Dead Man (1996)

I’ve seen a few Jim Jarmusch films in my day, but for some reason I never saw Dead Man, despite knowing the Neil Young connection. This was admittedly the start of my lapsed fandom, which cooled post-Sleeps with Angels. I had just hit college and my musical tastes had rapidly and widely expanded. Neil was a bit passé for me at the time. I was even receiving tons of bootlegged live shows on cassette from a friend my dad’s. But Dead Man just never crossed my stereo or vision. Now that I’m digging into it, I love the music but wish the soundtrack album was more of a straight score without the spoken dialogue interludes, film excerpts, and anachronistic sounds of motor vehicles (what the?). Given Neil’s love of trains, why in the world did he not at least layer in trains instead of cars? According to Shakey, Neil spent awhile tinkering with it, making it into a whole album instead of just being happy with the score itself serving on its own. What a shame, because hearing just pure Old Black riffs and solos for an hour would have been lovely, a nice complement to the cacophony of Arc. You can always skip the spoken word pieces, of course. The seven instrumentals stand well enough on their own.

The music works fairly well in the film, providing an appropriately spooky and ominous tone. I love the strange swiping sounds on “Dead Man #1,” reminding me of sounds he was experimenting with on Sleeps with Angels. What’s surprising is how serious the music is compared to the film, which is typically Jarmusch in its absurdist black humor. “Dead Man #4” is particularly dark and foreboding, somewhat at odds with the tale of a hapless accountant on the run from outlandish bounty hunters and a comedically cranky Robert Mitchum. On the album, this is followed by 8+ minutes of straight movie scene excerpts before getting to the 14 minute epic “Dead Man #5” which at times sounds like if you took “Cortez the Killer” and dropped out everything but Old Black, beautiful and aching chords mixed with intense rhythmic motifs. I’d wager the best version of this album cuts it to just the seven instrumental pieces, with a running time down to 45 minutes or so. The strangest moment of a strange album comes at the end as the almost pure tone poem of “Dead Man #6” adopts sounds like a moaning buffalo in places while Neil plays a minimal solo. It’s almost like the album drifts off in a dream. Fitting for Jarmusch’s odd western fugue.

There is an additional piece that Neil describes as an overdubbed piece not done as part of the live soundtrack he performed. It mixes acoustic and electric guitar and plays over the beginning and end credits of the film. “Dead Man Theme” is available as an outtake on the Neil Young Archives and is the closest thing to an actual song here. Not sure why Neil wouldn’t include it on the album when he spent so much time overdubbing ocean sounds and cars. It’s certainly much more what you would expect from “Neil scores a western,” and maybe that’s why it doesn’t quite fit. There’s more structure to it, more pure hummable melody. It’s completely badass for all that, though, and kind of sums up the album in one five minute nugget.

There’s also a very cool short movie Jarmusch filmed of Neil actually performing the music live while watching the film in the studio. It’s really neat to see Neil improvising in real time while locking his eyes on the screen. It’s the pure act of musical creation right before our eyes, not a performance or recording of music previously written. Have to wonder what he was thinking and feeling while doing this. Very rare look into the process.