This Is Not A Soundtrack LP (part 1)

John Buck Wilkin, In Search Of Food Clothing Shelter And Sex (Liberty, 1970)

Liberty spared no expense on packaging Wilkin’s album, gatefold with lyric and portrait inner. Hopper gets a thank you in the acknowledgements. I’m guessing there wasn’t enough original material to produce a soundtrack for The Last Movie, which used music recorded in performance and on location, so this is as close as we have to one, with ‘Bobbie McGee’ and ‘My God and I’ shared between album and film.

Wilkin appears to be wearing the poncho Hopper wore in the movie, and the locations mimic the desert junkyard theme at the beginning of Easy Rider and in countless biker movies.

Wilkin had once played in Ronny and the Daytonas and made one more album after this.

Dennis Hopper - American Dreamer OST

With the release of The Last Movie on blu-ray, I’ve been listening again to the OST of American Dreamer . Both soundtracks feature John Buck Wilkin, who appears in a cameo with Kris Kristofferson singing ‘Me & Bobby McGee.’ Wilkin’s mum was the Nashville songwriter and publisher Marijohn Wilkin, by this short route John Buck got hold of KK’s most famous song and delivered the first recording of it on his debut long player, In Search of Food Clothing Shelter and Sex (Liberty 1970). That album also contained ‘My God and I’, another song that found a home on The Last Movie.

John Buck is playing guitar (sitting) to Hopper’s right, to his left is Peter Fonda and Kris Kristofferson

Clive Hodgson’s review in Frendz #30 is pretty dismissive of American Dreamer and takes particular aim at the film’s producer, Lawrence Schiller, due to his exploitation of the Tate murder.

Schiller though was a good photographer and many of his images of Hopper provide the booklet illustrations that accompany the recent Light In The Attic re-issue of the OST. The vinyl edition is limited to 1000 copies, you can probably get the original (w/ poster) for less than it is selling on eBay.

Despite the wonderful packaging and that essential poster, the bottom line is that OST is feeble, only Gene Clark shines (of course he does).