La-la Land Records’ second Les Baxter release (after The Dunwich Horror) is a jazzy post-apocalyptic score based around a straight jazz source cue that opens and closes the film.

The dramatic cues are typically mercurial, as Baxter tends to cover subtext as well as obvious onscreen action by writing cuts that sometimes break a locked tempo and switch to a wholly different style, be it the chromatic intro bars of “Vacation,” or the shrill dissonance of “To the Phone Booth” with eerie notes on flute.

The electric guitar riffs, accented by cheeky woodwind theme quotes in “Atomic Tonic,” cover the Baldwin family’s efforts to race ahead of traffic and reach an isolated mountain campsite, as well as the family’s makeup of middle-aged parents and a pair of bickering youths. Baxter adds a sexy sax solo, lots of brass and a chugging train rhythm that evokes a bit of the breezy writing by Fred Katz (who scored Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors in 1960).

That rhythm is central to the family’s lengthy mountain drive, and along the way they encounter twentysomething thugs, militant townsfolk, and once they reach their destination, a mad rush to camouflage their vehicles and set up camp in a large cave.

For those episodic sequences Baxter sort of stays within a weird little middle ground where the music’s mood is never menacing nor comedic, but it’s not hard drama either, and one suspects Baxter’s repeated theme quotations form a sense of urgency, which he colours with slight changes in brass (shifting to low brass quotes of the theme’s 3-note bass line) as well as increased dissonance, and rumbling percussion and piano keys.

“The Hoods” is an example where the neo-feral aggression from a trio of young thugs is played tongue-in cheek, as Baxter gives his chugging rhythm a rockabilly twist with smarmy brass and showy fanfares, followed by a breezy tempo shift with sultry sax. The cue’s odd in the way Baxter avoids the trio’s menacing nature and sticks to a teasing tone until the family’s son uses a rifle from inside the camper trailer and shoots one of the thugs. Baxter treats the family’s defensive reaction like the end of a schoolyard fistfight that has the bullies getting knocked down hard (the lead thug gets shot in the shoulder) and stepping back with mock-bravado, issuing threats for some payback as the family heads deeper into the mountains.

Perhaps by adopting an up-tempo style – mainly via jazz orchestra – and returning to largely straight theme variations, Baxter ensures the film never develops a harder edge, which was perhaps what the producers wanted for their intended youth audience, but it sometimes goes against the dark themes in a fairly stark drama about the disintegration of civility after a nuclear strike hits the city of Los Angeles.

The score’s meatier dramatic cuts are easier to identify from Baxter’s increased use of dissonance, as well as more reflective, free-style tempo cues like “Johnson’s Act / The Slip / The Rape’ where capturing the sequence’s moods supersedes thematic formalism.

This lengthy track includes some lovely dark areas with low percussion, some introspection and intimacy using flute, and the sax kind of reappears for theme improv as well as a warning horn for the thugs’ reappearance and the sexual assault of the family’s teen daughter. The sudden return to the chugging rhythm plays up the thugs’ sadistic amusement in toying with the girl before the assault, but it also weakens any attempt to show the horror of the violation.

That rhythm tends to be overused in the score, and makes it repetitive at times – a problem when album-length versions of Baxter’s music has even been edited and sequenced into a narrative. Baxter loved to experiment in his scores, but the nature of the B-movies he largely scored restricted him to short, tightly edited scenes for what was regarded by studio AIP as disposable product for the drive-in market.

Baxter gave Panic is best, but his penchant for heavy theme repetition hampers the score, much in the way Master of the World (1961) sometimes feels like an extended theme compilation. Even the original LP for Dunwich has a rambling quality with a main theme that became oppressive early into the album.

For their Panic CD, La-La Land have gathered the score in crisp mono, and crafted tightly edited tracks that also carry some good bass – important to the formal jazz tracks that bookend the score, as well as the longer “Main Title” version with its extended bass and percussion intro.

Randall D. Larson’s liner notes provide an excellent overview of the film, as well as precise cue breakdowns that cite their function in the film, and sections dropped from the final edit. For Baxter fans, this CD is a definite must-have; one can only hope more of his scores (particularly the Poe scores) will eventually appear in complete form, with important historical notes.

Jazz fans might also find the score of note because it was written during that peak period when orchestral jazz scores were in vogue and used in most popular film genres.

The B-movies maybe served more adventurous composers because the youth market meant they could test their writing skills by applying big band and small jazz combo sounds to monster movies, psychological thrillers, or man-eating plant comedies. Whether they’ve dated over the past 40-50 years is subjective, because while Baxter’s approach doesn’t always match the film’s grim subtext of an autocratic father’s ferocious determination to protect his family at all costs, it gives it a cool toe-tapping gloss.

© 2010 Mark R. Hasan