The songs Jeff Bridges sold to Quincy Jones before he made his movie debut
Even though he was virtually pre-ordained to follow in the footsteps of both his father Lloyd and older brother Beau by going into acting, music was always Jeff Bridges‘ first calling.
It was easier to get ahead on-screen than it was in the recording booth, though, which came with the territory when his old man was a famous and popular star. Unsurprisingly, then, Bridges’ first two credited screen roles came from his father’s episodic drama Sea Hunt and anthology drama The Lloyd Bridges Show.
Throughout the 1960s, the second-generation thespian continued picking up bit-parts on television, finally graduating to cinema in 1970 when his first two movies—Halls of Anger and The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go—were released months apart. From that point on, he never looked back, but Bridges already had a foot in the music industry door before he’d even made his big-screen bow.
The aspiring actor had been dabbling in music since he was a kid, and he reaped the benefits when he sold two tracks to lauded producer Quincy Jones. While one of the songs remains a mystery to this day, the second gained a prominent place on the soundtrack of a popular film.
Four-time Academy Award-nominated director Peter Yates’ romantic drama John and Mary starred Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow in the lead roles, with the duo playing the titular characters who spend the morning after a one-night stand trying to piece together their collective memory of how they ended up in bed together.
Bridges wrote ‘Lost in Space’ and Jones even allowed him to record the vocals, which made it his first credited contribution to a movie in any capacity. Of course, as his career progressed, he began following his long-held dreams of pursuing music to a more significant extent, making it all the more fitting that when he won his Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ in Crazy Heart, it came for playing a musician.
As well as his songs being featured on the accompanying soundtrack to Scott Cooper’s film, Bridges would go on to release studio albums Be Here Soon, Jeff Bridges, and The Sleeping Tapes in addition to forming his band The Abiders, who took their name from one of the many memorable catchphrases spawned by his iconic protagonist in the Coen brothers classic The Big Lebowski.
Acting may have been his destiny, but music was—and remains—his first love. The former may have taken him to the summit of Hollywood and kept him there for decades, but it was the latter that ended up as his first credit. Nobody would have known what the future held when John and Mary was released in 1969, but history will always remember it as the first time Bridges and cinema crossed paths.
