When I got to thinking about bands that sound like throwbacks, I realized that sometimes they do it on purpose — for example, when a movie is set in the past. Consider this nugget from the “American Graffiti” soundtrack.
Back in the early ’70s the country went through a wave of nostalgia for the music of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Not much more than a decade had passed, but doo-wop and pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll were ancient history by 1972, when George Lucas was filming “American Graffiti,” set in the distant past of 1962. He needed a band to portray Herbie and the Heartbeats at the high school sock hop.
Luckily for Lucas, Sha-Na-Na had kicked off a doo-wop nostalgia fad that party bands everywhere capitalized on. Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids formed at the University of Colorado and were popular enough on the club circuit in Boulder that they moved to L.A. hoping for a break, and they got one when someone doing casting for Lucas saw them play. Lucas told them to tone down their raucous live act — “you’re the polite little dance band from up the road” — and they got a nice amount of screen time covering “At the Hop,” originally by Danny and the Juniors.
Most important for our purposes, they also got “She’s So Fine” onto the soundtrack, despite the fact that it was an unknown band original. It fooled plenty of people, mainly because it sounds like a lost track from 1961, but also because it’s the only tune on the 41-track double LP that wasn’t an actual “oldie” (that’s what a 10-year-old song was called back then).
Though it fits perfectly, the song wasn’t written for the movie — a studio version appeared on the band’s debut album, which appeared a year before the film debuted in 1973. It has a heavier feel than the polite version Lucas coaxed from them, but it was the movie version that was released as a single. Hear the original for yourself:
