Happy 30th Anniversary to The Crow Soundtrack, originally released March 29, 1994.
James O’Barr had lived a hard life. Born in Detroit in the ’60s, he was raised in orphanages until the age of seven, when he was finally adopted. But it wasn’t a happy ending. “That was an even worse time,” he says. To escape a childhood of abuse and neglect, O’Barr became an avid reader, retreating into a world of fantasy. Soon, he began writing and drawing to express his inner world. He’d attend comic book conventions, where he eventually met an artist named Vaughn Bode. “[He] was the first one to ever give me really positive feedback on my stuff,” O’Barr recalls. “The way he portrayed violence, and just the way he laid out the scene, was really influential to me.”
So O’Barr continued to draw and write and retreat into himself until the age of 16, when he met a girl. Suddenly, it was as though the sun had come out. “Up until that point, my life kinda felt like an endurance test,” he remembers. “And I felt like I finally got to the end of it. Good things were finally gonna start happening to me.”
They dated for three years and eventually got engaged, planning to marry after they graduated high school. But then, only a couple weeks before her 18th birthday, the girl was killed by a drunk driver. O’Barr was gut-punched. He didn’t know what to do with himself, never mind all the anger and frustration, self-destructive urges, and his white-hot rage at God.
So he did what he’d always done to work through his feelings, which was to write and draw. Soon, because he didn’t know what else to do, O’Barr joined the military, mostly just so he wouldn’t have to make any decisions. The Marines promptly shipped him off to Berlin. “And basically that’s where I came up with the idea [for The Crow] when I was over there,” he says. The process of writing the book was excruciating, like picking at a raw wound, and O’Barr poured his loss into the tale of his alter-ego, Eric Draven, who comes back from the dead and, with the help of a crow, avenges the murder of his fiancé.
In the Spring of 1994, I was milling around outside the base movie theater waiting for my friends Shana and Shawntel to show up. I still remember the outfit I was wearing: a black baby tee, a dusty-rose slip dress, a burgundy suede coat, and velvet Chinese slippers. I was also wearing a pound of black eyeliner and dark lipstick, Revlon Black Cherry. I had chosen it all, quite deliberately, for its gothness. The evening was warm, with a hint of summer flirting at the edges, but I’d brought the jacket so I wouldn’t freeze in the theater’s arctic air conditioning.
A teenage army brat stuck on an American army base in post-Cold War Germany, I was living a life probably not all that different from James O’Barr when he was in the Marines—seeing movies in the same kind of utilitarian, government-issue theaters with disgustingly sticky floors. I’d never heard of The Crow until recently, but Shana, Shawntel, and I liked to go dancing at a dungeon-y nightclub downtown Heidelberg called The Blue Fish (the drinking age in Germany was 16), and it was one of those spots where they played Joy Division, all the guys looked like Robert Smith, and one of the patrons wore a pet rat on her shoulder. So I guess we just figured that The Crow might be our kind of movie.
In the states, MTV had been promoting the film and its soundtrack on Alternative Nation to teenage Gen Xers of likeminded goth-adjacent persuasion. Sporting a vinyl bikini and matching miniskirt, veejay Kennedy spoke about The Crow’s heart-wrenching tragedy: “You may remember the publicity that occurred during the filming of the movie, because, unfortunately, there was a terrible accident and the star Brandon Lee, who’s the son of Bruce Lee, was accidentally killed during one of the scenes,” she said.
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In other words, the movie based on O’Barr’s comic book, which was created to exorcise a tragedy, had ended up begetting more tragedy when Brandon Lee—mere weeks from his own wedding—was accidentally shot and killed during the filming. Because the movie hadn’t wrapped before Lee died, director Alex Proyas had taken great care to adapt the film to preserve Lee’s hard work and deep commitment to the character. It had been Lee’s first—and only—film in a lead role.
Though I’d never read O’Barr’s comic book, I was aware of the tragedy surrounding the film, which is why I’d applied reverence in dressing up to go see the movie in that crappy army-base theater; I’d been moved by a funereal spirit. In other locales, people showed up to theaters dressed in full-on Crow regalia. In Philadelphia, Rochelle Davis, who played skateboarding tween Sarah in the movie, was touched by how entire rows of fans had come decked out like the Crow. “I mean, they put all this time into making their costumes before they even saw the movie,” she told Bridget Baiss in her book The Crow: The Story Behind The Film. “They were totally into it.”
The Crow would become a box-office success, perhaps because it arrived at just the right time. “If 1991 was the year punk broke, 1994 was the year goth broke,” observed Daphne Carr in her 2011 book on Nine Inch Nails. “With the release of The Downward Spiral; Marilyn Manson’s first album, Portrait of an American Family; and the films Interview with the Vampire and The Crow, mainstream depictions of goth peaked.” But, in the case of The Crow, it had been a long road from underground comic book to Hollywood blockbuster.
After James O’Barr’s tour of duty in Berlin was over, he returned to Detroit and began working in an auto repair shop, while continuing to work on The Crow in his spare time. But the process was painful, and so he eventually decided to just pitch what he already had to publishers. The response was lackluster. So he gave up on it for a while. However, a couple years later he began hanging out at a local comic-book store. One day, the owner Gary Reed asked O’Barr if he’d done any comic strips, and O’Barr showed him The Crow. Reed loved it, and thus Caliber Comics was born. O’Barr had finally found a publisher.
Despite its limited distribution, The Crow’s first issue sold surprisingly well. O’Barr was a fan of rock ‘n’ roll, and he’d begun to appreciate a goth element while getting into bands like Bauhaus in Berlin. Hence, in The Crow, he quotes from The Cure and punk poet Jim Carroll, and he even dedicated the first issue to Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. Maybe, O’Barr figured, it was this “alternative” element that was attracting The Crow’s underground readership.
Eventually, as Caliber Comics began to experience hardship, in 1989 O’Barr found another publisher called Tundra, which published all four books of The Crow, and O’Barr was able to complete the story with Eric Draven finally avenging the murder. Selling 80,000 copies, the comic became the bestselling story in Tundra’s history.
After all these years, O’Barr is now uncertain as to how The Crow began its initial flirtation with Hollywood—after all, there was interest from a few different directions. What matters, though, is that an aspiring producer Jeff Most and his friend, a novelist named John Shirley, had been struck by the idea to turn The Crow into a film. Most and Shirley would play a key role in bringing The Crow to a mass audience.
Shirley would end up penning the first screenplay of The Crow, and Most would become its producer. But before that, they’d noticed that Hollywood studios were becoming increasingly interested in comics as films—at that point Batman and Dick Tracy were in production—and they’d heard about The Crow when pitching their own comic to O’Barr’s publisher and hearing that The Crow was already too similar. For Most, who was a huge music fan, The Crow resonated because its apocalyptic Detroit backdrop reminded him of his native Lower East Side.
Most and Shirley optioned The Crow for two years, and Most pedaled his vision of The Crow-as-film all over Hollywood. Eventually, he sparked interest in Pressman Films. Most and Shirley then put together a ‘treatment’ (an outline that details the characters and the narrative). With only a couple months left on their option with James O’Barr, Most and Shirley’s third-draft treatment was accepted by Pressman Films.
In the search for a director, everyone agreed that they wanted a strong visual storyteller, so Alex Proyas was chosen. Though The Crow would be Proyas’ first film, he’d directed music videos for INXS, Sting, and Fleetwood Mac, as well as commercials. He was particularly adept at capturing desaturated shade and light, perfect for The Crow’s gothic moodiness.
After running into creative differences with some of the film’s principals, John Shirley was replaced by another writer named David Schow, a weird dude who took “goth” to the extreme by wearing swastikas and skulls as jewelry, but who came up with compelling ideas like putting the villain Top Dollar in an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Myca. Around this time, Brandon Lee was signed onto the lead role. Though several names had been kicked around—Johnny Depp, River Phoenix, Christian Slater—Lee was chosen for his ability to play tough and sensitive in a hypnotic way. The son of Bruce Lee, he also had a balletic grace that the comic book character displayed through distinctive tumbles and pirouettes.
The Crow was not a big-budget film by Hollywood standards. Which is why instead of filming in Los Angeles, the movie moved to Wilmington, NC, which had become an oft-chosen spot for making movies on the cheap due to an entire full-service movie studio, Carolco Pictures, in the beach town. The entire “Detroit” set for The Crow was built on Carolco’s back lot, where it was doused with constant “rain” and a flock of trained crows would fly through the mist. The producers even managed to find a local artist to create hyper-realistic miniatures, which would stand in for the crumbling buildings in the movie’s many “bird’s eye view” flight scenes.
Though it’s commendable how much ingenuity The Crow’s team showed in finding ways around a tight budget, it was possibly the film’s low budget paired with the exhaustion of long hours that contributed to Lee’s death. The gun used in the scene where Eric Draven is killed by Top Dollar’s thugs hadn’t been cleaned from one scene to the next, and a tip from a dummy bullet had gotten stuck in the barrel. When the blank was fired, the bullet tip dislodged, ending up in Lee’s abdomen. He died in the hospital.
Everyone involved in the movie was devastated, and filming ceased. It was only after Lee’s mother and fiancé agreed that all of Lee’s hard work should be showcased that Proyas went about finding ways to re-imagine the film. Some of this creativity involved having Lee’s friend Chad Stahelski, who’d often worked out with the actor and understood his movements, serving as a body double. It also involved superimposing Lee’s face in scenes he’d never appeared in. For instance, when Eric Draven angrily breaks a mirror and applies the Crow’s makeup, Lee’s face was lifted from another scene and carefully copied onto each shard. At the end of this excruciating process, The Crow found a distributor in Miramax.
For producer Jeff Most, part of paying tribute to Lee involved ensuring that The Crow’s soundtrack was as badass as possible. “Brandon took a great interest in the music—he would come into my office and say, ‘What have you gotten in?’ Most recalls. “Music was certainly something he knew.” So, Most threw himself into finishing the carefully curated soundtrack.
“I wanted every song in the movie to be original, unreleased, born of the film,” Most told MTV. “I was considered a crackpot for doing that at the time. Soundtracks were made up of hits, regurgitated Top 40 collections. And the songs that were done for the film were not, at the time, the kinds of songs that were put out as singles. I wanted to create this world on camera and with the music in the film.”
The album opens with the Cure’s dark, smoldering “Burn”—Every night I burn, every night I call your name. The band had originally planned to contribute “The Hanging Garden” because its lyrics had appeared in the comic book, but Robert Smith dug the story so much that he decided to record an original song instead. The band was in flux at that point, and so Smith and drummer Boris Williams created it on their own. "I had the idea, and we just recorded it, me and him, in the studio," Smith told Radio 105.4.
The clanking, atmospheric “Golgotha Tenement Blues” by Machines of Loving Grace was also composed specifically for the soundtrack. “We were familiar with the director and the comic, and we actually got to see the screenplay a year before the thing was even filmed. We tried to sort of match the mood,” said keyboardist Mike Fisher.
Stone Temple Pilots’ bluesy “Big Empty” appeared on the album as a replacement for their original contribution, a song called “Only Dying.” After Lee’s death, “a darkly satiric song mocking death," as Most deemed it, wasn’t exactly appropriate. STP would end up releasing it in 2017, on the 25th anniversary reissue of Core.
A Joy Division cover, Nine Inch Nails’ “Dead Souls” appears in a scene where The Crow is brooding over his revenge. “I was a fan of the comic book before I heard there was a film being made,” Trent Reznor told MTV. Reznor recorded it as the very first song in the Sharon Tate house prior to working on The Downward Spiral (1994).
Rage Against The Machine’s bombastic “Darkness” first appeared on their 1991 demo tape. But even before that, it was a staple of Zack de la Rocha’s previous hardcore band Inside Out. In contrast, the slow, psychedelic “Color Me Once” by Violent Femmes was described, colorfully, by bassist Brian Ritchie as “an ethereal sort of musical extravaganza.”
Rollins Band’s Doors-influenced “Ghostrider” was first recorded in 1987 for Henry Rollins’ solo album, a cover of a 1977 song by the punk band Suicide. Meanwhile, Helmet’s stuttering “Milktoast” appeared on The Crow soundtrack before it was re-worked for the band’s 1994 album Betty. And then, for its contribution, Pantera covered the 1990 track “The Badge” by hardcore band Poison Idea.
“I think we were the only band on that soundtrack where nobody knew who we were,” said Mike Lewis of For Love Not Lisa. But the band’s careening, staccato anthem “Slip Slide Melting” would end up being a highlight of their career. “We were thinking, ‘OK, crappy kung-fu movie nobody will ever see.’ But after we saw some of the storyboards, we were like, ‘Wow, this movie is like a dark version of Batman.’”
My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult would end up performing their frenetic “After the Flesh” in a nightclub scene in a Wilmington cement factory. “It was really, I would say, it was about twenty degrees in there because it was cold and damp because it was so cold outside,” remembers Buzz McCoy. They wrote the song quickly prior to appearing in The Crow and recorded it in a Christian recording studio.
The Jesus and Mary Chain’s seductive “Snakedriver” was written for The Crow, though it appeared first on their 1993 compilation The Sound of Speed. “They had asked us for a song and we went into our studio and messed around with a couple of possible ideas, and this one worked out the best,” they told MTV. Meanwhile, Medicine’s “Time Baby III” was performed in another Crow club scene as “Time Baby II,” but was reworked by Cocteau Twins for the album version. “We sent it to the Cocteau Twins and they finished it up and that came out really, really nice,” said Medicine’s Brad Laner.
Jane Siberry’s ethereal “It Can’t Rain All The Time,” written with Graeme Revell who scored the film, was supposed to have been written in the movie by Eric Draven and his fictional band Hangman’s Joke. It concludes the soundtrack, somewhat sadly, as The Crow’s melancholy theme song.
Although The Crow has become a beloved cult film, even spawning a few sequels, director Alex Proyas made headlines this month admonishing a remake starring Bill Skarsgård that’s currently in the works. "The Crow is not just a movie," Proyas said. "Brandon Lee died making it, and it was finished as a testament to his lost brilliance and tragic loss. It is his legacy. That's how it should remain."
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