The ambient jazz track that gave David Lynch a hernia in 1993
David Lynch didn’t just make some of the greatest movies of the late 20th century; he was also blessed with being a polymath.
Not content with merely being a writer and director of films, Lynch was also a talented artist and painter. He could act, too, check out his scene-stealing turn as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s masterful The Fabelmans for proof. However, the side project he seemed to have the most affection for was music.
It should come as no surprise, considering music operated as an intensely important part of building that signature Lynchian style.
Due to his obsession with the art form, it makes sense that he’d eventually stop merely telling his collaborators the vague ideas of the music that was in his head and start making music of his own.
By 1991, Lynch had been working with Angelo Badalamenti for over five years, their first collaboration coming with the distressing masterpiece Blue Velvet, and the two were on such similar wavelengths that they decided to collaborate directly on a whole music project together.
The two essentially wanted to take the ambient, experimental jazz they’d made for Blue Velvet and make a record out of it. As a result, Thought Gang was born. While a whole album was recorded, the only tracks that surfaced from it were on the soundtrack to the deeply misunderstood movie spin-off of one of the greatest TV series ever made, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. One of which was the song ‘A Real Indication’, which inadvertently sent Lynch to hospital.
The song is a moody slice of blues-infused jazz that was going to be built around Lynch’s own poetry. However, Lynch himself wasn’t comfortable performing the song, and couldn’t find anyone else to do it. So, being a top man and a top collaborator, Badalamenti volunteered to do the honours. Something which the infamously straight-talking Lynch told their engineer Artie Pohlemus would be “embarassing”.
Badalamenti was a man of his word, though, and stepped into the booth himself to improvise a performance of Lynch’s lyrics. The result needs to be heard to be believed. Badalamenti, looking and sounding like an enforcer from The Sopranos, delivered a raging, menacing, soothing and seductive reading of Lynch’s work, completely off the dome and unprepared. Lynch, being the supportive collaborator that he was, laughed so hard that he literally gave himself a hernia out of sheer mirth, describing the incident in graphic detail in an interview with Rolling Stone later on.
He recalled, “I laughed so hard, It was like a light bulb burst in my stomach. I had to have an operation and go through all this stuff ’cause of Angelo.”
At the very least, he loved what Badalamenti came up with so much that the song made it into Fire Walk With Me. However, the rest of the record wouldn’t surface until 2018, decades after the album was completed. It’s first single? A full-length, Lynch directed music video for ‘A Real Indication’.
Hopefully, the great man didn’t injure himself during that, too.
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