Editor’s note: this article contains some spoilers for ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘Not Fade Away.’
The eighth episode of the ‘The Sopranos’ made me fall in love with the show. ‘The Legend of Tennessee Moltisante” opens with a brilliantly photographed dream sequence. The episode follows Christopher as he longs to be something more than just a mobster. It has some great bits (“where’s my arc?” - Christopher, “you know who had an ark? Noah” - Paulie) where Christopher sulks about his place in life. There are those moments in the series for everyone like this episode was for me, when you become aware that show has layers of depth and incites philosophical questioning.
What drove home my love for the episode was the closing sequence. Ecstatic that his name is finally in the paper, a mark of fame, Christopher speeds to a newspaper stand. Cake’s “Frank Sinatra” begins to play as Christopher, with excitement, finds his name and takes all of the copies. The song’s energy picks up as the credits roll.
At the time of watching this episode, I hadn’t heard the song in about a decade. In freshman year of high school, I listened to that and a few other Cake songs on repeat, but they had then been on the back burner of my mind until seeing this episode a decade later.
Something about this moment and choice of song struck as me creative and brilliant. From then on, I was hooked on ‘The Sopranos.’
The show is famous for its use of music. Creator David Chase supervised the choices, illuminating how influential music was on his own life. As he explained to Interview Magazine, “when I was doing ‘The Sopranos,’ I liked putting music together with the film; that was my favorite part of it.” Chase highlights many of the show’s song choices in an interview with Vice, but noting that, “you can’t just have cool songs. The songs can’t all be good, because life isn’t like that.”
Regardless, the show helped me discover a lot of great music in my mid 20s. The soundtrack is electric, diverse, and enunciates the show’s thematic moments. Like in “Tennessee Molisante,” Chase often paired the songs with an episode’s end.
A fantastic example is the use of “Thru and Thru” by The Rolling Stones in the finale of the second season. I’ve gotten into the Stones more as I’ve gotten older, but at the time didn’t know too much about them, particularly their later music. I was first surprised that the song was by The Stones given the unfamiliar vocal—Keith Richards sings lead. The song goes a few minutes without a single drum sound. After a brief double snare, the song still holds back.
Chase plays to “Thru and Thru”’s idiosyncratic elements with flare. The opening of the song binds together a montage of the character’s lives at the end of season two. As the camera transitions from Carmella to Tony, puffing a cigar, the shot cross-fades to sunset on the beach. The waves crash. And then, as the credits come in, the drums finally drop.
David Chase’s affinity for The Rolling Stones and classic rock is on full display in his first feature film, ‘Not Fade Away,’ released 10 years ago this month. The film opens with a reenactment of a young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reconnecting on a train—they exchange small talk but the scene is an implicit foreshadowing of the band to come. We then transition to New Jersey, where a young man inspects a drum set through a suburban shop window. The narrator—our lead character’s sister—lets us know that “a couple years after that meeting on the train, my brother and his friends also started a band…like with most bands, you’ve never heard of them.”
Somewhat based on David Chase’s own life (his love for the music and time as a drummer, but not a full-fledged vocation), upbringing, and relationship with his father, the film follows an adolescent’s dream of being rock musician in the 1960s—the band, local and unpolished at first, comes close to putting in the time to transition to a signed act. For various reasons, they never do. They fizzle out, and the main character heads west for film school. “I like the idea of putting music together with film images,” the main character Douglas says.
The cultural milieu of the 60s and the birth of rock and roll serves as the backdrop for the film and the impetus for the development of its characters. David Chase reflects on how this setting influenced his life in an interview, “That music came of age at the same time I was…once Dylan came in and The Stones and The Beatles and people like that, it began to take on adult themes. And it began to look like art. A-R-T, it was a strange feeling, and I thought, well, maybe I could do something creative.”
Chase expands on these thoughts in his conversation with Interview Magazine:
“When I was growing up, they take you to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and you look at all these paintings and you go, ‘Oh, that’s really amazing.’ And you talk and chew gum and try to, you know, dump on the field trip. You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That’s called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of The Beatles, The Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people. Once the subject matter of rock-‘n’-roll changed from cars and pop love songs to songs about really true love and the blues and death and mortality, this light bulb went off in my head and I went, ‘Oh, that’s what they’re doing. That’s kind of—that’s art.’ It deals with the big subjects. Maybe I could do that. Maybe I could be an artist.”
‘Not Fade Away’ (2012). Image via NPR.
Television clips from The Twilight Zone and performances from variety shows like The Hollywood Palace are intercut with daily lives of the characters. These teenagers experience a cultural explosion in real time. This environment leads to a shift in demeanor, style, and life outlook in the main character Douglas, played by John Magaro, and draws pushback from his father, in a fine performance by James Gandolifni. Douglas goes from drummer to lead, dates his old high-school crush, and wears Cuban boots, all with dreams of being a major rock and roll artist. As the band finds near success and then teeters off, Douglas’s growing interest in film becomes his new path. His father, dealing with health issues of his own, grows more supportive and their bond survives Douglas’s rocky adolescent years. As he hitchhikes in Hollywood at the end of the film, it is clear that Douglas is in a new chapter of his life. Rock and roll remains an influence, but one formative rather than his active calling. The audience is left to make sense of the impact of that brief era on the culture at large.
In some ways, the trajectory of the Douglas’s journey reminds me of my own life. While I didn’t grow up at the peak of American music, as a teen and then college student in the late 2000s and early 2010s, hip-hop experienced a revival through mixtapes and the internet, led by artists such as Drake, Kid Cudi, and J. Cole. It was an exciting time to be on campus and connected with peers interested in these new sounds. And while I was never quite on the brink of a successful professional career in music, I was involved with the production scene at school, and took extracurricular classes in music production and audio engineering. I wanted to be a producer, engineer, and artist. The latter came gradually as I got better at the craft through practice and failure.
As I got more technically proficient and felt better about the quality of my work in my mid 20s, I noticed my passion for the the professional pursuit began to wane, and I got much more into film and found the craft of cinematography. Like the band in ‘Not Fade Away,’ I too didn’t jump into the depth of the serious dues-paying needed to make it in the music industry (“The Beatles spent two years playing German strip bars, dodging bratwursts,” says a prospective manager in the film—Chase’s dialogue remains both insightful and funny). This transition away from music production caused me some distress as I didn’t want to abandon a part of myself and lose the fruits or potential of accumulated effort. Watching ‘The Sopranos’ during this time reminded me of the bridge, and how music is an integral part of film, elevating its dramatic effect. I always connected to the use of music in movies. It’s now something I enjoy in practice for its own sake. And my research for this article reassures me that the love for music I felt and our natural inclinations toward art never leaves us—interests may shift but the animating spirit is always there.
James Gandolfini in ‘Not Fade Away’ (2012). Another New Jersey story, but a role very different from Tony Soprano. Image via TV Guide.
‘Not Fade Away,’ like ‘The Sopranos’ before it, has an amazing soundtrack. Chase mentions that the clearances took hard work from Paramount Pictures, but artists like The Rolling Stones—perhaps from kinship to the strength of music in ‘The Sopranos’—knew the creators “wouldn’t slap it on there,” and instead employ the music with care. The music appears through diagetic sound, the soundtrack, and pieces the band plays. The effect of this time period on the greater culture looms large alongside the personal story of the film. The blues, and American rock and roll music acts like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis, influenced The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and others, in turn bringing the sound back stateside in full force, affecting teens like Douglas and changing the twentieth century forever. Chase examines this phenomenon with a subtle touch in ‘Not Fade Away.’
Steven Van Zandt—guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, actor who played Silvio Dante on ‘The Sopranos,’ and musical supervisor for ‘Not Fade Away’—says that “David just has impeccable taste…He knows how to either marry a song to a scene or have it be in deliberate juxtaposition to a scene.”
- GJF