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Posted: |
Jul 12, 2015 - 10:23 PM
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By: |
Jim Doherty
(Member)
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To johnbijl,
I can't agree with your Pet Shop Boys/Elvis idea in this case. Sure, I've gotten albums by certain artists where you KNEW the music wouldn't be the way you heard it in the film (Mantovani is the first name that comes to mind), but UA Records plastered across the top of the LP covers of this horrible LeRoy Holmes series, "The Original Motion Picture Score."
These four LPs are about as far away from the "original" scores as you could imagine. Usually, when you see that "Original motion picture score" notation, it means you're going to get something reasonably close to the real thing. There were many "original score" LPs in the '50s - '70s that might have contained new recordings done expressly for the LP, or featured slightly re-written cues to make for a more enjoyable listening experience, but at least they sounded REALLY close to what you heard in the film itself. These four UA LPs show NO respect for the original intent and sound of these scores. It's like they were arranged for a high-school band.
Totally misleading advertising, and totally horrible LPs.
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Posted: |
Jul 13, 2015 - 1:01 AM
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By: |
Doc Loch
(Member)
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Okay, I know I'm probably going to get jumped on for this post, but after reading some of the extreme responses to this recording, which I haven't listened to for decades, I decided I had to dig it out and give it a spin. Based on some of the comments posted here I assumed it would sound something like those Hooked On Classics albums that were unaccountably popular years ago, but although the album certainly pales badly in comparison to later releases of the Kong score, it was not exactly the abomination I had expected. I actually think the first presentation of the Ann Darrow/Love theme is a serviceable treatment.
My overall reaction while listening to the album was less of revulsion than of nostalgia. Perhaps some perspective is useful here. I was in high school when the album came out and I bought it through something called The Movie Book Club, which had it as a featured selection. At the time the idea of releasing a recording of a Golden Age film soundtrack was almost unheard of (aside from Gone with the Wind). It had been at least a decade and a half since Ray Heindorf had done a brief line of classic film score releases at Warner Bros. Although Herrmann and Gerhardt had started doing their recordings, I was unaware of them since they were not readily available in a lot of smaller record stores (remember, kids, in those days there was no internet, social media, message boards, etc. to get the word out about these things). I think when the Musicland chain in the malls did finally start carrying some of the Gerhardt and London Phase 4 recordings they shelved them in the Classical Music section so it was a while before I discovered them. Also, this was in the age before John Williams brought renewed interest to symphonic scoring and a lot of the contemporary soundtrack music at this time had a strong pop orientation. So the Leroy Holmes recording actually sounded symphonic by comparison to much of what was available in the so-called soundtrack bins.
This was also the age before home video made films readily available and movies could be watched - and listened to - over and over until fans knew every note of the score. We actually had to wait until a local TV station decided to show King Kong and then hope that the sound was decent enough (once you adjusted the rabbit ears) that you could make out some of the music. If you were lucky, you might live in a bigger city with a revival theater or a college town that had a decent campus film program and you might have a chance to see a worn film print of Kong once every couple of years (in my case, I once was able to borrow a 16mm print of Kong, as well as Hitchcock's 39 Steps, and a projector through our local library's interlibrary loan system and ran them over and over for a week before I had to return them). So at the time the Holmes recording, for all its weaknesses, was the only way for most of us to hear any of the Kong music. This is not in any way a defense of the recording itself, but merely an attempt to put its release in perspective. It came out at a time when no one would even have considered things like releasing original tracks or doing complete recordings of scores (especially in an era when LPs ran about fifteen minutes a side). If nothing else, the Holmes Kong album got me interested in older film scores and I started scouring the cut-out bins for soundtracks. And maybe Holmes even deserves some backhanded credit for encouraging a renewed interest in recording older scores because his treatments were so inferior that others may have felt obligated to show how much better this type of thing could be done. Perhaps not just those two letters of praise for but also all those negative ones demonstrated that there really was an audience for classic film scores.
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My overall reaction while listening to the album was less of revulsion than of nostalgia.
Same here. I own the Prisoner of Zenda and the A Star is Born albums. They never fail to make me chuckle when I'm listening to them every other decade.
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Dear Doc,
Thank you for your thoughtful and nostalgic assessment.
Just one thing, though: This may have been in the days before easily-accessible videos, but many of us with reel-to-reel audio recorders were, trust me, very aware of the way these scores had sounded in their original incarnations.
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