Clint Eastwood discusses the musical era he wasn’t a “big fan of”
In a breakout role in the television series Rawhide, Clint Eastwood first established his associated image as the weathered gunslinger. Through the 1960s, this image was consolidated in the Dirty Harry movies and Sergio Leone’s renowned Dollars Trilogy, propelling Eastwood to international fame.
Throughout his illustrious six-decade career, Eastwood expanded his repertoire to include production and direction, garnering numerous accolades, including four Academy Awards and four Golden Globes for his work behind the camera. Despite being 93 years old, Eastwood remains active in the industry, with his most recent film, Cry Macho, receiving widespread acclaim.
Eastwood is currently wrapping up production on Juror No. 2, which has been tagged as his final direction. It is uncertain whether he will retire completely from the industry following the Nicholas Hoult-starring movie, but it’s safe to say he’s had a great innings on screen. During a 2014 interview with Husam Asi, the Hollywood veteran revealed the secret to longevity.
“Never let the old man in,” he asserted. “I think what keeps you going is just your interests in the work you are doing, and you are interested in the project you are working on at the moment, and if you don’t have that interest, you will find something else to do. If you stop living forward, there’s nowhere to go but living backwards, and that becomes nostalgia maybe, but nostalgia sometimes you have to set aside and say okay, let’s just move forward now, and enjoy it.”
Later in the interview, Eastwood discussed his keen interest in music. The director and actor is also a skilled musician and has composed original scores for most of his movies since 2003’s Mystic River. In 2014, Eastwood directed Jersey Boys, a movie that follows the story of how several New Jersey youths came together to form the rock band The Four Seasons in the early 1960s.
The director revealed that, while he didn’t hugely enjoy early rock ‘n’ roll, the Frankie Valli-fronted band was a cut above the rest. “I wasn’t a big fan of the generation that this was made in, but I did like this music particularly,” he explains. “I thought ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ was probably the closest thing to a classic song that I had seen out of the 60s and 50s era, which I didn’t think was a great music era. I think The Four Seasons did some great stuff, a lot of variety to it, and lost of spirit to it.”
As a man of a certain age, Eastwood was perhaps a little too old to catch the Beatles train in the mid-1960s. Instead, his tastes reside in jazz-pop, with particular favourites being Peggy Lee, Joe Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington.
“I’ve loved a lot of rhythm & blues and some rock and roll,” he explained in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone. “When you go back and listen to the music of the ’60s, some of it is quite good. But I must say I never got drawn into the rock and roll generation. I just kind of missed it, growing up in the ’40s. For me, it was big band and bebop. In the ’60s, I sort of skipped by rock. It didn’t musically inspire me a lot. But I love rhythm and blues, which is sort of the inspiration for rock and roll. To me, rock and roll seemed like sort of a white version of rhythm and blues.”
Listen to ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ by The Four Seasons below.
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