EARLIER this week we considered the slightly grotesque comparison between Rachel Reeves and Joliet Jake Blues, and their mutual anxiety to blame their troubles on anyone but themselves.
Today we’re going to look at another Blues Brothers adventure, not least because the hard-working TCW production staff love to run the clip. Also, in the wake of the decision of West Midlands Police to respond to the threat of a ‘Jew hunt’ in Birmingham by banning Israeli football fans, it might cheer us all up.
Our story starts in Kremenchuk in Ukraine in the spring of 1894, with the birth of Dmitri Tiomkin, son of a prominent medical professional, and part of a Jewish family with strong links to Zionism. The boy’s mother wanted him to be a musician, and by the time of the First World War he was studying at the St Petersburg Conservatory under Alexander Glazunov, teacher of Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. His drinking pals included Prokofiev and the poet Anna Akhmatova.
Tiomkin rubbed along with the Bolsheviks in the early years of their regime, his works including a spectacular Storming of the Winter Palace to mark the third anniversary of the October Revolution. But by 1921 he’d had enough, and he fled, first to Berlin and then Paris. In the mid-1920s he was offered work on the US vaudeville circuit, and, based in New York, he made a living playing music for the ballet company run by his wife, Albertina Rasch.
The work, however, dried up following the 1929 crash, and Tiomkin and Albertina moved to Hollywood, where she choreographed dance numbers for MGM. He began writing film music and struck up a fruitful relationship with director Frank Capra.
Tiomkin’s big breakthrough into popular music came in the early 1950s, when with lyricist Ned Washington he wrote the score and the theme song for Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon. The film, with a plot unprecedented for a western and a reputation as a communist vehicle, was blocked from release by its producers. Tiomkin’s response was to buy back Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’, release it in a version sung by Frankie Laine, and score a major hit. The film was released four months later, and success followed.
A lot of Hollywood work followed, together with awards. At the 1955 Oscars ceremony he accepted his prize with the following speech, delivered in company with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, in improbably broken English: ‘Lady and gentlemen, because I working in this town for twenty-five years, I like to make some kind of appreciation to very important factor what make me successful to lots of my colleagues in this town. I’d like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov. Thank you.’
At an Oscar award for The Old Man and the Sea four years later he thanked the fish. Perhaps a young Steven Spielberg was watching.
The same year saw the release of Rio Bravo, made by Howard Hawks and John Wayne as a patriotic response to High Noon. Tiomkin cheerfully did the music for Rio Bravo too, producing a score which heavily influenced Ennio Morricone, composer for the spaghetti westerns that made Clint Eastwood a star. Every time you hear an irritating lone trumpet tic played over the PA at a sporting event, you can thank Tiomkin for it.
Eastwood’s first break, however, came with the part of ramrod Rowdy Yates in the worldwide hit TV western series Rawhide, which ran for more than 200 episodes. A major selling point of Rawhide was its theme, by Tiomkin and Washington, and sung by Laine again. The tune was lifted by its bridge – move ’em on, head ’em up etc – which was, shall we say, inspired by Bach. Goldberg Variations, variation 14, if you would like to check.
We move on a few years to find the Blues Brothers marooned in Bob’s Country Bunker, a venue which features both kinds of music, country and western. There is a net across the front of the stage to protect performers from flying bottles should Bob’s patrons become unhappy. What to do to avoid a lynching? Our blues ‘n’ soul heroes are unfamiliar with Hank Williams.
The answer, as all fans of the film know, is to play the Rawhide theme. All night. The crowd are entertained. And under the Rawhide joke is a Jewish joke – the song that symbolised the Wild West for a generation was written by a Ukrainian Jew who worked for Lenin, who thought the steppe was much the same as the wide-open spaces of the US, and who made regular use of Ukrainian folk music. The hook, pure distilled frontier spirit, was nicked from an 18th century Lutheran Church music master who never left Germany. Here is the whole wonderful scene:
Mind you, I’d rather take my chances with the Bob’s Country Bunker crowd than the kind of peaceful Gaza demonstrators who turned up at Villa Park on Thursday night.
The Blues Brothers, of course, were not the only white rock ‘n’ soul group to discover the advantages of baroque music and composers out of copyright for a couple of centuries. But that’s for another day.
