You're the best, Joe

I remember my mother coming back from the pictures one night in 1969 and telling us she'd been to see some film called "Midnight Cowboy." She never told us what it was about (imagine telling a seven-year-old "well it's about this man who goes to New York to sleep with women for money...") and for years I literally thought it was a Western, and then somewhere along the line I also thought Glenn Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" had something to do with it. It wasn't until the late 70s that I got to see it myself (on good old BBC2 most likely) and I think it was because it had been shrouded in mystery for so many years it became a sort of icon of the "adult" world to me, something I wouldn't understand until I was older. Even though I've seen it a thousand times now it still has that cachet of adult sophistication about it, it's not my film in the way that "Taxi Driver" is but it represents that mysterious place my mother went to without me and my sister: dates with other men, X-films, cocktail parties, Cosmopolitan magazine, and Erica Jong novels.

The film's actual theme song was, of course, this beauty and not "Rhinestone Cowboy".

Download: Everybody's Talking - Nilsson (mp3)


One interesting nugget of trivia you might find handy to liven up boring dinner parties is that Jon Voight's brother is the legendary pop composer Chip Taylor who wrote "Wild Thing." Not only that, but the same year the film came out he produced the album "Any Way That You Want Me." for the lovely Evie Sands which includes a song he wrote inspired by the film called "Crazy Annie." The song is about Joe Buck's hometown girlfriend Annie who only appears in the film in his daydreams and nightmares, including a particularly harrowing one where the two of them are gang-raped by local thugs and she gets carted off to a mental institution. It was a long while before I figured out exactly what happened in that scene, maybe I was just too innocent to believe those guys were actually shoving something up Joe Buck's arse but it was all done in a trippy, hallucinatory style which was very late 60s and a little confusing to me at the time — I'd led such a sheltered life.

Download: Crazy Annie - Evie Sands (mp3)

It's a beautiful song written from Annie's point of view (well, you couldn't expect Evie Sands to sing a song as Ratso Rizzo could you?) using her few lines of dialogue in the movie as lyrics and rescues her from being a mere phantom in Joe's memory and turns her into a real person who wasn't crazy and is still in love with him. I can't think of another example of someone writing a song about a minor character in a movie (unless there's a really obvious one I've forgotten), it's like someone writing one about one of Alfie's girlfriends.

PS: That Evie Sands album is well worth buying, glorious sunny pop-soul from the woman no less than Dusty Springfield said was her favourite singer.