“The first one was a comment on the hold of drugs that was beginning to take hold in the counterculture. “When the first song really hit, it turned into two things,” Cambern says. 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. “‘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.”īut 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. 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.įilmmakers 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. “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. “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. 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. 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. 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.
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