“Don’t Bogart That Joint”) by the Fraternity of Man. “What could be better? I think that scene really was the platform for him moving on, in terms of getting more roles.”Īnother laugh arrives when George tries his first joint one night, and the following ride through horse country is cut to “Don’t Bogart Me” (a.k.a. “I mean, that’s Nicholson,” Joel Sill says of the song by psychedelic-folk group the Holy Modal Rounders. One of the film’s forays into humor comes courtesy of the goofy, honky-tonk “Bird Song” (“If You Want to Be a Bird”), which underscores the first ride with Jack Nicholson’s ACLU lawyer, George, grinning giddily underneath his gold football helmet. Our heroes pick up a hitchhiker and travel through desert and mountain country to “The Weight” (“Take a Load Off”), a sunny singalong performed by the Band. The second joyride is set to the rambling, uptempo strains of “Wasn’t Born to Follow” by the Byrds, which reprises during a playful scene of skinny-dipping with members of the commune - briefly morphing from acoustic folksiness into electric psychedelia. Steppenwolf’s raucous anthem “Born to Be Wild” plays over Billy and Wyatt’s first ride during the opening credits. “We wanted music that would contribute to the meaning of the story as they were traveling.” The film is structured around several cross-country montages, and “each ride really was a story unto itself,” Cambern says.
So there was joy - tremendous amount of joy.” ‘The Pusher Man.’ Followed by the grandeur, out on the highway, of this wonderful country that we were living in.
“The first one was a comment on the hold of drugs that was beginning to take hold in the counterculture. “When the first song really hit, it turned into two things,” Cambern says. The first song heard is “The Pusher” - a bluesy, explicitly drug-minded song by Steppenwolf - which accompanies a montage of Billy (Hopper) and Wyatt (Fonda) hiding drug money inside their motorcycles. “And we kept listening and culling, and listening and culling, and finally getting to the point where we had really worked out, over a long period of time, the music that we felt would be appropriate,” says “Easy Rider” editor Donn Cambern.īut there are no Monkees songs in “Easy Rider.” The radical road movie, which doubles as a travelogue of America with its winsome Laszlo Kovacs photography, moves to rougher rhythms. It was expensive to hire a composer and an orchestra, so as they edited the film they “temped” it with songs from a pile of roughly 200 records. The choice by Fonda and Hopper, the latter of whom also directed, to score the film with rock songs of their generation was as much economical as it was artistic. Produced for around $350,000 by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, the film was one of the first hits made outside of the studio system. Two drug-pushing hippies ride their motorcycles across America, picking up hitchhikers, stopping at communes and brushing with the law until they reach their ill-fated end in the Deep South. Strangelove” co-writer Terry Southern, “Easy Rider” railed against institutions both on screen and behind the camera.
#Billy easy rider movie
in Hollywood,” is a movie full of references to hippies and the counterculture, set to a rock ’n’ roll jukebox soundtrack of its era.įifty years ago, “Easy Rider” not only helped define the counterculture - with its frank depiction of drugs and free love, of “longhairs” squared against square culture - it also revolutionized the movie soundtrack, rejecting a traditional orchestra in favor of a hip “song score.”Ĭonceived by its stars, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, along with “Dr. Quentin Tarantino’s latest, “Once Upon a Time. A trip to the local theater will throw you back in time to 1969 Hollywood.
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