The Albums of My Life: Raiders of the Lost Ark

It's interesting how one of the albums of my life is one that I haven't actually listened to in at least 30 years.

The first music genre that I fell for, when I was just a kid, was movie music. And that tracks, doesn't it? My formative years coincided with that amazing period, roughly 1975-1985, when John Williams was cranking out one astonishing film score after another. For me, obviously it started with Star Wars, but I have another soundtrack album on my mind right now. It's from a movie that came out 45 years ago, called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Back then I would venture into record stores and flip through the records in the Soundtracks section, usually looking for records for movies I had seen; the idea of buying an album for a movie I actually hadn't seen was alien to me at the time, and since I was all of 9 years old, it's not like I had a vast filmography of movies I'd seen. But this approach did expose me to a lot: movie titles, composer names, and of course, all the wonderful art on the albums themselves.

In early 1981, a new album started showing up in the record stores for a movie I didn't know: Raiders of the Lost Ark. The cover had some weathered-looking guy wearing a hat and a leather jacket, with a bullwhip slung over one shoulder, and around the periphery were images that looked like action-adventure stuff. I had no idea what this was about, but I did see the magic words on the album cover: "Music by John Williams". So, I picked up the record and flipped it over to look into it in more detail. I remained confused. There was nothing on here to tell me what this movie was about, but there seemed to be some adventure involved, and it was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, the same crew that had performed my already-beloved Star Wars scores. There was a little blurb by the movie's director, Steven Spielberg (he directed Close Encounters!), and I would later learn that this is a touch Spielberg did for all of his movies' soundtrack albums.

This one, though, stuck with me. The album was there, every time I went to the record store. But what did it mean? Was it about someone who was raiding Noah's Ark? I had no idea. All I know was that the Close Encounters guy directed it, the Star Wars guy produced it, the Empire Strikes Back guy wrote it, and the music guy for all of those scored it. Oh, and the movie starred Harrison Ford, which was big to me as I was still reeling from the potential loss of Han Solo. (Look, I was 9, who knows what my brain was doing at the time, but seeing Harrison Ford as some new guy was a decent stand-in for Han Solo.)

That summer we moved across the country and we finally saw this movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, in a theater in our new town. I had never heard of the Ark of the Covenant, so that was new. So was pretty much everything in this movie. It rocked my world pretty hard…and especially the music. And now that I had seen the movie, I had to own the album.

That original album, the one that came out in 1981, is long gone…and it was something of an artifact in itself, as film music albums went. John Williams has always been one to arrange his albums into a more "listenable" experience, in which he edits cues together and presents things generally not in the precise sequence that they are heard in the movie. That original Raiders album would be supplanted in years to come by newer releases that presented unreleased material, in its film sequence. That original album did not include the music for the opening scene, the trek through the jungle; nor did it include a significant portion of the action music during the film's entire second half. (It did include "The Desert Chase", which may be Williams's greatest action cue of his entire career.) It did not include the wildly triumphant rendition of Indy's Theme that accompanies his boarding of the German sub. I remember watching Raiders at home a few years later, when "home video" started being a thing, and realizing how much music was missing from that original album. This is something that is very familiar to people who love film music: the supplanting of those first incomplete albums with more complete releases later on. That's how I can count that original Raiders album among the "Albums of My Life" even though I haven't heard that representation of the Raiders score in many years.

Nevertheless…how I loved that album. It was one of several that I played into significant wear on my stereo, especially certain cues that I would play, then lift the needle and return to the start them over again. When I listen to the "complete" score now, my ear still occasionally defaults to expectations based on the original album's sequencing. And it remains one of the high points of John Williams's greatest era.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all around the Galaxy!

Exeunt,
-K.