Far Out There: Character Sountrack - Skye

Okay, of all the characters in Far Out There, Skye’s character soundtrack should be the most obvious, right? She’s a hippy chick who travels around with a space-van full of Jesus Freaks. Heck, we’ve actually SEEN her playing guitar on numerous occasions. Obviously she listens to psychedelic jam band rock, right? Well… yes, of course she does. It’s physically not possible for me to have chosen anything else. HOWEVER, we now find ourselves faced with a problem that’s basically the opposite of the previous few soundtracks. With those, I tried to compile a playlist out of genres I don’t really listen to all that often, and therefore my picks weren’t quite the educated choices I’d have liked. This time, I know way too MUCH about the genre at hand, and wound up drastically over-thinking everything. Sure, Skye likes guitar-heavy psychedelic rock, but WHAT KIND? Jimi Hendrix-style blues/funk? Jimmy Page-esque stadium rocking riffs? Jerry Garcia’s aimless noodling? Whatever the heck you call the noises Syd Barrett made? Eric Clapton’s …Clapton-ness? Frank Zappa just for the sake of throwing everyone for a loop? At one point or another, I threw just about all of them at Skye’s playlist just to see what stuck (except for Zappa), and to my surprise, NONE of them ended up emerging as Skye’s designated guitar hero.

Jimi Hendrix seemed like the obvious choice at the start. I don’t know about you, but when you tell ME the words “psychedelic guitar wizard,” Hendrix is who immediately appears in my mind. However, despite throwing classics like “Purple Haze,” “All Along The Watchtower”, and “Fire” onto the playlist, the more I tinkered with it, the more they just didn’t seem to fit. For the most part, the trademark Hendrix style just seemed too… lively, I think is the word? Flamboyant, maybe? Between playing really fast or really funky, I just couldn’t picture most of Jimi’s biggest songs jibing with Skye’s personality. She wouldn’t like songs to set your guitar on fire to, she’d just want something to zone out, kick back and get… TOTALLY NOT HIGHT BECAUSE OUR SKYE IS A PURE AND UPRIGHT SOUL WHO WOULD NEVER ENGAGE IN SUCH VICES. But yeah, eventually all but one Hendrix song fell off the playlist, and then that lone straggler… well, I’ll get back to that. I had the same issue with most of the obvious Led Zeppelin songs, stuff like “Dazed and Confused” or “Whole Lotta Love” were just too forceful for the vague and nebulous Skye mood, and eventually only one Zeppelin track remained, and it’s NOT an obvious choice. The Grateful Dead, on the other hand, went a bit too far in the opposite direction. They may be the patron saints of jam bands, but I just couldn’t picture Skye enjoying any band as prone to flaunting blatant bluegrass influences as Garcia & Co. She still wants loud, straight ahead rock and roll, just the kind that washes over you in a constant wave of sound, not weird labyrinthine pickin’.  Clapton managed to stick around longer, with both “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Crossroads” by Cream sticking around to the final draft, the latter of which probably being the most aggressive song on the list, yet somehow JUST managing to slip into that loud yet relaxed Skye groove through the magic of ol’ Slowhand. And there’s also a third song… which again, I’ll revisit in a bit. Still, Clapton may be God, but he didn’t come out as Skye’s guitar god. As for Barrett and Zappa, yeah they were never under serious consideration, aside from VERY briefly trying out Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive.” Skye’s just too straightforward for anything that weird.

So who won out in the end? If not even the almighty Clapton can snag the coveted “Skye’s favorite guitar player” title, who did? I kind of stumbled into it backwards when I threw in “Woodstock” by Crosby Stills Nash & Young, because a futuristic space hippy would have a song about Woodstock somewhere on her soundtrack. Even though the primary gunslinger on that song is Steven Still, at some point listening to “Woodstock” reminded me that I hadn’t tried any Neil Young songs out for this playlist. And that was it, that’s Skye’s musical spirit animal: Neil Young. Not as technically proficient as Clapton, not as flashy as Page, not as weird as Hendrix… actually, I should rephrase that, because even a cursory glance at the discography of Neil Young reveals he’s a VERY weird dude, but it’s a different kind of weird. A more… straightforward weird, if that makes any sense. Your average Neil Young song, even the especially long ones, are about as all the compositional complexity as a three minute CCR single: four chords or less, simple basic rhythm played at simple basic tempo, recognizable country/rock melodic structure, and relatively unpretentious production aside from the occasional wall of distortion and feedback. It’s just plain ol’ rock & roll that occasionally forgets to end for about eight minutes, and, really, that’s a perfect fit for Skye.  For someone who flies around space with a van full of hippy preachers and is a super-secret master saboteur and has a frickin’ x-ray eye, Skye is really one of the most straight forward characters in Far Out There. In a cast full of quirky weirdoes and neurotic maniacs and airheaded clowns and just generally strange people, Skye’s one of the few who just does her thing and doesn’t make a big scene. I mean, sure, her profession demands a certain level of anonymity to avoid detection, but she’d probably avoid attracting attention anyway, just because that’s how easygoing she is. So, of COURSE Skye would like simple, no-frills songs where she can just drift away in a wave of distortion for ten minutes.

And just what ARE those songs? Well, for all my bigging him up, there’s actually just two solo Neil Young songs on Skye’s playlist: “Cinnamon Girl” and “Cowgirl In The Sand,” both off of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. I wanted to squeeze in one or two more (“Cortez The Killer” was very much a front runner) but time was really becoming a problem and I just couldn’t fit any more tracks in. This is actually one of the most deceptively long character playlists of the entire set, it LOOKS the shortest, but on average the tracks are each twice as long as the ones on everybody else’s. Ol’ Neil is still all over the place, even if he’s not the credited artist. Aside from “Woodstock,” CSN&Y also represent with “Almost Cut My Hair,” which is a David Crosby composition and therefore has more jazz/Indian chord changes than the rest of the playlist put together, but the loud yet deliberate atmosphere still fits in with Young’s solo stuff perfectly well. Even more so the Crosby solo track “Cowboy Movie,” which really has about as much involvement from the other members of CSN&Y as any official group track. Honestly, it’s just sounds like a Neil Young song with a guest vocalist.

With that precedent set, the rest of the soundtrack finally coalesced pretty quickly. More modest-temo, solo-heavy rockers took over, like “Theme From An Imaginary Western” by Mountain, “Dear Mr. Fantasy” by Traffic “, and Bluebird” by The James Gang (a Buffalo Springfield cover, just to keep the Neil Young connections going). “Whipping Post” by The Allman Brothers stuck around from the earliest drafts to, which stands alongside “Crossroads” as a song that’s probably too fast to fit that mood I just spent a paragraph describing, but it just works because I said it does so NYAAAH. The lone Led Zeppelin song to make the final list is “In My Time Of Dying,” but it’s also the band’s longest studio recording, so you can’t say they don’t make the most of it. And that one Jimi Hendrix song… okay, there’s a story to be told here.

For the longest time, the one Hendrix song that stuck around on Skye’s soundtrack was “Little Wing.” It’s a nice, easygoing jam that’s honestly always been one of my favorites of his, and seemed to fit Skye’s tastes perfectly. As time went on, however, I found myself struggling with whether or not I should replace the original version with the cover by Derek & The Dominos, the Eric Clapton/Duane Allman collaboration most people know for recording “Layla” (and yes, that’s what she’s named after). Personally, I prefer the smooth, spacy feel of Jimi’s original version over the cover, but I couldn’t help wondering if SKYE would actually prefer the more ragged, ramshackle qualities of the remake instead. And then YouTube went and made the decision for me. I know, I don’t usually bring up the YouTube stuff until a note at the end of the blog, but in this case it really did affect the final song choice, because once I started looking around to make the online versions of the playlist, I discovered that the Jimi Hendrix version of “Little Wing” just plain doesn’t exist on YouTube. I mean, it might if you’re not a North American user, but for me the song is straight up scrubbed from the site. I’ve always heard that the Hendrix estate are control freaks about his songs, and given the way he got screwed over and exploited in the past, I see where they’re coming from, but I was still kind of shocked to discover first hand just how little Jimi Hendrix stuff officially exists on YouTube. Long story short, I couldn’t have put the original version on the playlist even if I’d wanted to, so Derek & The Dominos won by default. And yes, in retrospect is really IS the one Skye would like better, even if I don’t. And that’s what this is all about, right? Me bending my own will to the wants and desires of fictional people that don’t actually exist? That’s not crazy, right? Right?

Oh, and I should probably address a major omission of Skye’s soundtrack: the absence of any Christian rock. If your awareness of contemporary Christian music only goes back as far as the late 80s, when it first brushed up against the mainstream, then it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this middle-of-the-road pop wouldn’t appeal too much to a hippy chick like Skye, but it really does go a lot further back than that. I mean, I didn’t make up the whole “Jesus Freak” thing, there really was a whole subculture of post-psychedelic weirdoes getting religious and making some of the weirdest Christian music you’ll ever hear. Why didn’t I load Skye’s soundtrack up with that stuff? Nothing too mindblowing in the reason, I just don’t like any of it enough to actually use here. Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) is as true for various subgenres of rock as it is for everything else, and as much as I personally get a kick out of ‘60s rock, a LOT of it isn’t objectively very good. It’s already a chore to weed out the unambiguously great stuff from the sheer amount of jam band stuff that’s just indulgent and boring, and when you add the handicap of only choosing from artists who belong to a very specific demographic to an already very specific set of genre restriction, that just makes finding something truly good even harder. Even the generally acknowledged best guitarist of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s Jesus Freak bands, Phil Keaggy, was in a band that was “alright” at best. Glass Harp (said band) didn’t suck, but I say that in the same way I’d say that Grand Funk Railroad didn’t suck as bad as a lot of rock snobs insist. Even if they don’t outright suck, I still wouldn’t put them on the same playlist as Cream or Led Zeppelin, and even if Skye would listen to them for fun, I doubt she’d ever use them as one of the handful of songs that represent her musically. Besides, “In My Time Of Dying” mentions Jesus, like, fifty times. That should be enough old time religion for one playlist, right?

(So, yeah, I kind of blew the big Behind The Scenes story up there in the main body of the blog: me not being able to find an official posting of the studio version of “Little Wing.” I have to specify that it’s the official studio version recorded for Axis: Bold as Love that’s not on YouTube, though. There’s PLENTY of videos of Jimi Hendrix performing Little Wing live, and THAT’S probably the other biggest tale of Skye’s playlist. By putting together a playlist full of songs by artists known for their live jamming, I wound up having to wade through TONS of live clips, especially if the artist in question is still alive and active. I wish I’d counted just how many live versions of “Cinnamon Girl” I had to scroll past before I finally found a fan posting of the original recording, ‘cos it was a lot. Heck, I found a posting of the Prince song of the same name before I found a posting of the Neil Young song that I could use, and Prince was even more aggressively anti-YouTube than Hendrix’s family!)

Skye's YouTube Playlist