Into the Mystic 

Maybe one of the best, most thematically perfect, movie soundtracks is the one that accompanies a quasi-documentary from 1971, “Dusty and Sweets McGee,” which uses actors and allegedly real addicts to tell us all about the wonderful world of heroin. If Moby Dick is the place to go for everything you’d ever want to know about whaling, “Dusty and Sweets McGee” is the Moby Dick of heroin: vignettes that take us through the entire heroin supply chain: selling it, buying it, preparing it, injecting it, arguing over it, committing crimes to pay for it, and as one character puts it, “Spending a lot of time sitting slack jawed on park benches.” 

At the film’s center is City Life, played by an unrecognizable Billy Gray (Bud on Fathers Knows Best), selling heroin and needles from his high-performance Mustang. His epic shoulder-length mullet is a begrudging acknowledgement of changing fashion, but otherwise he’s wearing the time-honored uniform of 50s gearheads: white t-shirt with a rolled sleeve holding his cigarettes, comb at the ready in a back pocket while he mulls over adding a tape deck and mag wheels to his car. 

Billy Gray, a long ways from Father Knows Best

Much of the film’s music is playing over City Life’s car radio, tuned into “the Big K in L.A.” with all the deejay patter and jingles, as he downshifts to “Runaway,” “Duke of Earl,” “Book of Love” and “Hey Baby” and we watch the neon death march of old brands whiz by on the highway: Rexall, Pep Boys, Rayco. 

It's perfectly placed; incidental music you’d expect to hear riding shotgun with someone who looks like he’s dressed for a Sha Na Na audition. 

In a bedroom where a couple are shooting up, “Ride Captain Ride” comes on the radio – the deejay, talking over the song’s intro, says “we’re just two hours away from the start of another solid gold weekend” – giving his patter, along with the lyrics of that groovy AM hit from the summer of 1970, an ominous feeling, playing as it does over closeups of needles in forearms and what looks like blood coming up the syringe. Another couple, locked away in a cheap motel room, are getting ready to inject themselves as Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” plays on the radio. Sample lyrics: “Then magnificently we will float into the mystic” and “It’s too late to stop now.” 

Sometimes the marriage of music and movies works. Often, you’re left scratching your head. Why does the Four Tops’ “Standing in the Shadows of Love” start playing in “The Fantastic Four” movie apropos of nothing? Why does the Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s, include music by Roxy Music and Beyonce? Watching “Casino,” with its soundtrack of 60 songs sounded like some hip dude’s iPod was playing on a continuous shuffle in the next room. “Dusty and Sweets McGee” got it right.

 

 

Last stop: The Lost Oasis 

If it’s 1965 and you’re obsessed with comic books, monster movies and spy shows, and come across this paperback on a spinner rack at Newberry’s, what can you do?

You find 50 cents. 

Beginning in 1964, Bantam Books began reprinting the run of Doc Savage pulp novels from the 30s. When Bantam commissioned James Bama to paint the covers to the Savage books, it was a hot wire to the brain – the colors, the lighting, the sweaty heroic poses. Bama was an illustrator and painter whose work mostly focused on advertising and the covers of “men’s adventure” magazines like True and Dare. 

Here’s the cover to another of Bama’s Doc Savage paperbacks, The Man of Bronze, with its golden lighting against a black background and the obligatory torn shirt, Doc’s security blanket. 

Lured by the covers, I bought several books until the dated Depression-era language (cars were “sedans,” friends were “chums”) and “comedy” routines between members of Doc’s gang of scientific experts began to feel uncool and tiresome. Even then, when I came across the latest installment in the series at Brentano’s bookstore, I had to stop and admire the cover. James Bama painted more than 60 Doc Savage paperback covers and had the knack for making the imaginary seem real. 

I didn’t find out until the 90s that Bama’s creativity was behind another childhood folly. Concurrent with the Doc Savage covers, he was also responsible for the box art that graced the popular Aurora monster models series. When I came across rows of these images on the shelves at Modell’s department store, I burned with the temptation of the damned. How could I resist? 

Fast forward to the dawn of puberty, and I find this book in my sister’s room: 

It’s James Bama again, this time capturing something I couldn’t quite articulate. The image seared a hole in my head and left me dizzy with the possibilities of adulthood.  

In the late 60s, Bama walked away from commercial illustration – although calling him a commercial artist is as severe an understatement as you’ll find; he was a modern master of realism – and turned to painting Western scenes: Native Americans with dignity intact, craggy ranch hands and cowboys staring out from a snowstorm or saddling up a horse. All of it looking more like a photograph than a painting. 

Bama died in this past April, a few days short of his 96^th birthday. He had an enormous talent, influential to many other artists who followed him and to some pre-teen boys as well.