This is the soundtrack album for a somewhat underrated yet very enjoyable Francis Ford Coppola movie.
Tucker flopped upon release and has never been held in the same regard as Coppola’s earlier classics such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Its certainly much more lightweight than those movies (deliberately so), but its a terrific, stylish biopic starring Jeff Bridges (excellent, as always) as the 1940s visionary automotive entrepreneur who dreams of building “the car of the future”. (Spoiler alert: given none of us are driving around in Tuckers today, the rubber never quite meets the road).
I’m not quite sure how I came to own this record. The soundtrack is by the pop musician Joe Jackson, an artist I’ve been lucky enough to see in concert three times. It contains quite a few boppy instrumentals in the style of his previous Jumping Jive album of covers by Cab Calloway and other artists of the period. Joe had previously written the soundtrack to Mike’s Murder (a movie which I have never seen, but it is a terrific album, one side of songs, one side of instrumentals). The Tucker soundtrack earned him a Grammy nomination, but surprisingly although he subsequently released several instrumental/classical albums, he did not go on to write any further soundtracks after this.
Listening to this again, it got me thinking about soundtracks written by pop/rock musicians, with varying degrees of success. It’s certainly an eclectic bunch: from Bob Dylan with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Queen with Flash Gordon, Prince with Batman, even Jimmy Page with (bizarrely) Death Wish II (done as a favour to his neighbour, director Michael Winner, apparently). And that’s not counting pop/rock musicians who subsequently carved out a second career scoring soundtracks: Trevor Rabin (Yes), Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), Clint Mansell (Pop Will Eat Itself). Even Johnny Greenwood andThom Yorke from Radiohead have recently gotten in on the (second) act – it certainly can be a rewarding new direction for pop musicians once the hits dry up.