A Few Of My Favorite Things is a series that appears most weekends on Driven By Boredom. Each week I talk about three of my favorite things from a specific genre of film, music, or something else all together. Each favorite thing is accompanied by a video and a description of why it is one of my favorite things. Click here for more favorites.

I have a pretty decent record collection and since I don’t own a CD player, I am pretty much listening to vinyl or mp3s.  I never really saw the point in buying new music on record.  If I could get it on CD I was happy to go that route.  Because of this my record collection consists of three main groups: mid 90’s punk 7″, hip hop and dance singles and music recorded before the invention of CD’s.  When I am hanging out in my room or about to go to sleep I mostly want to listen to full length LP’s so the singles don’t get nearly as much play these days.  While DEVO and Hall and Oates get their due, I find myself listening to mostly old rock and 70’s soul.  Side 1 of Menagerie by Bill Withers gets a lot of play as does T-Rex’s Electric Warrior.  But the music I find myself coming back to again and again is movie soundtracks.  I have never been much of a sound track guy in the CD world, but for some reason I own probably two dozen CD soundtracks on record.  It was really hard to narrow down just three.  I already talked about my fascination with Blaxploitation in an older Favorite Things, so my Shaft and Superfly soundtracks are out, and I mentioned the very punk rock Return Of The Living Dead sound track in my Zombie write up… so that helped narrow down things a bit.  So read on to hear about my three favorite soundtracks that I on on vinyl.

1. A Hard Days Night (1964)
No only is A Hard Days Night one of my favorite soundtracks, it is also my favorite Beatles record.  My parents raised me on later era Beatles… my favorite was Sgt Peppers until High School, but my tastes now lean heavily to early Beatles, and especially A Hard Days Night.  (Although my favorite Beatles song was Can’t Buy Me Love because of the Patrick Dempsy movie of the same name.)  The movie is also fantastic of course and for a long time it was my favorite movie that I didn’t own… until of course I bought it.  There has never been a music film like it again which is really too bad, although the entire Monkees TV show probably wouldn’t have existed without it.  I purchased the record at Plan 9 Records in Richmond, VA shortly after watching the movie for the 10th time.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNf046Uo2gI[/youtube]

2. Harder They Come – 1972
I saw this movie for the first time in a film class on third world cinema.  Even though it was in English we had to watch it with subtitles because of the Jamaican dialect.  Now that I have seen in probably 10 times I can finally watch it without subtitles which is really nice because on the Criterion version I have the subtitles are designed for the hearing impaired so they have things like “birds chirping” and “music playing” which is extremely annoying.  The movie is so amazingly bad ass.  It is about this guy who tries to make it as a singer/songwriter but he just gets ripped off.  He then turns to crime.  When people realize this criminal had a record out all the DJ’s start playing it and he becomes a legend as both a criminal and a singer.  I think this record belonged to my dad or something because I didn’t even realize I had it until I saw the movie, but it was just waiting there for me when I got home from class.    It was on my turntable for probably two months after that and it returns constantly.  I am not a huge reggae fan by any means but something about Jimmy Cliff really does it for me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGE4dnrPPZQ[/youtube]

3. Wild In The Streets – 1968
What? You have never heard of this movie?  That’s because until recently it had never been released on DVD and VHS copies were notoriously hard to find.  For some weird reason a video store in Colonial Williamsburg where my friend Tom went to school had a copy.  He rented it and had it out for a month while he showed it to just about anyone who would watch it.  It is a psychedelic musical masterpiece about a pop singer so famous that he lowers the voting age, elects one of his drug addicted groupies as senator and then eventually runs for president and has everyone over the age of 30 put into concentration camps where they are forced to drink LSD all day.  The movie was one of Richard Pryor’s first roles, although he is not at all funny in it and it also stars Shelly Winters as the pop stars crazy mom.  It must have been some sort of hit at the time because the song “Shape Of Things To Come” became a big hit despite being sung by a fictional band (Max Frost and the Troopers).  Speaking of Max Frost, all the music on the record that is not by the Troopers is unlistenable psychedelic background music that is the only reason I haven’t worn out the grooves on the record.  My friend Teddy bought the record after I made him watch the movie and eventually gave it to me after I whined to him about how obsessed I was with it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6TT5UT00wE[/youtube]

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