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Hey, it's Alan. And I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music. Early and ad free on Amazon Music included with Prime. There was a time when movie soundtracks were the lifeblood of the recorded music industry. The LP record, which was introduced in June 1948, was developed at least partially at the behest of movie studios and Broadway show producers looking for a better listening experience. The first movie soundtrack to be released as a record seems to have been Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938. But the problem was that everything was divided up over multiple 10 inch 78 RPM records. That meant that every four minutes he had to get up and either flip the record over or change it entirely. The same thing happened with the jungle book in 1942. But all that changed in the summer of 1948, when the 3313 RPM LP allowed up to 22 minutes of audio per side. Movie studios bought in and the marketplace was flooded with not only movie soundtracks, but original cast recordings of Broadway shows. Throughout the late 1940s, all through the 1950s and into the 1960s, movie soundtracks were seen as serious music for adults. The kids in their rock and roll had their 7 inch singles. Even as late as the middle 1960s, movie soundtracks often did the biggest business overall. Take the Sound of Music for example. It was a top 10 record in the US for 109 weeks between May 1, 1965 and July 16, 1967. It was the best selling album in the UK in 1965, 1966 and 1968. For years, the Guinness Book of World Records listed it as the best selling album of all time. The best guess we have today is that it sold 20 million copies, a very big number, especially back in the day. As the years passed, it became standard practice to release a soundtrack album with your movie. In many cases, it was just the score, the incidental music written for the title credits, the closing credits and all the scenes in between. In others, the records featured songs from the movie, some original, some licensed for that purpose. And some of these soundtracks went on to sell very, very well. Princess Purple Rain, 25 million copies. 20. Titanic, 30 million copies. Dirty Dancing, 32 million. Grease, 38 million. Saturday Night Fever, 40 million. The Bodyguard, 45 million. Even Space Jam from 1996 sold 6 million. By the 1990s, every movie had to have a soundtrack as part of its business plan. They were cheap to compile and the margins were fantastic. They even launched a career or two. Let's Take a look at some of the key alt rock based movie soundtracks of all time. This is the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross and this show is in response to the many requests I've had to do something on alt rock music soundtracks. A great idea since soundtrack LPs and CDs have been very important to the ecosystem of this music and also somehow advance the cause of the genre. Not so much anymore. We'll get to that. But in the past, wow. What I've done is made a list of what I think are key moments in movie soundtracks that affected the course of alt rock in some way. And before you ask, I've excluded the soundtracks to concert films. Instead, I focused on songs that were picked for specific projects. And I think you might be a little surprised by my choices, which is fine. But first, a little more history. Rock started showing up in movies in the 1950s. In fact, it was a movie that helped kick off the whole rock and roll thing in the first place. In 1955, MGM released Blackboard Jungle, a film about an interracial intercity school. And the opening titles start with Bill Haley in the Comet's version of Rock around the Clock. This was the first time a rock and roll song was ever used in a Hollywood feature film. 1, 2, 3 o', clock, 4 o' clock rock 5, 6, 7 o', clock, 8 o' clock rock 9, 10, 11 o', clock, 12 o' clock rock we're gonna rock around 8 o' clock tonight. The movie was supposed to warn of the growing danger of juvenile delinquency. Instead, it attracted delinquents and delinquent wannabes. And when that theme song started playing, kids would stand up in the theaters and dance. Sometimes this would result in violence and vandalism. The movie was actually banned in many cities and in all of the uk. Then along came Elvis with his string of terrible movies, all of which were used as vehicles for new music. The Beatles followed with A Hard Day's Night and Help. And by the end of the 1960s, rock was being heard in all kinds of movies. The concept just kept getting bigger and bigger. For example, the movie based on Woodstock from 1969 and its subsequent soundtrack releases are the things that saved the promoters from losing their shirts. For the purposes of the world of alt rock, we're going to start in the 1970s with the record that came with the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. For his futuristic dystopian vision, Kubrick hired Wendy Carlos, a classical musician who had been working with Bob Moog on the design and use of his new modular synthesizers. No one had ever heard such sounds. It was completely electronic, and it begins this way. Wendy then identifying as Walter Carlos. And part of her score from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. The movie was released in 1971. And the soundtrack came the following year. Rock musicians looking for something new and different flocked to it. It became. Musicians looking for something new and different flocked to it. It became a landmark in the development of electronic music for the masses. The next notable soundtrack on my list is the Rocky Horror Picture Show. This all began as a stage production in London in 1973. And was turned into a film two years later. It came out at a time when punk was just getting started. And if you think back to the costumes design for the film by Sue Blaine. They're actually pretty punk rock. Wild multicolored hair, crazy makeup, fishnet stockings. Did the movie influence the fashion of punk rock? Maybe. Blaine says she didn't do any research and just made the stuff up. And her entire costume budget was just $1,600. So she really had to improvise. The movie also turned Tim Curry into something of a darling in the alternative world a few years later. I mean, what's not alternative about a heavily made up transvestite homosexual mad scientist? Remember, this is the 1970s. This sort of thing was still way too weird for most people. Rocky Horror was a total flop when it came out. The soundtrack was a disaster, too. And was deleted by the record company everywhere except in Canada, where it stayed in print. And imports of the Canadian release Kept Rocky Horror alive in the United States. But then the midnight screening started. With people dressing up and yelling at characters. And dancing to the music. And creating routines to go with various scenes. It was all very punk rock. And now the Rocky Horror Picture show is legendary. And is considered to be one of the greatest musicals of all time. Let's do time. Let's do the time Walk again. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The second key alt rock soundtrack on my list. Number three, may also surprise you. It's the music that went along with the 1978 movie Midnight Express. This is the true story of Billy Hayes, An American who was caught smuggling hash out of Turkey, Sent to prison, and then managed to escape across the border into Greece. Director Alan Parker made an interesting choice when it came to composing the music. He chose Giorgio Moroder, An Italian who was experimenting with the new synthesizers that were coming out. He'd had an extraordinarily big hit in 1977 with this song. So there's Donna Summer with I Feel Love, produced by Giorgio Moroder. Yeah, it was disco, but it was different. Robotic, futuristic. And those who were into experimenting with synths found it to be extremely inspirational. You can actually draw a straight line from that song through to Depeche Mode and OMD and the Human League and dozens and dozens of other techno pop bands that would emerge in the next few years. Even Bowie was inspired by Maroter. And if you got into electronic music through Moroder, it wasn't that far a hop to craftwork. And it wasn't just I Feel Love from Donna Summer that got the early synth fan excited. It was the theme Morota created for Midnight Express. It was called Chase, Georgia Moroder and Chase from the Midnight Express SoundTrack, released in 1978 and the winner of the best original score at the Academy Awards in 1979. My next pick on this list of key alt rock soundtracks came with a 1980 movie called Times Square. This tells the story of a couple of teenage runaways who end up in New York City during the original punk rock and new wave era. And Tim Curry is back playing a hip radio DJ named Johnny LaGuardia. The soundtrack is notable in that it was one of the very first to feature the nascent alternative music of the day. The soundtrack featured the Pretenders, Roxy Music, Gary Newman, XTC Joe Jackson. There was Lou Reed and the Cure and Patti Smith and Susie Quatro. And yeah, there was Robin Gibb. Yeah, Robin Gibb of the Bee Geese. But you know, he was one of the producers of the film. So what are you going to do? You can't call this soundtrack a bestseller. In fact, both the movie and the double LP that accompanied it did dismally. But those who did buy it instantly had a look at the cutting edge music of the day. Like this ain't no discord There ain't no fooling around this. Talking Heads, one of the contributors to the Times Square soundtrack from 1980. My fourth pick on a list of key alt rock soundtracks. Times Square did a lot to introduce people to punk a new wave, but another series of movies did even more. Back in a sec. I've put together what I consider to be the key alt rock based movie soundtracks. I'm not saying that these are the best and we're certainly not going to cover all the worthy ones, but to me, these releases stick out more than others. Let's keep going and we can, you know, fight about things later. My next choice is a bit of a Cheat, Because I'm going to lump together the soundtracks of a bunch of John Hughes movies together. If you grew up in the 1980s, Hughes was the guy who spoke to you through his films. They treated adolescents and their feelings and their experiences with respect and intelligence. The big ones were Sixteen Candles in 1984, the Breakfast Club in 1985, Ferris Bueller's Day off from 86, Pretty in Pink from 87, and Some Kind of Wonderful, which also came out in 87. Each one of these movies was accompanied by a carefully curated soundtrack that was heavily mined from the alt rock of the day. So many people learned of bands like the Specials and Spandel Ballet and Billy Idol and General Public and Wang Chung and Yellow and New Order and the Psychedelic Furs and the Smiths and Echo and the Bunnyman, Suzanne Vega and inxs, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Flesh For Lulu and so many others from those soundtrack albums. Some acts licensed album tracks and B sides to these films, but there were also a lot of proper single releases, especially from the UK acts. It's pretty hard to understate how important these John Hughes soundtracks were to these British performers and the exposure they were given on on this side of the Atlantic. And no band benefited more than Simple Minds. When Hughes was putting together the Breakfast Club, he hired composer Keith Forsey to take care of the music. Forsey wrote a song with Roxy Music's Brian Ferry in mind, but Ferry didn't like it and turned it down. Then Forcy approached Billy Idol to record the song for the movie. He turned it down. Then there was talk of giving it to Corey Hart, who was hot with the song Sunglasses at Night at the time, that didn't go anywhere. Nor did the idea of getting Cy Kernan of the Fix to do it. So in desperation, Keith Forsey turned to Virgin Records. Have you got anyone you think could do this song justice? Virgin had a listen, gave it a think and said, well, how about Simple Minds? Funny you should say that, said Forsey, because I wrote the song with them in mind. In addition to Bryan Ferry. There seemed to be some miscommunication between me and the band, so we. We never really talked it out. So Virgin said, leave it to us, and contacted the group. And they were, shall we say, less than enthusiastic. Civil Minds had it in their heads that they only recorded songs that they wrote. They weren't about to take a track from some outsider, some American. Besides, they said, we're focused on breaking it in America and we just don't see this song doing it for us. But the label kept up the pressure, and Chrissy Hind at the Pretenders, who was married to singer Jim Carre at the time, asked everyone in the band to reconsider. So, to get everybody off their backs, Simple Minds went into the studio, completely rearranged the song and recorded it. Done and dusted in three hours. That's all the time they spent on the song. Three hours. And then they forgot about it. They were convinced that it was just a throwaway soundtrack song that no one would ever hear. Well, it didn't quite work out that way. In fact, this soundtrack song, written by somebody else, became the biggest hit of Simple Mind's career. As you walk. Simple Minds with their song from the Breakfast Club soundtrack, a track they did not write, a track that was rejected by a bunch of other people, and a track they did not want to record. For our next key alt rock soundtrack, we're going to Skip ahead to 1992 for the movie singles. This was one of the great bits of accidental timing in the history of cinema and soundtracks. The script, the cast and the locations were all in place by early 1991. Shooting began on March 11 and finished on May 24. At the time, the Seattle grunge scene was basically unknown to people outside the extreme Pacific Northwest. Yes, Soundgarden had signed to a major label and had released their Louder Than Love album, but outside the metal community, it didn't really register. Mother Love Bone, some local heroes that were poised for big things had their dreams shot to hell when frontman Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose just days before their major label album was supposed to come out. And as singles started filming, Pearl Jam had barely been born. Although Eddie Vedder had already moved from San Diego to Seattle, where he was hanging out with his future bandmates, Nirvana still hadn't gone into the studio to record Nevermind, and Alice in Chains was still trying to be a glammy hair metal band. And the Smashing Pumpkins, a group that would be sucked into the whole grunge thing, even though they were from Chicago, was still a couple of months away from releasing their debut album. In Other Words, director and writer Cameron Crowe thought he was making a Gen X movie set in a local music scene with no idea what was to happen in the coming weeks and months. The soundtrack was rushed out ahead of the movie on June 30, 1992. And when the movie was released on September 18, 1992, it appeared in a world where alternative and specifically grunge, ruled everywhere. It was a Hollywood motion picture that not only featured the music of the moment, but also cameos from Pearl Jam and Chris Cornell and Alice in Chains. And there's more. This song was originally written for the single soundtrack. In fact, we hear a snippet of it in one scene. Jeff Amit had been given the task of coming up with a name for a fictional band that he, Eddie and Stone and Matt Dillon, one of the stars of the film, would be in. So he listed a bunch of options. The winning name on his list was Citizen Dick. But one of the other options was a song named after a street performer named Artis, who played the spoons. And after this movie, Chris Cornell took the name of that once fictional band, mated it with what he wrote for that little interstitial piece, and turned it into. The single. Soundtrack was mined by grunge fans throughout the balance of 1992. Songs from Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, the Screaming Trees, and the Smashing Pumpkins were all played on the radio and in alternative clubs. And together with the movie singles, made the grunge tent even bigger. Now, for me, this also ushered in a golden age of alt rock based soundtracks in the 1990s. This is the decade when things peaked. Soundtracks just blew up in terms of promotion and commercial success. Now, the story I heard, I can't verify this, but stay with me, was that producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, guys who specialized in movies where a lot of stuff blew up, understood that young people went to see these movies at the multiplex, at the mall, and then after the movie, they'd go to the record store in the mall where they were offered the opportunity to buy the soundtrack of the film they just saw. And they did. Through the 1990s, this philosophy became a big, big part of the marketing of any movie. Artists were lured in with nice financial deals. Labels, often owned by the same company as the movie studio, promoted the soundtracks. Radio stations were convinced to play singles from the soundtracks, and because the quality of the material was often quite good, they sold by the boatload. And sometimes a movie soundtrack could still change the course of music. Such was the case of Judgment Night, a movie that came out on October 15, 1993. For some reason, the producers came up with the idea of pairing a rock band with a hip hop outfit. This was pretty radical thinking at the time because there was very little crossover between the two. Okay, yeah, there was the Beastie Boys, the version of Walk this Way with Aerosmith and Run dmc, Some Faith no More. But for the most part, rock and hip hop lived in different worlds. Not after Judgment Night. The pairings included Pearl Jam in Cypress Hill, Slayer working with Ice T, Faith no More in Booyah Tribe, Dinosaur Jr. And Del the Funky Homo sapien 11 collaborations in all. In retrospect, this was a major catalyst for the creation of rap rock and nu metal, two genres that would be very, very big later in the decade. And it also brought a lot of rock and metal fans into the hip hop world for the first time, and vice versa. Both sides of this divide realized that they had far more in common than they knew. The one disappointment, Tool and Rage against the Machine worked together on a song called Can't Kill the Revolution, but it was shelved because neither band liked how it turned out, so it never made the movie. But this song did well. It's Helmet and House of Pain with Just Another Victim. From 1993 in the groundbreaking Judgment Night soundtrack. There's Helmut and House of Pain with Just Another Victim. When we come back, three more movie soundtracks that altered alternative I have a couple more movie soundtracks that I think are among the most important in the history of alt rock, and I cannot let this discussion go by without mentioning the CDs that came along with the Crow movies. The Crow films were based on a superhero, a former rock musician bent on avenging the rape and murder of his fiance. We need to enumerate all the records that came with these films. First was something called Fear and Bullets by Trust Obey, which served as a soundtrack to the original graphic novel by James O'. Barr. That was in 1994. Then came the soundtrack to the first movie, also in 1994. And this is the film that became infamous for the fact that its star, Brandon Lee, died during filming. Some blank ammunition went wrong, and he died during surgery just eight days into shooting. The script had to be rewritten, body doubles were used, and there was a lot of cgi. The movie was already dark, but this was a whole new other level. The soundtrack had to reflect that, and it did. Again, this was 1994, right at the peak of a whole alternative and Lollapalooza period, and the music supervisors nailed it. They got the Cure and Rage against the Machine and Jesus and Mary Chain and the Violent Femmes, a new band called Stone Temple Pilots contributed a track called Big Empty, which is where a lot of people first heard that song. And about stp. And Trent Reznor, who released the long awaited Nine Inch Nails album the Downward Spiral just three weeks earlier, contributed this stunning version of Joy Division's Dead Souls. They Keep Calling Me, Keep On Calling Me, Nine Inch Nails and Dead Souls from what is technically the second soundtrack in a series of records that went with the graphic novel of the Crow. That was from the first movie in 1994, and it reached number one on the Billboard album charts, selling about 4 million copies. The third release was the original score of that first film written by New Zealand composer Graham Revell. The fourth was for the 1996 sequel City of Angels. It was pretty much as good as the first one. Bush, Korn, Deftones, E. Pop, White Zombie, Filter. The hit was a cover of the Fleetwood Mac song Goldust Woman by Hole. That collection sold about 3 million copies. There was a fifth Crow soundtrack in 2000 to go along with the sequel to the sequel. This was the Crow Salvation. More Hole, More Filter, Monster Magnet, Stabbing Westward, Kid Rock, Crystal Method. But what's interesting is that while the soundtrack was released in the spring of 2000, the movie didn't appear until 2004 and even then it went straight to DVD. There was a final Crow album in 2006 entitled Wicked Frere. Reviews were very bad and I also think it went straight to dvd. No soundtrack either. The last key alt rock soundtrack on my list is the trainspotting disc, brilliant 1996 film about a bunch of doomed Scottish heroin addicts. The story was great, but the soundtrack just exploded off the screen. In fact, the first volume has appeared on lists of the best movie soundtracks of all time. New Order, Pulp, Blur, Underworld, Elastica, Lou Reed. A great mix of old and new rock and electronic, desperate and uplifting. The opening scene is iconic with with Renton, played by Ewan McGregor and his mates running from the cops while Iggy Pop's lust for life plays. What a way to start a film. The first train Spotting soundtrack was such a big hit that a second appeared in 1997 featuring songs that didn't make the first volume, along with songs that didn't even appear in the movie. And I'd rank it almost as good as the first one. Before we finish this episode on key alt rock soundtracks through the decades, Here are some honorable mentions. The first Wayne's World CD from 92 is pretty good, although it's, you know, mostly classic rock. However, it does feature the Chili Peppers in Soundgarden. Reality Bites, a key movie in the whole slacker culture thing, featuring Winona Ryder and Ethan hawke, the Knack U2 and the massive hit for Lisa Loeb. Stay I Missed you'd Empire Records, the 1995 movie with Liv Tyler and Renee Zellweger. The movie is loaded with tracks from the 80s and 90s, although only 16 were released on the soundtrack CD, and there were two legitimate hits, till I Hear it from youm by the Gin Blossoms and A Girl like youe from Edwin Collins. 1996 had the cable Guy soundtrack, Creepy Jim Carrey Vehicle, Silverchair, Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains, Porno for Pyros, Cracker and Primitive Radio Gods ended up with a hit with Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand. There was the first Matrix soundtrack from 1999, some really cool heavy stuff. Marilyn Manson, Ministry, the Prodigy, Rammstein, Rage against the Machine, the High fidelity soundtrack from 2000, some good deep tracks from everyone from the 13th Floor Elevators and the Velvet Underground of the 1960s to more contemporary songs from the Beta Band and Stereo Lab. And then there were the Twilight soundtracks, which really, now that I think of it, should have probably made the main list. There were a bunch of Twilight discs to go with the movies. Stephenie Meyers, the author of the novels in which the movies were based, is a big fan of Muse. She did a lot of writing to their music, so it's no surprise that they made the cut for the movie. Paramore, Lincoln Park, Collective Soul, Death Cab for Cutie, Thom Yorke, the Killers, Editors, Metric Block, Keys, Dead Weather, Beck, Vampire Weekend, Florence and the Machine. They're mostly album cuts and outtakes, but still a really nice selection of tunes. Soundtracks continue to be an important part of any movie marketing plan, but outside of movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, which has done very well as a vinyl release, they aren't the big sellers they used to be. Remember, the golden age of these things was in the 80s and 90s when you'd go to the mall, see the movie, and then head over to whatever record store was in that mall so you could buy the soundtrack. In the era of Netflix and streaming, we just don't do that nearly as much anymore, if at all. But songs are still extremely important to films and movie trailers, and in the absence of CD sales, that has become an important source of revenue for artists. All ongoing history shows are available as podcasts. Just download and go from your platform of choice. There's more music news and information daily through my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com and we could connect on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and all email can go to alanancross CA Technical Productions by Rob Johnston. We'll talk to you soon. I'm Alan Cross. You've been listening to the Ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Subscribe to the podcast through itunes, Google Play, Stitcher Spotify, and everywhere you find your favorite podcasts.