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In 1997 Paul Anderson’s hit movie BOOGIE NIGHTS was released, a powerful, joyous if ultimately bittersweet look at 1970’s mores and the people who inhabited them, specifically the “dirty movie” industry of Southern California’s San Fernando Valley.
The movie’s music gave us 37 songs, almost 30 of them hits of the time, nearly wall-to-wall music even in a film with a 2:35 run time. With a soundtrack like that, BOOGIE NIGHTS should have generated a gatefold double album like the AMERICAN GRAFFITI soundtrack back in 1973. Sadly, it did not. This CD is the first of two volumes (no. 2 came out a year later), has only thirteen tracks, with two of them negligible tunes composed for the album.
Happily, there are any number of winners among the eleven time-specific hits here. This was an era (1975-1983) in which pop, folk, funkadelic and above all disco music got together, cross-pollinated, and took over the radio charts. Anderson managed to pull the AMERICAN GRAFFITI rabbit out of his hat by choosing songs that are generally exuberant, fun, and manage to comment on the action. The chipper confidence of the era is shown by choices like McFadden and Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” and the Emotions' “Best of My Love.”
The ambient sexuality of the era shows up clearly in such songs as Melanie’s “Brand New Key” and Walter Egan’s “Magnet and Steel” in which, you’ll notice, female and male “parts” are allegorized neatly as roller skates / keys, and magnet / steel. The Electric Light Orchestra’s “Livin’ Thing” found its way onto this CD, too, a happy high-tech opus of sex with its slippin’ and slidin’ and often referred to as “the only ELO song cool people can like.” (Also insanely danceable.) None of this is out of place in a movie where the happiest sex workers almost turned respectable.
In other words, the songs on this album, even if a touch cheesy at times, are really good cheese and perfectly emblematic of the Seventies and the BOOGIE NIGHTS. Four stars because again, this really, really should have been a double album (I’ll be reviewing vol. 2 shortly). The wretched graphic design of the album cover, in which arcane typefaces were shrunk down to CD size and rendered in all-caps Nouveau neon lettering on a black background, tempted me to give this product three stars. (But in the last analysis, the songs are just too much fun.) However, since there are no liner notes per se, fans who opt out for piecemeal downloads can be forgiven.
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