Zabriskie Point: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

 (22 customer reviews)

The "Zabriskie Point" soundtrack was re-issued a few years ago, and this is a most welcome reissue, overseen by the (as usual) reliable folks at Rhino. What originally was a single CD soundtrack now comes to us in 2 CDs.CD 1 (11 tracks, 36 min.) contains music by a variety of artists, including 3 tracks from "The Pink Floyd" (sic). It shows the band in pre-Atom Heart Mother/Meddle mode (all Floyd music for the soundtrack was recorded in Nov/Dec 1969). "Heart Beat, Big Meat" is a great mood piece along the lines of "Speak to Me"; "Crumbling Land" could have fitted nice along Meddle's "Fearless"; "Come in Number 51" is a retooled "Careful With That Axe Eugene". Jerry Garcia contributes the "Love Scene" accoustic guitar solo. Strangely there is also a 2 min. excerpt from the Dead's "Dark Star" that starts and ends with no rhyme or reason and begs the question: why? (Deadheads know what...Read more

There is a unique mood set by this CD, that is wholly separate from the film itself. The weirdness of psychedelic Pink Floyd tunes juxtaposed with acoustic pieces, hurtin' country tunes, and the "Tennessee Waltz" no less (!), works together to create an entirely unusual head space. Open your mind, and the rest will flow. I owned this on vinyl originally, and jumped when I saw the double CD re-release. Besides 4 lengthy out takes from Jerry Garcia's beautiful love theme, it also has 4 unreleased Pink Floyd pieces, "Country Song", which sounds like something that would have been at home on "Atom Heart Mother", "Unknown Song", a breezy acoustic instrumental with psychedelic flourishes that is vintage Floyd, and two pieces that were Pink Floyd's original attempts at writing music for the love scene before film director Antonioni opted to go with Jerry Garcia's piece. Both are excellent, one an amazing, late night blues instrumental, the other a...Read more

There are two possible questions that could be asked here:1. Should I buy this?2. I already have the original, should I now buy this.The answer to both questions is yes. There is enough new material here to make this worthwhile for any Pink Floyd (or Jerry Garcia) fan. If you already bought the original for the 3 Pink Floyd tunes, it means that you are a big enough fan that you have to have this one too.This was originally released as single album that contained the material on the first CD. It later came out as a single CD. Being a soundtrack, it was always a little more expensive than a standard album. It could be difficult to find at times. It contained 3 Pink Floyd tracks, a spacey track, a typical Pink Floyd movie soundtrack song, and a truncated version of Careful With That Axe Eugene (called Come In Number 51) which is very good and different from the original. The Jerry Garcia tune is a nice 7 minute solo acoustic instrumental. The Grateful Dead...Read more