Jack Nitzsche: The Hot Spot (soundtrack)

I love just about everything to do with The Hot Spot. I first saw the film in Bognor Regis, just as the first Gulf War was breaking out in early 1991, and I was on holiday at my parents' house, writing my Masters thesis. I got this CD soon afterwards, and then, a year or two later, picked up Charles Williams' original novel in St Pancras station. All good.

I saw an interview where Dennis Hopper, the film's director, was explaining that Don Johnson had refused to do a promotional round of interviews for The Hot Spot because he didn't think it was worthy of him. "I think it's the best thing Don's ever done," said Hopper. It's the only thing of Don's I've ever seen, so I can't comment on that, but it's Hopper's most enjoyable film as a director (less dense than Colors and a thousand times more intelligible than The Last Movie, though both are good in their way).

I always thought of the soundtrack as a collaboration between John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis, and it wasn't until I started digging up the links to post here (below) that I realised it's credited to Jack Nitzsche. Or at least the "original music" composer credit is. On a track like Moanin', which is just John Lee Hooker extemporising his thing (as the title suggests) with voice and guitar, it's a little hard to believe that Nitzsche gave John Lee some charts and said, "Here, play this." So does that not count as original music then?

Like Werner Herzog with the Grizzly Man soundtrack, Hopper used his contacts book to put together a kind of pop-up supergroup. Which is probably the best kind, because they're not overladen with expectations. It would be an exaggeration to say that Hooker, Davis, Taj Mahal, Tim Drummond (another sometime Neil Young collaborator) and the others really gel together. They turn up and… do their thing. But with a soundtrack, just contributing a vibe is all you've got time for most of the time. The best track, the one where Miles and John Lee come close to locking horns, is also the longest. It is, of course, the longest part of any movie: the End Credits.

The sleeve notes by Dennis Hopper have their own period comedy (not the same period in which they were written):

I want to give special thanks to… Miles Davis, who I have known since I was seventeen, who punched out the heroin dealer and said he would kill me if I ever did it again. I've wanted him to score every movie I've ever made and we finally got it together, man.

Individual scenes are laden with set-piece cliché, like this one (nattily dubbed into Italian), but — trust me — the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts.

You can pick up the DVD of the film for less than the price of a pint of beer (round these parts). I watched it with Jeremy a year or two back. Still good.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm Listen to this album in full at We7 Listen to this album in full at Spotify