I’m working on a Super Top Secret Project currently, related to a movie you may have heard of.
Okay, it’s Goodfellas.
If you have any kind of a connection with that movie at all – and if you’re reading Pop Thruster I imagine you do – you know the specific scene that Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire” conjures.
For the uninitiated, it coincides perfectly with the long, sweaty, anxious, and cocaine-fueled day that Henry and Karen Hill experience in May of 1980.
And don’t forget to look out for those helicopters, people.
“Jump Into the Fire” is on Nilsson Schmilsson from 1971, which placed as #186 as part of the best 1,000 albums ever, a five-year project in which I cataloged the thousand albums most important to me, with each getting a full blown pop culture-meets-memoir article.
When I look at the tracks on that album with the delightfully self-deprecating title, it never fails to astonish me how wildly eclectic they are from one another. For a singer-songwriter, this dude really knew how to create great tunes all over the musical map.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that this early ‘70s gem has been leveraged for other movies and TV shows as well.
For example, as a teenager, I became familiar with Nilsson Schmilsson without knowing it, thanks to both Goodfellas and another Gen X crime drama classic by the name of Reservoir Dogs.
Quick story there: in college I stumbled into learning that a movie was playing in a lecture hall (for some reason?) for the price of $3.00. I had never heard of Reservoir Dogs or Quentin Tarantino before.
In short, the movie blew my young mind: a brutal, darkly funny, slick as hell crime drama that was obviously low budget but thrived in every way nonetheless.
And then there was the music, all under the conceit of a radio station show called “K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ‘70s,” with its DJ voiced by comedy legend Stephen Wright.
The groovy, loopy “Coconut” was an inspired choice for Tarantino to layer into the sometimes menacing, sometimes explosively funny vibes of Reservoir Dogs.
Sidenote here that in researching this piece, I was briefly convinced that “Coconut” must have been on the Boogie Nights soundtrack, but alas it belongs instead to the realm of Mr. White, Mr. Pink, and Nice Guy Eddie.
Speaking of inspired, “Gotta Get Up” plays an enormous role in the great first season of Russian Doll. Main character Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) gets caught in a time loop, and part of the trigger for us to understand that she keeps “looping” back to the same dinner party is that we hear…
Gotta get up, gotta get out
Gotta get home before the morning comes
What if I’m late, got a big day
All three songs have that ear worm in a good way quality, staying stuck in your head for weeks at a time seemingly. But I need to hand it to “Jump Into the Fire,” that bouncing, jumping bass line that just feels like an adrenalized, off kilter morning in May, 1980 where you need to pick up your brother from the hospital in time to get him back to the house, where you can get started on dinner and then make sure Lois is ready to fly to Pittsburgh (and hope like hell she remembered her favorite hat)…