#bikermovie

Listen to three tracks from Stu Philips’ 1967 film soundtrack ‘Hells Angels On Wheels’ (Smash Records, SRS-67094, Stereo, USA, 1967)

Even before ‘Easy Rider’ in 1969, there was an American cottage industry devoted to churning out biker movies with titles such as ‘Devils Angels’, ‘The Wild Angels’, ‘Wild Rebels’ etc etc. The collecting of their soundtracks isn’t a rabbit hole I want to go too deeply down as much of what’s on offer is not particularly interesting. This record however, with it’s jazz/ pop sensibilities, makes good use of 1960s staples like male scat singing, flute, vibes, harpsichord and sitar, to produce a soundtrack atypical of what normally accompanies the celluloid roaring of massed Harley Davidsons.

I recently undertook a solo road trip across the USA, not on a Harley Davidson motorcycle but in a rather sensible Ford Fusion hybrid with A/C and sat nav. It was a long strange trip despite never listening to the Grateful Dead or ingesting hallucinogenics in fact, for much of the journey I mostly ingested nuts, dried fruit, apples and bananas. This was down to my fear of food produced intensively, on an industrial scale (especially of the meat and poultry variety) so, in short, I lived like a bear; a bear who drives a comfy car and stays in chain motels.

Anyway, this particular bear’s brief was to visit as many record shops as possible en route from LA to NYC and buy as many records as would reasonably fit into a suitcase (or two) and, after the delights of Los Angeles, I picked up the record sampled here at Laguna Beach CA’s only used vinyl retailer. The shop was staffed by a sweet, greying old hippy fella who was the walking embodiment of the term ‘burn-out’ and, I’m pretty sure, he wore a tie-dyed T-shirt to boot; certain aspects of Californian life really are exactly as one sometimes imagines.