Each month, PopImage will ask a different comic book creator or fan to give us the track listing on their fantasy soundtrack for the comic book story of their choice. This month, Larry Young shares with us the official soundtrack for Astronauts in Trouble.
When I write, sometimes I listen to music, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I cue up a few songs that'll get me in the mood to write; sometimes I'll cue up some tunes that'll put me in the mood for a certain scene I'm trying to get down on paper.
When I was preparing ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE: LIVE FROM THE MOON, I had some specific songs in mind. Unfortunately, nearly every one was on a different CD, and it became more of headache getting up every four minutes to put a new disc in the changer. So I convinced my business manager that it would be a really good idea if I bought a CD burner to back up my hard drive and store all the graphics-heavy artwork and files I had.
Of course, that was just an excuse to make this soundtrack.
I made three or four versions before I settled on the "Ground Crew Version," which is the one I gave to folks to help generate attention for the book and to thank those who are in the AiT Hall of Fame; this is the version I'll annotate:
Track 1: Professor Hawking's Channel Seven promo - I discovered that the voice generator program in the MacIntosh SimpleText application sounds an awful like the world's smartest man... so I typed in, "This is Professor Stephen Hawking, and you are watching the Channel Seven News Team... live from the moon." I then recorded it on a regular audio recorder playing from my computer speakers, and made an aiff file from the tape recording, to get that airy, filtered effect... as if Hawking was on the radio from Earth doing promos during the Hayes mission.
Track 2: 21st Century Newscast: This is an entertaining version of "We Will Rock You" by the Emergency Broadcast Network, a band from New England that uses found sound, music samples, and news reports to make former President Bush sing the old Queen song. Cool as all get-out, and represents the future to me in oh, so many ways.
Track 3: HayesCorp Command Center: This is a sample of the NASA ground transmissions to Neil and Buzz, giving them the go-ahead to land at Tranquility.
Track 4: AiT:TMP Opening Titles: I always thought Louis Prima's "Sing, Sing (with a Swing)" would make awesome music for the credits for a $100 million space movie, and if I have anything to say about it, this is the track that opens my movie. C'mon... picture deep space.. the camera POV floats from left to right and down a little... there's nothing but silence and galactic vastness in front of you... and all of a sudden you hear that cool Gene Krupa drum and you see a Channel Seven Newsvan jet into frame... DAMN! That'd be great.
Track 5: In the Newsvan Tape Deck: The inclusion of "Bad Astronaut" by writer/artist/singer James Kochalka needs no explanation. This is the song in Heck's tapedeck in the newsvan.
Track 6: Re-align the Low-Gain: While the Channel Seven guys have a few beers and tell their stories to each other in issue #2, the Flaming Lips' song "Turn it on" is playing in the background.
Track 7: Heck's Got a Hangover: The electronica band Fluke started off their album "Risotto" with the song "Absurd." The bounce of the drum, the bass chord and the woman's groan doesn't sound sexy to me; it sounds like my brain when I've got a bad hangover. This song was nearly ruined for me when Volkswagen appropriated it for their new Bug campaign, but any song that has the lyric "Judge Dredd/Found dead/Face down in Snoopy's bed" is OK with me. Plus, I used it first.
Track 8: The Moon From the Inside of a Spacesuit: One of my favorite bar-jukebox songs, "Oye Como Va" by Santana makes me and my drunken bar pals think we're in one-sixth gravity when it's played. There may be no logical explanation for this.
Track 9: Neil and Buzz: Neil's famous "One small! step" speech. True fact: every p icture of an astronaut from the Apollo 11 mission is of Buzz Aldrin as Neil was the guy with the camera. You can send a man to the moon, but ya can't give both guys cameras...
Track 10: Pepperoni Pizza Nightmares: "Dean's dream" by the dead Milkmen, while only a minute and change in length, may be the most disturbing musical interpretation of a nightmare ever. Just the kind of thing you'd hear in your suit if you were stuck on the moon.
Track 11: Float Me Another One: U. S. Olympic Snowboarding Team Honorary Coach MoBroadcast is just weird enough to sound like garbled radio transmissions... from the moon!
Track 14: Annie's Suit Radio: I asked my editor (and the inspiration for the Annie character) what song she'd be listening to on her suit radio if she were walking around on the moon, and she answered "Greeting to the New Brunette" by Billy Bragg. So, there you go.
Track 15: The Cows Go In: Johnny Cash songs seem like good space music to me: the justaposition of The Man in Black with the inky blackness of space is too thematically cool for me to not include a song of his. And since the cows burn up in the sun, "Ring of Fire" seemed most appropriate, although I like "Folsom County Blues" better. "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die...." Man, that's cold.
Track 16: Home Box Office: A short clip of Tom Hanks saying "Houston, we have a problem" from the Ron Howard film Apollo 13.
Track 17: Not Enough Coffee to Go Around: If I were running out of air in my suit on the moon, I'd want to list! en to Dire Straits' "Fade To Blac k" on my suit radio. Just for the heck of it.
Track 18: AiT: TMP End Titles: The closing credits of my hypothetical movie would be this song from the japanese Speed metal band The Mad Capsule Markets, "Hi-Side." I did the English-language version of their CD cover, and got to really like the music.
Track 19: Doomsday Plus One: President reagan's famous "We begin bombing in five minutes" gaffe.
Track 20: Hot Mike: This is a .wav somebody sent me from the Canon help desk voice mail. It's hysterical.
I've got a second volume of stuff for AiT: LFTM, as well as soundtracks for AiT: COOL ED'S and AiT: SPACE: 1959, which is the story arc available in January...
...and as always, up-to-date info on all my stuff is available on: www.astronautsintrouble.com
If you have a favourite story you'd like to compile a soundtrack for, contact us at PopImage. If we like your line-up, we'll run your soundtrack here.
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Relevant Links
www.astronautsintrouble.com