The repercussions of this LP on the fruitful pre-hipster clique will be innumerable. This is like an instruction manual that indicates the myriad musical forms necessary to be cool. And the remainder is constituted by the most wonderful Italian cowboy dopplegangers of all eternity. At my showing, gentlemen and their harlots were going epileptic in their seats during the introductory titles alone, grasping each other, believing the rate of noise to be inadequate, and therefore weakly clutching at the sounds disseminating from the THX system, bopping their barren appendages into their ears, attempting to acquire even more music.
The intro is Nancy Sinatra’s ensanguining Hazlewood-orchestrated filthy divorce lament, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” Adjacent to a lonely string instrument played by a submarine corpse, Sinatra growls the incontestable intro, “I was five and he was six/ We rode on horses made of sticks … ” Sun Records genius Charlie Feathers’s “That Certain Female” is entirely coughing lechery. In the long lifeline of country/blues/rock songs that commence with a religion-challenging “Wellllllllll … ,” this is in the top stratification. Whether he ever located his profligate adulteress or not, his concupiscence has been satisfied. It literally made my CD player heat up to the point where I needed to turn it off.
Archived article by Alex Linhardt