‘Easy Rider’s’ pioneering road map
Fifty years ago, the counterculture film assembled a soundtrack that redefined movie music.
A trip to the local theater will throw you back in time to 1969 Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino’s latest, “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” is a movie full of references to hippies and the counterculture, set to a rock ’n’ roll jukebox soundtrack of its era.
Fifty years ago, “Easy Rider” not only helped define the counterculture, it also revolutionized the movie soundtrack, rejecting a traditional orchestra in favor of a hip “song score.”
Conceived by its stars, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, along with “Dr. Strangelove” co-writer Terry Southern, “Easy Rider” railed against institutions both on screen and behind the camera. Two drug-pushing hippies ride their motorcycles across America, picking up hitchhikers, stopping at communes and brushing with the law until they reach their illfated end in the Deep South.
Produced for around $350,000 by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, the film was one of the first hits made outside of the studio system. The choice by Fonda and Hopper, the latter of whom also directed, to score the film with rock songs of their generation was as much economical as it was artistic. It was expensive to hire a composer and an orchestra, so as they edited the film they “temped” it with songs from a pile of roughly 200 records.
“And we kept listening and culling, and listening and culling, and finally getting to the point where we had really worked out, over a long period of time, the music that we felt would be appropriate,” says “Easy Rider” editor Donn Cambern.
“Easy Rider” wasn’t the first film to use rock music — “Blackboard Jungle” was a pioneer, and “The Graduate” was set to the songs of Simon & Garfunkel — but it was arguably the first to use a curated playlist in place of an instrumental score. Schneider and Rafelson continued the trend of “jukebox scores” with “The Last Picture Show” and “Five Easy Pieces,” and the rest of Hollywood took notice.
Filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, John Hughes, Wes Anderson and, famously, Tarantino carried on the tradition of using existing songs in a sophisticated, story-driven way — but there’s also been a 50-year wave of more crass, marketing-motivated imitators.
“This was brand new,” says Cambern. “‘Easy Rider’ opened that whole conception of thinking that a song really needs to be placed for its narrative value, as well as its playability in a scene — that is, its contribution.”
A lot of the film’s personnel were alumni of “The Monkees.” Schneider produced the TV series — which Cambern was a music editor on — as well as the feature film, “Head.” Costar Jack Nicholson was a writer and producer on that film. “Easy Rider” music supervisor Joel Sill often joined the Monkees on tour.
But there are no Monkees songs in “Easy Rider.” The radical road movie, which doubles as a travelogue of America with its winsome Laszlo Kovacs photography, moves to rougher rhythms. The first song heard is “The Pusher” — a bluesy, explicitly drug-minded song by Steppenwolf — which accompanies a montage of Billy (Hopper) and Wyatt (Fonda) hiding drug money inside their motorcycles.
The film is structured around several cross-country montages, and “each ride really was a story unto itself,” Cambern says. “We wanted music that would contribute to the meaning of the story as they were traveling.”
Steppenwolf’s raucous anthem “Born to Be Wild” plays over Billy and Wyatt’s first ride during the opening credits. The second joyride is set to the rambling, uptempo strains of “Wasn’t Born to Follow” by the Byrds, which reprises during a playful scene of skinny-dipping with members of the commune — briefly morphing from acoustic folksiness into electric psychedelia.
Our heroes pick up a hitchhiker and travel through desert and mountain country to “The Weight,” a sunny singalong by the Band. One of the film’s forays into humor comes courtesy of the goofy, honky-tonk “Bird Song,” which underscores the first ride with Jack Nicholson’s ACLU lawyer, George, grinning giddily underneath his gold football helmet.
“I mean, that’s Nicholson,” Sill says of the song by the Holy Modal Rounders. “What could be better?”
Another laugh arrives when George tries his first joint one night, and the following ride through horse country is cut to “Don’t Bogart Me” by the Fraternity of Man. “It was a continuum of a good feeling, of discovery of the land they were going through,” Cambern says. “And then it changed to Jimi Hendrix. Abruptly.”
The good vibes smash-cut to a shot of the Long-Allen Bridge taking the characters into the South, scored by Hendrix’s syncopated, acidic “If 6 Was 9.” The song viscerally conveys this place of danger where, according to George, the natives hate what Billy and Wyatt represent: freedom.
“That song set up that whole sense of: ‘Oh, God ... we’re in the wrong place, guys,’ ” Cambern says. “The audience just lurched forward. ‘Uh oh.’ It’s a wonderful moment.”
Cambern’s radical editing, with its lightning-fast flashbacks and flash-forwards, also included cutting on the “kick beats” in the music — rather than the strong beats — to keep viewers alert.
After a night of drunken revelry in the Mardi Gras parade, set to a diegetic street performance of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the music goes away, and there is no song for the acid-tripping makeout scene in a New Orleans cemetery — just the sound of a girl reciting scripture, snippets of crying and Wyatt talking to a statue as though it were his mother.
Then, suddenly, “Flash Bam Pow” by the Electric Flag bangs as Billy and Wyatt ride out of the Crescent City. Roger McGuinn’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” accompanies their dawn ride after an important nighttime talk, but fades out as the duo arrives at their destiny on a country road. No music plays as each is shot to death by a local, no music plays as Wyatt’s bike bursts into flames, and there is only silence as the camera rises into the sky.
The end credits roll to “Ballad of Easy Rider,” the soundtrack’s most straighton commentary (“All they wanted was to be free”), which Dylan partially composed, but was completed and performed by McGuinn.