Happy 30th Anniversary to the Pulp Fiction Soundtrack, originally released September 27, 1994.
“I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove.” – Rob Sheffield, Love Is A Mix Tape
A couple sits in a booth in an old-fashioned diner, arguing affectionately over whether or not they’re going to do one more robbery. After considerable back and forth, they finally decide that they’ll rob this very restaurant—right now, right here—cleaning out not only the register but the other patrons’ wallets. They kiss wetly and sloppily in closeup. “I love you, Pumpkin,” the woman says. “I love you, Honey Bunny,” the man says. And before you can say Denver omelet, they spring to action, guns drawn with the woman screeching, “Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfucking last one of you!”
The action freezes, and raucous surf music roars onto the screen. “Having ‘Misirlou’ as your opening credits, it’s just so intense, you know?” mused director Quentin Tarantino in a bonus-CD interview for the 2002 collector’s edition of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. “It just says you’re watching an epic, you’re watching this big ol’ movie—just sit back.” “Misirlou” managed to achieve just that—it would eventually come to be known informally as “The Pulp Fiction Song,” while the entire Pulp Fiction soundtrack would come to be known as a compendium of bygone-era cool that also somehow seemed very new and very fresh, and very much of the ’90s. A whole new groove.
At this brief juncture in the film, after Pumpkin and Honey Bunny’s cozy yet sociopathic diner scene, it wouldn’t be farfetched to think that this movie might end up following the same formula as two of Tarantino’s preceding early-’90s projects—True Romance and Natural Born Killers—by following a pair of outlaw lovers on yet another cross-country crime spree. But just as we begin to get lost in Dick Dale & His Del-Tones’ spiraling, labyrinthine “Miserlou,” the song abruptly stops amid radio static and a changing of the channels.
Now, we’re on a totally different wavelength: the bad-motherfucker bounce and swagger of Kool & The Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” and suddenly we’re in a car with a very sleazy-looking John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson with a Jheri curl. Both wearing black suits. Well, now maybe we’re in some new version of Reservoir Dogs.
This early-movie staticky switching of the channels—and the abrupt switching of scenes and signifiers—brings to mind “the radio tape,” one of the many subcategories of mix tape that music journalist Rob Sheffield catalogues in his 2007 memoir Love Is A Mix Tape. “Back when people listened to the radio, you kept a tape handy in your boombox at all times so you could capture the hot new hits of the week,” he writes. “You also ended up with static, commercials, and jingles, but all that noise just added to the field-recording verisimilitude. The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs.”
This is no mere accident, or charming coincidence. Tarantino was very aware of taking a mix-tape approach to his soundtrack and to Pulp Fiction itself, which combines three different storylines and several different film genres (the spaghetti Western, the Blaxploitation film, Deliverance—to name just a few). In fact, the music typically comes first when Tarantino begins his screenwriting process.
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“One of the things I do when I’m starting a movie is I’ll go through my record collection and just start playing songs. Trying to, like, basically find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie,” he says. “And then boom! I’ll eventually hit one, two, three songs. You know, one song in particular—‘Oh, this would be a great opening credit song.’ Cause to me, the opening credits are very important; that’s like the only mood time that most movies give themselves.” And the mood of Pulp Fiction, with its abrupt switch from zigzagging surf rock to strutting funk, is something eclectic yet also curiously nuanced.
Unlike Tarantino’s directorial debut Reservoir Dogs, where every piece of music was source music—a character would turn on the radio and suddenly you’d hear “Stuck in the Middle With You”—Pulp Fiction employs some of Tarantino’s favorite songs as the film’s score. (The movie has no traditional score whatsoever.) For example, as John Travolta’s character Vincent Vega shoots heroin, The Centurians’ moody, broody “Bullwinkle Part II” plays over a slow montage of the needle filling with blood, and a blissed-out Vega cruising in his convertible to Mia Wallace’s house in Beverly Hills.
The overall sound of Pulp Fiction is ’60s surf music, presumably because it evokes an old-school California cool that pays tribute to Tarantino’s native Los Angeles, while simultaneously tipping its hat to the Wild West sensibility of the film’s criminals and outlaws. “I always really dug surf music a lot but the thing is, I never really quite understood what the hell it had to do with surfing,” admits Tarantino. “To me, it always sounded like rock ‘n’ roll spaghetti Western music.”
And just like “the radio tape” takes you back to another time and place (that moment, as Sheffield says, that you recorded each song on your boom box), Tarantino very purposely chose some nostalgic tunes—“Jungle Boogie” and Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”—from his own coming of age in the ’70s. It was his way of distinguishing Pulp Fiction as something almost defiantly generational. “It’s like people from the generation before don’t appreciate it—it’s like, ‘We had the ’60s,’ and they just wrote off everything as a joke in the ’70s,” Tarantino explains. “I think growing up in the ’70s gives you an appreciation for certain music that came out in the ’70s that nobody else on the planet has an appreciation for unless you grew up listening to it.”
I was born in the ’70s and remember very little from that decade, but I’m a member of Generation X—that generation who, while growing up, heard ad nauseum about how nothing was nearly as good as the ’60s. So something about the music of Pulp Fiction lights up an almost primitive part of my brain. As a small child, I remember moving to a Navy base in Rota, Spain, and the tall palm trees swaying in the salty breeze. I remember going to a laundromat with my young parents, and my dad putting me on one knee and my brother on the other as he hummed The Ventures’ “Apache,” faithfully replicating all the sound effects, while bouncing us wildly like we were the Lone Ranger and Tonto riding through the desert.
Later, as we morphed into teenagers and my parents into nostalgia-worshipping middle agers, early ’60s surf music—Dick Dale, the Beach Boys, the Ventures—was on every single one of my dad’s mix tapes. So my brother and I spent many a road trip enduring the Beach Blanket Bingo—or putting on our headphones in hopes that The Cure or the Beastie Boys might drown out “Surfin’ Safari.” But then Pulp Fiction made it all cool again.
To the point that Pulp Fiction has come to be known as Gen X’s definitive film (at least according to an Esquire poll.). It’s certainly at least one of them. As writer Michael Green points out in Senses of Cinema, “Gen X was the first self-consciously postmodern generation, hyper-aware of its place in history and obsessed with popular culture: the movies, television, music, fads and ads ever-proliferating in the age of mechanical and, increasingly, digital reproduction. Pulp Fiction didn’t define us so much as it revealed us, by dramatizing our sensibilities to the world.”
It was a film that took all of these seemingly disparate elements we had grown up with, and were coming of age or coming into our own with—our parents’ surf music, ’70s music, so many different movie genres that were right at our fingertips with the rise of the video store, John Travolta, ’50s nostalgia, the Jheri curl, body piercings (“Which one’s Jody? The one with all the shit in her face?”), ’90s heroin chic, and—in a meta twist—Tarantino’s own recent screenplays and films. And it made a mix tape out of all of it—a medium and an art form that, thanks to the boom box (cue a mental image of Radio Raheem), we were all intimately familiar with.
The Pulp Fiction soundtrack takes this movie-as-mix tape sensibility and replicates it by using snatches and snippets of the film’s dialog between songs. “We were trying to make it really fun and neat, and not just collection of songs,” says Tarantino. “Kind of give it a personality, like its own little mini offshoot of the movie where you get pieces of dialog. And hopefully the dialog is witty enough and interesting enough that you can hear it totally out of context and just enjoy it for that.”
The soundtrack begins where Pulp Fiction begins, with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, and then the wild stampede of Dick Dale & His Del-Tones’ “Misirlou.” Recorded in 1962, the song was a folk tune that originated in Greece, Turkey, and Armenia and made its way to the United States after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. Dick Dale, who was of Lebanese and Polish-Belorussian descent, was versed in Mediterranean and Arabian music, and translated the song he had heard his father and uncles playing on the oud—a lute instrument—for his Fender guitar. “Misirlou” became a staple of surf rock, and even the Beach Boys recorded their own version for Surfin’ USA the following year.
After “Misirlou,” we’re back in the car with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters Vincent and Jules in a dialog segment titled “Royale With Cheese,” where Vincent tells Jules about his recent trip to Amsterdam and “the little differences” between American and European life. The dialog is based on Tarantino’s own experiences in Amsterdam, where he wrote Pulp Fiction after falling in love with the city on the international festival circuit with Reservoir Dogs.
“I had this very cool writing existence,” Tarantino remembers. “Through luck and happenstance, I found an apartment to rent right off a canal. I would get up and walk around Amsterdam, and then drink like twelve cups of coffee, spending my entire morning writing.”
Jules and Vincent’s conversation is followed by the very funky “Jungle Boogie,” a track Tarantino chose largely for just how quintessentially ’70s it is. Besides appearing on Pulp Fiction, the song has lent its instantly recognizable swagger as a sample on records by everyone from Madonna to the Beastie Boys.
Keeping with the ’70s vibe, next up is Al Green’s slow and sensual “Let’s Stay Together,” which serves as a backdrop to the scene where Ving Rhames’ character Marsellus Wallace instructs Bruce Willis’ Butch Coolidge to take a fall in a boxing match. Tarantino chose it as a “hypnotic score” so that the viewer would be lulled by the long take of Bruce Willis listening to someone talking off screen. It also serves as foreshadowing—despite their contentious relationship, Butch does indeed stay with Marsellus Wallace, saving him whilst he’s being raped by a couple of hillbillies in a pawn shop. The use of sexy ’70s baby-makin’ music is highly ironic, considering that this is the scene where we first meet Marsellus Wallace, who “don’t like to be fucked by anybody but Mrs. Wallace.”
The soundtrack then brings us back to its surf-vibe backbone with The Tornados’ “Bustin’ Surfboards,” full of watery guitar and lapping-wave sound effects. The song plays as Rosanna Arquette’s excessively-pierced character Jody chatters about the benefits of a tongue stud for performing fellatio. Meanwhile, Ricky Nelson’s melancholy “Lonesome Town” lends some ’50s nostalgia, as Mia Wallace orders a $5 shake at the schlocky ’50s restaurant Jack Rabbit Slim’s.
The next track, Dusty Springfield’s smoky “Son of a Preacher Man” provides seductive suspense as Vincent—and we, the audience—waits for Mia Wallace to finish snorting coke and emerge downstairs after speaking to him on the intercom. "I'd had [that scene] in my head for six or seven years," Tarantino divulges, "and it always was scored to 'Son of a Preacher Man.'"
Another snippet of dialogue arrives—Butch on the hillbilly Zed’s chopper after he’s left him for dead with Marsellus Wallace—and then comes The Centurians’ “Bullwinkle Part II” full of soulful saxophone, which set it apart from most of the surf music of the era.
Then, we’re brought back to the twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim’s with Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell.” Berry penned the song, along with “Nadine” and “No Particular Place to Go,” while doing time in prison for allegedly bringing a 14-year-old girl across state lines to have sex with her. “You Never Can Tell” puts allegedly under a microscope, considering that the song’s opening line references “a teenage wedding.”
It's followed by “Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon,” Urge Overkill’s cover of the Neil Diamond classic. While living in Amsterdam, Tarantino found a used copy of the band’s 1992 Stull EP in a record store, and became obsessed with the track. So he ended up using it as the song Mia Wallace dances to right before she overdoses on the heroin she finds in Vincent’s jacket.
The song became one of the soundtrack’s biggest hits, catapulting Urge Overkill out of Chicago indie-band obscurity and turning them into a household name. “The thing is, our version [of the Neil Diamond song] is really so squishy. Everything’s a little out of tune. There’s no solid meter. The drums speed up and slow down,” says Urge Overkill’s Nash Kato. “Everything that was so wrong with that take became so right for that pivotal scene in the movie, where everything turns to shit.”
Another standout song, the Revels’ high-energy “Comanche” serves as the backdrop to the Deliverance-style rape scene in the pawn shop. Originally, Tarantino had planned to use The Knack’s “My Sharona” instead. “I thought this is just too funny not to use,” recalls Tarantino. “Apparently part of [The Knack] was for it, but one of the band members had become a born-again Christian or something and he just wasn’t interested.” So “My Sharona” went to Reality Bites (1994), and Tarantino went with “Comanche.” “You know, ‘Comanche’ still works the same,” he says. “It’s kind of funny, but it doesn’t break the scene.”
Closing out the album are The Statler Brother’s “Flowers on the Wall” and The Lively Ones’ “Surf Rider.” “Flowers on the Wall” is significant due to its lyrical reference to Captain Kangaroo, because we all know that Butch’s watch was left behind “on the little kangaroo” figurine on his nightstand. He sings it after killing Vincent, who’s been waiting to kill Butch in his apartment. And yet because Pulp Fiction doesn’t tell its three storylines in chronological order, “Surf Rider” plays as Vincent and Jules walk out of the diner into the sunlight, after successfully avoiding death at the hands of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. The song then takes us into the final credits.
The soundtrack, however, ends with Samuel L. Jackson’s impassioned “Ezekiel 25:17” monologue from the beginning of the movie, followed by a round of gunfire, the gunfire that somehow—like an act of divine intervention—missed killing Vincent and Jules, and makes Jules rethink his life as a criminal. The snippet adds a thoughtful, introspective twist to both the movie and the soundtrack, as though Tarantino is speaking to us directly, with one last dramatic little flourish.
“I make tapes. I’ve made tapes for friends of mine. And I make special tapes for special friends,” Tarantino said, reflecting later on the soundtrack. “And this has that feeling about it for me—this could easily be a Quentin tape.”
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