A soundtrack ahead of its time
In the summer of 1985 I was a teenager with a 10-speed and a Sony Walkman. Not the most powerful combination of technology, but I swear I got up to 88 miles an hour at least once on that thing. And here I am in 2015, still tingling from the memory, so maybe it worked.
The plutonium in the tank was the soundtrack from Back to the Future, Robert Zemeckis’s time travel comedy featuring a young Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly. The hit single was of course The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News. (The band also recorded Back in Time for the film.)
But my favourite track was number six, an eight-minute instrumental riff titled Back to the Future Overture and performed by “the Outatime Orchestra” — actually a 98-piece philharmonic assembled by composer Alan Silvestri, the largest orchestra at that time for a Universal picture score.
The piece swings between slow sections and zippier moments, and includes the 10-note intro that remains one of the most recognizable movie themes in history. Sure, Star Wars may be more powerful in its Wagnerian bombast, and Raiders of the Lost Ark gave us hero music with a John Philip Sousa flair, but Silvestri’s overture has a malleability lacking in other great themes.
Slow it down and it evokes hair-raising suspense. In fact, its first use in the film comes when Christopher Lloyd’s character reveals the time-travelling DeLorean, slowing backing it out of a trailer in a dramatic swirl of dry-ice fog.
Take the same theme and goose it, as happens a few minutes later when Marty tries to outrun the Libyans, and you’ve got perfect carchase music. (Or bike chase if you’re too young to drive.)
The soundtrack was not the biggest hit, peaking at 12 on the Billboard 200 chart. That may have had something to do with its odd mix: 10 tracks comprising Huey Lewis’s two songs; two bits of Silvestri’s score; Heaven is One Step Away by Eric Clapton; Time Bomb Town by Lindsey Buckingham; Etta James’ The Wallflower (from 1955); and three contemporary covers by Marvin Berry and the Starlighters (actually Harry Waters Jr.) and featuring Marty McFly, though the vocals were by professional singer Mark Campbell.
“The soundtrack album sold nothing,” Lewis says in a new making-of book by Caseen Gaines, We Don’t Need Roads. “Because it was Back in Time, The Power of Love and maybe a Phil Collins song or something.”
Lewis’s poor recollection notwithstanding, the album and the film were released just as soundtrack recordings were starting to make inroads as both merchandising add-ons and marketing tools. The previous summer, Ray Parker Jr.’s theme from Ghostbusters had been all over the airwaves. In 1985, it was The Power of Love.
Many of the top-selling soundtracks of all time date from that period: The Big Chill, Purple Rain, Footloose, Top Gun and Dirty Dancing were all released between 1983 and 1987. “It was done by design, to be able to have a really cool song … on the radio,” says Zemeckis in We Don’t Need Roads. “That’s advertising. We only had so many outlets back in the day.”