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What is the Greatest Rock Movie Soundtrack of All-Time?


The Hersch

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...is "Performance", featuring one of my favorite rock song performances, "Gone Dead Train", written by Jack Nitzsche and Russ Titelman, vocal by Randy Newman, remarkable slide guitar work by Ry Cooder. Randy Newman may never have been a great singer, but he totally nails this. If you manage to make head or tails of the lyrics, you'll discover that they're pretty filthy, which is another plus.

The same soundtrack features the song "Memo from Turner", written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and sung by Jagger, in one of my favorites among his vocal performances, and also featuring the excellent Ry Cooder on slide guitar. I'm ambivalent about Mick Jagger as a singer. Hard to keep him off a list of greatest rock singers, but at the same time, his singing has always been so un-musical that it's hard sometimes to think of it as singing at all. Here is a clip from the movie, starting with "Poor White Hounddog" with a vocal by Merry Clayton (whose soaring voice you may remember from the Stones' "Gimme Shelter"), segue-ing into "Memo from Turner," which was an obvious progenitor of a thousand music videos. You'll also notice the film's other star, James Fox.

"Gone Dead Train"

"Memo from Turner"

"Poor White Hounddog"

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