Uriah Heep Brings a Touch of the Uncool to Cold Water

One song is more of an outlier than any of the others: “Easy Livin’,” by Uriah Heep. The only hit single by the still (relatively) active band. To be blunt: it’s the least cool selection on the soundtrack. I’m not that much younger than Assayas, and as someone who grew up close to New York, I didn’t find the pursuit of rock and roll as difficult as it seemed to have been for Assayas in his early teens: “There was no rock and roll on French radio at all,” the director told Kristen Yoonsoo Kim in an interview last year, and “only three record shops in Paris.” I was luckier in that I had a favorite radio station, WNEW-FM, with a weekly “Things From England” DJ, and a Sam Goody with a smart import buyer in Paramus. And I could pick up, at local magazine shops, the rock rag Creem, which regularly lambasted Uriah Heep in its pages. They were considered the epitome of a journeyman boogie band with pretentions, and while they’d pick up a critical commendation here and there—Robert Christgau called their 1972 album The Magician’s Birthday “okay stuff,” but not before describing it as “third-hand heavy metal fantasies [. . .] hooked to some clean, powerful arrangements”—it was clear that they were not to be taken seriously. They were part of a post-psychedelic wave of British rock that produced a lot of unusually named bands, including Jethro Tull. Tull took its name from an obscure eighteenth-century pioneer in agriculture, while Heep merely lifted its moniker from Dickens’s David Copperfield. This is called not trying hard enough while trying too hard.

But, played between Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Up Around The Bend” (by this point the kids have stopped dancing inside and are breaking windows and throwing old furniture on the bonfire, around which they bounce and gyrate) and the reiteration (with better sonics) of “Virginia Plain,” “Easy Livin’” sounds better than fine. This Is Spinal Tap’s Marty De Bergi (Rob Reiner, also the film’s director) praised that fictional band for “their exuberance, their raw power, and their punctuality.” In that spirit one may laud “Easy Livin’” for its sonic crunch, its momentum, and its brevity: the whole thing clocks in at a mere two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. The single, which originates from Heep’s Demons and Wizards album (which directly preceded Magician’s Birthday) chugs along on an irresistible up-tempo chunka-chunka rhythm while Ken Hensley’s keyboards, usually portentous, recall the amiable dinkiness of Dave “Baby” Cortez’s 1959 instrumental hit “The Happy Organ” more than they might the pipe organ majesty of a rock E. Power Biggs. The vocal hook is sharp too—singer David Byron’s baritone-to-tenor range is both rico and suave—and the lyrics simple but immediately evocative. “This is a thing I’ve never known before / It’s called easy living / this is a place I’ve never seen before / and I’ve been forgiven.” Been forgiven, you say? Yes, “since you’ve taken your place in my heart.” Oh.

One can shrug at, and off, the banality. But the lyrics don’t lack pertinence to the film’s action, or the emotions of its characters. Up until the party Gilles enacts his arguments with authority and his dissatisfaction with the suspended state of his relationship with Christine through several confrontations, one with Mourad, the boyfriend of Christine’s mom. Before we see Gilles at the party, we see Christine there, cutting off her own hair; the song the kids dance to as she snips away is the Janis Joplin version of “Me and Bobby McGee.” When “Easy Livin’” is playing at the party, Mourad and Christine’s mom show up, furious, searching for her; she’s not found, and the adults leave, still agitated. Assayas isn’t so corny as to seek direct song-to-image correspondences (although the film hits on one as the furious Mourad runs around the party and the words “tried to find ya” turn up in the Heep tune), but uses the songs as both tokens of period verisimilitude and commentary. There’s an almost concrete reason that “Bobby McGee,” with its trenchant, oft-repeated observation about freedom, plays again over the end credits. After the party, when Christine enlists Gilles on a quixotic trek to a probably mythic commune where they can get away from everything by which they feel oppressed, how can the viewer not loop back to the image of “easy living?” And the film’s final moments certainly raise almost mortifying questions about what, and who, will or will not be forgiven.