South by SouthWest was the great unmade road movie of the early Seventies. As Mitch Levine, one of its many producers, recalled in his autobiography, "The script passed through so many hands we had to laminate it. At one point, we had John Huston as the girl's father, Angelica Houston as the girl, and Steve McQueen and Peter Fonda both thought they were playing the detective. But it kept getting delayed. The original director got busted on his way back from a research trip to Juarez. Ryan O'Neal and Roy Scheider both dropped out from the part of the cult leader because of the orgy scene. So we got Sammy Davis Jnr. He was alright with the orgy, but he didn't like the voodoo. Cissy Peters, who was our first choice for the girl, really did join a cult. Then the whole Patty Hearst thing happened. We were so far advanced that we'd even commissioned a soundtrack. I lost a fortune." (Mitch Levine, Death By A Thousand Cuts: My Life In The Movies)
Those soundtrack tapes remained lost for over thirty years. In 2005, builders installing a tanning salon in the basement of a West Hollywood studio found three reels of tape marked South By Southwest, and a stack of handwritten sheet music. Now retired in Florida, Mitch Levine reviewed his tax position and passed the tapes and the sheet music over to The Karminsky Experience Inc.
In their London studio, The Karminsky Experience Inc. cleaned up the tapes and brought in jazz hacks Crockett & Green. Over several painstaking months, using only 70s instruments, amps and guitar strings, they completed the sessions begun in 1974. Restored, reworked, thirty years late and not a day too soon, South By Southwest is the Original Soundtrack of the greatest movie never made.
Full album available at iTunes
