‘Breathless’: How David Letterman inadvertently helped create one of punk’s greatest covers
A 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), starring Richard Gere, takes the French New Wave’s classic tale of romance and crime and sets it in heady Las Vegas.
Both versions are rooted in the hedonistic worlds of illegal activity and doomed love affairs, taking two ill-fated characters, stubbornly in love, and placing them in a self-imposed storm. In this version, Gere steps into Jean-Paul Belmondo’s shoes, Americanising the inexplicable Nouvelle Vague charm and adapting it for the neon-tinged world of the 1980s, turning Godard’s story into a neo-noir romantic thriller. Gere’s Jesse Lujack, an occasional car thief and “cop killer”, has three obsessions: the Silver Surfer comic book series, Monica (Valerie Kaprisky’s counter to Jean Seberg), the French woman who got away and the music of Jerry Lee Lewis.
The American pianist and singer-songwriter’s music weaves its way into Breathless’ narrative, featuring 1958 hits ‘High School Confidential’ and, conveniently, ‘Breathless’, originally composed by Otis Blackwell, who had co-written Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and penned some of Elvis Presley’s most successful hits.
Lewis’s rendition hears his signature eccentricity on the piano with wild vocal inflexions, caught up in the lovesick lyrics that leave him – literally – breathless. The song became Lewis’s fourth record and his last Top Ten hit in the United States, before his disturbing, scandalous marriage to his 13-year-old second cousin rightfully ended his career.
‘Breathless’ gained a second life, however, thanks to 1983’s Breathless. In the film, Lewis’s version is featured, and Gere’s Lujack sings the song to his love interest, Monica, before–spoiler–grabbing a gun and firing at the police who have been trailing him. As the credits roll, a cover of ‘Breathless’ by the Los Angeles punk band X plays. The four-piece band’s version is performed with a rockabilly flair, as Exene Cervenka’s vocals elevate the song into a delightfully chaotic story of all-consuming love, and the melody goes from a classic pop song with a lighthearted piano to a fast-paced, guitar-driven tune.
Appearing on the Late Night with David Letterman show in 1983, performing their rendition, X guitarist John Doe explained to the host that the band first encountered the song through somewhat accidental circumstances. “They called us up and said, ‘We hear you do a wonderful version of the song,’” he recalls. “And we didn’t, so we BS’d our way through it and said, ‘Sure, of course we do.’ We ran back to the studio, rehearsed it up and recorded it in about a week.”
X’s appearance on American late-night television introduced the band to mainstream audiences for the first time. They first formed in the late 1970s, puzzle-pieced together from Los Angeles’ burgeoning punk scene. Cervenka, a poet, joined as a vocalist because of her then-partner, Doe. They quickly stood at the helm of their Los Angeles enclave, bringing a literary style to their lyrics thanks to Cervenka’s pen. Years of touring would garner them a cult-like underground following and, as their crowds grew bigger, the band realised that their sound, influenced by the music that sprung from Lewis’s era, could resonate beyond their insular world.
Suddenly, young crowds “answered the call to ‘new music’ from a culture steeped in the ‘50s, where our heroes came from,” Doe writes in his memoir, Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of LA Punk. “In our minds, these people had a direct connection to Ritchie Valens…. It was wishful thinking then, but it gave us confidence that this music of ours, this punk rock, wasn’t just for one slice of the public; it could speak to everyone.”
Memorably, X would perform ‘Breathless’ at the first Farm Aid benefit concert in Champaign, Illinois, on September 22nd, 1985. Hosted among the likes of Johnny Cash, Lou Reed and Loretta Lynn, X dominated a crowd of 80,000 people, dedicating ‘Breathless’ to Lewis.
