I just nabbed this VHS from eBay for a good price, even though I am supposed to be thinning my collection, not expanding it. A quick pop in the video player to see if it’s in good shape, and oh – “what’s that music?” Taking a suggestion from a reader, I clicked on Shazam on my phone….
i fast-forward, hit play, click Shazam again, and…. over and over, NO RESULT – TRY AGAIN… then I get to the Lance clip and the very familiar “Make Love To Me”… and….nada! so it must be some William Higgins / Costello Presley concoction/creation? (who’s doing the Costello Presley documentary?)
director: Dan Allman (60 minutes) (1982, compiled from shorts)
starring: (in order of appearance) Mark; Lance and Thor; Jamie Wingo, T.N.T., Chaz (Holderman); Lance again (solo); T.N.T. and Jeff Holden
P.S. – at some point, and I got so frustrated I don’t remember where, it i.d’d Keep On by Touch.
13 replies on “Good Times Coming”
The gevi page for the film you bought only lists a director (Dan Allman) and the actors, but none of the other film credits are listed there so I’d guess they aren’t mentioned in the film itself either. The ‘Make Love To Me’ song is definitely Costello though, as with some of his other music the song also appears in other films he did too; so it would make sense that he did the rest of the music in Good Times Coming also. From what I’ve been able to piece together, 1982 was the earliest year when Costello was credited for music in a film, with both Members Only and How I Got The Story released that year. And I’m pretty sure Make Love To Me appears in How I Got The Story as well. There’s a post on reddit (that I made a few years ago) with a list of at least some of the films scored by Costello:
https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageGayVids/comments/5iymsb/who_is_costello_presley/
Check out the two links in the reddit comment below the post, one of the songs is a cover of Make Love To Me with the lyrics changed to They Lied To Me but the notes and music are the same. The other one is a faithful cover of Animal Reaction from Route 69, the scene with the two guys smoking a joint on a bed (young gay me thought that scene was the ultimate in hotness, and the original music just added to it).
I would love to see a documentary about who Costello is or was, that’s pretty obviously a pseudonym since they are both famous singers named Elvis. I actually heard a rumour about who it really was but unless or until he comes forward (or dies, sorry to say) I probably shouldn’t be repeating it, because he clearly wants that part of his life to be separate from whatever else he does. And also I’d love to see a compilation of his remastered songs come out on CD and vinyl, like Pat Cowley’s porn music — I would buy that in a second.
(told ya I’m a music nerd, well I’m a nerd in many ways but where music and porn meet has long been interesting to me) (and thanks for putting up with my long winded comments buddy)
I checked out the reddit page – good lord don’t show me another website to get lost doing “research! –
the youtube link to They Lied to Me was gone – but I found it, converted it to an mp3 – and here we go – They Lied to Me
and i wonder where that SPREADSHEET on reddit came from? hmmmmm
Guilty as charged, that post was from back in 2016. I don’t think I’ve ever shared my full Excel document anywhere on line, I don’t put things in the cloud it’s just saved on my computer. And it’s pretty hodgepodge with gaps, like the few songs I wasn’t able to i.d. when you posted Closed Set 2. I’ve even linked to your blog once or twice when I was at the subreddit called GayPornHunters and someone asked about a clip or pic from a vintage film, on that topic you are among the foremost authorities online that I’ve ever seen.
And yes that’s the exact same song as Make Love To Me, with just slightly different lyrics. Isn’t Make Love To Me in How I Got The Story also, do you have that one? I thought I might and couldn’t find it, and didn’t search for it online yet.
ugh! (smiley face – see new post)
This is very illuminating. I’m a musician (pianist-composer) all my life, but this is the first time I’ve ever read of really getting scholarly about music in gay porn. I’ve also noticed that I am often surprised in legit films in the credits with their long lists of songs that I hadn’t noticed them, was totally surprised. Unless there is something recurring or very concentrated on, I think the visual aspect so outweighs the music, it itself seems ‘musical’ (something I’ve written extensively about.)
I have been noticing them more in the clips here when you and BJ point them out, but having played concerts much of my life and had the best French Solfege Training, I am sort of bewildered when I see those credits. Yet your research has to be even harder, because it isn’t nearly always credited. So–very interesting, and does enhance the experience, although I’m a second-tier ‘vintage film person’, since I started liking new porn more than I ever thought I would beginning 2-3 years ago.
Still hope to find out about the background musics added later in those Best of Colt films, but if you don’t know (and that’s never credited–ever, at least in the original films, as ‘501’, I remember somebody’s name for the music), it would be very difficult to find out. Some of it was very beautiful.
Speaking for myself, I can remember recognizing a few tunes in the earliest porn films I started watching when I came out in the 80s. By this time some of the films were already considered somewhat vintage, 5-10 years earlier in some cases. And being the 80s, there was no way to verify most of them by looking anything up, so it was mostly just the obvious ones like Moments In Love which I mentioned not long ago, playing while the van goes through the car wash in One In A Billion since I actually had that Art Of Noise tape and liked the song a lot before I saw it in a porn setting. AFTER having seen it with sexual imagery accompanying it, the song then took on a new life in my head — kind of like the way MTV combined listening to music with watching the singers lip sync the words, making megastars out of artists like Prince, Madonna or Duran Duran, combining the visual and audio makes it more memorable for me.
But it’s been in this holding pattern for so long that I never felt a burning desire to complete the list I’ve been compiling for a while now, just expanding it and filling in some more blanks has always been enough for me. You are right that info about these is scarce and hard to come by, because either the musician would have been credited for making original music (Costello, Patrick Cowley, Man Parrish etc) or else the filmmakers would have just snagged what they wanted to use and not bothered getting permission first, or leaving a paper trail to track back to them after the film was completed. So it’s hunt and peck(er), nowadays made much easier for the already existing tunes that were used with shazam or programs and apps like that.
I know nothing about the music for any Best of Colt compilations and would have to hear the music while watching it to be of any help. Especially if the music is classical-based, that’s a much weaker hand for me than pop/rock/disco etc. music that I’m more familiar with. Hope you can figure some of those out if it’s something that interests you too.
are you referring to 501 – Joe Gage, or is there a COLT film called 501? also…. there is such a wide range of attempt of adding a musical soundtrack – some of the great FILMS of the 70’s had actual music written for them – take the them music for the Gage Trilogy. others (I’m looking at so many of the Francis Ellie films) just added in random “classical” music – and then the films that had music added in when they got grouped together for home video tapes….. I can see where some folks could go down quite a hole trying to figure out COLT!
Yes, the Joe Gage one. I thought it was a wonderful movie, and the Adonis had gone to the pits yet. The music was by Rick Rockwell. I now remember I owned the vhs of it, and don’t know how I lost it. I also read a review of it in some ‘male film anthology’, probably just leafing through at a bookstore…or online. Someone said it had ‘absolutely no redeeming qualities’. I couldn’t believe it, since I’d thought it was one of the best I’d ever seen–very lyrical and musical (not just the music itself) from beginning to end. There was also a very tall, handsome, marvelously sexy guy in it, who literally had talent for ‘silent films’, just like Lillian Gish or Bobby Harron. I don’t think he regularly did films, and none of the actors except the one who played ‘Michael’ had photos on GEVI.
I’ve heard a few of these ‘random classical music’ additions to some films, and have now forgotten all except the one for Bill Eld’s Narcissus.
What fascinated me about the Colt collections for VHS was that musicians had come in and matched the music to the action–just exquisite in both ‘Bruno’s World’ and ‘Chute’. Someone must have done that as a labour of love, because it was very sensitive, even though not possibly made for the original loops.
i LOVE 501! and so happy I hung on to my bigbox original version of that movie! and the music was definitively part of what made it so good, haunting, moody. Here’s an earlier post – maybe that’s the guy you are referring to? here’s a link to the trailer, although I don’t think the actual film has “i want you” over and over again…..
another earlier post from 2008
Yes, that’s the guy, he had such a unique, strangely exotic look. Especially like him smoking in the solo photo on the box. I guess that is Richard West, looked back at GEVI and saw the same box cover picture with Daniel Holt (was going through the names too fast yesterday and didn’t look closely.) There were several moments when he was talking, but you didn’t hear, exactly as in the old silents. Another part of what made it ‘haunting’ and very artful. And as I recall, it ends very much like a European art film, has this ephimeral quality. That’s the very last few years of real male film before it was all video, yet this one has obviously evolved more than the early 70s ones in some ways.
The opening views of Paris in ‘Adam and Yves’ have very nice music too, that’s probably some of the original music by David Earnest and Peter de Rome. Later scenes, of course, use music not written originally for the film. I just looked at GEVI for some of the men in ‘Adam and Yves’, and few had done anything else, but in the late 70s or early 80s, I did see Michael Hardwick on the street with a woman (clearly not a paramour), just as I’d left the Adonis. He looked superb. Saw Bill Eld at the Gaiety, but that was already the beginning of the decline, and there was literally none of the charisma there that had been in ‘Narcissus’.
There’s also another important Michael Hardwick that had to do with overturning sodomy laws in Georgia. This is extensively covered in Wiki, but I couldn’t find a connection between the two men. This one died in the early 90s, and it was a big deal, eventually affecting SCOTUS rulings overturning sodomy laws, but a sad story from what I’ve read so far.
No, it’s not classical, more like what you said in the other post about ‘guitar-synth hybrid sound’, but the one in ‘Bruno’s World’ (recorded over it whenever, probably 20 years later than the film, at least) has this strangely mournful sound that has more to do with the timbre of this kind of instrumental sound than anything of melody, harmony, etc. I’m interested that it can do that with just the timbre alone; without meaning to, it makes the fabulous porn very otherworldly, including when Toby and Bruno finally meet and kiss. The music in ‘Chute’ was more joyous, but equally sophisticated, and really beautiful stuff (and that’s sure not why I bought the vhs’s back in the late 90s either, so it was just obviously very expert and professional.) In ‘Bruno’s World’ they fix the music to go with a splice remaining from the 8mm loops when Toby is frigging his Prick to Bruno’s porn, which is strangely lovely and means they had to have done this later, since that would have been the first time the splicing was done, for VHS.
I’m not expecting to be able to find out what this music is and who it’s by, and I am not going to ask Colt anything else–they’re notably unhelpful with 2 things I’ve asked before, and in fact, gave me the stupidest imaginable reasons why they wouldn’t answer, including “well, I do know, but…” Incredible. But I wouldn’t be surprised that nobody part of Colt now would know. Somebody associated with them would, but impossible to have any idea how to search out. I don’t even know if Jim French would have remembered, but that source is gone.
Anyway, keep up the good work. It is all very interesting and does enhance the pleasure.
I should add something that really is interesting about those 2 Colt films: The music, which surely is not original, does seem to have been composed expressly for these old silent 8mm films, which never had sound in them when you’d watch them in the old-style porno store booths where you never even had to pay. That is what is so intriguing about them, and there’s one with Bill Eld on one of the collections which has also a very obviously composed background music, but that one is not quite as inspired, or rather, it’s characterized more by a playfulness, but still matches the action very closely.
I haven’t seen nearly all the Best of Colts nor the Buckleroos, but that amounts to a lot of original music set to match the fucking action in the films. It just works so well and brought an entirely new enchantment to these already beautiful films (at least those two are, and I like a couple of the others on the sets.) It is interesting that some of these 70s porn stars were never in the films in theaters, although Eld was. ‘Chute’ is particularly interesting in having been made long after ‘talkie porn’ was really going strong. I frankly don’t know of another one, but there must be. That one is famous because was one of Al Parker’s first big breaks, but he shortly went into ‘mainstream porn’ which we all first saw in the theaters. But I saw plenty of ‘porn talkies’ long before ‘Chute’ was made. I think the bio of Parker indicated that that had something to do with Toby’s rarely working, but his last film ‘Workout’ also only has music and no speaking–although in that case, the music was put to the action from the very beginning, and included black girl groups singing things like ‘Touch Me and I’ll Never Let Go’, which I didn’t think was original, and would be more along the lines of the kind of work you’re doing–with songs and music placed in mostly ‘talkie porno’, and sometimes, as in ‘501’, written for the film (I think I recall that that one has no speech either. It was one of the last films I saw at the Adonis Theater (the old one) and I remember thinking it was a beautiful movie.
i’m impressed that you tried to get info from COLT – i would assume that anyone responding to inquiries would either have no clue, or not be interested to even bother – I would think most of all if any music was NOT their own, they’d be worrying about licensing and therefore, dollars owed. so many cool films that added in known music did so knowing that the likelihood of being pursued was low – But I did hear Tom DeSimone bemoan that his film THE IDOL had the music changed when it went to VHS, as Hand In Hand was worried about licensing (Tom had carefully selected a pop music soundtrack). I’ve been out to find a newer version of Making It Huge, as I recall they did redo the soundtrack (poorly) and the dialogue wound up being out of sync!