Whether it was on Sunday afternoons or when he would let me stay up past my bed-time to enjoy a movie with him, some of my strongest childhood memories are of watching Westerns with my Dad.  He was always more partial to John Wayne but, when I was younger, it was Clint Eastwood’s interpretation of a cowboy in films like, The Good The Bad and the Ugly, that really made an impression on me.  Eastwood was the type of gunslinger that I wanted to be; the way his eyes squinted and the way he smoked his cigar.   Both a quiet enigma and a force to be reckoned with, he was an outlaw and the quintessential anti-hero.  Equally as important was that he had a bad ass theme song, to boot. Like the late-60s equivalent of a modern day internet meme, Ennio Morricone’s title song paints the audio picture of a showdown.  Even if you have never seen the movie or heard the actual song, that classic two-note melody is so ingrained in the annals of pop-culture, the odds are that you’ve probably heard some sort of reference to it somewhere.  That soundtrack to The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly was in my father’s vinyl collection and I distinctly remember listening to it, imagining the scenes in my head, and, with the help of my action figures, reliving them in my pretend world, while playing the record in my basement.  The music was so powerful that it made as much of an impression on me as the movies themselves or Eastwood’s portrayal of “Blondie” in those spaghetti westerns.

It has now been 45 years since The Good , The Bad, & The Ugly (1966) was released and it has, obviously, earned its place in pop-culture history.  Evidence of Morricone’s lasting influence is supported by Brian Burton (Danger Mouse) and composer, Daniele Luppi’s latest project, ROME. Read the rest of this entry →