The 33 Greatest Musical Moments in ‘Dazed and Confused’
Twenty-five years since it was first released, Richard Linklater’s Texas high school classic still rocksThe 33 Greatest Musical Moments in ‘Dazed and Confused’
Twenty-five years since it was first released, Richard Linklater’s Texas high school classic still rocks
On September 24, 1993, Dazed and Confused was released on 183 screens, grossing just over $918,000 in its opening weekend. The following week, it appeared on 31 more screens … and made about $90,000 less. Within a month, the film disappeared from theaters altogether, having grossed less than half of its $6.9 million budget.
We all know that Dazed and Confused carried on l-i-v-i-n on home video and cable TV, becoming one of the most iconic teen films ever and an early springboard for future superstars Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck. But 25 years ago, Dazed and Confused was a cheap, unsuccessful period comedy with a very expensive classic-rock soundtrack.
Remember the scene where Wooderson (McConaughey), rebellious quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), and baby-faced freshman Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) stride in slow motion through local teen hangout the Emporium? Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” the song playing on the soundtrack, cost $80,000 to license. For the opening credits sequence, in which the audience meets all of the characters to the tune of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” usage of the Toys in the Attic banger came with a $23,000 price tag, more than the entire budget of writer-director Richard Linklater’s previous film, the pioneering 1991 indie phenom Slacker.
It’s no wonder that the studio, Universal, initially pushed Linklater to drop the oldies and allow current hard-rock bands, such as the cartoonish southern-metal outfit Jackyl, to re-record them. After all, why else would the film’s target audience of teenagers and 20-somethings care about ancient arena-rock songs that their parents liked?
Besides, it wasn’t as if Linklater was spotlighting those numbers in bombastic, show-stopping sequences in the style of Martin Scorsese or another emerging early-’90s indie auteur, Quentin Tarantino. Linklater’s filmmaking style was more understated and naturalistic, and his use of music followed suit—in most cases, he deployed the soundtrack as a means of creating atmosphere, as if he were merely capturing songs already floating in the air, making his movie feel like a cinema-vérité documentary about a self-contained subculture.
But even if he chose not to beat viewers over the head with his well-chosen Ted Nugent and ZZ Top deep cuts, that didn’t mean Linklater was willing to give an inch in terms of historical accuracy. For a moment, he had considered using Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song” over the closing credits, “but that song didn’t come out until July,” two months after the film’s May 1976 setting, “so I didn’t use it,” Linklater told Texas Monthly in 2003. (“Cowboy Song” actually came out that March. Anyway, Linklater instead closed Dazed and Confused with Foghat’s “Slow Ride.”)
If Thin Lizzy of all bands was ruled out on authenticity grounds, there was no way that Linklater was going to allow Jackyl’s cover of Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band”—an idea floated by Universal—to wrap his semi-autobiographical ’70s movie.
For Linklater, music had always been an essential part of Dazed and Confused. When major studios pursued him in the wake of Slacker garnering fawning critical acclaim, he pitched the “teenage rock and roll film” that had long gestated in his imagination. The primary reference point was American Graffiti, the 1973 George Lucas classic that follows a group of California teenagers wandering aimlessly through a fateful night in 1962 as an omnipresent soundtrack of period rock hits roars in the background. Linklater saw Dazed and Confused as an American Graffiti for Generation X—using popular rock songs as both a Greek chorus and as a way to enrich the film’s verisimilitude.
Linklater was eventually vindicated for his stubbornness. Not only is Dazed and Confused now regarded as the teenage rock ’n’ roll film, the soundtrack was certified double-platinum and became a fixture whenever stoners gathered around car stereos during the height of grunge.
But what really makes Dazed and Confused special among films with memorable throwback soundtracks is that Linklater wasn’t merely leaning on nostalgia. While Dazed and Confused evokes 1976 with uncommon specificity, the film endures because Linklater’s attention to detail—musical and otherwise—makes it feel like a universal depiction of adolescent wanderlust. I was born one year after Dazed and Confused takes place, and yet it feels like an uncannily accurate depiction of my own high school experience decades later.
“I didn’t want it to be this fond look at, ‘Oh what a great era,’” Linklater says in the making-of documentary. “This was a shitty time. It’s always a crummy time. If you’re a teenager, it’s always going to be difficult, no matter when and where.”
How did Linklater achieve that “crummy” universality with his randy, riff-tastic soundtrack? Lay back, close your eyes, and strap on your headphones, because we’re going to count down the 33* greatest musical moments of Dazed and Confused.
33–21: Songs You Only Notice When You’ve Seen Dazed and Confused 100 Times
If you’ll indulge me as I use a $10 film studies term: Dazed and Confused is rich with examples of diegetic music, which are songs that are actually heard by the characters on screen. Many times, these tracks are buried low in the mix so you can hear the dialogue. For instance, you might not have realized that Sweet’s swaggering glitter-rock gem “Fox on the Run” (27) plays as Wooderson utters his quintessentially creepy line about teenage girls, “I get older, they stay the same age.” Or Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way” (32) trilling in the distance as Wooderson flirts with smart-girl Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi) at the Top Notch drive-in. Or Steve Miller Band’s honking “Living in the U.S.A.” (33) boogieing it up as Pink, Mitch, Pickford (Shawn Andrews), and Slater (Rory Cochrane) climb the moon tower at the climactic beer bash.
But even when the music is practically subliminal in Dazed and Confused, you can still marvel at Linklater’s thoughtfulness in choosing songs. Before filming began, Linklater made mixtapes for each cast member composed of tunes he felt their character would like. (Apparently not everyone appreciated this. “I was a gigantic Neil Young fan at the time, and I was getting ELO and Foghat?” Adam Goldberg, who played sensitive erstwhile party brawler Mike Newhouse, complained later to Maxim.)
If you pay close attention, you can glean insights into the taste of certain characters. For example, meathead jock Benny (Cole Hauser) has an authentic love of early metal and Southern rock, evidenced by Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” (29) and Black Oak Arkansas’s “Jim Dandy” (30) blasting in his truck as he and his buddies chase down freshmen during the film’s “hazing” section.
Over at the Emporium, where the characters kill time in the middle of the movie, there’s a predictable mix of blue-collar, workmanlike “people’s bands” like Head East’s “Never Been Any Reason” (28), Black Oak Arkansas’s “Lord Have Mercy on My Soul” (31), and Foghat’s “Slow Ride.” That Foghat song memorably reappears later in Dazed and Confused, though it’s not the only track that Linklater uses more than once.
It’s possible that he doubled up occasionally in order to save a little money, though hearing the same tunes repeatedly also has a true-to-life quality that’s endemic to teenage cruising culture. Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” (23 and 24) and Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold” (21 and 22) also appear twice—the former in Pink’s car and at the beer bash, and the latter in Pickford’s bedroom and again at the beer bash, right before Newhouse takes his ill-advised swing at “dominant male monkey motherfucker” Clint (Nicky Katt).
Both of those tracks would have been in a heavy rotation in the Texas suburbs during the late spring of 1976. Frampton Comes Alive! rose to no. 1 for the first time that April, and hit the top of the charts again for several weeks in July, August, and September. As for Nugent, he was nearing the peak of his popularity among the nation’s hesher population, thanks to his smash hit 1975 self-titled album, which dropped early in the school year that is about to end as Dazed and Confused opens. This explains why “Hey Baby” (25), which like “Stranglehold” is culled from Ted Nugent, also gets played at the beer bash—not to mention Wooderson’s Nuge T-shirt.
While you can sense the affection that Linklater has for all of this music, the song selection also serves his “crummy” objectives. Unlike many directors, he’s not trying to show off his worldly taste in obscure, cool music. He’s determined to show how things actually were in ’76, not how he wished they were. The smart kids—Cynthia, Mike, and Tony (Anthony Rapp)—aren’t closet Big Star or Jonathan Richman fanatics. They groove to Foghat along with everybody else. Linklater uses the soundtrack to establish a genuine world filled with characters who love music but aren’t connoisseurs. It feels like real life.
20–12: The Soundtrack Stalwarts
A major part of Dazed and Confused’s paradoxical status as a timeless period piece was no doubt engendered by the soundtrack, which made several old and mostly forgotten songs newly relevant decades after they were originally released. Just as the students of Robert E. Lee High School cruised to War’s “Low Rider” (13) and Rick Derringer’s “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” (17), those songs subsequently became a part of my high school experience because of Dazed and Confused. Along with scoring endless drives, the Dazed and Confused soundtracks were also ideal as mood-setters for smoking weed, particularly War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends” (15) and Dr. John’s “Right Place, Wrong Time” (14).
For those who came of age, as I did, in the nowheresville of mid-’90s middle-American suburbia, both volumes of the Dazed and Confused soundtrack were Friday night hangout touchstones. (Other albums in this category include the two early ’90s Beastie Boys LPs, Check Your Head and Ill Communication, and the collected works of bro-ska punks Sublime.) Just as Dazed and Confused depicts a guileless mid-’70s American youth culture right before the twin explosions of disco and punk, Dazed and Confused became a cult hit right as hip-hop and nu-metal finally supplanted classicist rock music in the hearts of millions of teens. It’s an elegy that unwittingly signified a much different sort of elegiac moment in popular music history.
If I ever wrote and directed a movie about the mid-’90s, I would insist on including several songs from the ’70s, because that was the last time that those old songs could still feel “current.” In 1993, it wasn’t uncommon for a typical Soundgarden fan to also love Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” (18) or Kiss’s “Rock and Roll All Nite” (19). Alice Cooper was then in the consciousness thanks to his cameo in 1992’s Wayne’s World, so hearing “School’s Out” (12) and “No More Mr. Nice Guy” (16) in a movie the following year made sense. As for true anachronisms like Foghat’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” (20) … well, the ’90s were also a golden age for “ironic” listening.
A movie like Dazed and Confused couldn’t influence culture to the same degree today. Classic rock is just too distant from “youth” music now. But, for a while, even as the songs got older, the fans stayed the same age.
11 and 10: Special “ZZ Top’s Fandango!” Category
As much as I love Dazed and Confused—believe me, there aren’t many soundtracks that I deconstruct to this extremely nerdy degree—I’ll always be intrigued by the movie Linklater didn’t make, in which ZZ Top’s 1975 dirtbag masterpiece Fandango! plays a prominent role.
Apparently, his original idea was to focus solely on two teenage guys in a car who drive all night listening to Fandango! on an 8-track. The film would’ve taken place in real time and tracked the duo’s meandering late-night conversations and misadventures, all while the 33-minute album played on a loop over the stereo. (Assuming this version of Dazed and Confused had run for 90 minutes, the audience would’ve heard all nine and a half minutes of “Backdoor Medley” for about a third of that.)
You can see traces of the film that Linklater made after Dazed and Confused, 1995’s Before Sunrise, in that idea, only with the explosive musical alchemy of guitarist Billy Gibbons and the crack rhythm section of Dusty Hill and Frank Beard subbed in for the romantic chemistry of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Fortunately, Linklater was able to integrate two songs from Fandango! into Dazed and Confused: “Tush” (10), which scores the “smashing mailboxes with garbage cans” sequence, and “Balinese” (11), which memorably rocks the beer bash.
Hidden Track: “Alright, Alright, Alright”
This isn’t a rock ’n’ roll moment from Dazed and Confused but it certainly informed the movie: In a 2011 interview with George Stroumboulopoulos, Matthew McConaughey revealed that the inspiration for his signature “alright, alright, alright” catchphrase came from a Doors live album, in which Jim Morrison hollers “alright!’ several times at one point between songs. McConaughey listened to the album to get pumped up before shooting his first scene in the movie, which was his first scene in any movie.
McConaughey never identified the specific Doors live album—there are many of them—but I think he’s referring to Live in Boston, a recording notorious for Morrison’s drunken, frankly insane stage banter. In the Stroumboulopoulos interview, McConaughey recalls Morrison saying “alright” four times, though he actually says it a few more times than that. McConaughey then explained why he settled on three “alrights.”
“So right before before we’re about to go I go, ‘What is Wooderson about?’ And I go, ‘He’s about four things: He’s about his car, he’s about gettin’ high, he’s about rock ’n’ roll and pickin’ up chicks.’ I go, ‘I’m in my car, I’m high as a kite, I’m listenin’ to rock ’n’ roll …’ Action ... and there’s the chick. Alright, alright, alright ... three out of four.”
And the rest is history. However, if McConaughey had listened a little deeper into that album, I wonder if “Adolf Hitler is still alive, I slept with her last night” would have become his catchphrase.
9–6: The Beer Bash Sequence
I’ve already mentioned several highlights from the party at the moon tower, but these four songs are the most memorable.
9. Milla Jovovich, “The Alien Song (for Those Who Listen)”
This is the one tune in Dazed and Confused that’s not from the ’70s—it wasn’t even officially released until 1994, on Jovovich’s (really good!) avant-folk album The Divine Comedy. You hear her play it as Slater goes off about how Martha Washington kept her husband George flush with big fat bowls at the end of each day.
In various articles and oral histories about the making of Dazed and Confused, Jovovich is barely mentioned, even though she was one of the most famous people in the cast when the film was released, and a focal point of the promotion. While most of the actors partied together, Jovovich apparently kept her distance, preferring to canoodle with Shawn Andrews—the one person everyone else involved in Dazed and Confused apparently disliked—who was also her boyfriend in the movie. Though she was only 16 during the shoot, she eventually eloped with Andrews in 1992, though the marriage was quickly annulled.
In the final cut, Jovovich’s part was edited down to practically nothing, which understandably disappointed her. After Dazed and Confused, Jovovich didn’t appear in her next film, The Fifth Element, for another four years. Nevertheless, “The Alien Song” slaps.
8. Seals & Crofts, “Summer Breeze”
One of the greatest yacht-rock songs of all time, which means it’s somewhat out of place on this party-hearty soundtrack, “Summer Breeze” scores Mitch’s end-of-the-night make-out session with Julie (Catherine Avril Morris). A perfect showcase for Linklater’s light romantic touch, and one of those scenes that feels like a memory ripped out of my own brain whenever I watch the movie.
7. The Runaways, “Cherry Bomb”
Amazing song, even more amazing showcase for Parker Posey’s drunken dancing.
6. Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Tuesday’s Gone”
With sincere apologies to Semisonic, “Tuesday’s Gone” is the best “closing time” song of all time, and it’s due entirely to Dazed and Confused. The sun is coming up, the keg is empty, you just lost a fight, you’re still buzzed but also feeling defeated—only Skynyrd can capture the epic sweep of this melancholic predicament. I think about this scene whenever I’m up way too late and anticipate feeling terrible the next day—even if I rarely behave like this on a Tuesday.
The Top Five
5. Nazareth, “Love Hurts”
The other big make-out song, this time from the junior high dance where Hirschfelder (Jeremy Fox) is stopped from “getting there” by Carl (Esteban Powell) and Tommy (Mark Vandermeulen). This is another scene that feels more like a memory from my own life than something I saw in a movie. Sometimes, this song is physically painful for me to hear. Compliments to Nazareth and Rick Linklater.
4. The Edgar Winter Group, “Free Ride”
In a movie overloaded with classic driving songs, “Free Ride” is (almost) the best. Linklater utilizes “Free Ride” at the beginning of the night, during a montage in which we see all of the characters getting picked up and feeling excited about the potential action that awaits. If it’s true that Linklater didn’t want to romanticize 1976, and instead depict it as the “shitty time” it really was, it also can’t be denied that doing nothing and going nowhere when you’re a teenager inevitably seems romantic in retrospect because you’re rarely allowed the freedom to do absolutely jack shit with your time later on in life. This song, and the way Linklater uses it, captures that.
3. Foghat, “Slow Ride”
OK, this is the best driving song ever, which is clearly why Linklater used it twice in Dazed and Confused. I didn’t always see it that way. The first 10 times I saw Dazed and Confused, I questioned why Linklater didn’t use another Aerosmith song in the film’s final scene, as the purpose of Wooderson’s road trip is to purchase Aerosmith tickets in Houston, the “top priority of the summer,” as Pink puts it. I always felt that “Back in the Saddle” from Rocks, which was released about three weeks before the events in Dazed and Confused take place, would’ve worked beautifully in this slot.
But now I respect reprising “Slow Ride,” a Zen koan that reiterates Wooderson’s “Just keep livin’” speech on the football field from a few minutes prior. What is life but a slow ride in which one must take it easy in order to survive over the long haul? “Slow Ride” is philosophy presented in the guise of a party, as is Dazed and Confused.
2. Aerosmith, “Sweet Emotion”
Is there a better opening credits sequence than this? I don’t think so.
Beautiful. Linklater filmed that 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge the way that Bruce Springsteen sings about a ’69 Chevy with a 396.
1. Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”
“The first time I saw it I cried,” Marissa Ribisi said of the “Hurricane” sequence, and who can blame her? It’s Dazed and Confused’s most purely mythic moment, the one scene in which Linklater indulges in “look how fucking cool this is!” showmanship, the equivalent in his oeuvre to Scorsese introducing Robert De Niro in Mean Streets with that slow-mo bar stroll set to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
If you want to examine the subtext of this scene, you could point out that Dylan is the most “mature” artist on the soundtrack, and note how this correlates with Mitch entering the “older kid” world of the Emporium for the first time. You might also observe that Linklater includes the part of the chorus in which Dylan sings that “Hurricane” Carter “could’ve been the champion of the world,” an ironic commentary on the lecherous Wooderson. Or you can just grab another beer and watch this scene 10 times in a row because it looks fucking awesome. It’d be a lot cooler if you did.