Soundtrack - I Am Sam

There’s certainly been no shortage of Lennon, McCartney, and Lennon/McCartney material on the market of late, with, in addition to the usual back catalogs, McCartney’s new disc Driving Rain, a McCartney pop music tribute album called Listen to What the Man Said, the Stone Temple Pilots paint-by-numbers cover of “Revolution,” as well as the recordings inspired by 9/11—including Paul’s own “Freedom” and Neil Young’s take on “Imagine.”

I guess the producers of this soundtrack didn’t recognize the obvious bad karma inherent in excluding the songs of both Ringo Starr and the late George Harrison from a collection of Beatles covers. Especially given that Ringo’s “When I’m 64” and/or Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun,” for example, would have done nicely. Both are certainly more apropos of the film’s mood and themes than Lennon’s anthems of acid trips (“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) and political unrest (“Revolution”).

The movie 'I Am Sam' is one of those projects that uses a sunny exterior to hide a larcenous heart, plundering bits of meaning from popular culture at every turn. The film’s title is pinched from Dr. Seuss children’s book Green Eggs and Ham (“I am Sam, Sam I am. . .). The mentally challenged hero thrust into a parental (or pseudo-parental) role is derived from recent Hollywood successes Slingblade and Forrest Gump (Gump, in fact, also provided an explicit model for the wholesale hijacking of signifiers from other segments of popular culture).

Sam, Sean Penn’s character in the movie, is obsessed with Beatles music, and the movie’s soundtrack was conceived as the coup de grace of pop culture shoplifting—the actual original recordings of the actual Beatles performing these songs. I Am Sam’s producers probably should have known better, but I suppose there’s no harm in trying. This scheme was nixed when they were unable to obtain the rights to these recordings. So this is the fallback plan: an album of mostly painstakingly faithful cover versions performed by a rather predictable cross-section of “adult alternative rock” artists. The final product is a mixed bag that tends to err in interpretation on the side of caution. Although it’s likely to sell well—as I write this, it’s currently #23 on the Billboard 200 and #5 on Billboard’s Top Internet Albums chart—it will likely, as does any reinterpretation of Lennon/McCartney songs, polarize Beatle fans regarding its artistic merit.

It probably makes pleasant background music for a movie (we can’t fault it for this achievement; it is a soundtrack, after all), but I Am Sam doesn’t really quite work as a stand-alone listening experience. It’s not that this is that bad of an album. Sure, some of the tracks completely miss the target. The Black Crowes’ “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” would have been better off going for William Shatner than for John Lennon. Granddaddy’s “Revolution” sounds closer to “Revolution 1,” the muddled version that appeared on the White Album, than to the more highly regarded version that appeared as the B-side of “Hey Jude.” Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder contributes “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” delivered in a mush-mouthed, anesthetizing warble that only serves as a reminder of why grunge is over. Paul Westerberg sleepwalks through a Lennon-as-Dylan reading of “Nowhere Man.” The oddest misstep of all is Lou Reed/Patti Smith fetishist Heather Nova’s negation of McCartney’s “We Can Work It Out.”

Most of the rest of the tracks are more successful, though to varying degrees. Aimee Mann and Michael Penn, Sarah McLachlin, The Wallflowers, Ben Harper, Sheryl Crow, Ben Folds, and the Vines each opt for puppy-dog-faithful versions of their respective songs. Rufus Wainwright’s “Across the Universe” is the most sincere, nuanced vocal performance of the collection, and perhaps the only of the album’s 17 tracks that will be essential for fans of the respective artists. Folkie Howie Day slows and strips down “Help” into a country blues shuffle. The Stereophonics do the record a big favor by throwing down an irreverent interpretation of “Don’t Let Me Down” that sounds more like the Faces in their prime than the Beatles in theirs. Chocolate Genius hangs “Julia” on musical hooks that owe as big a debt to Lenny Kravitz as they do John Lennon. Nick Cave’s vocal approach to “Let It Be” replaces the pop optimism of McCartney’s original with a mordant stoicism that subtly but wickedly changes the meaning of the song. It’s Cave’s best cover since he did Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” on From Here to Eternity, as well as best cut on this album, slightly edging out Wainwright’s “Across the Universe”.

--Matt Parks (Feb 24, 2002)