I have a day off work so re-arranged all my LPs (I am seriously knackered by the way). I found some old print outs that map the history of how the music used in 'Dawn of the Dead' was discovered and shared. Here's some of the stuff I can remember in a rough chronology.
In 1996-97 I bought a pile of library records (a big pile of 800). It included a very good run of De Wolfe LPs from around 1976 / DWS/LP 3300-ish. At that time I was looking for funky stuff, breaks, etc. as well as any cues from Prisoner Cell Block H that I was a huge fan of at the time.
It took months to go through these records as I was working full time and young so out a lot with friends. I moved from my Mum's house to a flat in this period and can remember which location I was in when finding different cues. I found 'Fugarock' pretty quickly which I loved and recognised 'Telex' on the same LP (Sounds Unusual- DWS/LP 3304). I remember a year or three later (now in another flat so must have been 2000) trying to convince some dude on an online forum that the DOTD track was Derek Scott's 'Fugarock' and he was having none of it and telling me it was something else. I had moved from cassettes to Mini Discs by now but didn't know how to record stuff on to my PC so I couldn't prove it to him.The 'Sun High' LP stuff I found pretty quickly. You can still see on the sleeve that I circled it and wrote '
P?' (meaning 'Might have been used in 'Prisoner'). I was flicking through these records at such a rate I knew I recognised it but didn't know where from at the time. It seems ridiculous now because other tracks on the same LP were used by Romero but I wasn't thinking about it in that way and still didn't know that much about how LPs were catalogued. I must have found 'Spinechiller' a bit later because I was in the flat. I picked out a random LP and started to run a bath. From the bathroom I heard the intro to 'Mask of Death' and was deliriously excited legging it into the front room to see what it was!
In this first batch I found nine LPs with Dawn cues on; those above and also the 'Cosmogony' LP, 'Empty Horizons', 'World Power'... I can't remember what else off hand. I know that when the Trunk compilation came out there was only 'Dank Earth' that I hadn't found yet.
I had offers of lots of money to sell them (£1000 Canadian Dollars so about £70 per LP) but never did I'm glad to say.
In March 2001 Chris Stavrakis posted up a cue list on his website. It had been transcribed from hand written notes so included multiple errors (LPs were written down as 8056 instead of 3056, names were incorrect or incomplete, 'Spinechiller' was listed as 3309, not 3300, etc). I didn't see it until October 2001 when I emailed him and said I had these nine records so could correct some of the errors and add some of the tracks that were missing- 'Fugarock', 'Queka', 'Flossie', etc weren't on the original list along with some other really big titles.
Chris lived in Pittsburgh I think so had access to the source materials. I was in the UK where you could find the records so we made a pretty good team. Now I had a list of the records I started finding and buying them. Check out this fax to Warren De Wolfe:
And a follow on one to order the records- note me correcting him that it is 8056 I want NOT 3056!!:
As the records arrived I realised that the list was full of errors. There were a substantial number of tracks that were on the list but not actually used which was annoying at the time as I didn't have a lot of money! The list must have gone through multiple updates and at this time I hadn't met anyone else who had found or had any of the cues. They were still extremely elusive.
After I emailed Chris he posted the list again with some corrections:
Here's the list with my handwritten additions, etc:
I was swapping Mini Discs with a guy called Alan H in Australia. He had some of the Sylvester ones so I was able to verify or cross off more cues from his rips. This is how we did it in 2001- no online sharing and buying LPs from mailing lists before eBay really kicked in.
I sent Chris the tracks by mail and here's an email from him on November 28th 2001, with more detail for the 'Spinechiller' LP:
I also faxed Warren De Wolfe about them releasing the tracks on CD before I moved in to my second flat so it would have been the late 90's. He suggested |I find a publisher and get back to them. I didn't have a clue where to start so forgot about it until the Trunk comp came out in 2004.
Finally some more handwritten stuff I found with me starting to list chronologically:
Sometime between 2001 and 2004 the Complete Soundtrack started selling on eBay, and this was the first time the tracks were 'out there' and readily available to a lot of people.
What's particularly interesting is these incorrect lists. It would appear George Romero changed his mind and tried out various cues before the final cut. I don't doubt that at some point 'Once', 'Non Vibrato', 'Trumpet Requiem', 'Synchropulse' etc were all used in some cut of the film and replaced with Goblin music or other library cues. It gives an unseen snapshot into the history of a film loved by so many, not least me who as a young teen rented the Intervision video of DOTD from Radio Rentals (complete with Alpha Films logo and it's 'Telex' cue from Derek Scott and the same LP that 'Fugarock', 'Scarey I' and 'Scarey II' are on) so many times and that soundtrack became emblazoned on my memory forever.
This is why we love this shit so much
