July 7, 2026
#458
Gentle reader,
I will be turning 70 in a matter of weeks. I've lived in eight decades and grew up first listening to radio shows then television ones. The kind of staple back in the early days was wholly wholesome. The Good Guys always Won and the Bad Guys always lost: Either in the ground, or in jail waiting to be hung. My heroes were Roy Rogers, John Wayne and just about everyone associated with The West.
(A note to the readers: No matter what I do, every time I upload a photograph, Blogger CHANGES the size and type of FONT! For which I apologize.)
(A second note for the readers: Music for a program, film or show is called the SCORE. ALL of the sounds, including the music in a program, film or show is called the Soundtrack.)
The very first Western radio show in the US was "The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok," which featured the legendary lawman and gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok and his sidekick, Jingles P. Jones. This show aired in the 1950s and became a popular staple of the Western genre on radio. That quote is from this website:
Wikipedia states: The spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's filmmaking style and international box-office success.[1] The term was used by foreign critics because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians.[2]
The majority of the films in the spaghetti Western genre were international co-productions by Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the United States. Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978,[3] including nearly five hundred in Italy, which dominated the market.[4] Most spaghetti Westerns filmed between 1964 and 1978 were made on low budgets, and shot at Cinecittà Studios and various locations around southern Italy and Spain.[5]
Leone's films and other core spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, criticized or even "demythologized"[6] many of the conventions of traditional U.S. Westerns. This was partly intentional, and partly the context of a different cultural background.[7] In 1968, the wave of spaghetti Westerns reached its crest, comprising one-third of the Italian film production, only to collapse to one-tenth in 1969. Spaghetti Westerns have left their mark on popular culture, strongly influencing numerous works produced in and outside of Italy.
Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer, was often THE preferred choice for Score writing for many of these films. Clint Eastwood gained experience and followers as a result of the many spaghetti Westerns he performed in. This particular LP has music from three of the films.
Mackenna's Gold is a 1969 American Western film directed by J. Lee Thompson, starring an ensemble cast featuring Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Telly Savalas, Ted Cassidy, Camilla Sparv and Julie Newmar in lead roles. It was photographed in Super Panavision 70 and Technicolor by Joseph MacDonald, with original music by Quincy Jones.
Mackenna's Gold is based on the novel of the same name by Heck Allen using the pen name Will Henry, telling the story of how the lure of gold corrupts a diverse group of people. The novel was loosely based on the legend of the Lost Adams Diggings, crediting the Frank Dobie account of the legend (Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver) in the author's note. The film was a box-office failure in North America, but went on to become a major success in the Soviet Union and the Indian subcontinent.
Well, that last bit explains why I did not see it. Still, someone bought this record after seeing the film, back in 1969. Interesting to me is that Jazz star, Quincy Jones composed and conducted the Score. And Jose Feliciano, a guitarist extraordinaire plays in it as well.
Wikipedia wrote, The Missouri Breaks is a 1976 American Western film starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. The film was directed by Arthur Penn, with supporting performances by Randy Quaid, Harry Dean Stanton, Frederic Forrest, John McLiam, and Kathleen Lloyd in her film debut. The score was composed by John Williams.
The title of the film refers to a forlorn and very rugged area of north-central Montana, where over eons, the Missouri River has made countless deep cuts or "breaks" in the land.
The film explores themes including the American frontier myth, economic exploitation and law and order. Like some other films directed by Penn, it has been read as an allegory of capitalism and the American counterculture. The album is pristine.
Originally developed by Pacific Microsonics, the first HDCD-enabled CD was released in 1995. In 2000, the technology was purchased by Microsoft, and the following year, there were over 5,000 HDCD titles available. Microsoft's HDCD official website was discontinued in 2005; by 2008, the number of available titles had declined to around 4,000.
A number of CD and DVD players include HDCD decoding, and versions 9 and above of Microsoft's Windows Media Player on personal computers are capable of decoding HDCD.
HDCD is a favorite among artists who have a preference for high quality sound, such as Neil Young, the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead—all of whom have multiple CD titles (new and archival) in their catalogs mastered in this process.
IF you are interested in having a variety of WESTERN music to listen to, some of it obscure and hard to find, then THE WILD WEST and WAY OUT WEST are two you should seek out. Each has TWO CDs and they are chock full of wonderful snippets of Western film and TV music.
