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Straight to Video
Rock Art Rock
Jay Reatard
October 2008
Music Hall of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY
By Andres Jauregui "Before I bought my DSLR (a present to myself the day I got axed from a shitty office job), I took pictures on a lowly point-and-shoot..."
Thee Oh Sees
July 2009
Glasslands Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
By Andres Jauregui "I shot this trippy double exposure on the front line of a particularly raucous, incredibly sweaty set that kicked off Thee Oh Sees' swing..."
R. Stevie Moore
November 2008
Cake Shop, New York, NY
By Andres Jauregui "Eli Moore (no relation) from LAKE turned me on to his mentor, R. Stevie Moore, during an interview for Crawdaddy!, so when LAKE opened for R. Stevie in November of 2008, I had to check him out..."
Say No! To Architecture
June 2009
Death By Audio, Brooklyn, NY
By Andres Jauregui "Allen Roizman's one-man-band blew me away at the otherwise sleepy inaugural Northside Festival this past June. Death By Audio is a hub for under-the-radar talent in Brooklyn..."
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Dark Side of the Death Star (or How I Wasted Eleven Months of My Life)
I think we, the global movie-watching pop culture community at large, can all agree that there is a lot going on in The Wizard of Oz. Deadly tornados, flying monkeys, talking lions, Ray Bolger, regional witches of varying virtue, glittery shoes, singing munchkins—Jesus, there are even birds in the background that look like people trying to kill themselves. It’s really a tour de force of wacky crap, a carnival of Technicolor insanity that’s kept audiences entertained for decades. Few films can match Oz’s density; even the awesome 1978 remake fell flat by comparison (and that one had Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, back when they were still both at the top of their game). Yessir, there’s just no topping some cinematic spectacles.
Of course, in this age of cable television, instant playback, and re-re-re-recordable media, it is possible to desensitize one’s self to such greatness, to make the incredible mundane, the fascinating routine, the amazing boring. Too many TBS/VHS viewings have probably rendered Oz as pedestrian to some people as your average episode of Webster. This (and a heroic amount of pot, I speculate) is probably what led an unknown party sometime in the early ’90s to view The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s 1973 masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon. Why listen to Judy Garland’s warbling when you have a mute button, right? Throw on some Floyd, spark a doob, and let the colorful Land of Oz jack off your brain.
Sounds like a pretty killer way to burn off a few hours late on a Sunday afternoon. What no one in the world expected, though, was that there would be some kind of interstellar connection between these two seemingly unrelated properties. Indeed, it would turn out that, when started at the correct moment, a good majority of Dark Side of the Moon would mirror the events in Oz. Nearly 60 moments of synchronicity occur, just enough to blow the minds of every burned-out classic rocker and rabid Bert Lahr fan on the planet. Mainstream media first picked up on the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” phenomenon in 1995, thanks to a piece by Charles Savage in Indiana’s Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (those guys are always on the cutting edge).
“The result is astonishing,” wrote Savage, who tried the experiment himself. “It’s as if the movie were one long art-film music video for the album. Song lyrics and titles match the action and plot. The music swells and falls with characters’ movements.”
Savage chalked the whole thing up to the “Infinite Monkeys, Infinite Typewriters, Shakespeare” thing, igniting fierce debate over whether Roger Waters and his pals planned this elaborate, impressive joke or whether it was just the will of the cosmos. The members of Pink Floyd deny they intentionally created an alternate soundtrack for MGM’s most beloved film of all time and generally seem disgusted at the very notion they’d waste their time with such nonsense. This is the same band, though, that gave the world that Pulse CD with the stupid little blinking light in it. They also, at one point, relied on giant inflatable pigs to get their musical message across. So, you know, they could be full of it.
Like any other urban legend-obsessed member of Generation Y, I was quite intrigued by this “Dark Side of the Rainbow” business. In 2005, during a rather severe employment drought, it was on my mind constantly. How is something like this even possible? Is David Gilmour a Highlander? How does the KGB factor into this? I began to wonder about other likely film/music synchronicities. One night, as I lay in bed not making money and getting fatter by the minute, an exciting thought hit me:
Whoa, wait a minute—I bet that one White Zombie album totally synchs up with Star Wars!
White Zombie’s landmark 1992 album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1 certainly seemed like the type of sample-heavy rock freak-out that 
would align perfectly with a wild, outer space adventure starring Mark Hamill. Also, I figured it would be pretty cool watching Darth Vader parade around to all those bad-ass metal riffs. That alone might keep me from dozing off in the middle of said experiment. The following evening, I popped Star Wars into my VCR—that’s right, I only rock the original Star Wars trilogy, sans all that goofy CGI crap Lucas added two decades after the fact; this was a year before those “original unaltered” trilogy DVDs (which were sort of lousy anyway) came out. So anyway, I popped Star Wars into my VCR, hit “PLAY” on White Zombie immediately after the second 20th Century Fox drumroll, and hoped I wouldn’t fall asleep.
Oh, I would not be drifting off during this experiment, dear reader. Strange things started happening from the get-go. The first explosion soundclip in “Welcome to Planet Motherfucker” occurred at the same exact moment the Star Wars title burst onto the screen. Wow. A short time later, Darth Vader made his first appearance as the “Get up and kill!” soundclip from Dawn of the Dead was heard in “Psychoholic Slag.” Something was happening here. C-3PO’s stiff movements through the Tatooine desert matched up with the creaking at the start of “Black Sunshine.” I heard Rob Zombie sing “Take me away!” in “Soul Crusher” as C-3PO tried to convince Uncle Owen to buy him. This was getting weird.
15 Comments
what the hell does that comment even MEAN, anonymous? try making a little bit of sense next time. anyway, i love this piece. it’s one of the most entertaining things i’ve read in a long time.
The anonymous naysayer is a disbeliever. But there may be something said for using double-LPs for synch experiments. I would suggest “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.”
Hey, James Green Jr. Great piece. You and every other person interested in this phenomenon need to check out syncmovies.com
your mind will be re-blown!
here’s a link to an article I wrote about it
http://www.rollingstone.com/rockdaily/index.php/2008/04/18/meet-the-king-of-stoner-rock-movies-just-in-time-for-420/
Great, funny article. I’m a movie editor, and anyone who cuts much of anything soon realizes that lots of music will “magically” sync up with images. Especially Floyd, who I use on roughcuts all the time, and something interesting always happens.
your full of it dumbass it dopesn’t match up if it did Dark Side if the Moon would be as long as the movie
Hi there Mr. James Greene Jr! Evan sends me links to articles he thinks I might find interesting. He was right, great article!
Thought I might just throw a monkey wrench into that thousand monkeys / thousand typewriters theory. There is a tried and true method for discovering syncs that I call the “rainbow connection”. As you know, on the cover of “The Dark Side Of The Moon” there’s a rainbow, and in “The Wizard Of Oz” Dorothy sings “Somwhere Over The Rainbow”. That’s it – that’s the whole secret. You’re looking for similar titles, themes, cover art, etc.
Before you say, “Nah, that sounds too easy” I’ll go ahead and tell you that just because a movie and CD seem like they ought to go together, it’s no guarantee. Billy Joel’s “Glass Houses” didn’t work with either movie entitled “Glass house”, nor did it go with “Unbreakable” (Samuel L Jackson’s character was Mr. Glass!).
But, using the Rainbow Connection I have come up with EIGHTEEN combinations that produce a hundred or more sync points!
Rolling Stone calls my “Fellowship Of The IV” (Fellowship Of The Ring / Led Zeppelin “IV) – The one sync to rule them all!
So James, if you happen to be in the neighborhood, check out the RS story by Evan Schlansky, see his post 2 comments down, or come by the web site – SyncMovies.com
Okay, I would probably keep typing for the rest of the night, but there’s a bowl of dank calling my name :)
Stay cool all you cats and kittens!
Mr. James Greene Jr! I really enjoyed this piece. Please do write more. It was the first thing I wanted to read on Wolfgang’s Vault’s Crawdaddy.
I can’t locate it now but I really thought someone gave credit to being the first to write about it the discovery of the Oz/Floyd synch-up – I found it online years ago and believe it was a scan to a magazine article. In the piece, Waters denied any connection but there was always that question that they were rich enough to have projected films in those days – plus the amount of time going into recording an album. This was before videotapes. And no drugs were mentioned.
After that I would say that I first heard of this from a New York D.J. on the radio – back before the classic rock disappeared and has since returned – so about 9 years ago at least.
When I tried the Oz/Floyd synch-up I found some similarities but not enough to tell my classic rock friends – I became puzzled what to do when the movie was longer than the album – and I began to empathize your futility to it all as I considered just restarting the album. Maybe every movie is secretly matched up to the Alan Parsons Project or 10cc? :)
I would think a film with a lot of cutting would be interesting to try with this – I wonder what The Fifth Element would be like?
I’m glad so many of you enjoyed this piece. Thank you for all the kind words.
Someone with time and weed on hand should see what THE BEATLES aka “The White Album” synch’s up with….Yellow Submarine ?
Will smeeone please hand me my vintage Koss headphones while I slip the needle into the first groove of my vinyl copy of “Dark Side…”I am just gonna lay back here, close my eyes and take it all in…
I edited Dark Side of the Moon to the 6 Star Wars movies. When I saw this article I almost thought someone had borrowed my idea. What you did was hilarious. I think you should try using the 1812 overture with a movie or In-a-Gada-da-vita.
Star Wars is for 8 year olds and fatasses who live with their parents.
honestly the dark side of the moon with wizard of oz is kind of amazing. but we also did some songs off the queen of the damned soundtrack with the end of harry potter, and it went together to well. (and theres no way anyone did this on purpose, the two are two different) so yeah i agree it can be done with any combination of music and movie. but sometimes the syncs are really cool.
Google/Youtube on “the golden mean” which is a ratio that can be found repeating endlessly in nature, especially in things considered beautiful. Also check out the fibonnaci number series. Hermes Trismegistos: “As Above, So, Below” – THE FIRST LAW.
Thanks for a fun read, James. The
“Dark Side Of The Moon”-”Wizard Of Oz” connection, while highly amusing, is ultimately just another urban legend which likely originated during a late-night smokeathon in some anonymous rec-room in suburban America. “The Wizard Of Oz” is plenty weird enough on it’s own, without drawing any external elements into the mix. Salmon Rushdie wrote a brilliant essay on the film, “Out Of Kansas”, which appears in the collection, “Step Across This Line”.
If you want to check out a great movie/soundtrack combo, try “Sorceror”, with it’s dark and brooding “Tangerine Dream” supplied soundscape…Now that’s mind-blowing!