El Dorado/George Alexander and The Mellomen

Hiatus over. While we were away we had occasion to reacquaint ourselves with the 1967 John Wayne western El Dorado, directed by Howard Hawks. It's entertaining but no classic (if you've seen the earlier Wayne/Hawks collaboration Rio Bravo, you've seen El Dorado—it's essentially a remake). We enjoyed it, but our attention was particularly drawn to the filmmakers' references to Edgar Allan Poe's 1849 poem Eldorado, which can be found in The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

A character called Mississippi, played by James Caan, quotes the poem throughout the film, but the allusions begin with the opening credit sequence, which features a title song performed by George Alexander and The Mellomen. This amiable cowboy ditty reworks Poe's theme of a lifelong quest to attain an elusive goal, and lifts phrases directly from the poem—In sunshine and shadow and particularly Ride, boldly ride, a line that was seemingly made to be used in an amiable cowboy ditty. The lyrics are by actor John Gabriel, who appears in the film as Pedro, with music by Nelson Riddle. Click here to see El Dorado's opening credit sequence, featuring paintings by Western artist Olaf Wieghorst, who also appears in the film as a gunsmith called the Swede.

For a more faithful musical rendering of the poem, see Donovan's 1996 album Sutras, which includes a track called Eldorado that puts Poe's own words to music. Poe scholar Burton R. Pollin, writing in the journal Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, called the track "outstanding" and said it is "composed and sung well by Donovan." See Donovan performing the song here.


The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe (Kindle Edition)

Immortal/Eric Woolfson

Eric Woolfson, a founding member and creative force behind The Alan Parsons Project, passed away yesterday at the age of 64. Woolfson ended his partnership with Parsons in the late 1980s in order to pursue an interest in musical theater. He wrote and scored a number of shows, including Edgar Allan Poe, a musical about the writer who inspired the very first Alan Parsons Project album in 1975, Tales of Mystery and Imagination. "I envisaged a Volume II though when we moved to a different record company, they were not interested in Volume II because they didn't have Volume I," Woolfson recalled. "I had to wait many years before revisiting Edgar Allan Poe--the man whose life and works inspired me probably more than any other." The song "Immortal" provides the climax to Woolfson's musical and includes the Poe-inspired lyric All that we see/All that we seem/Is but a shadow of a shadow/Of a dream within a dream. Steve Balsamo, who starred as Poe in the show, sings the song on both the soundtrack album, Edgar Allan Poe: A Musical By Eric Woolfson, and on Woolfson's long-delayed "Volume II" of Poe-inspired songs, 2003's Poe: More Tales of Mystery & Imagination. However, in the version on the album Eric Woolfson Sings the Alan Parsons Project That Never Was, released earlier this year, Woolfson handles lead vocals himself. "I think it is a good example of the composer at work singing his own material," he wrote in the liner notes, "and it is certainly a song I consider to be one of my best." It is a fitting song to mark his passing: Free as the wind/Lighter than air/Free from the jealous minds/The scornful bitter words/Won't hurt me there/And I will live/Forevermore/If you remember me/I am immortal.

Learn more about Eric Woolfson's life and work at http://www.ericwoolfsonmusic.com/.

For Halloween: Dr. Heckyll and Mr. Jive/Men at Work, and More

For Halloween, we're featuring Dr. Heckyll & Mr. Jive, from Men at Work's 1983 album Cargo. The song offers a musical spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 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 Nutty Professor. The video for the song features a Sherlock Holmes figure--suggestive of mystery writer Loren D. Estleman's 1980 novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes, which pitted the sleuth against the Jekyll/Hyde duo. [England Dan and John Ford Coley released a 1978 album with the title Dr. Heckle & Mr. Jive.]

Here are some other musical selections, featured in previous posts, that are suitable to the season:

Moon Over Bourbon Street by Sting, about a vampire, based on Anne Rice's novel Interview With The Vampire.

Tales of Mystery and Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project, an entire album of songs based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Resurrectionist by the Pet Shop Boys, based on Sarah Wise's book about body snatchers, The Italian Boy.

Scentless Apprentice by Nirvana, about the misanthropic mass murderer featured in the novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind.

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, which, not surprisingly, is based on At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, a short novel about a terrifying excursion to the Antarctic.

Happy Halloween!

I Am the Walrus/The Beatles

"I Am the Walrus," from The Beatles' 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour, was actually created out of three songs that John Lennon was working on. Unable to finish them, he combined them into one. The idea for the walrus came from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter," found in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel of sorts to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In a 1980 Playboy Magazine interview, Lennon said: "It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?" And we always thought the walrus was Paul. (Let's not overlook the other literary reference in the song: Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.)

Submitted by William Scheckel

Tales of Mystery and Imagination/The Alan Parsons Project

Not just a song--an entire album based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1976), the first release from The Alan Parsons Project, includes musical versions (some of them instrumental) of "A Dream Within a Dream," "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado," "(The System of) Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "To One in Paradise." A remixed version of the album, with narration by Orson Welles that had been dropped from the original edition, was released in 1987. After leaving the band, founding member Eric Woolfson produced his own follow-up album, Poe: More Tales of Mystery & Imagination, in 2003. (A later APP release featured an instrumental called The Gold Bug--a leftover...?)