Customer Reviews

What's Up, Tiger Lily? / You're A Big Boy Now: 2 Classic Original Soundtracks

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TIGER LILY includes a jazz masterpiece called GRAY PRISON BLUES. Which gets my vote as The Spoonful's greatest track. LOOKIN' TO SPY is an instrumental version of COCONUT GROVE and contains 2 fab guitar dischords. Another gem is PHIL'S LOVE THEME. Which has a brilliantly understated yearning quality.

I had one disagreement with the last reviewer. I'm a Spoonful fan and "Wash Her Away" has been one of my favorites of theirs for years. It's one of their most rambunctious tunes. Also "Respoken" is another one of their more underrated songs (rather melodic). It's probably correct, however, to call "Girl Beautiful Girl", a throwaway, but with the footnote that it was, after all, the song Francis Ford Coppola chose to open the film with (i.e., can't be that bad). Although most of the songs are instrumentals, this CD combination does provide to Spoonful fans an added dimension to how unique a band they were.

Okay, okay. This 2-on-1 CD reissue of the two soundracks the Spoonful did should not be judged by the same criteria as their official studio releases. That said, there are some classic Spoonful tunes here to be weeded out from among the mostly instrumental songs found here.

About a third of the tracks are vocals and all deserve a listen. "Pow" is the kind of zany track like "Blues in the Bottle" or "Bald-Headed Lena" that wound up on the albums Do You Believe in Magic and Daydream respectively. "Fishin' Blues" remained in John Sebastian's live set throughout his solo years. "Respoken" gives Zal Yanovsky the opportunity to provide some understated guitar licks. "You're a Big Boy Now" is classic Spoonful with its bouncy rhythms. And "Darling Be Home Soon" even became a hit (peaking at #15). However, "Wash Her Away (from the Discotheque)," with its cheesy organ sounds like some studio mogul's idea of what rock and roll should sound like. And "Girl, Beautiful Girl/Barabara's Theme" is little more than a throwaway when compared to classics like "Do You Believe in Magic" and "Summer in the City."

In between, there are lots of incidental instrumentals. All of it listenable(at least once), but not much really memorable. Zally's guitar playing is always tasteful and Sebastian's harmonica is used to good effect. Although on the tracks that get the full orchestration teatment, like on "Letter to Barbara" and "Miss Thing's Thang," the band seems to disappear entirely. And even as kitsch "Dixieland Big Boy" can be painful to listen to.

However, when the band is left unadorned like on the bluesy "A Cool Million" and the country-ish "Phil's Love Theme," the Spoonful deliver.

Overall, this album is for completists only. But with so little of the Spoonful's original albums in print, this is worth giving a spin--and the price isn't bad either. CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED

This CD is a must for Spoon-heads desiring an archive of their original film work. Well-recorded/reproduced, too.

Before you dissect these two albums, you have to give the Spoonful credit up front for being one of the first -- if not THE first -- bands to put out soundtrack albums for movies they didn't appear in (okay, they're in a few scenes in "Tiger Lily," but that's not "A Hard Day's Night," is it?)
That said, "Lily" is my favorite of the two. Being a lifelong Yanovsky freak, his playing dominates the record. His many off-center styles and use of the lower strings is so unique. The whole thing is completely homemade and sounds that way. It's really the Spoonful, unadorned.
"Darling" has its moments -- the title track, "Lonely," "Darling Be Home Soon," the march version of said song, "Wash Her Away" (again, Zal's playing and background screaming make the song) -- but all the strings and other arrangements make it feel as if the band were only a part of the proceedings rather than the centerpiece.