‘Times Square’: A Forgotten Punk And New Wave Movie Soundtrack Turns 40

First released in October 1980, Times Square, a coming-of-age film directed by Allan Moyle, was originally poised to be a punk and New Wave equivalent to Saturday Night Fever. Like the hit 1977 John Travolta disco-centric blockbuster, Times Square focused on disaffected youth in New York City–in this case, two teenage female runaways Nicky and Pamela (played by Robin Johnson and Trini Alvarado respectively) from opposite backgrounds who rebel against convention and authority, form a punk band called the Sleez Sisters, and gain notoriety and young female fans after performing on a radio station. 

But unlike Saturday Night Fever, Times Square—which was produced by the late Robert Stigwood, the man responsible behind Saturday Night Fever and Grease—turned out to be a commercial and critical disappointment upon its original release. But over the next 40 years, Times Square, which also starred Tim Curry as a charismatic radio deejay,  has gone on to be a cult film and is appreciated for its depiction of two troubled yet strong female heroines. The notable aspects of the film was the friendship between the lead characters with its underlying lesbian subtext (though it was downplayed in the final cut); additionally, the Sleez Sisters were the precursor to the Riot Grrrl bands of the 1990s. 

Similar to Saturday Night Fever, Times Square boasted an impressive and outstanding soundtrack and featured a number of punk, New Wave and rock acts.  If the Fever album was a snapshot of 1970s disco, then the Times Square soundtrack—released on RSO Records this month 40 years ago ahead of the film’s premiere—was a time capsule of punk and New Wave at the dawn of the 1980s. While the Saturday Night Fever album still sees sales and gets airplay thanks to the iconic Bee Gees songs, the Times Square LP has remained out of print for years—thought used copies can be found the online secondary market.

“It was quite fun doing it,” says producer Bill Oakes, who supervised the music for Times Square along with Saturday Night Fever and Grease. “But in a way, the soundtrack departed from the movie. The soundtrack holds up better than the movie, and the movie was damaged I think in a way by too many cooks perhaps deciding what it was going to be. The original script was quite hard edged. Somehow we had a director [Moyle] who had been quite a good director 10 years later, but at the time he was really unable to control the set. There were quite a few little chiefs and not one big chief, put it that way.”

At the time of Times Square's film production, Oakes was the president of RSO Records—the label that put out the Saturday Night Fever and Grease soundtracks; it also had Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees on its roster. “Stigwood said he wanted to make a New Wave version of Saturday Night Fever,” recalls Oakes, “which I've just done. So he wanted to do the same thing for the up-and-coming new bands.”

The Times Square soundtrack contained a diverse and fascinating mix of pre-existing and new music by established and emerging artists mostly from the punk and New Wave genres. A good number of them went on to have long and enduring careers, including Patti Smith (“Pissing in a River”); the Pretenders (“Talk of the Town”); Talking Heads (“Life During Wartime”); the Cure (“Grinding Halt”); XTC (”Take This Town”); Gary Numan (”Down in the Park”); and the Ramones (“I Wanna Be Sedated”). Other artists who predated punk also appeared on the album, such as Lou Reed (the iconic “Walk on the Wild Side”); Roxy Music (“Same Old Scene”); and Suzi Quatro (“Rock Hard”). Collectively, the music lent a gritty, cutting-edge feel to the film’s storyline set in then-dangerous Times Square before it became a family-friendly tourist trap decades later.

In contrast to his previous experience working on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Oakes was able to get the stellar music for Times Square without much difficulty. “None of [the musicians] wanted to be in what they called my ‘little disco movie.’ You couldn't get music people interested in doing soundtracks. On Saturday Night Fever, I couldn't get the Boz Scaggs track “Lowdown.” I had to re-score the scene. It was an expensive decision for him because one track on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack would have bought him a few houses. By the time Times Square came around, people were much more ready. Now they queue up to be involved in a film.”

“I wanted to get some cutting-edge bands, and also some recognizable names, of which obviously the Pretenders, the Talking Heads and the Cars were already established. You need a Ramones track obviously [since the film is set in New York City]. So I had a sort of carte blanche. There were notations in the script where certain scenes were going, but I sort of took it upon by myself to find places for a lot of songs, because one of the mandates was they wanted double album like Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and  they wanted a two-record set—a best of. So there were a lot of places in the movie I needed to put music.”

One of the stars Oakes wanted in the film was the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger to play radio deejay Johnny LaGuardia, even though Moyle and screenwriter Jacob Brackman were committed to actor Tim Curry. “Robert Stigwood had been listening to me saying Mick Jagger—who I knew very well in New York—wanted to do a movie. I said, ‘We should really ask Mick if he'd like to do it.’ So I flew to Paris to meet with Mick. And then because he was very interested, we brought Moyle to Paris as well where the Stones were recording an album. 

“I thought it was in the bag,” Oakes continues. “But unbeknownst to me Allan Moyle then turned back to Stigwood and said: ‘I need to do the movie with Tim Curry.’ And he wouldn't do it with Mick, which was a shame  because it would have been a great role for Mick. It was only about a week’s work. If anything, Tim Curry's performance has echoes of Mick in it. I think it would have just been better to have the real thing.”

Aside from Jagger, David Bowie was also considered for the project. “I did ask for him,” recalls Oakes. “He was also someone I knew casually, not in the way I knew Mick.  David was an acquaintance and I did ask. I got his manager to ask him as well. It never really happened. He was approached. I would've loved for him to write an original song,  but that didn't happen.”

A couple of the soundtrack’s tracks featured performances by actress Robin Johnson, including “Damn Dog” and “Flowers of the City,” a duet with former New York Dolls singer David Johansen. Another song from the soundtrack was a duet between Johnson and Alvarado performing together as the Sleez Sisters called “Your Daughter Is One.” Of the inclusion of Johnson on the soundtrack, Oakes explains: “When she did her lines, she almost spat them out in a sort of early version of rap because she had that ability to give cadence and rhythm to her lines of dialogue. So the whole “Damn Dog” thing came out of really just a rapid diatribe she made. “Your Daughter Is One”—you could say is it both of them singing or really sort of rapping to “your daughter is one” [directed at Pamela’s] father.  It was very obvious they should be on the album.”

In addition to the Johnson tracks, the Times Square album contained another new song, “Help Me!,” a melodic pop duet between the Bee Gees' Robin Gibb and Marcy Levy that appeared at the end of the movie  According to Oakes, the inclusion of “Help Me!” was an afterthought. “[Stigwood] didn't think there was a big enough hit single. He wanted something that was really more Top 40. And where do you go when you want Top 40, of course you call the Bee Gees. Robin came up with [“Help Me,” co-written with Bee Gees keyboardist Blue Weaver]. It did go out as a single with Marcy Levy, who was one of Eric Clapton's singers.”

“I was signed to RSO Records at the time as were the Bee Gees,” says Levy, who is also better known today as Marcella Detroit of the British-based musical duo Shakespears Sister. “Somehow Mr. Stigwood or someone at the company presented me to Robin. I have to say it was an incredible honor to work with Robin. He was so professional and the writing on this song and the production were fantastic. I hadn't met Robin before this experience, but I was certainly aware of the Bee Gees! Their music was part of the backdrop of my youth!”

She recalls the recording session for the song at Criteria Studios in Miami: “Everything went extremely well. Blue was there and I'm pretty sure one of their top engineers Albhy Galuten was there as well. We did it all in one afternoon. I was very young, nervous and beside myself with the opportunity to work with Robin and Blue.”

Oakes admits that the overall film’s mixed reception could be traced to the differing visions of director Moyle and producer Stigwood. “If it had been an indie picture that Allan Moyle wanted to make, perhaps it would have ended up with better reviews. Stigwood was never concerned with reviews. He wanted 'bums on seats,' as he called it—'I want people to see it.' So there was a kind of a conflict at the top.

“We brought in another editor who edited separately from Allan Moyle, and it was taking a lot of the hard edges off. I regret it because I was sort of split down the middle. I can see what Stigwood meant, and my mandate was to put together a terrific soundtrack. But it wasn't commercial enough for Stigwood  and it was probably too commercial for the director. So there was a lot of heated discussion in the editing suites and it shows. It got lost somewhere along the way.”

Along with the film, the soundtrack didn't really make a dent commercially (it peaked at number 37 on the Billboard album chart), sell in the millions or win an Album of the Year Grammy compared to Saturday Night Fever.  As of today, the Times Square soundtrack has not been reissued (a 40th anniversary edition of the film was slated to be commercially released). Still, several of the tracks from the LP can be found on some of the individual artists’ own albums.

“I really enjoyed the film, and the soundtrack had some very cool bands on it,” says Levy. “ I loved that it was a story about rebellion. I was overjoyed hearing [our] song on the radio and I was a little disappointed that it couldn't do better chart wise. But to have the opportunity to work with Robin was worth everything!”

Even after 40 years, Oakes considers the Times Square soundtrack a great album. “I always felt that soundtracks should stand up on their own two feet as well,” he explains. “In the case of Fever, I thought it was a party album. You don't have to see the movie—you put it on and you've got a dance party. The same with Grease, really.

“I think with this album I wanted it to hold up on its own. I wanted to encapsulate where music was now, meaning 1980. And I think it does represent that time with a slightly New York-centric base. There were a few English acts in there like XTC and Gary Numan. So it was a mixture of New York, London and L.A., that's for sure. I think the tracks hold up. They also conjure up to me the kind of movie that it should be.”

Times Square: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (taken from the Wikipedia entry)

Side one

Suzi Quatro: "Rock Hard" 

The Pretenders: "Talk of the Town" 

Roxy Music: "Same Old Scene" 

Gary Numan: "Down in the Park" 

Robin Gibb and Marcy Levy: "Help Me!"

Side two

Talking Heads: "Life During Wartime" 

Joe Jackson: "Pretty Boys"

XTC: "Take This Town"

Ramones: "I Wanna Be Sedated" 

Robin Johnson: "Damn Dog" 

Side three

Robin Johnson and Trini Alvarado: "Your Daughter Is One" 

The Ruts: "Babylon's Burning"

D.L. Byron: "You Can't Hurry Love" 

Lou Reed: "Walk on the Wild Side" 

Desmond Child and Rouge: "The Night Was Not" 

Side four

Garland Jeffreys: "Innocent, Not Guilty" 

The Cure: "Grinding Halt" 

Patti Smith Group: "Pissing in a River" 

David Johansen and Robin Johnson: "Flowers of the City" 

Robin Johnson: "Damn Dog" (Reprise – The Cleo Club)