In the wake of the recent 40^th anniversary tribute to The Wild Bunch, and my conversations with Camille and Claudia Fielding at that event, I thought some quality time with Jerry Fielding (at least his music) was in order.

                                

I normally listen through my collection on my iPod reverse alphabetically by title so that I’m always occasionally revisiting everything. Once I get all the way through, I make another pass through listening only to my personal four and five-star scores, then back to the full collection from scratch again. This tends to keep things nicely eclectic and far from stale.

 

I had never before sat down and listened through the entire ouvier of a single composer and certainly Jerry’s releases were a reasonable volume with which to try it out.

 

My listening list was comprised of the Sam Peckinpah films (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and The Killer Elite); the Michael Winner films (The Big Sleep, The Lawman, The Mechanic, The Nightcomers, Chato’s Land, and Scorpio); the Clint Eastwood films (The Enforcer and The Outlaw Josey Wales); and the miscellaneous films (The Gambler, Gray Lady Down, Johnny Got His Gun, and War of Children). I didn’t listen to them in groupings such as this or even by genre – I went purely alphabetically so as to make the listening experience as random as possible.

 

My first exposure to Fielding – that is, in the sense that I was conscious of whose music I was listening to, was while watching The Gauntlet, followed soon thereafter by Wild Bunch. Gauntlet (another Eastwood film) was my first Fielding LP. (Incidentally, when will this jazzy work become available in a complete version on CD? Seriously.) Now Gauntlet and Wild Bunch couldn’t be more far apart in their style, genre, instrumentation, etc. if one was trying. And it was this very diversity – the fact that they were such polar opposites – that caused me to take note of what a great artist Fielding was.

 

However, I discovered something interesting when I finished listening through all of the scores above randomly. His body of work as a whole is much more similar than it is different. Someone has been quoted and requoted to have said something along the lines that Jerry Fielding’s music was like a man in a green suit walking in a field because it was so perfect to the situations in which the music is used. To this day, I have no idea what the hell that means (and I bet you I’m not alone). I learned something instead in the last few weeks about his music.

 

Listening to Jerry’s collective works is like spending time with an old friend – albeit, the most cynical and paranoid one you know. Prior to this, the best term I’d had to describe the Fielding style was “dissonant strings.” And indeed there are plenty of them. But where most film composers have some recognizable signature styles, Jerry is best compared not to other film composers but to film directors.

 

Allow me to explain what I mean. When we study a director’s body of work, we often hone in on certain sociological, psychological or cultural themes that weave their way or are revisited – sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously – repeatedly in film after film. Usually, this holds true whether the filmmaker adheres to certain genres or is a genre journeyman, so to speak.

 

Jerry Fielding’s body of work does the same, only it does so musically rather than cinematically. He seems to keep returning to certain musical motifs, chords, orchestrations, stylings, and so on. But here’s what’s unique and almost jarring. This holds true no matter the genre of the film or era in which it’s set.

 

Now granted, when you think of Jerry’s music the word happy doesn’t come to mind. Outside of requisite source music, the lightest pieces in his work are perhaps the brawling cues from Convoy, the rodeo cues from Junior Bonner, the “Gathering Information” cue from Alfredo Garcia, the “Drinking Song” cue from Wild Bunch, and the “Hot Waltz on Thin Ice in Two Movements Without Pause” cue from Killer Elite. (Raise your hand if you noticed the ironic fact that these are all composed for films by Peckinpah, the so-called “master of violence”?)

 

Putting these exceptions aside, the overwhelming atmosphere of Jerry’s music is one of paranoia – even his love themes such as the “Main Title” to The Bionic Woman or some of the “Carol and Doc” themes in Getaway, having an underlying sense that it ain’t time to cozy up by the fire with your loved one just yet. When you consider that the composer was blacklisted and for a period of time unable to work in films, it is understandable that paranoia and cynicism should be a constant undercurrent in his music – he lived it. As the old saying goes, even paranoids have enemies.

 

But it’s truly fascinating to listen to a contemporary espionage thriller like Killer Elite and find variations on themes in a period noir piece like Big Sleep or a military film like Gray Lady Down. Or to listen to portions of Wild Bunch’s “High Country” theme emerge in Johnny Got His Gun, set in WWI. And a domestic drama like Straw Dogs has themes that also show up in such diverse Winner films as Mechanic and Lawman. And don’t get me started on the Westerns. You can move from Wild Bunch to Lawman to Chato’s Land to Josey Wales and hear the evolution of certain motifs – particularly those tied to Native Americans or “indios” on the other side of the border.

 

None of this is to suggest plagiarism or a lack of creativity on Fielding’s part. If anything, I believe it was a combination of obsession with certain stories he was trying to get out of his system and elaborate upon through his compositions over a period of years (in much the same way a filmmaker returns to themes again and again), and an ingenious understanding that certain instrumentations don’t so much fit the images like a glove as they are a demonstration that a number of moods are interchangeable (just as certain lighting or camera angles convey multiple messages about the characters and story unfolding across a variety of genres and story types). In essence, he was experimenting with ways to use similar music to have numerous meanings and purposes depending on the film and the scene he adapted it to.

 

So the next time you listen to Jerry Fielding’s music, pay attention to the context of how he uses it and how it compares to the context of how he’s evolved these same and similar themes and atmosphere in the context of other films. It may add a whole new dimension to your appreciation of this musical master.