It’s A Happy New Year with Real Gone Music’s January Slate

Real Gone Music is saying “Happy New Year!” a couple of months early with the announcement of the label’s January 6 slate of releases. This customarily eclectic batch is highlighted by the classic soul of The Main Ingredient and Jackie Moore, blue comedy from Redd Foxx, two otherworldly soundtracks from the films of cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (on both LP and CD!), and more live jam-band greatness from Grateful Dead.

Real Gone’s press release, with full details on each title, follows!

LOS ANGELES, CA – One of the ironies of the career of Chilean-born filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky is that while he is best known as a visual stylist, his most avid and loyal champions have often been musicians. When Jodorowsky arrived in New York from Mexico City in 1970 carrying a copy of the then-unreleased El Topo, it was the jazz producer Alan Douglas who bought the distribution rights to the film. When Jodorowsky and Douglas were looking for a venue in which to screen El Topo, it was John Lennon and Yoko Ono who asked for it to run at midnight following their short-film festival at New York’s Elgin Cinema. And after six months of sold-out midnight screenings at the Elgin, it was Lennon’s manager, Allen Klein (ABKCO’s founder), who bought the rights to El Topo and agreed to produce its follow-up, The Holy Mountain. But then, music has always played a very large role in Jodorowsky’s films—and that has never been more evident than in the soundtracks to The Holy Mountain and to his latest film, The Dance of Reality. Both soundtracks are being issued by Real Gone Music in association with ABKCO Music & Records for the first time on LP and stand-alone CD on January 6.

When Jodorowsky wanted, in his words, “another kind of music—something that wasn’t entertainment, something that wasn’t a show, something that went to the soul, something profound,” for the soundtrack to The Holy Mountain, forward came jazz legend Don Cherry and crack studio musician (and one-time Archie) Ron Frangipane to share composing and (along with Jodorowsky) conducting duties. And, boy, did they deliver—the score to The Holy Mountain is every bit as hallucinatory as the fantastic visual imagery in the film itself. The deep, primordial chants that begin the movie, “Trance Mutation,” give way to an almost jaunty percussion-and-plucked-strings melody, “Pissed and Passed Out.” On the next track, “Violence of the Lambs,” a single flute is slowly joined by a set of mournful strings while, onscreen, Gestapo-like soldiers in gas masks parade with bloody lamb carcasses on sticks. “Drink It,” an upbeat sitar folk melody, follows, briefly accompanying the main protagonist The Thief’s ill-considered decision to guzzle tequila (or sleeping potion). Then there is “Christs 4 Sale,” a blaring orchestral riff that sounds like it was ripped from a 1950s swords-and-sandals epic. The next track, “Cast Out and Pissed,” begins with a bee-like buzz, then is overwhelmed by a cacophony of drums, horns, and, finally, screaming. “Eye of the Beholder” which follows, changes moods entirely once again—a string section swells with overwrought romanticism. (Onscreen, a group of young prostitutes prays in a church. One of them later walks arm and arm with a chimpanzee.) And then there is “Communion,” a brooding, trumpet-led number that would be at home on the noir-steeped Chinatown soundtrack. (As “Communion” plays, the Thief is not driving through Los Angeles at night but eating the face off a statue of Christ.) This veritable cornucopia of musical styles would be more than enough to fill an entire movie. It would be more than enough to fill three movies. But in fact, the eight musical compositions described above play entirely in The Holy Mountain’s first 24 minutes. Still ahead lie the hard rock of “Psychedelic Weapons,” the pomp and circumstance of the waltz “Miniature Plastic Bomb Shop,” the gospel-inflected sax of “Isla (The Sapphic Sleep),” and so on. Every one of the 24 tracks on the film’s soundtrack presents another vertiginous twist in the philosophical and spiritual journey that is The Holy Mountain.

Now, Real Gone Music/ABKCO presents, on gatefold double-LP and CD, the original soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 masterpiece The Holy Mountain. Both editions feature liner notes by New York Times contributor Eric Benson that include exclusive quotes from Jodorowsky himself, festooned with copious production stills. Produced for release by Grammy-winning producer Teri Landi and Mick Gochanour, and mastered from the original tapes by Joe Yannece (with lacquer cutting on the LP by Carl Rowatti at Trutone Mastering), this long-awaited release of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain: Original Soundtrack offers a major addition to the soundtrack canon and a completely unique listening experience.

For the soundtrack to The Dance of Reality, which marked his triumphant return to the film world in 2014 after a 23-year hiatus, Jodorowsky tapped his own son, Adan Jodorowsky (a.k.a. “Adanowsky”), whose work as a composer and performer (with Devendra Banhart among others) has won him an international following in his own right. In the radiantly visceral autobiographical film, a young Jodorowsky (played by his son, Brontis) is confronted by a collection of compelling characters that contribute to his burgeoning surreal consciousness. Adding to the autobiographical nature of the work, the film was shot in Tocopilla, a coastal town on the edge of the Chilean desert, where the filmmaker was born in 1929. Blending his personal history with metaphor, mythology, and poetry, The Dance of Reality reflects Jodorowsky’s philosophy that reality is not objective but rather a “dance” created by our own imaginations. To accompany the film’s rich, dense and disturbing imagery, Adanowsky’s score is alternately lush and comical, blending brooding string passages with hypnotically repeating piano figures that create a mood that is at times foreboding, at times wistful and, as is always the case with a score to a Jodorowsky film, surreal. Real Gone Music/ABKCO’s release of the complete soundtrack to The Dance of Reality on LP and CD features a number of beautiful production stills from the film displayed on the album jacket and CD booklet, with mastering by Joe Yannece. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s tradition of remarkable film soundtracks lives on with The Dance of Reality.

After the jump: a look at a treasure trove of rare and never-before-heard music from Jackie Moore (of Sweet Charlie Babe fame!), plus some off-color laughs from the inimitable Redd Foxx and more from The Main Ingredient and Grateful Dead!