Zabriskie Point :: Original Soundtrack

All three major American counterculture movies of the late sixties benefited from the new vogue for rock soundtracks. The Strawberry Statement mixed purpose-written orchestral themes with mostly familiar numbers by Crosby, Still & Nash and Neil Young, plus the predictable yet appropriate “Something In The Air” and “Give Peace A Chance.” Easy Rider thrummed along to a more eclectic but still fitting selection from Dennis Hopper’s record collection: Steppenwolf, Hendrix, the Byrds and stoned oddities from the Holy Modal Rounders and the Electric Prunes. But maverick director Michelangelo Antonioni’s choices for Zabriskie Point are more enigmatic, and the story of their choosing more bewildering.

The film itself, part willfully perverse take on the late sixties student unrest, part classic road movie and part soft-porn skinflick, has been analyzed to death; you either love it or hate it. The soundtrack album by contrast has received few reviews and deserves examination in these pages. The story goes that Antonioni commissioned the then “hot” acts Pink Floyd, John Fahey and Kaleidoscope (US) to create new music for various scenes in the film including the notorious desert love scene, which they duly did, and then summarily rejected almost all of this when delivered, instead delving into the back catalogs of these acts and others. (According to legend, the spurned Fahey was so affronted he “decked” the director forthwith.) The lengthy, dusty love scene was eventually orchestrated by Jerry Garcia’s solo guitar improvisations, and even then Antonioni insisted on a fussy edit compiled from four different improvs for the final seven-minute opus.

Perhaps the oddest thing is that despite all these creative shenanigans the soundtrack still works, both in the movie and as a long-player. Floyd’s opening “Heart Beat, Pig Meat” is an organ-driven sound collage that contains enough menace to convey the tension as the students discuss the upcoming strike, and their soft, Byrdsy “Crumbling Land” provides a fleeting but apt background to the start of Daria’s desert odyssey in the Buick though, as Dave Gilmour admitted, it “could have been done better by any number of American bands.” A brief spiraling segment of the Dead’s live “Dark Star” accompanies Mark’s liftoff of the stolen Cessna from the airfield at LA, while Fahey’s “Dance Of Death,” which is somewhat discordant but isn’t actually very morbid, plays after Daria hears over the radio of Mark’s gunning-down by the cops on his return to the airfield. Patti Page’s venerable “Tennessee Waltz” is an inspired choice for the old rednecks in the desert truckstop (and would cost Antonioni a small fortune to license from the State, which owned the copyright). Garcia’s sweet, restrained playing provides a genuinely sensitive background to the balletically-choreographed desert orgy. And of course the explosive climax is tailor-made for Floyd’s climactic “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” which appears in a re-recording unfortunately inferior to the wonderful original single B-side and with the alternative title “Come In Number 51, Your Time’s Up.”   The two Kaleidoscope tunes “Brother Mary” and “Mickey’s Tune,” Roscoe Holcombe’s down-home “I Wish I Was A Single Girl Again” and the Youngbloods’ “Sugar Babe” are all excellent, delightfully obscure country rock items which accompany various highway scenes out in the Mojave.

The movie also featured Keith Richards’s bluesy “You Got The Silver,” which for licensing reasons never appeared on the OST album, and Roy Orbison’s splendid but inappropriate “So Young” which played over the closing titles and was allegedly added at post-production without Antonioni’s permission, and is hence with some justification also omitted. The 2-CD Sony reissue offers on its first disc all the other soundtrack tunes in complete form apart from the truncated “Dark Star,” and on the other the four complete Garcia improvs and four pieces of the rejected Floyd material, most of which are interesting enough but sound rather raw and unfinished, presumably not having being polished up for the final takes, and hence really for Floyd completists only. The CD booklet offers as cover picture a bizarre solarised still of the film’s two principals au naturel and a really excellent essay on the soundtrack by David Fricke. words / l. leichti

MP3: Pink Floyd :: Crumbling Land
MP3: John Fahey :: Dance of Death
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5 thoughts on “Zabriskie Point :: Original Soundtrack

  1. zabriskie point is an absolute gem of a film. thanks for sharing some of he music. the garcia pieces are the standout.

  2. There is a Pink Floyd bootleg called “The Complete Zabriskie Point Sessions” circulating out there that culls 15 tracks from that period. One track, “The Violent Sequence,” is a pretty Rick Wright piano piece that the band would later return to in 1972 to expand into “Us &Them.”

  3. Yea, The Pink Floyd stuff is good for sure. love The Red Queen.

  4. It’s rarely mentioned these days but I would add the film and the soundtrack to Zachariah to this group. Members of the Firesign Theatre were involved in the writing but it’s not a comedy. There are no hits on the soundtrack but many of the musicians that contributed music were also in the movie, like the original James Gang with Joe Walsh, Cajun violinist Doug Kershaw, Country Joe and the Fish, the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble and jazz drummer Elvin Jones who plays an amazing drum solo after killing a guy. The soundtrack album blends the songs with sound effects and dialogue from the movie which a lot of soundtracks did in that era, like Easy Rider. It’s definitely worth watching.

  5. The best Zabriskie Point collection is A Total Zabriskie Point of View (Rev.A) released by MQR in September 2012.
    All the other collection released in the last 15 years are inferior in sound and conceptually.
    ATZPoV is composed around the Lost ZP Pink Floyd Album: 370 Roman Yards.

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