![]() The first song heard is “The Pusher” - a bluesy, explicitly drug-minded song by Steppenwolf - which accompanies a montage of Billy (Hopper) and Wyatt (Fonda) hiding drug money inside their motorcycles. “And we kept listening and culling, and listening and culling, and finally getting to the point where we had really worked out, over a long period of time, the music that we felt would be appropriate,” says “Easy Rider” editor Donn Cambern.īut there are no Monkees songs in “Easy Rider.” The radical road movie, which doubles as a travelogue of America with its winsome Laszlo Kovacs photography, moves to rougher rhythms. It was expensive to hire a composer and an orchestra, so as they edited the film they “temped” it with songs from a pile of roughly 200 records. The choice by Fonda and Hopper, the latter of whom also directed, to score the film with rock songs of their generation was as much economical as it was artistic. Produced for around $350,000 by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, the film was one of the first hits made outside of the studio system. Two drug-pushing hippies ride their motorcycles across America, picking up hitchhikers, stopping at communes and brushing with the law until they reach their ill-fated end in the Deep South. Strangelove” co-writer Terry Southern, “Easy Rider” railed against institutions both on screen and behind the camera. in Hollywood,” is a movie full of references to hippies and the counterculture, set to a rock ’n’ roll jukebox soundtrack of its era.įifty years ago, “Easy Rider” not only helped define the counterculture - with its frank depiction of drugs and free love, of “longhairs” squared against square culture - it also revolutionized the movie soundtrack, rejecting a traditional orchestra in favor of a hip “song score.”Ĭonceived by its stars, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, along with “Dr. Quentin Tarantino’s latest, “Once Upon a Time. A trip to the local theater will throw you back in time to 1969 Hollywood.
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