Jay Farrar of Sun Volt and Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie were asked to provide original songs for the film One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, a documentary about Jack Kerouac and his 1962 autobiographical novel Big Sur
. The book is based on several visits Kerouac made to a cabin in Big Sur, California, seeking time alone to deal with the stress of his fame and with his alcoholism. Farrar and Gibbard had never met before but enjoyed working together on the songs they created for the film and shared a mutual interest in Kerouac's work (Gibbard had even stayed in the same cabin Kerouac writes about in Big Sur when he was composing songs for Death Cab For Cutie's album Narrow Stairs)
. They decided to keep the collaboration going and expand it into an album-length project, One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Music From Kerouac's Big Sur
, released last month. Farrar did the lion's share of the writing, taking the lyrics for all of the songs directly from Kerouac's novel. He also derived several songs (Low Life Kingdom
, Sea Engines
, The Void
) from the poem "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," which was included at the end of the book.
. The book is based on several visits Kerouac made to a cabin in Big Sur, California, seeking time alone to deal with the stress of his fame and with his alcoholism. Farrar and Gibbard had never met before but enjoyed working together on the songs they created for the film and shared a mutual interest in Kerouac's work (Gibbard had even stayed in the same cabin Kerouac writes about in Big Sur when he was composing songs for Death Cab For Cutie's album Narrow Stairs). They decided to keep the collaboration going and expand it into an album-length project, One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Music From Kerouac's Big Sur, released last month. Farrar did the lion's share of the writing, taking the lyrics for all of the songs directly from Kerouac's novel. He also derived several songs (Low Life Kingdom, Sea Engines, The Void) from the poem "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," which was included at the end of the book.
, from Men at Work's 1983 album 
. The song offers a musical spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella 
. The title--with the first letters of Jekyll and Hyde transposed--offers a clue that the song is a variation on Stevenson's classic tale of split personality. Instead of a respectable doctor turning into violent brute, as in the original, the lyrics have a socially awkward mad scientist (Hey hey, he fumbles for what to say) transformed into a suave man-about-town (Hey hey, he's cool in every way)--essentially the same premise as the 1963 Jerry Lewis film 
. The video for the song features a Sherlock Holmes figure--suggestive of mystery writer Loren D. Estleman's 1980 novel 
. [England Dan and John Ford Coley released a 1978 album with the title 
.]
, three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. The three books--The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan--were published individually in 1975 and as a single volume in 1984. The trilogy serves up a dense, satirical melange of conspiracy theories, religious cults, alternate history, and talking porpoises (to name just a few elements), all leavened liberally with sex, drugs, and yes, rock and roll. A previous incarnation of The KLF, The JAMs, took its name from The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, a group featured in The Illuminatus! Trilogy that is devoted to sowing chaos and discord in order to disrupt the plans of The Illuminati, who secretly control the world. (The KLF were similarly inspired to sow anarchy in the corporately controlled music industry.) The song "Justified and Ancient" was recorded in a number of versions and contexts by The JAMs and The KLF, but its most notable incarnation occurred in a 1991 release (available on the album 
) with country singer Tammy Wynette handling lead vocals. The subtitle of this version, "Stand by The JAMs," is a nod to Wynette's hit 
. Under the name The Timelords, the duo released additional recordings and a 1988 book, 
, which details how anyone can create a #1 single.
, from the Pet Shop Boys' 2006 album 
: "I’d had the idea of writing a song called ‘Casanova in Hell’ from reading a book about him. . . . It’s a short novel, 
by Arthur Schnitzler, who was the Viennese writer at the tum of the twentieth century and it sort of draws upon the idea that Casanova is getting older. . . . A woman laughs at him because she thinks he’s too old to have sex with her, and he confronts that realisation and gets his revenge by writing his memoirs." Casanova has the last laugh, as the lyrics note: Back in the library/His revenge is his story/What he will write/Will recall the bite/Of his wit/And legendary appetite. (Rufus Wainwright was the first to sing the song at a live performance, at a concert for the BBC in 2006.)
, from their 1981 album 
, alludes to Ray Bradbury's celebrated short story "A Sound of Thunder." First published in the magazine Collier's in 1952, Bradbury's tale has become one of the most widely reprinted science fiction stories ever written, and is currently available in 
. It concerns a hunter named Eckels who contracts with a company called Time Safari to go back in time to kill a tyrannosaurus rex. While visiting the distant past, Eckels is repeatedly warned by his guide not to stray from Time Safari's predetermined path--damaging even a single blade of grass might cause reverberations through time that could have a dramatic impact on history. "A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion," the guide warns him. Unfortunately Eckels is terror-stricken when confronted with the live T. rex, and in his panic he steps off the path, inadvertently killing a butterfly. Upon returning from the past, the hunting party discovers that the death of that single butterfly millions of years earlier has produced devastating changes to their own time. The song's lyrics seem to refer specifically to Eckels with the lines: I'm the man who stepped off the path/And I just lie here/It's what I was made for. [In the story, the phrase "a sound of thunder" does double duty: It is used to describe the terrible noise made by the approaching dinosaur as well as a climactic gunshot.]
. It has long been known that John Lennon wrote the song after taking LSD; but did he draw inspiration directly from 
as some Beatles insiders claimed, or from Timothy Leary's 1964 book 
, written with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert? The Beatles' own book, 
, seems to lay the matter to rest, quoting Lennon as saying: "Leary was the one going around saying take it, take it, take it. And we followed his instructions in his ‘how to take a a trip’ book. I did it just like he said in the book, and then I wrote 'Tomorrow Never Knows,' which was almost the first acid song. ‘Lay down all thought surrender to the void’ and all that shit which Leary had pinched from The Book of the Dead. . . . I read George Martin was saying John was into The Book of the Dead. I’d never seen it in my life." Certainly the line Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream is straight out of Leary's book. The title of the song is unrelated to the content. "I gave it a throwaway title because I was a bit self-conscious about the lyrics," Lennon said. "So I took one of Ringo's malapropisms, which was like 'a hard day's night,' to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics." [The Psychedelic Experience is dedicated to Aldous Huxley, and quotes his book 
--the same book that inspired Jim Morrison to name his band The Doors.]
was published. References to the novel abound in popular music, but for this anniversary we'll consider a number of songs by David Bowie that relate to Orwell's book. In the early '70s, Bowie began working on a musical adaptation of the novel that never came to fruition. Instead Bowie featured much of that work on his 1974 album 
, including the songs 
; 
(a line from the novel spoken by the main character, Winston Smith); 
, after the dictator of the totalitarian state depicted in the book (with the repeated line We want you Big Brother); and 
, inspired by the novel's "Two-Minute Hate," a daily ritual required of those faithful to The Party (the ruling political class) in which they must express their hatred for the Party's enemies. The album ends with the first syllable of the word brother (as in Big Brother) heard over and over. [For another musical take on Orwell's novel, see our previous post about 
features the song "Like a Great Gatsby," a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age novel 
, published in 1925. The song opens with the lines: Waiting for some dream lover like a great Gatsby/And then I look in the mirror and it's only me--a reference to the novel's rich and mysterious title character. Gatsby lives in the wealthy-with-new-money Long Island community of West Egg and pines for Daisy Buchanan, who lives across the bay in the wealthy-with-old-money community of East Egg. Gatsby fell for Daisy before he became wealthy, and social constraints kept them apart. Everything he has done--acquiring a fortune, throwing extravagant parties--has been designed to attract her attention. But Daisy is married now and lost to Gatsby, just as the narrator of the song seems to be addressing a woman beyond his reach (Use to follow you home/Hold on to you at dancing school and call you on the phone forever/But now your world begins with never). The line Do you ride on ancient ships under Dr. Eckleburg's eyes to heaven alludes to one of the key images in the novel, a fading billboard on the road into New York City featuring a huge pair of blue eyes behind enormous yellow spectacles. ("Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens," speculates the narrator, Nick Carraway.) On his 
appeared on the 1995 album Sensations of Tone, the only work produced by the experimental musical group Gods of Luxury, known as G.O.L. It is inspired by Aldous Huxley's 1932 satirical dystopian novel 
. The novel depicts a World State that uses science and technology to control all aspects of the lives of its citizens--even reproduction, which is now carried out in labs called "hatcheries" and is carefully manipulated in order to limit the population and produce members of the five castes necessary to keep society running smoothly. The government provides for all the needs of its citizens, including readily available quantities of a hallucinogenic drug called soma. The government encourages the populace to indulge in soma (to take a "soma-holiday") in order to keep them docile and happy. The song's lyrics are culled directly from three different sections of the novel. The first verse--Feel how the Greater Being Comes/Rejoice and, in rejoicing, die/Melt in the music of the drums/For I am you and you are I--are from a Solidarity Hymn, sung at Solidarity Service Day meetings that members of the highest caste are required to attend. These rituals involve the consumption of copious amounts of Soma and conclude with an orgy--referred to as an "orgy-porgy" in the book. Soma Holiday was released as a single in 1996, and is currently available on the compilation 
