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Drummer Doug Clifford is best known for his work in the seminal band, Creedence Clearwater Revival. The group celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and as part of that, Craft Recordings released a remastered version of Clifford's 1972 album, Cosmo, along with Tom Fogerty's 1972 solo release, Excalibur. We were lucky enough to speak with Clifford about that release for Modern Vinyl, and also m...

In addition to his work in the pioneering New Wave band, the Waitresses, Chris Butler has worked for years as a musician and producer on such albums as Freedy Johnston's debut, The Trouble Tree. His most recent work, out next week on Smog Veil Records, is a collaboration with Tin Huey's Ralph Carney, entitled Songs For Unsung Holidays. It's Carney's last recordings before his death in December of...

On this episode, we continue our summer series, Your Favorite Soundtrack, where we talk to our favorite people about the soundtracks they love. Our third installment features Aaron Vehling, writer, podcaster, and synthwave expert, talking about the soundtrack to the 2011 Nicolas Wending Refn film, Drive.

On this episode, we continue off our summer series, Your Favorite Soundtrack, where we talk to our favorite people about the soundtracks they love. Our second installment features Charlie Brigden, freelance writer and film score expert, talking about John Williams' score to the 1980 Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back.

On this episode, we kick off our summer series, Your Favorite Soundtrack, where we talk to our favorite people about the soundtracks they love. Our first installment features Josh Robbins, bassist and vocalist for Charlotte, North Carolina's Late Bloomer, talking about Ken Higgins and James Calabrese's score to the 1986 horror movie, Spookies.

Loren not only appeared in Beach Blanket Bingo, Bikini Beach, and Muscle Beach Party, but the prolific '60s performer was the "Dr Pepper Girl," the featured singer on Shindig!, and guest-starred on both Batman and The Monkees. She left entertainment at the height of her fame in 1968 to start and raise a family, and while she recorded occasionally in the '80s, didn't return to music in a big way un...

Director Jenn Wexler's debut feature, The Ranger, is a fun but brutal movie about a bunch of punks who hole up in a cabin while on the lam, only to be stalked and killed by a psychotic park ranger. It's been getting a lot of acclaim from everyone I know who's seen it, so I reached out via Twitter, especially after reading a piece music supervisor Middagh Goodwin wrote for the Modesto View, running...

It took a while to set this up, but we were able to track down and talk with 4 Out of 5 Doctors' guitarist and singer, Cal Everett, about the band's appearance in The House on Sorority Row, as well as their history with another lesser-known horror film, The Boogeyman. It's probably our longest episode ever, but the conversation is pretty wonderful.

David DeCoteau's 1988 horror comedies, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and Nightmare Sisters, are notable for featuring the trio of '80s scream queens Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens, and Michelle Bauer. They're low-budget bits of craziness, loaded with bad jokes, buckets of blood, and copious nudity. Also in both films is actor Michael Sonye, better known as Dukey Flyswatter, frontman...

Back in February, Joel McHale made a triumphant return to making fun of TV clips with the show that's definitely not the Soup reloaded, but absolutely definitely is. The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale is on Netflix, and it's hilarious and kind of the way I kick off every week. Part of what makes the show so wonderful is the music which plays over the closing credits. Written and performed by co...

The Breakfast Club was written, directed, and produced by John Hughes and starred Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy as the titular kids brought together by Saturday detention in fictional Shermer, Illinois. The film's spawned memes, quotable lines, and just last week became the subject of a retrospective look in a New Yorker essay by Molly Ringwald,...

On this episode, we talk about the 1980 slasher classic, New Year's Evil, with Bobby Asea, bassist for Made In Japan. New Year's Evil is fairly amazing, because it's pretty nasty in terms of tone, but it also manages to be a really punk rock kind of film. It's thanks in no small part to the fact that two L.A. area bands, Shadow and Made In Japan, perform during the film's New Year's Eve TV special...

Artie Kane composed the music for over 250 television shows, conducted scores for 60 motion pictures, and had eight marriages and a career spanning over eight decades. At the end of last year, Kane released his memoirs, entitled Music To My Years: Life and Love Between the Notes. In the book, out now from Amphora Editions, the musician recounted his life in Hollywood and New York as a child prodig...

If there is a list of iconic '80s movie songs, Stan Bush's "The Touch" has to be be on it. Notably featured in 1986's Transformers animated movie, the song has made repeated appearances in any number of '80s homages, and its soaring opening lines are instantly memorable. However, while Bush is best known for that song, his work on the early Jean Claude Van Damme hits Kickboxer and Bloodsport, are...

On this episode, we're talking with April Wolfe, host of Switchblade Sisters, a podcast providing deep cuts on genre flicks from a female perspective. Every week, Wolfe -- former lead film critic for L.A. Weekly -- sits down with a phenomenal female film-maker to slice-and-dice a classic genre movie - horror, exploitation, sci-fi and many others! Along the way, they cover craft, the state of the i...

On this episode, we're talking with Franklin Fantini, host of Dollar Country, a podcast which primarily features country 45's that Franklin finds in dollar bins around the country. The show has everything from old hits to b-sides, common records to rarities, and everything between the most popular artists and private press junk. Franklin swung by my house to talk about his favorite soundtrack -- D...

he official music video for “Black Sheep” essentially takes the scene from the film and plays it out to the full length of the song, complete with Brie Larson vocals throughout — meaning this is an actual Clash at Demonhead video, not just a lip-synched performance to a Metric song. I mean, that’s the way it goes, right? There are all kinds of fake bands in movies, but rarely do you get a future O...

Following on the success of Troma's Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'Em High, Troma's War saw the independent studio taking on the action-adventure genre in their own way. Surprisingly well-reviewed, the movie doesn't quite have the following of the studio's tentpole franchises, but it's definitely an entertaining and inventive Tromatic view of the guns and glory films which were everywhere in the...

Scrooged always seems to get shunted to the side when we’re talking Christmas genre movies. Black Christmas and Gremlins always get the horror nods, in addition to Santa slashers like Silent Night, Deadly Night and Christmas Evil. The action advent selections are always Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, with maybe I Come In Peace for the heads. Romantic and family movies abound, obviously. However, with...

For whatever its flaws — and yes, there are many — the John Williams score for the film was stellar. The video for “Duel of the Fates” debuted on MTV’s Total Request Live on May 3, the first video of a week of premieres that included both “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears’ “Sometimes.” A cut from a film score getting a video is a pretty big deal: I mean, despite the fa...

Since 1981, the alternative rock band Soul Asylum has gone from a scrappy pack of dudes recording for Minneapolis label Twin/Tone to becoming a Grammy-winning, multi-platinum act. Along the way, the band's recorded music for all kinds of films. Most notably, Soul Asylum or its frontman, Dave Pirner, have had songs in three of director Kevin Smith's films, as well as So I Married An Axe Murderer, T...

The animated music video is absolutely bonkers -- basically an anime nightmare -- and this sentence from the Wikipedia entry on the song sums it up nicely: “It features the band performing in Gotham City, with Bono battling between two of his alter-egos from the Zoo TV Tour: ‘The Fly’ and ‘MacPhisto.’ The band also chases the Batwing, using a yellow supercar and their guitars as flamethrowers.”

The Bosstones celebrated the 20th anniversary of Let's Face It with a bunch of dates this year, and when I spoke with the band's frontman, Dicky Barrett, about their Lawrence show this summer, I took the opportunity to ask him about the Bosstones' appearance in Clueless, and how the club scene came to be.

Back when I discussed Phunk Junkeez and their contribution to the Tommy Boy soundtrack, I mentioned offhand that Goo Goo Dolls’ cover of The Damned’s “Wait for the Blackout” wasn’t bad. Being as how I’m always trying to track down weird-ass music videos for this column as well as look for bands to come on my soundtrack podcast and talk about how weird it was to have their song in a movie, I come a...

Shot in 1990 and unreleased until this very moment, Jungle Trap is the final collaboration between exploitation demigods James Bryan (DON’T GO IN THE WOODS) and the late Renee Harmon (FROZEN SCREAM). The movie is a decapitation-fueled, shot-on-video horror masterpiece about a jungle hotel haunted by kill-crazy ghosts in loin cloths. The movie remained unedited, unscored, and unseen by human eyes f...