When Cat Stevens first met Hal Ashby: “I thought he looked like a guru”
The dramatic comedy in Hal Ashby’s 1971 romantic black comedy movie Harold and Maude was greatly elevated by Cat Stevens’ wonderfully tender and poignant soundtrack, which featured one of the singer-songwriter’s best-loved tracks, ‘Tea for The Tillerman’.
Harold and Maude stars Bud Cort as Harold Chasen, a young man with a morbid obsession with death who regularly plays suicide pranks on his mother, who longs for him to live a normal life. When attending a funeral for someone he doesn’t know, he meets Maude, a spritely 79-year-old. The pair develop an unlikely friendship that eventually turns romantic, and Maude shows her young friend how to live life to the fullest despite its difficult obstacles.
In an Academy ‘Salute to Hal Ashby’, director Cameron Crowe once asked Stevens about the time he first read the script for the film and visited its set. “You were really on the ground floor with this movie,” he began. “I know you said you saw the script on a plane, and you immediately related to Harold.”
Crowe then asked, “Besides wondering if you really were ever that mischievous, I have to ask you what it was really like visiting the set of Harold and Maude as you did in San Francisco?” Stevens replied, “It’s true I was dark and mysterious at one time in my life; that’s why I was looking for the light so hard.”
The singer-songwriter went on, “When I first came onto the set, it was the first time I met Hal – I’d never seen a picture of this guy before, so I thought, ‘He looks like a guru, not a proper film director’. He was smoking these little cigarillo things and something else, many things.”
It sounds as though Ashby was always in the San Francisco spirit of the 1970s and enjoyed more than the odd toke on a spliff. “I got brought into his world, San Francisco, blue sky, and on set, there was Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort, and it was just so amazing,” Stevens said.
Stevens also noted how he first came to supply the film with his music, adding, “I had a couple of songs, and he wanted something original. I went into the studio, cut these things which I always meant to re-record properly, but we never did because he wanted the film out, and they got stuck there like demos.”
Listen to Cat Steven’s soundtrack for Harold and Maude below.
