And artists complain that they don't have control over their catalogs while they're alive -- wait till they die. Then you really find out who your friends are.
Indian Summer: Music from the Motion Picture is that most spurious of beasts, the unrecorded soundtrack to a nonexistent movie. Around 1981-1982,
Mick Ronson was approached to score a film and, apparently finding himself with a little time on his hands, settled down to sketch out a few ideas. But that was just about all he did -- sketch. The idea that the handful of even half-completed demos might someday be combined with a clutch of other outtakes, working versions, and revised oldies and sold to the fan club as some kind of final project surely never crossed his mind. The liner notes, though they do endeavor to construct the most lavish silk purse from a pig's ear of offcuts, admit as much with their confession that "little information exists about the project" -- indeed, the only conclusion that they draw from the tapes is that
Ronson was "one of the most underrated musicians to come out of Britain." But did they really need to scrape the barrel this deep to discover that? What you see is what you get -- alternate versions of a few songs familiar from other posthumous
Ronson releases, an early version of "Midnight Love" from his
Heaven and Hull farewell, and a lot of instrumental meanderings that he never took any further. But hurry and you can pick up a limited-edition version that is even more insulting, as the entire "soundtrack" is reprised on a bonus disc, shot through with "screen test dialogue." In other words, demos of the script. Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy. ~ Dave Thompson