While trapped in a hardware store, Bobby Wiggins and Hank Thompson discuss the guitar playing skill of The Sadies' Dallas & Travis Good.
Since Jim Jarmusch started making feature films, the part-time musician and full-time music fan has sought to sneak in cameos of his favourite artists. Beyond the starring roles frequently played by his longtime pals John Lurie and Tom Waits, Jarmusch always finds clever ways of getting some screen time for artists he loves, whether it's having underground NY rapper Rammelzee portraying "man with money" in his 1984 breakthrough Stranger Than Paradise, Screamin' Jay Hawkins serving as a hotel night clerk in 1989's Mystery Train, Butthole Surfters' frontman Gibby Haynes playing "man with a gun in alley" in 1995's Dead Man, Wu-Tang Clan's RZA and GZA discussing the finer points of alternative medicine with Bill Murray in 2003's Coffee and Cigarettes.
In Jarmusch's latest The Dead Don't Die – a cautionary tale about the hazards of fracking and consumerism run amok which opens this weekend), he's got regular collaborators Iggy Pop playing a coffee zombie, RZA appears as a WU-PS delivery man while Tom Waits has a key role as Hermit Bob, a mysterious forest-dwelling loner who provides Rod Serling-esque commentary. Alt-country star Sturgill Simpson is name-checked frequently as the singer of the film's title song whose CD of "The Dead Don't Die" serves as a prop throughout and Simpson himself later appears as a guitar-dragging zombie.
In a similar multi-level reference, there's a scene set in a zombie-surrounded hardware store where Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones) and Hank Thompson (Danny Glover) talk about the awesome guitar skills of The Sadies' dynamic brother duo of Dallas and Travis Good after seeing a brief cameo which fans of the Toronto twangers won't soon forget. You'll need to see the film for that entertaining sequence but in the meantime, watch the trailer below followed by a video for Sturgill Simpson's title track.
Ginger St. James has invited The Sadies to play The Casbah (306 King St. West) in beautiful downtown Hamilton on Sunday (June 16) – Check the venue's page right here for more info and tickets – before they head to Saskatchewan for the Long Day's Night Festival with Reverend Horton Heat in Swift Current (June 20-23) and then continue on a Western swing through July before hitting Buffalo's Cobblestone Live Music & Arts Festival (49 Illinois St) August 2-4.
After Otto Preminger finished the 1965 psychological thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing – his creepy black & white rejoinder to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho – the notorious control freak was so concerned with filmgoers showing up late and missing essential plot development points that he enlisted the Zombies to help create a special promotional clip to warn people against being tardy.
So the Zombies, who were already contributing three songs to the film's soundtrack, came up with Come On Time – a crafty rewrite of Just Out Of Reach which namechecks the principle players and presses the importance of punctuality. Now largely forgotten, the Zombies' Come On Time promo clip (reportedly shot under Preminger's critical glare) is an early example of a celebrity tie-in now commonplace in the set-up of big budget Hollywood films.
Since Sony Pictures strangely left it off their 2005 release of the Bunny Lake Is Missing DVD and today happens to be the birthday of Zombies' frontman Colin Blunstone, here's Come On Time followed by Preminger's original trailer where you can see the Zombies performing Just Out Of Reach on a pub TV and hear Otto underscore his "iron rule" that no one will be admitted to the theatre after the movie has started.
