Elephant's Memory – "Old Man Willow" (1969)

He just wants to get out of the sun

And find a place where he can go to sleep

Fun fact about the 1969 movie, Midnight Cowboy: it’s the only X-rated film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.  (Coincidentally, Oliver! – which was released the previous year – is the only G-rated movie to win a Best Picture Oscar.)

Actually, Midnight Cowboy wasn’t really an X-rated movie.  The head of the studio that produced it assumed it would be rated X, so he didn’t bother submitting it to the Motion Picture Association of America for an official rating – he simply put an X rating on it himself.  Two years later, the MPAA gave the movie an R rating without even being asked.

If you’d like to learn more about the making of Midnight Cowboy, I highly recommend Glenn Frankel’s 2021 book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic.

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The old X rating (which was renamed NC-17 in 1990) eventually became exclusively associated with porn movies.  But before that happened, several well-respected directors made X-rated movies, including Nicholas Roeg (Performance), Stanley Kubrick  (Clockwork Orange), and Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris).

Sam Peckinpah’s greatest movie, The Wild Bunch, was originally rated R when it was released in 1969.  Warner Bros. decided to do a 25th anniversary re-release in 1994, and resubmitted the movie to the MPAA – which rated it NC-17 for some reason.  After a year of bitching and moaning by the studio, the MPAA agreed to give the movie an R rating – clearing the way for the 26th anniversary re-release of The Wild Bunch.

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Midnight Cowboy and The Wild Bunch weren’t the only notable movies to be released in 1969 – Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Easy Rider, Goodbye Columbus, Marlowe, Medium Cool, and Once Upon a Time in the West are among the others.

1969 marked the beginning of the greatest decade in American film history.  Five Easy Pieces, The French Connection, The Last Picture Show, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, American Graffiti, Badlands, The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, An Unmarried Woman, Days of Heaven, Apocalypse Now, and Breaking Away were all released between 1969 and 1979.

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Harry Nilsson’s recording of “Everybody’s Talkin’” is the song from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack that everyone knows.

But let’s not forget “Old Man Willow” by Elephant’s Memory, which you hear during the Midnight Cowboy scene when Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) go to a party whose attendees include several of Andy Warhol’s better-known pals. 

Several years after Midnight Cowboy was released, Elephant’s Memory became John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s backup band.  But I’ll forgive them for that because “Old Man Willow” is a seriously groovy track.

Click here to listen to “Old Man Willow.”  (The song is named for a character in The Lord of the Rings.)

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.