Danke Schoen
Gratitude for Ferris, Friedkin and the Flipmode Squad.
The Flowerpot Men “Beat City” is streaming.
What a time to be alive!
For most of the four decades since Ferris Bueller’s Day Off hit screens, this was not the case.
A comprehensive soundtrack is still impossible to come by; no “Beat City,” no Sigue Sigue Sputnik (more on them later), no “March Of The Swivel Heads” stuffed on a single CD next to the Austin Powers and Pulp Fiction soundtracks in my Case Logic binder.
Regardless of media format, that’s where it would live emotionally.
Everyone of a certain age has a favorite John Hughes' film, and Ferris was the one that spoke to me as a youth.
It still does, as a more… seasoned one.
I wrote my college entrance essay on its existential bent. “Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around…” etc etc.
Don’t have a copy handy; more cringe than profound in retrospect I’m sure.
But like the film — points were made!
And these songs underlined them.
Considering the inherent messiness of analog-era music licensing, 2022’s excellent John Hughes box set arrived as a welcome surprise; four compact discs (there’s a vinyl version, but you gotta drive to it) collecting songs from his entire filmography, mixtape-style.
I forgot about the Elvis cover from Some Kind Of Wonderful.
It goes!
The lovingly detailed liner notes from Hughes’ son James and longtime music supervisor / A&R Tarquin Gotch are the best part. It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to a proper Ferris LP. Yes, I know about the (still incomplete) 30th Anniversary disc, but let’s all admit there’s a totemic quality to the box set that can’t be denied.
Life Moves Pretty Fast comes packaged with a facsimile Hughes Entertainment newsletter and newly re-pressed 7” of “Beat City” b/w “I’m Afraid” by The Blue Room — aka “here’s where Cameron goes berserk.”
OG vinyl copies were given out at 1986 screenings; Hughes Entertainment would also mail them to kids who wrote into the fan club address.
James very sweetly sent me one after I shouted out my love of the film many years ago.
Aside from tending to the archives, James is also a writer and publisher focused on film, music and all things Chicago.
Last fall, I found myself checking several of his old interviews with the Second City’s own William Friedkin, after the legendary director passed.
Have you seen Sorcerer?
It rips.
Another film about some boys and their automobile, as luck would have it.
If John Hughes archetype’d the eternal adolescent, Friedkin’s domain was the middle aged male.
Undercover cops and Catholic priests.
A college basketball coach.
These protagonists tend to be competent, horny, and trapped in some kind of self-destructive purgatory that leads to an elaborate car chase — fast, slow, or against traffic.
Sorcerer drops four of these hard luck fellas in an unforgiving jungle so they might drive a truck filled with nitroglycerin over a rope bridge.
Don’t want to ruin the film by saying too much. Not that Sorcerer is overly plot dependent… more of a brutal “man’s inhumanity to man” tone poem, peppered with moments of insane tension and fishscale-grade celluloid beauty.
It’s intended to be a visceral experience.
Just watch it.
The church sequence was shot a few blocks away from Jersey Gardens AMC, a multiplex dressed like a Cheesecake Factory, where I would gorge on Sour Patch Kids and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle a quarter century later.
But what is time anyway?
I was last week years old when I realized Three 6 Mafia “Rainbow Colors” (“Jolly Ranchers, man, that shit be good as fuck…”) is not the only song in regular Nick rotation to sample Tangerine Dream’s Sorcerer score.
“Everybody On The Line Outside” by the Flipmode Squad — as heard on All Star Killa Kuts Volume 6, alongside “Banned From TV” and “4 Alarm Blaze” (did not remember everyone being so sweaty in that video).
Thank you Paul Hunter, for putting Busta in a Zorro costume.
And thank you DJ Scratch, cinephile.
(We all have our go-to crates. “Semi-obscure Busta Rhymes record” is one of mine. Marvelous shit.)
Not at all surprised that post-Flipmode Googling led me to even more Hughes / Friedkin connections, this time via a conversation with fellow auteur l’homme Nic Winding Refn:
“Friedkin has said his process on Sorcerer was to not show a script to Tangerine Dream, but to let them compose based on the feeling of the scene as he described it to them, then cut around their compositions. One sequence in particular, where the drivers assemble and fine-tune their trucks for the journey — if that doesn’t get you hyped, I don’t know what will.”
It does!
I am grateful to still get hyped from digging.
Old Q&As and rando associations.
Deep cut URLs and forgotten ephemera.
‘80s teen popcorn, quixotic ‘70s flicks, forgotten ‘90s posse cuts…
Put it in my veins.
Before you do — would have loved for all of us to experience Sigue Sigue Sputnik in real time as a family.
The band peaked circa Ferris. They dressed insane, treated NME like VladTV, and now are best remembered as a cautionary tale of death by music industry hype / self-destructive bluster.
Chart positions and overexposure aside… what a weird and wonderful concept!
They shilled ad space between songs on their debut album.
The Chic Organization may have beat SSS to “group as corporation,” but crediting space guitars, ultra vixens, and attorney as band members is sui generis. So was their sound: Thatcher-era tech (courtesy Moroder), mashed with primitive, ‘50s inspired proto-punk riffing.
Great looks, even better fonts.
Their debut single screamed in Friz Quadrata: “being the adventures of a young group whose principal interests are ULTRA VIOLENCE, VIDEO NASTIES, AFFLUENCE, ROCKETS, HOME COMPUTERS, EXCITEMENT.”
Their Oui Magazine shoot (NSFW) has a sexed up silliness that today’s post-Richardson transgressives could take a page from.
“Love Missile” aside, the songs weren’t really there. That’s fine.
Trashy and meta, they saw the future.