by Glenn Kenny
George Lucas’ American Graffiti, another 1973 picture from a director who would prove a galvanic force in American cinema, also has a pop-song soundtrack. Its main function is as a toe-tapping nostalgia-inducing accompaniment to a coming-of-age story set in the ostensibly halcyon days prior to the Kennedy assassination. It’s a deftly assembled soundtrack of oldies that’s largely attuned to the cutting rhythms and overall dynamics of the individual scenes (Del Shannon’s speedy heartbreak song “Runaway” backs the first depiction of the kids with their fast cars cruising the main drag of the “turkey town” at least one of them can’t wait to leave). The songs it uses to comment upon characters’ states are sometimes on the nose in a way that’s amusing rather than overtly groan-worthy: when Richard Dreyfus’ character spies Suzanne Somers’ “vision” in a white Thunderbird, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers plays. But there’s not much in the way of consistent, purposeful interweaving of music with the characters’ states of mind.
While both acknowledged as classics today, neither Mean Streets nor American Graffiti were box-office blockbusters. But, along with 1969’s Easy Rider, whose rock-song soundtrack did a lot of heavy lifting in the verisimilitude and mood-setting departments, they were influential to an extent that even took Scorsese aback. By the time he made the 1986 The Color of Money he viewed the song-soundtrack practice with skepticism. He told Christie and Thompson: “These days every damn movie in America, and I guess all around the world, is using recorded music like Jerry Lee Lewis, the Ronettes, and all these people I grew up with as nostalgic soundtracks. So, to go a different way, I said, ‘Why don’t we shape the movie first and then actually get the artists we like?’ Touchstone made a deal with MCA, so that Robbie [Robertson] could talk to their artists like Don Henley and Eric Clapton. We told Eric Clapton that he could do an actual guitar solo for about one and a half minutes where there was no dialogue, when Carmen walks down the aisle with all these guys looking at her before Eddie tells her to leave. So when the song begins exactly at the beginning of the scene, it’s no accident. I remember Eric’s original lyric—‘He’s getting ready to use you’—was a little too on the nose, so Robbie and he conferred on the phone and they came up with ‘It’s in the way that you use it,’ which is slightly to one side and much better. It felt like heaven because I was able to mix separate tracks as if I was playing the guitar myself.” For all that, though, the most memorable musical moment in The Color of Money is when pool cue demon Tom Cruise mimes to Warren Zevon’s 1977 song “Werewolves of London” while destroying an opponent.
Scorsese also remarked on how soundtrack scores were turning into a cottage industry that had advantages for neglected musicians: “Robert Palmer did a little song called ‘My Baby’s in Love with Another Guy,’ recorded by Little Willie John, who only made about five singles and no album. His fifth record had not been a hit and this song, which we thought was just great, was the ‘B’ side. When the company finally found him in Brooklyn, his wife answered the phone and they said, ‘This is Disney and we’re going to give you $2,000 to use that song in a film.’ She screamed, ‘It’s a miracle!’ Then she woke up her husband to tell him.”
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In Goodfellas Scorsese moves freely between songs coming from jukeboxes and live performers and songs that are just in the air, so to speak. There’s never a scene, as in Mean Streets, in which a song explicitly disconnects from an in-scene source and then goes back to functioning as background—the closest we get, in my estimation, is the much-cited use of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” playing as Jimmy muses on murdering Morrie. What Scorsese does in the mix, generally, is more subtle: songs playing in one scene will segue, or bleed, so to speak, into the next. He doesn’t just do this with songs. After Henry and Karen’s first time at the Copacabana, the film cuts to Tommy and Henry carrying out the Air France heist, and the soundtrack stays in the club, with comedian Henny Youngman continuing his litany of one-liners: “Dr. Wellser is here,” et cetera. And then the song “Look in My Eyes,” a dreamy girl-group number introduced by starlight-evoking strings, begins.
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In the movie’s early scenes, doo-wop alternates between popular ballads from the old country. The opening song, of course, is sung by Italian American Tony Bennett, born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Queens, New York, in 1926. Bennett was nearly thirty and signed to Columbia Records when he recorded the song in 1953. The label’s A&R (artists and repertoire) head at the time was Mitch Miller, who’d become famous as a performer of sorts with popular “Sing Along with Mitch” television appearances and LPs. In Bennett’s autobiography, he speaks of Miller’s proficiency at finding novelty tunes that turned into hits—“Come On-a My House” by Rosemary Clooney is cited—and Bennett’s own preference for more mature material. He sought Clooney’s counsel, and was advised by her that as far as Miller was concerned, it was best to go along and get along, and besides, he was usually right about the commercial potential of such tunes. Bennett continues: “Mitch and I came to an understanding. We were still doing four tunes per recording session at that time, so we worked out a deal. He picked two songs and I picked two songs. [...] I’m not saying that I was always right. I absolutely hated ‘Rags to Riches’ the first time I heard it in 1953. They really had to tie me down on that one.” It doesn’t show in Bennett’s performance, which is full-throated, almost lusty, and embellished with playful trills. He lives up to the blare of the horn section in Percy Faith’s arrangement. “I had another colossal hit and a gold record,” Bennett writes. The song indeed went to number one on the Billboard charts and stayed there for eight weeks. “More importantly, I grew to like the song and enjoy singing it.” The inclusion in Goodfellas is not its first use as a pop-culture reference; its opening line was frequently sung by an Italian American character on the ’70s sitcom Laverne and Shirley, a creation of Bronx-born Garry Marshall, whose father’s birth name was Masciarelli.
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Lou Reed, a rock innovator whose guitar-driven music emphasized unusual, drone-enabling tunings and high volume, gave the induction speech for Frank Zappa’s entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Zappa, an occasional (and possibly even then reluctant) proponent of free improvisation, composed music for rock and orchestral instruments that was knotty to say the least. There’s substantial evidence that the two men disliked each other personally, which made the Hall of Fame induction thing raise a few eyebrows. There is one thing, though, that the two iconoclastic musicians had in common: a love of doo-wop music. It can be argued that doo-wop is a great, unequivocal uniter of white men of a certain age and temperament. It is a mostly black form in which a song is performed in polyphonic harmony that emphasizes blue notes and embraces potential dissonance but is mostly intended to create a lush, romantic atmosphere.
The doo-wop accompanying young Henry’s adventures is all East Coast stuff. The music was developed in the 1940s, inspired by black vocal groups such as the Ink Spots, on the East Coast. But California developed a strong doo-wop culture, including such groups as the Penguins, who made “Earth Angel.” (And perhaps this is where the doo-wop affinities of lifelong New Yorker Reed and Angeleno Zappa diverged.)
“Can’t We Be Sweethearts,” by the Cleftones, is a bouncy number opening with, as was doo-wop custom, the bass voice going “bom bom.” Infectious and a trifle generic, and only ironic when you’re hearing it under Henry’s father giving him the belt.
“Hearts made of stone/will never break,” jauntily sung by Otis Williams and his group, the Charms, accompanies the unfortunate fate of Henry’s neighborhood mailman. The Moonglows’ “Sincerely” and “Speedo,” by the Cadillacs, play in the wiseguy barbecue scene and the introduction of Jimmy to Henry, respectively. These songs have faded back into obscurity in the post-rock-’n’-roll era of popular music. Substantial hits in the ’50s (and for some reason “Speedo” was sometimes cited by certain pop-culture historians as the fir
st rock ’n’ roll song, which it absolutely was not), they enjoyed a new vogue in the 1970s largely thanks to not so much American Graffiti (neither song appears in the film) but a whole 1950s nostalgia wave buttressed by Happy Days, a sitcom largely derived from Graffiti and starring its lead actor Ron Howard. (And created by Garry Marshall.)
The Italian songs in this section of the movie, “Firenze sogna” and “Parlami d’amore Mariù” are both sung by Giuseppe Di Stefano, a Sicilian-born tenor who was a major influence on Pavarotti and was as beloved for his pop renditions as his classical work. “Parlami” comes from a 1932 Italian film Gli uomini, che mascalzoni (What Scoundrels Men Are), in which it was sung by Vittorio De Sica, who would become a key director in the era of Italian Neorealism, a substantial influence on Scorsese’s work. (Among his most distinguished films are Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D, and in the 1970s, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.) The song had a long life after De Sica’s performance (which is maybe the most difficult to hear today) and was covered, eventually, by Pavarotti.
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The viewer’s reintroduction to Henry as an adult, standing outside the Airline Diner with Tommy, looking cool while he waits to steal a truck, is scored to Billy Ward and His Dominoes’ stately, impassioned doo-wop version of the Hoagie Carmichael standard “Stardust.” Scorsese lops off the song’s twenty-four-bar prelude (which takes over a minute to spin out) and begins with Ward’s grandiose “SOME... TIMES... I WONDER” lead vocal, into the song proper. With the Dominoes oohing in the background and the piano bashing out high triplets, the effect combined with Henry’s suavity is elevating to an extent that it can’t be immediately undercut by the actions Henry and Tommy take next. Scorsese lets nostalgia have its way with us, or at least what was us, back in 1990. (Nick Tosches called the Dominoes “the most brilliant, and the classiest, of the rock ’n’ roll vocal groups”; while the writer was skeptical about making definitive assertions about who did what first—as all good historians ought to be—he admiringly describes, in his Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll, their ribald 1951 “Sixty Minute Man” as “the first record by a black rock ’n’ roll group to become a pop hit.”)
Several subsequent songs nestle comfortably in the atmosphere of each scene, with small notes of ironic counterpoint. “Il cielo in una stanza,” an Italian pop hit for the singer Mina in 1960, plays at the Bamboo Lounge; “Playboy,” a 1962 girl-group number by the Marvelettes, plays as Henry and Tommy shut down the Bamboo Lounge. The song is a warning to women to stay away from its title character; the minor joke is that Tommy’s complaining to Henry about striking out with this “broad” he’s been trying to “bang.” The Marvelettes were a Motown group; their prior single “Please Mr. Postman” had been a big hit in 1961. (It was covered by the Beatles early on.) This was a little bit before Motown really began to dominate the pop charts.
“It’s Not for Me to Say,” a better-than-average pop ballad raised to near-exquisite heights by Johnny Mathis, accompanies the disastrous double date where Henry first meets Karen. When Karen confronts Henry in front of his buddies, you may recognize the melody of the song playing from a jukebox: “I Will Follow Him,” by Little Peggy March, which had been used to optimum Anger effect in Scorpio Rising. But this version has Italian lyrics. The recording is by Betty Curtis (an Italian singer in spite of her Anglo-sounding stage name; she was born Roberta Corti) under the song’s original title, “Chariot.” The composition was first an instrumental co-composed by Paul Mauriat, the French musician who later in the ’60s would have a huge hit with his arrangement of “Love Is Blue.”
“Chariot” proved infectious enough to gain lyrics in at least two languages; “I Will Follow Him” is, true to its title, a pop hymn to obeisance, while “Chariot” promises that after taking a ride on the title vehicle, “tu vivrai con me/in un’isola fantastica,” that is, “you’ll live with me on a fantastic island.”
“And Then He Kissed Me,” a Phil Spector production sung by the Crystals, is the next foregrounded song in the picture, playing over the Copacabana Steadicam shot, its lyrics “I felt so happy I almost cried/and then he kissed me” strengthening the heady rush of Karen’s entrance into the glamorous part of Henry’s world, its own fantastic island.
While nobody mentions the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Goodfellas, viewers who lived through the period, or who have a sharp historical sense, will intuit the event’s existence in the periphery of the film’s narrative. The fact, say, that the New York airport is called “Idlewild” when Henry and Tommy begin to raid it over and over again. From that point on it is referred to as “the airport,” although its name was changed to John F. Kennedy a mere month and two days after the thirty-fifth president was killed.
“Then He Kissed Me” was written by Spector with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, New York–based songwriters associated with the post–Tin Pan Alley songwriters clustered around Times Square’s Brill Building. By the early ’60s Spector himself had relocated to Los Angeles, and he recorded the song using his “wall of sound” technique. Working with arranger Jack Nitzsche, Spector filled his studio with large ensembles and doubled-up key instruments such as guitar and piano. Strings and choruses put things over the top. The sound was as far removed from Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly (unornamented guitar and piano with rhythm section chugging out riffs and melodies) to the extent that it was more “rock” than “rock ’n’ roll,” except it wasn’t “rock,” either. (The fact that most of the singers Spector used were African American did lend some R&B inflections to the songs.) It was pop, grandiose pop; “teenage symphonies,” Spector called his singles. “Then He Kissed Me” was released in the summer of 1963 and peaked at #6 on the Billboard singles chart. If the Kennedy Administration was “Camelot,” Spector’s songs were regal entertainments for its children. So, the use of the song in this position, at this point in time, reflects that idealized state, as well.
After “Look in My Eyes” comes the treacly “Roses Are Red” (sung by Bobby Vinton, who, as Karen recalls, sends a bottle of champagne to her and Henry’s Copa table; Vinton is doubled in the scene by his son, Bobby Vinton, Jr.), and with the apropos Harptones’ doo-wop number “Life Is But a Dream” in the wedding scene, Scorsese then has some fun mixing the sounds of a revving motorcycle amid the profane prattle at the cosmetics party where Karen meets the wiseguy wives and girlfriends for the first time.
“The Leader of the Pack,” a story-song again by Greenwich and Barry and the single’s producer, in this case one George “Shadow” Morton, is voiced by the Shangri-Las, white teens from Queens who toggled between being a trio and a quartet; in either configuration, they adopted a tough-girl collective personae. Producer Morton had some affinities with Spector, but less grandiosity, less money, and a more pronounced New York sensibility. This song is right at home with these outer-borough gum-snappers Karen has been thrown in with.
The film comes back to Spector, after contributions from Al Jolson (singing “Toot Toot Tootsie” on the Hill TV set) and Dean Martin (the blithe, upbeat “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” giving song to Karen’s voice-over apologia for her husband’s way of “making a living”). Another Crystals song, “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” opens the Billy Batts scene. It’s now 1970; the song is almost but not quite what they’d start calling an “oldie but goodie.” Kennedy’s assassination coincided with the release of A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector, an album of guess what kind of songs, featuring the Crystals, Darlene Love, the Ronettes, and more, a terribly expensive labor of love that ended with a spoken-word message from Spector himself, in which he thanks his fans for allowing him to express his “feelings” about the Christmas season. The album, of course, flopped given the circumstances. The failure of the record was possibly the most morbid note in pop-culture history, at least until the soundtrack to Mariah Carey’s movie debut Glitter came out on September 11, 2001. While Spector remained a rich man and successful producer, the Ken
nedy assassination certainly ended not just “Camelot” but, arguably, Spector’s reign as a titan of teen. But his sounds still galvanized in certain corners, and Henry Hill’s nightclub The Suite, where Billy Batts celebrates his release from prison, was one of those. The song’s spoken introduction—“I always dreamed the boy I loved would come along/and he’d be tall and handsome, rich and strong/now that boy I love has come to me/but he sure ain’t the way I thought he’d be”—sets up a sense of occasion and anticipation, and sure enough, we meet a wiseguy we have not seen or heard of before.
Who is subsequently stomped nearly to death while a more current pop hit, Donovan’s “Atlantis,” plays, again ostensibly from a jukebox. The song begins with strummed acoustic guitar while the singer/songwriter Donovan Leitch tells the story of the ancient/mythic continent of Atlantis and how awesome it was, what with all the components of our current civilization in attendance, but BETTER. “The antediluvian kings colonized the world/All the gods who play in the mythological drama/In all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis...” the singer instructs us as a piano joins in and plays a pretty countermelody over the guitar chords.