VARIOUS – NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK (MCA)

VARIOUS – NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK (MCA)

I purchased this CD in Orlando while on holiday there with my family back in 1993.  It was a release that I never envisaged would even exist.  And now here it was in the bargain section with all the other ridiculous long box packages (thank God those never took off in England).

Animal House is a great movie and yet it is a film by rights nobody from the UK should understand.  And that generally has been the response I gleaned from friends over the years when I would offer this to them as a laugh riot.  Unsurprisingly I was into it because of John Belushi.  At a young age I got into him and The Blues Brothers and Saturday Night Live as in my mind the New York I was being offered represented a 24 hour culture that doesn’t actually exist.  At a young age I saw Neighbors first and devoured everything of his that I could find.  I even liked the universally derided Wired.  What was I getting from Belushi?

It is quite impressive how Elmer Bernstein manages to get his name on the cover of this album as once you are into the tracklisting you soon realise, for better or worse, that this record is not exclusively his score.  Instead what’s on offer is a collection of swinging R&B songs from the era book ended by Bernstein’s score/theme.

This is a party record complete with sound clips from the movie making it probably one of the first soundtracks to service such an element.  In addition to this at times the slower tracks coming from an era close to Blue Velvet add a whole different and dark David Lynch type texture.  Here is a collection with layers.  “Hey Paula” by Paul & Paula particular touches this tone.  This is a song you could ironically film a murder/killing/death to.

The album gets good very quickly as the Belushi version of “Louie Louie” arrives in a very good arrangement.  I must admit when I purchased the album/CD it was for this track and The Kingsmen’s version so once open and unveiled as being this version it was both a disappointment and a treasure.  This track was pre-Blues Brothers and you suspect that it was probably his forceful enthusiasm that saw this version of the song appear on the soundtrack rather than The Kingsmen original.  At this stage his voice does yet feel fully formed or established as the rasp Joliet Jake would eventually achieve.  Indeed it sounds quite similar to that of Caleb from Kings Of Leon.  He later chips in with an effective take on “Money” solidifying and justifying his presence on the record which comes pre-empted by the sound of his guitar smashing scene in the movie.  Excellent intro to both the song and the music career that lay ahead.

The other in-house hero of the record is Stephen Bishop who actually orchestrates on a higher level than Bernstein himself.  In constructing the theme song “Animal House” he scores high with a rich shout out to characters onscreen and running the show.  His weird Bee Gee like range (that horrible high pitch voice shit) offers a quite the lyrical antidote to American Graffiti/Grease takes on the time.  And then come samples from the movie at the end.

There is an element of this album that feels like raiding your parents’ record collection but as with such things the fresh association of these songs with this movie and these scenes lends a higher degree of credibility and cooler context.  Benefiting from such treatment/representation is Sam Cooke who appears with “Twistin’ The Night Away” and “(What A) Wonderful World”.  Elsewhere fairing somewhat better is Chris Montez with “Let’s Dance” before hired hand Lloyd Williams pulls his role from the screen and places it on wax with bounding versions of “Shama Lama Ding Dong” and an exhilarating take on “Shout” that drives one of the best scenes in the film.

Silly times, silly shit.  Its obvious why Homer Simpson loves this stuff.

Thesaurus moment: indoctrinate.

National Lampoon’s Animal House

MCA