In nineteen sixty, a western was launched under the working title “Black Star”, starring Elvis Presley and singing the title song. However, the producers quickly realized: the black star, according to the plot, was seen only by someone who was expected to die soon. The film was quickly renamed Flaming Star, and the lyrics were rewritten accordingly. The original recording went on the studio shelf, having seen the light only in the nineties of the last century. David Bowie’s final album, as well as the opening track, is called “Blackstar”. The album was released in 2016, on January 8th, the day both Bowie and Presley were born. And both had already left their mortal shells at the time of release.
In David Lynch’s 1990 film Wild at Heart, Sailor, the character of Nicolas Cage, is a big fan of Elvis and even performs his songs.
In 1991, Wim Wenders presented to the audience his new film “When the World Ends/Bis ans Ende der Welt”. Singer Julee Cruise performs Presley’s song “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears”, recorded with Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, which was not included in the movie “Flaming Star” at the time.
In 1992, in Lynch’s next work, Twin Peaks: Through the Fire, David Bowie played a small but significant role as FBI Agent Jeffries.
The connection between people, events, and numbers often becomes visible only from a distance, and skeptics tend to consider many patterns to be coincidences, although deep causes and effects lie behind each “coincidence.”
Born in Iowa into a dentist’s family on December 1, 1956, Julee Ann Cruise began learning the French horn from childhood. Wind instrument lessons develop the lungs, and soon Julee began to sing. Performances in children’s musical productions followed, and the dream of Broadway led to New York. Initially, Julee’s vocal style was radically different from the ghost vocalization that made her famous, it suffices to mention her work in the “Beehive” revue, where Julee played Janis Joplin. The appearance a la “Zhanna Aguzarova regained consciousness” was hardly advantageous for the Broadway stage, there was already one Barbara Streisand. But Cruise also began working with pianist and composer Angelo Badalamenti, who had experience working with Nina Simone, Dusty Springfield and other Personalities of world music.
Meanwhile, director David Lynch, recovering from the producers’ failure of the Dune space opera, has embarked on a new project, dubbed “Blue Velvet” thanks to the song “Blue Velvet” performed by Bobby Vinton. Isabella Rossellini, who was chosen for one of the main roles, needed a vocal mentor, the producer advised Badalamenti.
Lynch had a complete understanding of the musical accompaniment of the film, in addition to “Blue Velvet” and Roy Orbison’s masterpiece “In Dreams”, presented in the most frightening episode, the director regularly introduced his Yankees to Shostakovich’s symphonies on the set. But the stumbling block was “Song To The Siren” by This Mortal Coil. David Lynch believed that this song was necessary to complete the sound tapestry, and the rights holders believed that it was worth the money that was not available after Dune.
It turned out to be a brilliant idea to ask Badalamenti for help: “compose something very Russian, in the spirit of Shostakovich, make the music beautiful, but at the same time dark and a little creepy”
Angelo, in turn, recommended Julee Cruise. It is completely unclear how Lynch and Badalamenti forced the singer to produce roulades that were completely out of character for her, but “Mysteries Of Love” based on David’s poems and the soundtrack composed by Angelo marked the beginning of one of the most ingenious experiments in music and cinema.
The director and composer, who quickly found a common language, also quickly took over the newly acquired singer. The debut album, however, was hatched for about three years, during which Julee regularly wondered what kind of adventure she had stumbled into. Relatives and friends, listening to the first demo recordings, expressed themselves in the range from “music for white vinyl” to “what are you singing about, an unprintable word?!”. It seemed to Cruise herself that she was turning into a grotesque character like Tiny Tim, known for his transcendent falsetto. Released in 1989, the album “Floating Into The Night” was difficult to get on radio stations: although music critics most often defined its genre as dream pop, jazz was noticeably present in the arrangements, and the general mood led to monochrome teenage dreams of the fifties, when America seemed innocent, hiding the blackest behind Marilyn Monroe’s carefree smile. secrets.
The premonition of love song “The Nightingale” is infinitely magical and seems to have been created for the cartoon “Snow White”. Not Walt Disney Studios, but David Lynch’s imaginary studio, where a fragile, ugly doll exudes tenderness, dreaming of waking up from an endless dream. “Into The Night” is a lullaby of a lost soul to a lost soul. A sudden orchestral crescendo means, perhaps, a car accident, after which one restless spirit cries in search of another. Finally, “Falling” is a lost ballad from the 1960s. She became the defining theme of the TV series Twin Peaks.
The first season was sensational. The critical attitude towards Julee Cruise’s debut has changed with rabbit-like speed. The average consumer grasped the essence much more than the highbrow ones, voting with a dollar. David Lynch, reaping the laurels, shot the melodramatic neo-noir “Wild at Heart” based on Barry Gifford’s novel and the sad ending to it, designated “Industrial Symphony No. 1”, where Julee Cruise, embodying a kind of Bright Angel, dangled suspended by obvious safety ropes in the dream space of the Girl with a broken Heart, depicted By Laura Dern.
Cruise’s second album was “The Voice Of Love”. The composition“She Would Die For Love” should be described as a dream noir: the detachment and at the same time the shrillness of the absurd trumpet, strung on the eerie sound of the acoustic bass, creates the atmosphere of a midnight crossroads crying in the rain, where two cease to be one. Badalamenti’s harmonic solutions are characteristic, as if they get under the skin through a subtle instrument called “Julee Cruise”, injecting the poison of understanding otherworldly harmonies and meanings. “Up In Flames” ends with drumming arachnomania. “Kool Kat Walk” is a shuffle with three parallel harmonic lines. “Until The End Of The World” demonstrates Badalamenti’s virtuosity as a composer, while Julee purrs as if waiting for the End of the World.
Still, the second album has a little less magic and a little more sanity. Perhaps, otherwise it would be a plus…
The release of “Twin Peaks: Through the Fire/ Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” was simply not appreciated by the townsfolk. No one was interested in what led to Laura Palmer’s death when the killer became known. Such a superficial approach has long characterized a consumer society that does not think about causes and effects and does not know how to wait.
The reasons that prompted Kyle McLachlan to leave his collaboration with David Lynch were once outlined by McLachlan himself. I wanted something simpler. It’s amazing how many actors Lynch paved the way to the big cinema, and how poorly most of them managed this trip. The story of Lara Flynn Boyle (Donna Hayward in Twin Peaks) should be taught in every acting school as an example of unfounded ambitions that led to a dead end. In the case of Julee Cruise, everything seemed to be somewhat different: after the unsuccessful premiere of “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me”, David Lynch found himself in a critical situation – the studios did not want to give money for experiments, so Lynch had nothing to offer Julee, he himself found himself in a situation where shooting commercials was the best way to earn money. Angelo Badalamenti, on the other hand, began to receive more and more offers to create music for films.
Julee Cruise, who was famous all over the world by that time, went back to her old ways: she began singing in the musical Return to the Forbidden Planet. Finally realizing that musicals and other cabaret were not serious, Cruise joined The B-52’s band on backup. It wasn’t enough, and soon she took a place in Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra. Julee decided to label her first album in isolation from Badalamenti and Lynch as “The Art Of Being A Girl”. The record, released in 2002, had all the qualities of a good record: round, equipped with a typographic booklet, and a smooth hole in the middle… But musically, it didn’t contain even a hundredth of the twilight genius of Badalamenti/Lynch. The re-sung “Falling” sounds foreign here, and the new arrangement is not good. In search of either a new sound or herself, Julee contacted a character calling himself DJ Dmitry.
One of the first attempts was David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which I think we mentioned. With the same dubious Dmitry, Cruise recorded her fourth and last album. “My Secret Life” is a goofy jumble of samples in the best traditions of all the DJs in the world. A voice floats on the surface of this broth, not knowing whether it should be a potato, a mushroom or a batwing. The Solar System has never heard a more helpless version of “Season Of The Witch.” It is better not to bring such a “secret life” to the public. In 2017, the singer visited the town of Twin Peaks again. All subsequent years were overshadowed by depression against the background of developing lupus, Dr. House’s favorite disease.
On June 9, 2022, Julee Ann Cruise voluntarily left this world, while her husband, Edward Grinnan, played the B-52’s song “Roam” until the last second. The ashes, according to the will, were scattered in Arizona. Lynch and Badalamenti used Julee as a flexible musical instrument, but it wasn’t their fault that, lost in their dark fantasies, she couldn’t find her way back to herself. The year she was born, Elvis recorded the very songs that Saylor sang for Lula. She left on the same day as Beatrice, Dante’s muse.
Angelic voice, sad story!