Out Of Limits (1963) by The Marketts.
Did you know that Marius Constant, composer of the theme for The Twilight Zone, had a career as a serious composer? I didn’t. I wonder what Constant thought about the reworking of his theme into a surf tune by Michael Z. Gordon and The Marketts in 1963. Gordon’s version was originally titled Outer Limits then changed to Out Of Limits to evade the copyright police. The Marketts’ version will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Pulp Fiction where (as I recall) it’s playing while John Travolta is driving around. But it’s even more familiar to surf obsessives as this small selection of covers shows. There’s more out there (so to speak), and we’ll probably be hearing even more interpretations versions in the future.
Outer Limits (1963) by Jerry Cole And His Spacemen.
Out Of Limits (1963) by The Ventures.
Out Of Limits (1964) by The Challengers.
Out Of Limits (1964) by Billy Vaughn.
Out Of Limits (1983) by Agent Orange.
Out Of Limits (1994) by Man Or Astro-Man?
Out Of Limits (2003) by Los Straitjackets.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• In The Past
• My Surfing Lucifer by Kenneth Anger
• A Reverbstorm jukebox
The Ventures version/lp was *spun on vinyl* as my show (“The joey Zone”) Theme when I dj’d college radio post-grad. William Burroughs, Nancy Sinatra, Hawkwind–the usual.
When it comes to surf music I find a little goes a long way but I enjoy odd things like this. And The Ventures In Space is a great album for the cosmic component. Sci-fi-surf is almost a sub-genre of its own: in addition to Out Of Limits by Man Or Astro-Man? there’s a version by a Finnish surf outfit, Laika and the Cosmonauts, that I couldn’t locate on YouTube.
Let’s not forget the psychedelic surf stylings (sorry) of THE MERMEN!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZdM9ebirvQ
And while we’re bumping up against THE OUTER LIMITS let’s not forget the wonderful original soundtrack work of Dominic Frontiere.
Thanks, I’d not heard The Mermen before. It’s odd the way surf has hung in as a genre. It’s such a niche thing yet it seems to maintain an audience even in countries with no surfers!
“Out of Limits” plays at the very end of Pulp Fiction as Bruce Willis’ character Butch hauls off on Zed’s hog.
The Marketts were, of course, a total studio concoction (Hal Blaine played one some of the tracks) instead of a working surf band that played live.