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Carter's Notes
I visited the Coens while they were shooting in Scottsdale, more a social call than a professional one since we hadn't spoken at all about me scoring Raising Arizona. While I was there they had dogs barking all over town during the shooting of the "Huggies Chase."
When Ethan did call me, he was clearly not convinced that I the film and I were a great match. He opined that the film was probably not "groovy" enough for me. I loved the script but it's true that I have no affinity for country music or other things Western. But I did want to give it a try.
The first thing I mocked up was a Spanish Rock Opera for the Biker From Hell (Tex Cobb's character), using early sampling technology to simulate dementedly swooping sopranos. When it came to yodeling the only lead I had was a Polish singer I'd worked with for a while, Mieczyslaw Litwinksi, who could yodel you to tears. I didn't know any banjo players, but Ben Freed, whom I believe was optometrist to one of the Coens, fit the bill. For percussion I enlisted Geoffrey Gordon and Skip La Plante who had a group called Music For Homemade Instruments which seemed appropriate for this film. Geoff and Skip are featured in the scene in which Nicholas Cage wrestles John Goodman in a small trailer home. The score is pretty well improvised using household objects - vacuum cleaner hoses, hubcaps, peanut butter jars, etc.
Mieczyslaw's yodeling was indelibly Eastern European - a fine point I'd overlooked - and Ethan and I tried to relocate the sound from the mountains of Silesia to the plains of Arizona. Ethan would say "You're riding your horse across the prairie - no one around for miles - the sun is shining and you whip off your hat and let loose a joyous yodel!" and what came out sounded like an Orthodox chant. Heart-rendingly beautiful, but not Arizona. Not even Utah. In the end Mietek whistled and hummed and played Jew's harp on the score, and we hired an honest-to-goodness Okie, John Crowder, to do the yodeling.
To play over the scroll of credits at the end of the film I proposed a varied arrangement of the upbeat tunes from the film - in particular I wanted to do something with ukelele, bagpipe and kazoo. We only had a bit of free time remaining in the recording studio and the Coens were dubious about my concept so they left assuming that they'd use edits of the music we already had for their end titles. I went on and recorded the ukelele variation with a group of uke players called Songs From A Random House. Knowing this tune was not going to make it into the film I went home and mixed my variation as "Raising Ukeleles" and I don't think the Coens actually heard it until it was placed on the CD many months later.
From David Morgan's interview with Carter Burwell in Knowing The Score:
I believe while Joel was shooting the movie he was thinking about yodeling. Joel and Ethan are both into old timey country music, and Ethan actually does yodel. I give them credit for that because it's a brilliant idea.
The music treats the movie like a cartoon. No one's really ever going to get hurt in this movie is what the music tells you. People can be firing shotguns at each other and no one's going to get any more hurt than Bugs Bunny would in a similar situation. And the yodeling and banjo helped to tell you that. It's a crazy ride we're going on in this film, and the music is playing Nicholas Cage. It's used right over the intro to the movie before the credits, and introduces him. It plays him as a latter-day cowboy who wants to live free on the prairie, so to speak, in his own fashion, and no matter what situation he's in it reminds you that he's got this cartoon cowboy aspect.
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