By Daniel Spicer
The
psychedelic period of the late 1960s/early 1970s produced a number of movies
that sought to incorporate youth music with film. From the elegiac tragedy of Easy
Rider to the
Monkees’ Day-Glo comedy Head, the best of these represented and reflected the
era’s curious mix of turbulence and naïveté.
And then
there was Zachariah. This head-scratcher from 1971
was directed by George Englund (who’d previously worked with Marlon Brando on
1963’s The Ugly American) and featured a script by cult US
comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre, with a storyline loosely based on Herman Hesse’s hippy-pleasing novel of
spiritual discovery Siddhartha. It tells the tale of the improbably beautiful and
white-toothed Zachariah (played by John Rubinstein) who, with his equally
dreamy young friend, Matthew (a 21-year-old Don Johnson, later of Miami
Vice fame), sets
out to pursue the glamorous life of a gunfighter. Clearly, the film broadly
falls into the genre of Acid Western, alongside classics such as Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, released the same year, and Sam Peckinpah’s Pat
Garret and Billy the Kid from 1973: movies that attempted to address
countercultural concerns (Zachariah and Matthew’s first scene together has them
sharing a joint), within the Western milieu. But, while most films of this
genre explored serious themes and maintained an element of verisimilitude, Zachariah blasts off somewhere else entirely.
Almost singlehandedly creating a new genre, the publicity blurb excitedly
trumpeted it as ‘the first and only Electric Western.’
In this
instance, ‘electric’ essentially means ‘psychedelic rock.’ The opening scene captures power trio The James Gang rocking-out in the desert with huge amps
plugged right into the sand, while Zachariah runs around firing a pistol into
the air. It’s the kind of temporal incongruity you might find in Thomas
Pynchon’s epic Western novel Against the Day, in which dynamite-chucking
anarchists get bombed on peyote and hallucinogenic explosive putty. But Zachariah becomes still more disorientating as
its protagonists’ adventures lead them into surprising encounters with a range
of real-life musicians. San Francisco’s psychedelic pioneers, Country Joe and
the Fish, play The Crackers – a gang of inept outlaws whose
performances induce unrestrained go-go dancing in respectably attired
frontierswomen; fiddler Doug Kershaw – aka The Ragin’ Cajun – makes a lightning
cameo with a yodelling piece of plot exposition; and, strangest of all, Elvin
Jones, arguably the greatest jazz drummer of all time and veteran of the late
John Coltrane’s Classic Quartet, turns up as the suave gunslinger, Job Cain,
shooting a man dead before bashing out a drum solo.
The result
is oddly surreal – but not in the way that Jodorowsky’s nightmarish Western
allegory, El Topo(released
in 1970) is surreal. In tone and execution, Zachariah seems closer to the closing scenes
from Mel Brooks’ screwball Western spoof, 1974’s Blazing Saddles, in which the cast spills off the
set and into the bustling streets of downtown 1970s Burbank. Zachariah’s fairly negligible storyline makes
a half-hearted lunge at profundity – clumsily advocating pacifism and
brotherhood – but it’s so flimsy that, in the end, all that’s left is the
music: an eclectic mix of rock, pop, folk and jazz that fails to hang together
with the conviction of the equally wide-ranging soundtrack to Antonioni’s 1970
countercultural lament Zabriskie Point.
Ultimately,
the fact that the soundtrack to Zachariah has been out of print and
unavailable for so many years hardly seems to matter. You probably had to be
there.
L'originale è qui:
http://www.soundandmusic.org/features/sound-film/found-soundtracks-zachariah
