Forgotten Movie Songs #18: "Benson, Arizona" from DARK STAR

Recently I watched a nifty little fan film called Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star. Though its obviously dedicated maker, Daniel Griffith, couldn't get on-screen interviews with the key figures behind this history-making 1974 cult movie, he still managed to construct a detailed and dramatic saga of Dark Star's history by talking to nearly everybody else connected with the movie (and he does manage to get both producer/director John Carpenter and writer/star Dan O'Bannon on record, though quite slyly). The film is slightly padded out with too much graphic repetition, but I'm being peevishly picky in mentioning it. It's a fan-driven film through and through, and I'm a fan, so I have to give Griffith's movie high marks. I really liked that it covers everything we Dark Star enthusiasts always wanted to know about this unusual production. It's like a special edition of Cinefantastique come to life.

I'll leave it to the reader to search Let There Be Light out, of course. But I wanted to underline the sequence in which it explores the madly surprising theme song to Dark Star, played as an innerspace radio transmission over the titular spaceship's transmitter as the opening credits hit the screen. Dark Star, if you haven't heard of it, is a way-out sci-fi comedy--a loose spoof of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey--in which four astronauts are stranded in space, put out there on a pointless planet-destroying mission, during which they encounter numerous obstacles that spell their eventual doom. In Let There Be Light, novice lyricist and veteran special effects artist Bill Taylor--who's worked on scads of movies like Blade Runner, What Dreams May Come, Cape Fear, The Thing and The Blues Brothers--tells us what inspired him to write the opening song:

I proposed to John (Carpenter) that it should be a country song...{to match with the idea of} truck drivers in space. And I went away and wrote the lyric. And he liked it. and I was amazed and delighted. It's called "Benson, Arizona" because, years earlier, about 1962, I had driven my little Morris Minor car for a long road trip from Los Angeles to Los Cruses, New Mexico, where my girlfriend lived, for the Christmas holiday. And my Morris Minor broke down in Benson, Arizona on Christmas Day...A gas station attendant identified the problem and he said "You know, there's a guy here in Benson who reconditions electrical parts for cars and he might be able to handle this generator. So he called this guy up on Christmas day and he sent me over there, and this guy, God bless him, had a Lucas generator. And he couldn't install it himself because he said he was all swelled up like a toad from eating too much Christmas dinner. But he gave me tools, and gave me good instructions, so I put in a new generator and I was on my way, thanks to two total strangers willing to help out a traveler on Christmas day. And I'm still very moved by that all these years later. So when it came time to write the lyric, I was thinking about "Where is the most unlikely place in the world that these guys could be longing for? A place so obscure that it would be funny..." So Benson, Arizona automatically came to mind. I wrote three verses--the third verse wasn't necessary--and it all timed out perfectly for the titles. The other nice side effect was that the lady I wen to visit on that Christmas ultimately wound up as my wife.

One of the chief reasons I've always adored Dark Star is because it seems exactly like what it is: a student film, three-fourths of which was filmed at the University of Southern California, where John Carpenter was a student. Let There Be Light meticulously details the journey Carpenter and O'Bannon's film took from being a little 16mm basement project to being a full-fledged 35mm cult classic. But I have to be up front about it: beyond O'Bannon's snide screenplay and supporting performance, beyond Carpenter's inventive direction with those ahead-of-the-times special effects, the theme song to the film became a key ingredient to why I instantly loved the movie when I first saw it in the early 1980s. "Benson, Arizona" is just utterly apt, and filled with the pinings these four unlikely, hippiefied astronauts for a little part of the Earth they'll never see again. Its inclusion into the final print of Dark Star helps tremendously in making the film into the fledgling near-masterwork it is.

After you enjoy part of the pre-song opening (with graphics by Dan O'Bannon), you'll hear it. The song is called "Benson, Arizona." Its evocative lyrics are by Bill Taylor and the music is by John Carpenter. It's sung by John Yeager, and it still give me chills to this day:



A million suns shine down
But I see only one
When I think I'm over you
I find I've just begun
The years move faster than the days
There's no warmth in the light
How I miss those desert skies
Your cool touch in the night

Benson, Arizona
Blew warm wind through your hair
My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona
The same stars in the sky
But they seemed so much kinder
When we watched them, you and I

Benson, Arizona
Blew warm wind through your hair
My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona
The same stars in the sky
But they seemed so much kinder
When we watched them, you and I

Now the years pull us apart
I'm young and now you're old
But you're still in my heart
And the memory won't grow cold
I dream of times and spaces
I left far behind
Where we spent our last few days
Benson's on my mind

Benson, Arizona
Blew warm wind through your hair
My body flies the galaxy, my heart longs to be there
Benson, Arizona
The same stars in the sky
But they seemed so much kinder
When we watched them, you and I

Love Theme from Halloween (R.I.P. Patrick Flynn 1961-2009)

My very best friend Patrick Flynn passed away on May 20th, and as John Carpenter's Halloween was one of his favorite movies, I thought I'd write these bad-taste lyrics for Carpenter's eerie electronic theme for the movie. Hey, it's silly, but Patrick would have dug it. Thanks to Bill Tomey for the idea, and you can hear the theme below!

LOVE THEME FROM HALLOWEEN

(BACKGROUND MELODY)
Jab jab jab
Stab stab stab
Kill kill kill
Jab jab jab
Still I go and
Stalk stalk stalk
Walk walk walk
Die die die
Fall down and die
And get up again
Up again, up again, up again
Then I go after you
After you, after you, after you
You and those brats of yours
Brats of yours, brats of yours, brats of yours
Friends are total idiots
Idiots, idiots, idiots
They will feel my shiny blade
Shiny blade, shiny blade, shiny blade
Certainly the boogey man
boogey man, boogey man, boogey man
Glide around and
(repeat ad nauseum)

(MAIN MELODY)
Halloween night
Taste my fright
Run all night
Without light
Dropping the knife

Disbelieving
Always greiving
Finding friends dead
Headstone on bed
Donald Pleasence
Fancy presence
Scardy head shrink
while in the klink
But I'm free now
Wear a mask now
William Shatner
What's it matter?
Where's my sister?
How I missed her
Want to tell her
Stab and smell her
Jamie Lee, you're
Chaste and clean, you're
All I wanted
To send to hell on...
(repeat)

SIDE ORDERS #9

For my first entry into this month's quickly-written SIDE ORDERS, we have the opening scene of Morton DaCosta's 1962 musical masterpiece The Music Man. If one were listing great opening scenes of any movie or stage production, one would have to include "Rock Island," the incredible white-rap penned by Meredith Wilson. The amazing thing about this scene is that only two of the characters on this chugging train will ever be seen in the movie again (and you only see the film's lead character, Robert Preston's Harold Hill, very quickly). It's a whiz-bang opening, filled with glib turn-of-the-20th-century references that now sound like otherworldly gibberish (though if you know what these guys are talking about, it deepens the piece). When I was a kid, I used to listen to the soundtrack of The Music Man on a cassette I recorded off of TV. Thus I can recite "Rock Island" (and the rest of the movie) completely by rote; I'm apparently the only one in the world who considers it one of the most notable movie musicals. I'd love to do "Rock Island" in kareoke one day, but, alas, I think this is simply a beautiful, unattainable dream.
I was talking to my friend Stacy McClendon in Atlanta today, and she admonished me for not including the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy on my recent list of the 170 best soundtracks ever. I do think John Barry's theme to the Oscar-winning movie is brilliant, but the soundtrack as a whole--excepting Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'"--seems packed with filler (Midnight Cowboy is just one of scads of films that sport a catchy title theme which fails to take deep root in the score's body). Anyway, me and Stacy kept chatting, and I mentioned that I thought Ferrante and Teicher's version of the song was one of the 100 greatest singles of the rock era. Stacy then revealed to me that she was a Ferrante and Teicher uber-fan. See, this is why Stacy is my friend; she knows what's cool. Ferrante and Teicher, the piano-playing pair that cornered the market in 60s/70s-era elevator music, are the shit--just take a look at them performing John Barry's Midnight Cowboy theme in frilly tux shirts and cool sideburns. Then you can consider yourself edumacated.
One of the greatest of recent credits sequences: Kuntzel and Deygas's wonderfully retro title sequence to Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can, from 2002, with astonishing music from John Williams.
Bugsy Malone's "My Name is Tallulah," written by Paul Williams, was crafted as the intro for the film's star, Jodie Foster, who in this same year, was nominated for an Oscar for a similarly precocious role as the underaged NYC prostitute Iris in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. As fine as she is here, Foster doesn't do the vocals (all the singing in Bugsy Malone was overdubbed by adults, to surprisingly laudable effect). Pay close attention to the background players here, as well as to the expertly scaled-down sets and costumes: though it's a 30s-era gangster movie, there are nothing but kids in the cast. It's really a one-of-a-kind movie, Bugsy Malone (directed by Alan Parker, who also did four more musicals: The Committments, Pink Floyd The Wall, Fame, and Evita).
Finally, just because I love the film, the original trailer to Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter's perfect sci-fi spoof Dark Star. Somehow, this movie's dread-filled atmosphere still gives me chills, even while it delivers uproarious laughs.
And now, finally, speaking of uproarious laughs, the famous "vessle with the pestle" scene from The Court Jester (Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, 55). Courtesy of Danny Kaye, has there ever been in cinema a more impressive diplay of verbal gymastics? I don't think so. (By the way, that's Glynis Johns as Maid Jean, and on the throne, Angela Lansbury and Cecil Parker, with Basil Rathbone off to the side).

Film #56: They Live

Scaremeister John Carpenter called the shots on this massively entertaining (and overlooked) variation on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers theme. World Championship Wrestling staple "Rowdy" Roddy Piper stars in They Live as an L.A. drifter who uncovers an alien takeover of earth after stumbling upon a pair of glasses that allows the wearer to see both the aliens and the Big-Brother way they've started to transform Earth. Keith David throws out very memorable support as Piper's disbelieveing associate; their six-minute fight in a deserted alleyway stops this 90 minute movie cold, but in a hilarious fashion. I leave it to you to find that scene. Here's where Rowdy Roddy first discovers what the glasses can do:

Writing under the nom de plume "Frank Armitage," John Carpenter delivers here a film that has genuine affection for the underdog facing an impossible fight (They Live often seems to be dramatizing the way all liberals felt at the end of the Reagan era, when this 1988 film was made). Doom seems to follow wherever Piper goes, and "winning" the
war never seems like a viable option. Throwing a strong follow-up punch is the best he can do (his famous line "I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum...and I'm all out of bubble gum" is one that's supposed to have come from Piper himself, but I think it was stolen from some western; no matter--it works). Piper's no-name character is a steel-willed humanist who can't live with himself if he doesn't do something about this scourge. You really end up rooting for him; it's a fine performance (the best one ever by a former wrestler)! Excellent make-up and art direction plus Carpenter's trademarked widescreen look are some more of the major assets belonging to They Live, a surprisingly important, unfortunately precient, and yet fun science-fiction actioner.

And, hey! Look what I found! I suspected this all along!