This soundtrack is an odd bird. There’s a smattering of clips from R.E.M.’s film score, a few songs from the band, a couple of performances by Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman/Tony Clifton, a handful of pieces of source music from significant Kaufman appearances, and one song that doesn’t fit any of these categories but does show up briefly in the movie. I’m sure there’s an audience for each category, but I have to think their intersection is a very small group.
I remember thinking the score did a good job fitting the movie when I saw it, but it’s hard to get much sense of it from any of these clips. Most of them are about two minutes long, so there’s no time for them to really build a mood. I do particularly like “Miracle” and “Milk And Cookies”, which come from the tail end of the film as Kaufman deals with his impending death and his performance at Carnegie Hall – there’s a bittersweet resignation to the music that conveys the sentiment of the plot quite well. An orchestral version of “Man On The Moon” is good, but almost unrecognizable – it was only when I got the DVD-Audio version of Automatic For The People that I recognized a few elements from the song that had made the transition.
The original “Man On The Moon” is one of three R.E.M. performances on the album. Of those, “The Great Beyond” is the only new composition. It’s one of my favorite songs of the band’s three-piece period, thoughtful and mellow but still up-tempo enough to have some energy to it. The guitar-bass-keyboard combo provides an atmospheric backdrop to Michael Stipe’s verses and then kicks into gear with a fuller sound, including some strings, in the choruses. Unfortunately, like almost every other track on this album, it’s marred by the inclusion of dialogue clips from the movie. The third performance, “This Friendly World”, features Carrey singing along with Stipe as both Kaufman and Clifton. It’s amusing, especially when Carrey/Kaufman demands that he and Stipe sing every other word of one verse.
Carrey/Clifton also absolutely butchers “I Will Survive”. Since that’s what he’s setting out to do, I’ll call this one a highly successful failure. “Rose Marie” and “One More Song for You” are original Kaufman performances from the archives, and the man could carry a tune quite well, but they’re probably more memorable for novelty value – “Hey, Latka can sing!” Bob James’ theme from Taxi, “Angela”, fits in rather well with the other instrumental pieces. It’s understated but I think it holds up rather well as one of TV’s most memorable instrumental themes. The Sandpipers’ “Mighty Mouse Theme” is another fun and obvious piece of source music.
As for Exile’s “Kiss You All Over” . . . I got nothin’.
The problem is that the album is both schizophrenic and short. There’s not enough orchestral music for this to appeal to fans of film scores, there’s not enough comedy for humor fans, and there’s not enough original Kaufman material to appeal to his fans. Once upon a time, the presence of “The Great Beyond” might have made this somewhat worthwhile for R.E.M. fans, but now you can get that song without the film dialogue on the band’s Warner Bros. best-of, and “Man On The Moon” is there as well. But if you’re looking for eclectic eccentricity, this might work for you.
- Mighty Mouse Theme (Here I Come to Save the Day) – The Sandpipers (song) (1:53)
- The Great Beyond – R.E.M. (song) (5:22)
- Kiss You All Over – Exile (song) (3:37)
- Angela (Theme from Taxi) – Bob James (instrumental song) (1:27)
- Tony Thrown Out – R.E.M. (score) (1:07)
- Man on the Moon – R.E.M. (song) (5:13)
- This Friendly World – R.E.M. and Jim Carrey (song) (3:03)
- Miracle – R.E.M. (score) (2:53)
- Lynne and Andy – R.E.M. (score) (1:46)
- Rose Marie – Andy Kaufman (song) (2:36)
- Andy Gets Fired – R.E.M. (score) (1:07)
- I Will Survive – Tony Clifton (song) (1:49)
- Milk & Cookies – R.E.M. (score) (1:59)
- Man on the Moon (Orchestral) – R.E.M. (score) (1:51)
- One More Song for You – Andy Kaufman (score) (1:16)
Released by: Warner Bros.
Release date: 1999
Total running time: 37:08
Possibly inspired by the moon shots of 1969, To Our Children’s Children’s Children is an interesting musical document of awe and wonder, and you can hear Hayward and Lodge turning over in their minds the implications of that decade-defining triumph of technology and determination. That rebirth of wonderment and subsequent wrestling with the realization that this triumph could be used for either good or ill is very much the theme of the album, starting with the cacophonous opening of “Higher And Higher”, evoking the sound of a rocket launch (or is that a bomb blast?) from up close and even featuring processed spoken vocals that could conceivably remind one of voices transmitted from space.
Overall, To Our Children’s Children’s Children is one of the Moody Blues’ best efforts, and one of the best reflections of a lyrical style that is uniquely theirs. Their words express concerns and worries about the human condition, present and future, without taking the banal (and, for future listeners lacking the context, commercially fatal) route of making things topical. Even knowing the events that were going on when these songs were written is entirely optional – it becomes a subtext, not a context vital to understanding the songs. Beautiful stuff – there simply isn’t enough music like this around.
Even if you were unaware that Klark Kent is, in fact, a pseudonym for Stewart Copeland, it would be difficult to listen to Kollected Works without thinking of The Police. The heavy reggae/ska influence and experimental attitude so prevalent in The Police’s early work (and almost entirely excised by the time of Synchronicity) are found in spades here. Copeland founded the Police and was responsible for most of the early songwriting, until Sting’s prolific nature (and, let’s face it, greater overall songwriting skill) took over. These recordings date from that earlier time, with most of them seeing original release around 1978/9 as an outlet for Copeland, already feeling boxed in by the band.
This Talking Heads album gets a bit of a bad rap for being the one where David Byrne took over the band’s creative direction completely, but be that as it may, it’s my favorite. Of course, just about any album that kicks off with “And She Was” would stand a good chance of ranking right up there with me – incredibly catchy, surreal and funny all at the same time. Which just about sums up this whole album.
I’ve heard a few diehard fans refer to Little Creatures as a bit of a post-sellout album for Byrne & company, but I have a hard time buying into that (miserable pun intended). Some of the band’s best and most offbeat stuff can be found here, though for this group, delving into more popular territory as this album did was offbeat. It’s rather uneven as an album when listened to all in one sitting, but there are indivdual numbers that make this easy to overlook. Little Creatures is a big joy to listen to.
You’ll probably remember about a year ago when I was yammering on about my disappointment with Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will, the first studio album in some 15 years with both Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham on board – but also the first studio album in many more years without Christine McVie. When I heard Friend, the first single from McVie’s first post-Mac solo album, I thought to myself “Ah, so that’s where the real Fleetwood Mac sound went – Christine took it with her!” After listening to the entire album from which that song springs, though, one wonders if that train of thought doesn’t run in both directions.