Easy rider

VARIOUS / MCA

Before John Travolta strutted to ‘Stayin’ Alive’ and Ewan McGregor sprinted to ‘Lust For Life’, another movie shot into of-its-moment soundtrack history. Fifty this year, Dennis Hopper’s existential biker movie Easy Rider (1969) was originally to be scored by folk-rockers Crosby, Stills & Nash. But Hopper’s preferred, off-map route was the stuff of revelations.

Precedents such as Blackboard Jungle (1955) aside, Easy Rider was one of the most influential movies to use pre-recorded songs by various artists to connect a film’s story and themes to its hipster audience. Hopper either rejected Crosby, Stills & Nash because they liked limos or because co-star/ co-writer/co-producer/sparring partner Peter Fonda liked them. Whichever you believe, editor Donn Cambern cut the film to a temp track of contemporock songs – and Hopper wanted what he was on.

Even if the $1m licensing fees were high for the budget, Hopper’s instincts served him well. Steppenwolf’s ‘The Pusher’ scores the opening coke deal with dirty-cool swagger. Then Fonda

fills his tank with gas bought from drugs money (dig the metaphor) and ‘Born To Be Wild’ propels the bikers on to the highway, with all its implications of freedom and nihilism.

Although both Steppenwolf cuts rock like monkeys, the songs’ lyrics broach themes of mortality and failure that hang like shrouds over Hopper’s tragic trip. Re-recorded on the soundtrack album by LA rockers Smith due to rights issues, the folk-country gospel of The Band’s ‘The Weight’ also keeps death near (“Feeling about half-past dead…”).

Conversely, The Fraternity Of Man’s stoner-country frolic ‘Don’t Bogart Me’ echoes Hopper’s view of Rider as a western on wheels. Yet elsewhere, the riders’ pursuit of chemical freedom summons increasingly trippy, thematically charged song choices. The Byrds’ ‘Wasn’t Born To Follow’ and The Holy Modal Rounders’ ‘If You Want To Be A Bird’ mount cosmic takes on the hippie dream of liberation, while Jimi Hendrix’s individualist acid-rock scorcher ‘If 6 Was 9’ is pointedly used to pre-empt the riders’ confrontations with prejudice.

If the psychedelic chorale of

The Electric Prunes’ ‘Kyrie Eleison’ resembles a trip gone bad, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn brings the darkness home with a cover of Bob Dylan’s biting ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. Allegedly, Dylan also wrote the lyrics to the film’s one original, McGuinn’s sorrowed ‘The Ballad Of Easy Rider’, on a napkin for Fonda. True or not, the film and its hit soundtrack certainly succeeded where its heroes failed. For heat-seeking outsider heroes to follow, trails had been blazed. Kevin Harley