The Music of Mystery Train

The thing I liked most about mystery train was, which should be made obvious by the title of my post, was the music. Not Elvis or Roy Orvison or any of the other main strem hits that came out of Sun Studios, but the background theme that was revisited throughout the entire movie. Immagine, for a moment, a couple of vagabonds hopping train to train in the 1930s living out of cloth bags tied to the ends of sticks. They travel wherever life takes them, they venture in and about anywhere living life vicariously through themselves. They are constantly writing the soundtrack to their own lives. This is the theme of mystery train. I didn't see much of the train's importance to the plot of the movie. But aurally, it never left. Whenever the main-stream music subsided, whenever there was walking or traveling of any kind around the streets of Memphis by all three parties, whenever no one was listening, the train was there in the background. I heard guitars, basses, harmonics, bongos, drums, and even an eloquent slide guitar motif all of which constantly echoed the beating of the train. Take the "chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga" and set it to 4/4 rythm, add some instruments, and you have the basic beat for 12 bar blues. If you remove all the racial and criminal stereotypes, the charactars, the statues and scenery of memphis, the words and plots and take only what is left, what you have is a musical exploration of what would have been like to walk the streets of memphis in the 30s and 40s during one of the most expansive eras in the history of music. The instrumentations added suspense and intrigue and filled the gaps where the story line and dialogue were left in abandon. The idea that this "train music" filled the empty spaces to be overlooked, I think, speaks wonders to the history of music in Memphis. We Memphians may take Memphis music for granted, but how many of us could immagine Memphis without it?
On another note, just because I like the parallel, Mitzuko wakes on her second day in Memphis to say "When you're dead you don't ever get to sleep again, which means no more dreams." Compare this to Wade Garrett's (Sam Elliot) take in "Roadhouse" when he says "I'll get all the sleep I need when I'm dead." Both movies made in 1989, they have very differing opinions about the natures of death, sleep, and dreams. Maybe an insider v. outsider perspective or even foreign v. domestic. But that's probably too lengthy a topic to cover in just paragraph. Maybe a rant for another blog.