For no good reason we recently bought a chocolate brown 1985 Westfalia. The purchase fell squarely into the category of vanity. This was before the gas spike this Summer and the financial meltdown of the Fall. In other words, simpler times.

The question on everyone’s lips is: What constitutes the perfect road mix for this vehicle of leisure? Have a listen.

The song cycle begins and ends with the plaintive call of a boy to a girl. The opening two tracks I associate with morning and the architecture of idealism. The first is “Thirteen” by Black Star and the second “Oh You Pretty Things” by David Bowie. Utopian design was both imagined by us and alien when brought to life. In the early twentieth century HG Wells popularized the scientific romance and in mid-century Buckminster Fuller introduced the geodesic dome. In 1951 a contractor located in the Westphalia region of Germany began converting Volkswagon vans into campers. Our model has the pop top, refrigerator, stove, swivel table, swivel passenger front seat, and sleeps four on two beds comfortably. When western society began mass marketing idealism we couldn’t know whether we were undertaking a paradigm shift or a passing novelty. Now we sit in our VW camper and laugh at the too small compartments and the full size pull-out beds and marvel that anyone ever thought of this New York studio apartment on wheels. In truth, the van steps in and out of time effortlessly like the most sublime pop song. Like Alex Chilton asking the girl to be the outlaw for his love and Bowie narrating from the future or the distant past or a far off planet. Our chosen songs say:

We want sex
We want the darkness
Our youth is our validation
We are innocent until we fail

“Lisa Says” and then “Memo From Turner” are the bridge. I first came across the latter when I was a child and among my mother’s LPs I found Jagger on the cover of “Performance” in makeup and pouty, full lips.
As the song rumbles along on a filthy lick and tells the cautionary tale of “a faggy little leather boy with a smaller piece of stick,” let us rumble along listening on our iPal speaker propped up in the passenger side glove box assured that for once everything is right and better than we imagined.

My mom had a hot date with this guy named Dick Erskine some Saturday night in the fall of 1981. He had two teenage sons. They were several years older than myself, but we got along okay because we’d bonded over Atari. I was nine-years old. Mom brought me over to their swanky house that night then hit the road with Dick (who, in the long run, revealed himself to truly BE a dick). The two kids had rented a couple of movies. Back then, VCRs were really goddamn rare because they were so expensive. One of the movies was a really gory samurai movie I’ve long forgotten about, and the other was Phantasm. They turned off the lights and cranked the sound.The film opens with a couple getting it on in a graveyard, and I distinctly recall the older kid laughing and saying, “Hey, Lance, you know what they’re doing, right?” I was addicted to re-runs of Benny Hill at the time and I’d developed a pretty good British accent, so using that British accent, I responded, “I’d rather not say!” which cracked them all up.

It’s 27 years later, and I’m STILL talking about that film, so obviously the experience was pretty powerful. I’ve come to recognize that much of it’s appeal for me is the soundtrack by the late Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave. Don Coscarelli, the film’s writer and director, says the following in the soundtrack’s liner notes:“…The circumstances surrounding the creation of the score for the original Phantasm were extremely difficult, because Fred faced the challenge of creating over an hour’s worth of music on a minuscule budget. Fred, however, managed to turn adversity into advantage. He made up for the lack of financial resources with ingenuity, enthusiasm and energy. Unable to afford any semblance of orchestra and today’s sophisticated synthesizers not available at that time, he, and Malcolm Seagrave, assembled a palette of unusual instruments which brought a unique and insidious texture to the score…”I’ll say! I love stories like that, because it’s exactly those kinds of cruel restrictions which occasionally have impressive results. Yes, there’s an actual musical theme to the film which is iconic in its own right, but much of what is heard is simply textures and weird noises. It’s two guys hitting wrenches against pieces of metal and dragging screwdrivers across mattress springs, but the effect is unsettling and eerie. The temptation today would overwhelmingly be in favor of scoring the film through any number of music programs, and I think that (as the Phantasm sequels have demonstrated) the results would have been less effective. Here are 4 tracks from that spectacular soundtrack.

What was it about the 1985 film Real Genius which caused so many people to form a kind of cult around it? Yeah, it’s funny, but if you look at it objectively, is it really THAT funny? If you run a web search for the soundtrack, you will find dozens of fan sites (most of of them peppered with defunct or cryptic links) dedicated to assembling a complete track listing– a retail version of the soundtrack was never released. The movie is one I never get tired of, but it’s a peculiar kind of romance I have with it, one I have a difficult time justifying. I think people my age gravitate to this film mostly because they played the holy hell out of it on cable at a time when American households finally began to surrender en masse to the lure of subscription television. For me, watching Real Genius is about experiencing a weird kind of enjoyable melancholy. Despite the comedy, the film has it’s own particular mood, kind of like how the look and sound of those old original-series Star Trek episodes are imbued with a weird melancholy of their own.

Then again, maybe the film simply is as good as the fans make it out to be.

Here are two montage scenes which the fans tend to be ravenous for. They succeed almost entirely because of their marriage to the soundtrack. Out of context, they are really kind of boring. Sorry about the sound being out of sync on the first one.

I’ve included downloadable versions of the tracks below. A tip of the hat to my friend “Umberto St. John” for providing them. Again, they’re not especially great songs or performances, but if you are a fan, you hear them and you smile automatically.