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Deep Throat O.S.T.

A bit of history.

Gerard Damiano is a former New York women's hairdresser who, following his accountant's advice, started making underground porn films to augment his income. One fine day, while working on one of these so-called "loops" intended for the semi-clandestine peepshow circuit and mail order sales for the limited use of a narrow audience of erotomaniacs, he encounters a married couple, Chuck Traynor and Linda Boreman, with the young wife indulging in polishing her esophagus with her neighbor's pleasure tool. The performances offered by the talented Linda are remarkable and of great impact, enough to convince the novice director to upend his plans and assemble a film with all the trimmings. Gathering up $25,000, mostly from shady dealings of the Italian-American mafia in the Big Apple, Damiano (using the pseudonym Jerry Gerard) hires Boreman, changing her name to Linda Lovelace, relegates the very jealous husband Chuck (a topless-bar manager) to the role of factotum in the production, and after a week spent between Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and New York, the footage is ready. Another five months pass and in June 1972, "Deep Throat" debuts at the World Theater in New York.

A milestone as both a culmination and a starting point for the young porn film industry, "Deep Throat," quickly becomes a cult mass film: intrigued hordes of more or less bourgeois families crowd the cinemas where it's playing, famous public figures queue at the box office alongside ordinary people, and those who don't mix with the populace (and have the means) purchase a copy to project privately at home.
Fundamentally, Damiano's movie did nothing more than arrive at the right point at the right time: the sexual revolution and a general reassessment of the prevailing prudish morality occurring on both sides of the Atlantic allowed a thin storyline, humorously marketed as a true story with clumsy references to Freudian thinking and its therapeutic applications, to become an artifact of an era and gather worldwide success few films have achieved (the numbers fluctuate due to distribution mainly in the hands of the mafia, but revenues are around $100 million, with some estimates comfortably reaching $600 million with home video releases).

From the perspective of scabrous content, the scenes are certainly less vulgar than many things seen both before and after (talking about the timeline, you dirty minds!) from the extremely uncomfortable strictly wooden seats of a porn theater. But the particular directorial style, the humorous-demonaic tone (worthy of note is Harry Reems's performance as Dr. Young) and, not least, the choice to center the story around the woman proved to be winning. In fact, at a time when porn actors were paid by the "milking" (ahem...), Damiano chose the more arduous path of showing us everything from the female side, using the technique of "jump cutting" to represent the unrepresentable: the female orgasm. Bell tolls, fireworks, and rockets take off alternating in clips with Lovelace's hard scenes, magnifying the absurdity permeating the entire film and making it less onanistic than one might think, amidst typically seventies settings, a very rustic yet enjoyable performance, and the delirious acrobatics of the amazing soundtrack.

And it's here I wanted to arrive, if I hadn't gotten carried away...
The music accompanying Lovelace's actions and the whistling company (whose vinyls were originally sold directly in cinemas as a souvenir of the pleasant viewing) shared much of the film's tribulations. Firstly, the modus operandi, which was the spontaneous typical of similar operations from the time: recordings in a single daily session and total anonymity for the musicians. Secondly, the soundtrack faced the same legal issues as the film. In an investigative framework involving obscenity charges that risked landing actor Harry Reems in jail (and took the whole cast to court) and investigations into the criminal underworld interests behind the production, the soundtrack masters were seized by the FBI and subsequently lost. Not before the vinyls were printed, though. Quickly disappearing from the market and reprinted only once in a trivial quantity, in just a few years a reissue on LP and CD is available (practically a rip of an old seventies vinyl copy) also containing the soundtrack of the sequel, or rather: the only and original one amongst the countless sequels (or so-called) that have exploited the name and fame over the years, the only one with the same Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems as protagonists, shot in 1974 by Joseph Sarno.

Delving into listening or, better yet, listening paired with the film viewing, we can see how Damiano cut his movie to fit the soundtrack and how it has its own particular adherence to the various settings and narrative situations, constituting a desecrating and irreplaceable audio commentary. Desecrating because it removes the obscenity from the hard scenes: how can one not be baffled by a fellatio accompanied by a circus-style Charleston filled with effects, or a joyful marching band that distracts us from a penetration filmed in great detail? And the examples could go on endlessly: in this crazy sonic whirlwind made of porno-funk, easy-listening, catchy melodies, psychedelia, wild jam sessions, and whimsical ideas galore (in every sense...), we find the famous main theme and the apotheosis of visions with a very particular version of the famous Coca-Cola Christmas advertisement theme ("Pussy Cola") with altered lyrics for the occasion ("I'd like to teach you all to screw..."). It's this last one that is the background to a scene where a patient of nurse Lovelace is trying to find the right drink to sip from a very special chalice, and after being dissatisfied with a series of vintage wines, finds the perfect nectar in the most famous American carbonated beverage in the world, almost as if to remind us of the ideal gastronomic pairing of Coca-Cola and chips.

It's worth mentioning that the entire compilation is essentially made up of true excerpts from the movie: entire film sequences with the most salient dialogues give us a sort of audio version of Damiano's work, so much so that the individual tracks don't even have real titles but only quotations from dialogues or scenes they are a sound commentary on. The only exception is the centerpiece of the batch, the track that alone is worth buying the record: "Love is Strange", a cover of a 1950s hit by the r'n'b duo Mickey and Sylvia rearranged and transformed to the point of becoming a psychedelic jam session typical of the seventies, which with its eight minutes of improvised bass, drums, guitar, and Hammond organ virtuosities paces the performances of Linda and her friend Helen (Jenny in the Italian version) dealing with a plethora of partners lined up with numbers like at the supermarket.

Worthy of mention is the contemporary reissue containing, as previously stated, the soundtrack of "Deep Throat Part Two", this time remastered with all the chords from the original tapes. Certainly less wacky and more traditional than the preceding soundtrack but absolutely deserving with all its captivating retro-lounge charge pervading the auditory pavilion from the first track.
Curious? I hope so: maybe it won't fill those "four centimeters you lack for happiness" but will give you a few pleasant minutes... and deep throat to you all!