Outstanding Music Soundtracks: Part 4
“Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” — 1973
“Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” is a pretty difficult film to enjoy. It is a mishmash of well-trodden but not very well-defined or relevant cowboy scenes leading to the killing of Billy (Kris Kristofferson) by a former friend, now sheriff, Garrett (played with his usual brilliance by James Coburn).
Thankfully, the music — Bob Dylan’s only actual soundtrack — is something of a masterpiece, if a generally forgotten one.
The film is revisionist Hollywood: it came out in that era when Westerns were no longer about clean-cut white men and put-upon honest women taming the West for the good of all. Instead, it is scruffy, unwashed drinking-and-whoring men and women living an essentially lawless, anarchic existence.
The album mirrors this revisionism. It has a Mexican lilt in many places (fitting with the New Mexico locale), with Dylan banging out his best harmonica amid references to guns, death, señoritas, and haciendas.
Much of it is dreamily instrumental, exemplified by “Cantina Theme (Workin’ for the Law)” with its catchy background bongos. “Bunkhouse Theme” is another instrumental that brilliantly captures the ethos of this kind of West, where people hang around waiting for something to happen.
