and would be doing a show at the Honda Center (formerly The Pond) in Anaheim, I was immediately interested in getting tickets to see them again and to give my wife the chance to attend.

The timing for getting tickets turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as they went on-sale last December during the week that we were on vacation in Florida. The on-sale time, in fact, happened to precisely correspond with our dining reservation at Tusker House in Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Ticketmaster currently doesn’t have a mobile-friendly web-site that can be used for ordering tickets from a cell phone, so I ended up programming the phone number for their automated ticket ordering system into my phone. Their phone ordering system is a pretty big hassle to use and the process of ordering tickets used up the majority of the time we were waiting for our table at the restaurant, but I did manage to get the tickets ordered.

Traffic between home and Anaheim can be pretty heavy on a Saturday afternoon, so we made arrangements for our son’s babysitter to arrive in time for my wife and I to leave home around 4pm, which we figured should be plenty of time for us to get there in time for the 7:30pm concert. The drive wasn’t overwhelmingly bad for a Saturday and we made it down to Orange County by 5:30pm, giving us enough time to stop off at a nearby mall for a quick dinner at the food court. We then made it over to the Honda Center around 6:45pm or so. Traffic was a little bit heavy getting into the parking areas, but it wasn’t overwhelmingly bad. I did think that they would have benefited by a few more people directing traffic (particularly controlling access to the left turn lanes from Katella Ave.), but I’ve seen worse.

I had been to the Honda Center (still The Pond, at that time) once before to see one of Billy Joel’s solo concerts back in 1999. While I didn’t remember the layout exceptionally well, I did recall that I had been seated in the cheap seats in the top tier for that show and that the view was still reasonably decent. Considering that the tickets time time were over $100 each for anything on the lower tiers, we went with similar seats again this time. When we first got to our seats, our first reaction was that we were awfully high up and far from the stage, but we really ended up being pretty happy with where we were. Our view, while distant, was unobstructed and from the front, which wasn’t true of many of the closer seats. The picture below, taken using my cell phone camera while we were waiting for the show to start, gives an idea of how far we were from the stage.

The concert started about 20 minutes late (not too bad for a rock concert), with the lights initially going down about 1/2 way followed by an overture of instrumental versions of some of Billy Joel and Elton John’s songs, played as two pianos rose from beneath the stage. The house lights then went the rest of the way down as Billy Joel entered to "Yankee Doodle" and then Elton John entered to a very British tune that was extremely familiar, but I don’t know the title. The two greeted one another and then headed to their pianos to start an introductory series of duets.

John Williams: A Hollywood Legend (Concert Review)

September 6, 2008 Jeffrey Graebner1 Comment

Hollywood Bowl – August 30, 2008

John Williams’ annual concert of film music with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl has been an annual tradition for me as long as I have lived in Southern California. I’ve been a huge fan of Williams’ music since I was a kid and I love these regular opportunities to hear his music live, particularly with Williams conducting it himself.

Even though I have continued to attend, and thoroughly enjoy, the concerts every year, my last review was of the 2005 concert. The concerts are great fun, but the content is basically similar from year to year. The concerts tend to be targeted more towards the fans of Williams’ mainstream blockbusters than at film score enthusiasts, which results in the selections usually being drawn from a somewhat limited subset of Williams’ exceptional repertoire of compositions.

Williams typically includes a section featuring additional material besides his own during his concerts, sometimes including guest performers. My interest in those parts has varied from year to year. Generally, I have most enjoyed those segments when they have been very focused on classic film music that clearly influenced or otherwise connected strongly with Williams. The second half of this year’s concert featured a lengthy tribute to musicals directed by Stanley Donen, with each piece introduced (in person) by Donen himself. This was easily my favorite "extra" yet from the Williams’ Hollywood Bowl concerts I have attended.

Indiana Jones Memories: Temple of Doom

May 20, 2008 Jeffrey Graebner1 Comment

Click here for my previous post on Raiders of the Lost Ark

By the time the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom came out in 1984, the dominance of the multiplex was really starting to take hold. The sequel opened both at the big single-screen Flint Cinema where Raiders played, but it also opened at a suburban multiplex (the Genesee Valley Theaters) that was much closer to our family’s home. This was the same release pattern that was used for Return of the Jedi the year before. My sister and I saw Jedi at the first after-school matinee at the multiplex and then saw the film again that weekend in the better 70mm 6-track Dolby presentation at the Flint Cinema.

We had expected to follow the same basic pattern with Temple of Doom, which was also opening the Wednesday before Memorial Day, a week or so before school let out for the summer. Much to our surprise, my father had other ideas. At the time, the local newspaper in Flint came fairly late in the afternoon. After work, my father was looking through the paper and called my sister and I into the room. He then showed us the full-page ad for the movie that announced a midnight showing that night at Flint Cinema and asked us if we could promise to still get up and make it to school the next day if we all went to see it. Of course, our answer was a definite "yes".

Not being a night person at all, my mother again opted out of the first showing (another good excuse to see the film again soon…), but my father, sister, and I headed out to the theater late that evening. This was my first experience seeing a midnight movie. It wasn’t a sold-out show, but the enthusiasm level of the audience was about as high as it could get. The crowd cheered and applauded at all the right moments and clearly was having a great time. I particularly got a kick out of the reaction to Indy’s entrance. The first time we see the character in this film, he is well-groomed and dressed in a white tuxedo. The audience reacted with applause, although it was a bit restrained and even a little delayed as it took a moment for it to register that it was him. At the end of the prologue, Indy makes a second entrance dressed in his traditional leather jacket, fedora, bullwhip, etc. and that prompted cheers and wild applause.

I obviously had a much better idea of what to expect than I did prior to the release of the first film, which led to quite a bit more heightened excitement about the film, but also a lot less mystery and surprise. What I actually liked a lot about the film (and I’m a bigger fan of it than many people are) was that I felt that Lucas and Spielberg really did find some surprising and unexpected directions to take the movie. Right at the very start, I certainly wasn’t expecting the movie to open with an entire Busby Berkley style musical number. I even recall momentarily wondering if they were running the wrong movie. A lot of people were also put off by the darker tone and overall modified structure compared to the first film, but I felt that it made the movie seem a bit fresher than most sequels. The film was, if anything, even faster paced than the first and, even with the ultra-late showtime, I certainly had no trouble staying awake for the movie. Yes, I did make it through the school day the next day as well.

I liked the film a lot and did see it several times in the theater that summer, but not as many times as the first film. In fact, it wasn’t even really the movie that most dominated my attention that summer. As a 14-year-old boy, I was right in the primary target audience for Ghostbusters, which became my favorite movie of that summer and the one that I gave the most repeat viewing. The Indiana Jones films have overall likely withstood the test of time better over the last 24 years and I suspect most people might even be a bit surprised to learn that Ghostbusters was actually a bigger box-office hit overall that summer. Still, it did play through the whole summer and I do recall several return trips to see it again.

In my post on Raiders, I mentioned that the John Williams score was something of a milestone. While the sequel score wasn’t as much of one, it did come as something of a surprise to me and still remains one of my favorites. The big surprise was Williams’ decision to abandon all of the themes that he had written for the first film with the exception of the iconic Raiders March. At that point, I never really had conceived of a sequel score that would essentially start from scratch instead of further developing the first film’s music. It caught me a bit off-guard, but also appealed to me very much.

I will close with probably the silliest and oddest personal story that relates to this movie. At the very end of the credits is a somewhat cryptic credit that simply says "Thanks to Reed Smoot". Being a couple teenagers, my sister and I both thought that was kind of a funny name and were also intrigued by the mysterious credit. It then became a running joke for the two of us for quite some time, with us often joking about being the only members of the "Reed Smoot Fan Club". Without the vast information available online today, we didn’t have any success finding any information on Mr. Smoot. We were pretty sure he wasn’t the early-20th century Utah Senator that was the only reference we found to the name. I now know that Mr. Smoot is actually a respected cinematographer that is best known for his work on a variety of IMAX features. He apparently did some second-unit photography work on the film, which was the basis of the credit. If Mr. Smoot ever stumbles on this, I hope he doesn’t mind that a couple silly teenagers had some goofy fun with his credit.

Indiana Jones Memories: Raiders of the Lost Ark

May 19, 2008 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

Unless you have been living under a rock (and possibly even then), you probably know that a brand-new Indiana Jones movie is opening this Thursday. My wife and I have already arranged for a babysitter and purchased our opening night tickets. With that in mind, this seems like a good time to reminisce a bit about my experiences seeing the previous movies in the series. In this post (and later ones about the other two films), I’m not really going to write reviews, although I expect to reveal at least a bit of my opinion of each. Instead will just tell a bit of the story of my own experiences.

With 19 years having past since we last saw Indy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and 27 years since the character was first introduced in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I’m part of a likely pretty large group of adults who will be going into this new movie with a hope of recapturing a little bit of magic from my childhood. I was only 11-years-old when the first movie came out and was 14 and 18 when the previous sequels came out. As a long-time movie enthusiast, I probably would list other films (including others by Spielberg and Lucas) as somewhat higher on both my lists of favorites and bests, but I can think of very few that invoke more fond memories or that had quite as much influence on my love of movies and my cinematic preferences.

When Raiders of the Lost Ark came out back in 1981, I was already a fan of the Star Wars films (The Empire Strikes Back came out one year earlier) and, not surprisingly, was immediately very receptive to the promotion of a new George Lucas movie starring Harrison Ford. My older sister (who was 14 at the time) also had a definite movie-star crush on Ford, which also helped to build our family’s interest in the movie.

The first that I ever heard about the film remains my pick for possibly the most amusingly wrong magazine article I’ve ever seen about a movie. I don’t remember the specific publication (although my sister may still have the clipping somewhere in her files), but it was a movie rumors column in either a teen magazine or a general entertainment magazine of some sort. The short article ran right around the time that The Empire Strikes Back was released and announced that the 3rd film in the Star Wars series would be coming out only one year later and would center around the character of Han Solo. The title of this new film would be "Lost Raiders of the Ark". I’m sure that whoever wrote that is very proud…

Back in 1981, I didn’t really follow the movies very closely and certainly didn’t have access to the kind of ready information on the topic that is out there today. For the most part, the first real awareness of Raiders came primarily when the ads started hitting. Back then, George Lucas and, especially, Steven Spielberg were not really household names, so the ads heavily promoted the movie as "From the creator of Star Wars and the director of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind". As I said, the Star Wars connections were the big draw for me, although I had seen and enjoyed Close Encounters (but only on TV). I didn’t see Jaws until a few years later. After seeing Raiders, I quickly became a Spielberg fan, something that really solidified a year later when our family went out to see a sneak preview of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial without knowing much of anything about the film other than that it was from the same director.

My father took my sister, my best friend, and me to see the first evening showing of Raiders on its opening night. We were living in Flint, Michigan at the time and saw the movie at The Flint Cinema, an old-fashioned single-screen theater. Built in the late 60s shortly after the end of the movie palace era, it wasn’t anything overly fancy but was mainly known for a large screen and 70mm, 6-track Dolby presentation. I think Raiders was actually the first film we saw there as the first two Star Wars films had opened at the nearby Eastland Mall Cinemas instead. The movie pretty much blew us all away. We knew it was supposed to be a fast-paced adventure movie, but I don’t think any of us really were prepared for the scope of the film or the sheer level of adrenaline it would pump.

My Mom wasn’t originally sure she was that interested in the movie (she hadn’t really liked Star Wars) and decided that she didn’t feel like dealing with the opening night crowds for the movie. We, of course, all came home and told her that she needed to see the movie as soon as possible and we all went out to see it with her the next weekend. As a joke, we all conspired ahead of time to repeatedly warn her that the movie started out very slowly, but promising her that it got better as it went along. As you might expect, the very exciting opening sequence in the idol cave caught her very much off-guard. She really loved the movie, although the intensity did get to her a bit at times. She was holding my Dad’s hand during much of the movie and afterwards they laughed that she instinctively pulled her hand to her mouth, thus biting my Dad, during the Well-of-Souls sequence when the snake climbed out of the skeleton’s mouth.

Over the course of that summer, this became the first movie that my sister and I went to see multiple times in the theaters during its initial release (we had seen Star Wars and a few Disney films more than once due to re-releases). By the end of the film’s run, I saw it a total of 13 times. My father absolutely fell in love with the movie as well and went along with us to many of those showings. Prior to that, he had never been much of a movie fan and didn’t typically see anything more than once.

John Williams score to the movie also represented a bit of a milestone for me. I had started to become interested in movie scores a couple years earlier. My interest was first sparked by John Barry’s orchestral score to Disney’s The Black Hole, which ended up being the first score soundtrack that I purchased. My interest expanded dramatically after getting first The Empire Strikes Back and then the original Star Wars soundtracks and I then started a collection of movie score LP’s from movies involving outer space. Over a year or so, I bought a bunch of albums including Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Superman, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc. After seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark and hearing Williams amazing music for the film, I immediately wanted that soundtrack. It was at that point, that my interest really broadened to film scores in general instead of just to souvenirs of space movies. This really established my musical tastes for the long term as film scores remain the dominant part of my collection and my music purchases today.

I loved the sequels and have certainly been very impressed and excited by other action/adventure movies over the years as well. I think Raiders will always hold a very special place in my memory, though, and I don’t really believe any other movie will ever quite match the surprise and excitement that surrounded this one.

The Film Music of John Willams (Concert Review)

September 10, 2005 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

Hollywood Bowl – September 2, 2005

A concert review by Jeffrey Graebner

John Williams conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in a film music concert at the Hollywood Bowl has been an annual summer tradition for me ever since I moved to Southern California in 1996. The Friday, September 2, 2005 concert featured a good mix of selections from Williams’ own film scores as well as a few selections from other celebrated film composers.

Including a couple summers where Williams conducted multiple concerts, this was the 11th concert of his that I have attended at the Bowl. Adding a couple earlier concerts with the Boston Pops as well as one concert of mainly non-film compositions at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, this was the 14th time that I have seen Williams conduct a live concert. I’ve been a film score enthusiast since I was around 10-years-old, with Williams’ compositions being important to establishing and continuing that preference.

As is typical of Williams’ Hollywood Bowl concerts, this one featured a good mix of his extremely well-known selections as well as a few that will be very familiar to film score enthusiasts, but probably not to the more mainstream audiences that make up the bulk of the attendees. It came as no surprise that the program was dominated by his scores to films by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, but there were a few less widely recognized selections, including the welcome inclusion of some works by other film composers.

As with most concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, this one got off to a patriotic start with a performance of The Star-Spangled Banner, which was then well complemented by a performance of The Liberty Fanfare, the concert piece that Williams wrote to commemorate the re-dedication of The Statue of Liberty following its refurbishment in the late 1980s. Either this piece and/or one of Williams’ Olympic themes are usually included even when the remainder of the concert is all film music. This is a very rousing and inspirational piece that helps to quickly pull the audience into the concert. These two opening pieces were the only non-film compositions included in the concert.

A definite shift in tone came next as, without any commentary, Williams transitioned into a pair of suites illustrating opposite views of alien visitation. First was a suite from Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that featured one of the most famous, and my personal favorite, Williams’ scores. While this was definitely not the first time I had heard a suite of music from this film performed at one of the concerts, it is always a very welcome inclusion.

The highly melodic, almost magical tones of the Close Encounters theme were then followed by the much darker and foreboding music from Spielberg’s film of War of the Worlds, which was released earlier this summer. This was Williams’ first time conducting music from this score in concert and, while it was very interesting to hear, I tend to doubt that it is going to become a concert staple. The exciting, action-oriented cue “Escape from the City” seems more likely to be used as an occasional change-of-pace interlude in future concerts than the very dark, downright mournful “Epilogue”, which was also featured.

War of the Worlds (2005)

July 2, 2005 Jeffrey GraebnerLeave a comment

A film review by Jeffrey Graebner

Steven Spielberg’s new adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel War of the Worlds contains many of the conventional elements of the mainstream disaster movie and adds an unusual layer of realism, both in style and characterizations. The result is a genuinely scary film that maintains a very high level of tension and excitement.

The film, which was adapted by screenwriters Josh Friedman and David Koepp (the latter also adapted Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World for Spielberg) pretty closely follows the structure of Wells’ novel, but transports the setting from 19th century London to present day New York. The central character of an absentee father (Tom Cruise) trying to escort his children to safety is created for the film, a smart decision as Wells novel was told through the eyes of an undeveloped first-person observer, an approach that wouldn’t likely work as well on film.

Cruise gives a good performance as Ray, a man who initially is not very sympathetic or heroic, but is ultimately forced to find some maturity and parental instincts by the extreme circumstances of the alien invasion. The character is a variation of the charming, cocky, but irresponsible persona that Cruise has frequently portrayed in past films and it is interesting seeing those traits treated more as negatives that need to be overcome instead of strengths, a somewhat natural progression as Cruise has become older and is naturally going to be playing characters with greater responsibilities. Ray is likable, but clearly a lousy parent who has to struggle to gain enough trust from his children to provide any chance that he can keep them safe.

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