In 1996, years before helping to found the experimental rock institution Animal Collective, David Portner and Brian Weitz were Baltimore high school pals who diligently hunted for the soundtrack album that perfectly meshed their love of the unorthodox sound worlds of musique concrète and the thrills of horror movies: “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” “It wasn’t really till years later that I found out that it had never been released,” Portner said.
“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” changed the horror business when it splattered out in 1974, turning a spartan budget into a $30 million juggernaut and laying groundwork for the blood-soaked slasher genre that dominated the 1980s. Among its many innovations was its unconventional score, an abstract suite of bone-chilling scrapes, metallic clanks, ominous drones and mysterious stingers.
This symphony of discordance, recorded by the film’s director Tobe Hooper and the sound man Wayne Bell, emerged three full years before the first commercially available industrial music from Throbbing Gristle. It anticipated the tape-traded noise music underground that flourished in places like Japan in the 1990s and the American Midwest in the ’00s. But with the master tapes ostensibly lost and Hooper seemingly uninterested in an official release, the “Chain Saw” score survived mostly as a bootleg, often just the entire 83-minute film dubbed to audio cassette from a VHS or Laserdisc.
That half-century of tape hiss and YouTube rips will end in March with a vinyl release on the boutique soundtrack label Waxwork Records. (Pre-orders start this week.)
“It was kind of like a holy grail. Was it even possible to do it?” said the Waxwork co-founder Kevin Bergeron, who had been doggedly pursuing the release for more than a decade. “Everyone has asked. Literally every label from Sony to Waxwork. Major labels to independents to randos living with their parents. Everyone wanted to release it. What would it take to make it happen? No one had any sort of intel, like what would it cost or what would it take.”
Bell had held on to a few of the original tapes, but a majority were assumed lost. After the success of “Chain Saw,” Hooper left Austin for Hollywood, leaving behind a storage shed full of personal effects. But the “Chain Saw” tapes were not absorbing water damage or rotting away in some hot Texas garage: They would be quietly donated to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, lovingly archived alongside Albert Einstein’s notes, a Frida Kahlo self-portrait and a Gutenberg Bible.
“Suddenly they’re artifacts,” Bell said in a recent video interview. “Sometimes you need to wear gloves to handle this stuff. So the idea of threading it up on a machine and listening to exactly know what you’ve got? I just had to go by what little notes I had in 1974 and, by eye, just recognizing my handwriting and remembering what tapes we had.” He finally got to hear the digitized version of their audio this year.
With $16 in his bank account, Bergeron first reached out to Bell in 2013, before Waxwork even stamped its first LP. After years playing guitar in horror-centric punk and thrash bands, Bergeron started Waxwork with his girlfriend, Sue Ellen Soto, with the idea of becoming the “Criterion Collection of soundtracks” by releasing albums with newly commissioned artwork, liner notes from the filmmakers and whimsically colored vinyl. Bergeron sent almost-monthly correspondence to Bell for a decade. All emails to Hooper, up to his death in 2017, went unanswered.
“A big pitch of mine was, ‘Look, there’s a lot of parallels between how we conduct business and how you guys conduct business,’” said Bergeron, who sees a corollary between Waxwork’s D.I.Y. ethic and the spirit of idealistic hippies in the desert cobbling together a horror movie. “I would hate to see this precious thing that they’ve guarded for 50 years get in the hands of a major or someone that’s going to do some Hollywood accounting and rip people off.”
Getting the requisite tapes and permissions was an odyssey, but making a coherent album from them would prove a different challenge entirely. As an editor, Bell, 73, is now a seasoned veteran with credits on more than a dozen Richard Linklater movies. He said the estimated 10 to 12 hours of sound on the “Chain Saw” tapes was of good fidelity and would allow the listener to “really hear into this music.” However, nothing was mixed down. This meant a three-month process of reconstructing the familiar cacophony from the original raw materials, hand-scrawled notes and 50-year-old memories.
“It’s putting together a thousand-piece puzzle of very similar-shaped and similar-looking pieces,” he explained.
The tapes contained the sounds as they were originally recorded in the 1970s: Bell and Hooper experimenting and laughing on the carpeted floor of a spare bedroom belonging to the director’s then-girlfriend, Paulette Gochnour. The body of an upright bass was used as a reverb chamber and its metal bridge served as a mount for a mobile made of can lids. Cymbals were scraped against the strings of a lap steel guitar. Lithography plates were flapped around like dish towels. Children’s percussion instruments were chimed and rattled. When Bell heard Gochnour cooking with an 11-inch sauce pan, its bell-like tone inspired him to fill it halfway with water and strike it with a timpani mallet.
“Just because the sound comes from a stringed instrument, you could torture it such that you don’t know that that’s a string instrument or it doesn’t necessarily sound musical,” said Bell, who had already honed these techniques in playful jam sessions with Hooper. “Clearly these sounds had emotional properties, they made you think this or that, would trigger the mind. So it was a fertility that was right there already for us.”
After these sounds were pieced together and matched with the grainy footage of Leatherface’s murder spree, they took on a life that extended far beyond the borders of Texas. In ’80s London, where “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was banned outright, the Iphar label sold cassette bootlegs of the score alongside first-generation extreme noise artists like Ramleh, S.P.K. and Consumer Electronics. Alternative metal bands in the ’90s including Nine Inch Nails, White Zombie and Marilyn Manson peppered their albums with “Chain Saw” dialogue and sounds. The fleet-fingered oddball guitarist Buckethead professed that he would solo over the drone feast that follows the actor William Vail getting bludgeoned to death with a hammer. The director Nicolas Winding Refn pushed the composer Cliff Martinez to put more “Chain Saw” influence in the game-changing synth soundtrack to “Drive” from 2011.
Aaron Dilloway, a solo artist and onetime member of the noise band Wolf Eyes, called the “Chain Saw” score “ground zero for noise music.” He recorded the entire film to audio cassette and would play it in the van on Wolf Eyes tours, and once accompanied the rest of the band using “Chain Saw” audio played on a variable speed cassette player. (He accidentally concluded the set with an incredibly spooky recording of the actor Paul A. Partain’s disembodied voice calling out for Jerry the van driver.)
“Nothing sounds like that. Nothing,” Dilloway said of Hooper and Bell’s score. “I mean, there’s little bits and stuff here and there, but nothing’s been able to get that screech like that — eeeeeerrrgh. There’s nothing else like it. And it’s always just been stuck in my head. You want to strive for that. Make something as scary and as unique as that sound.”
Portner, who records as Avey Tare, spent Animal Collective’s earliest days in New York without a practice space or much room to hold instruments. “It was a way of seeing that you could make music with anything,” he said of the score. “You could have as much of a dramatic effect or emotional effect just banging on pots and pans if that’s all that was around.”
With the official Waxwork release — complete with two never-heard-before cues — the “Chain Saw” score’s legacy is secure, though its story may not be finished. Bell estimated that he had 95 percent of the material, but said there was still a single missing tape he would like to incorporate to complete the picture.
“There’s a cue that I knew I didn’t have,” he explained, “and I didn’t want to do an ersatz version of that. ’Cause it’s very important that it be what ‘Chain Saw’ fans expect. I’ve felt a big responsibility to deliver this. A responsibility to myself and to Tobe and to the film, but also to the fans.”
Starting in 2022, he even started appearing at horror conventions. He found the gaggle of cosplaying “Chain Saw” fans to be interesting and likable.
Said Bell with a laugh, “I’ve never been around so many Leatherfaces in my life.”
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