ALBUM: Robbie Robertson and Alex North, ‘Carny: Sound Track from the Motion Picture’
After the Band bid farewell with the “Last Waltz” show on November 25, 1976, lead guitarist and songwriter Robbie Robertson spent the next year or so working with director Martin Scorsese finishing the concert film of the same name. The pair’s collaboration on The Last Waltz bloomed into a partnership that has lasted decades, with Robertson either writing the score or acting as music producer/supervisor/consultant for most of Scorsese’s films since 1980’s Raging Bull. Robertson’s first experience with composing for film, however, was on a mostly forgotten movie made with a lesser known director.
Robertson didn’t originate the idea for Carny, but it resonated with him, having worked in two carnivals during his teenage years in Canada. Originally brought in to contribute music to the film, he ended up producing, co-writing the story, and co-starring alongside Gary Busey and Jodie Foster. Carny benefits from solid chemistry among its lead trio and an authentic carnival milieu, thanks to director Robert Kaylor (a former documentarian) and the real-life “freaks” who appear in the film. Nevertheless, it was a box office bomb, and has never had a standard DVD release in the United States.
For decades, the Carny soundtrack also remained hard to come by, despite a presumably built-in audience of Band obsessives. Fortunately, Real Gone Music has now reissued it on CD for the first time ever, filling in a long-missing part of Robertson’s career. Carny – Sound Track from the Motion Picture is split into two halves: Robertson’s “Midway Music,” which consists of song-based, mostly instrumental pieces, and composer Alex North’s “Themes and Variations,” which, as its title suggests, is more of a traditional film score. While Robertson may be the Carny soundtrack’s selling point for rock fans, North was one of Hollywood’s most respected film composers, as well as one of the first to incorporate jazz into his arrangements. North received 15 Oscar nominations for his scores — including A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — and penned the music for what would be known as “Unchained Melody.”
“Midway Music” opens with the instrumental “Garden of Earthly Delights,” a seedy, bluesy number suited for backing the carnival’s low-rent strip show, featuring a memorable guitar solo by Robertson. “Pagan Knight” is more of the same, but adds Mac Rebennack (aka Dr. John) on an organ line that recalls the Band’s Garth Hudson. In the film, sideshow fat man Harold “Jelly Belly” (George Emerson) performs a cover of Fats Domino’s 1950 hit “The Fat Man,” but the soundtrack features Robertson’s demo instead. Despite Robertson’s notoriously limited vocal range, however, his rendition is far more soulful and enthusiastic than the film’s version, injecting a bit of grit, humor, and even sex appeal. (Robertson’s co-star Gary Busey also appears on the track, playing drums and singing harmony.)
The melody of “The Fat Man” recurs in Robertson’s instrumental “Rained Out” — fittingly, as it soundtracks Harold’s other major appearance in the film. “Rained Out” is one of Robertson’s two compositions on the album that he doesn’t play guitar on. The other is the organ-dominated “Freak’s Lament,” which is less mournful than its title indicates, but nonetheless conveys the weariness of an outcast just trying to make it day to day. “Sawdust and G-Strings” is the only “Midway Music” instrumental penned not by Robertson, but by saxophonist Randall Bramblett and guitarist Davis Causey. Nevertheless, it’s one of the highlights of the soundtrack, featuring some funky bass and organ riffs and and a bubbling backbeat.
If “Midway Music” soundtracks the public face of the carnival — the lighthearted sleaze and anything-goes attitude — then “Themes and Variations” expresses the private emotions of the carnival workers behind the scenes, and the problems they grapple with in both their personal and work lives. North’s contributions include both strings-laden, traditional Hollywood compositions like the romantic “Remember to Forget” and the melancholy “I’m a Bad Girl,” as well as more abstract numbers like “Carnival Bozo” and “Fear and Revelation,” which conjure up the motion sickness and disorienting overstimulation of the carnival’s less appealing side.
Unfortunately, the Carny soundtrack is a victim of its era’s production trends. Guitars and drums have a canned, flat sound, while other instrumentation (especially the ever-present saxophone) come off tinny and thin, as if produced by cheap synths. (In fact, the score sort of resembles a carnival calliope, although the similarity is probably not intentional.) Listeners who can shrug off the dated production, however, will find a few gems scattered among the sonic muck, particularly if they are curious about Robertson’s film career or are looking for half an LP’s worth of instrumental follow-ups to “Life is a Carnival.”
To get your copy of the Carny soundtrack, visit Real Gone Music’s online shop.
