Quentin Tarantino’s favourite songs from the 1970s
If Quentin Tarantino wasn’t heralded as one of this generation’s finest directors, he’d have a pretty good career as a DJ. Not the knob-twisting, drum-pad-bashing kind like Fred Again, but more akin to the lead character from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. For those unfamiliar, the character in question is a scruffily dressed crate dweller who, when he isn’t found in dingy record shops or at the front door of a lover he’s most recently fallen concerningly obsessed for, is behind the decks at a local pub playing high-brow wedding songs.
While his filmography takes centre stage, the soundtracks make pretty compelling mixtapes and showcase his ability to provide an atmospheric backdrop you didn’t know a scene required. In fact, I cannot picture Marsellus Wallace opening up a shimmering golden briefcase in Pulp Fiction without the sultry sounds of Al Green’s ‘Let’s Stay Together’ in the background.
“One of the things I do when I am starting a movie,” the acclaimed director once said, “When I’m writing a movie or when I have an idea for a film is, I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie. Then, ‘boom,’ eventually I’ll hit one, two or three songs, or one song in particular, ‘Oh, this will be a great opening credit song’,” the director added.
Subsequently, Tarantino’s tracks and his upcoming movies garner as much speculation as the films themselves, for they are an opportunity for culture vultures to discover their next unknown track. How he unearths these songs is as mysterious as how he generates storyline ideas: ultimately, he’s an artistic obsessive with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things entertainment.
His latest offering, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, was a self-professed love letter to the City of Angels in 1969. A year that brought a close to the technicolour of the psychedelic 1960s and a new dawn of the 1970s, ready to usher in a new chapter of progressive rock. Naturally, in the crossover of the two decades came a wealth of incredible music that spanned from the leafy valleys of Lauren Canyon to the troubled streets of New York and beyond.
So, if Tarantino can create a three-hour epic that simply satiates his own desire to express his love for a singular time period in history, then surely he has a healthy list of songs to adoringly accompany it? Tarantino was merely six years old in 1969, so come the turn of the century, he entered a well-known phase of adolescent musical curiosity and surely soaked up every ounce of ‘70s instrumental texture like a sponge.
Indeed, he did, but not always to a positive effect: “I was all ears about this firsthand rock ‘n’ roll history because I wasn’t into ’70s white-boy rock,” he said in the book Cinema Speculation. He continued, “I didn’t give a f*** about Kiss, I didn’t give a f*** about Aerosmith, I didn’t give a f*** about Alice Cooper or Black Sabbath or Jethro Tull. I didn’t own Frampton Comes Alive! I openly rejected that entire culture”.
So if he didn’t spend his spare time cladding pancake make-up to his face and raising his devil horns to the sky in the name of rock, what was he listening to? Below is a comprehensive list of the songs he did, in fact, enjoy from one of music’s most interesting decades.
Quentin Tarantino’s favourite songs from the 1970s:
- ‘Coconut’ – Harry Nilsson
- ‘Run Fay Fun’ – Isaac Hayes
- ‘Street Life’ – Randy Crawford
- ‘Jeepster’ – T Rex
- ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ – Santa Esmerelda
- ‘Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)’ – The Delfonics
- ‘Little Green Bag’ – George Baker Selection
- ‘Let’s Stay Together’ – Al Green
- ‘Strawberry Letter 23’ – The Brothers Johnson
- ‘The Flower of Carnage’ – Meiko Kaji
- ‘I Got a Name’ – Jim Croce
- ‘Who Is He (And What Is He to You)?’ – Bill Withers
- ‘Stuck in the Middle With You’ – Stealers Wheel
- ‘Jungle Boogie’ – Kool and The Gang
- ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘I Left Some Dreams Back There’ – Freda Payne
- ‘Staggolee’ – Pacific Gas & Electric
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.