Some stoner in a basement somewhere once swore that Pink Floyd’s moody Dark Side of the Moon album synched up perfectly with The Wizard of Oz. You know, “Run, Rabbit, Run” plays during the tornado—and the drum beats, man! They’re right in time with her feet! Well, San Francisco duo Dark Side of the Cop gives a healthy nod to the tradition of combining musical/cinematic loves, but they actually do it intentionally… which is some amazing, dorky genius right there. Marco Panella, armed with guitar and various bits of electronica, created a synched-up soundtrack to the masterpiece Beverly Hills Cop. You’re damn right that’s fucking Eddie Murphy. Now he and his buddy Roger Thomasson have a disc on Auger Down Records and are touring a shitload in support of good music and ’80s movies alike.

I had a chance to chat with Marco and Roger after a distortion-riffic (and very chilly) set at the South Union Arts Center (read: a converted church with a neon Jesus above the stage/altar that says, “I am the Light of the World”) last week, to discover more about… you know, people who actually come up with such ideas:

So tell me about how all this got started – you know, getting high one night and watching Beverly Hills Cop, maybe?…

Marco: Haha, yeah, pretty much! It was sort of a bad idea that floated around in our heads since high school, but we never really had any occasion to do it until we were between bands. My friend and I were big Eddie Murphy fans in high school… we never thought we’d, you know, actually do it. He’s from Detroit, so you know—there’s the Detroit angle, and it was either that or Trading Places. Trading Places would be harder…

Roger: Harder to name.

Marco: Yeah.

So how did you go about doing that? Watch the movie with the sound down?

Marco: Yeah, actually… I made the whole thing on the computer, so you can watch little clips with the songs linked up to them. When we perform we kinda stretch the songs out a little bit, but yeah… it was a pain. I didn’t even see the whole thing through until I was done, and then we watched it and I was like, “Oh my god, what the hell was that?”

Have you ever thought about doing it live? Like if you had a video hookup, playing the songs while screening the movie?

Marco: Yeah, definitely, we’ve thought about it… We’re not really good enough…

Roger: One of the problems is that the songs have changed a little bit since the album, so they wouldn’t link up the way it was intended. I’m sure people would still assume they were linking up anyways, but you know. Some of the songs were like two minutes on the album, to keep them synched up to a particular scene, but now they’re like four or five minutes, and wouldn’t work, really.

Have you come across the website with fans who swear that Rush’s 2112 synchs up with Willy Wonka?

Marco: No way! Haha! We did come across this website dedicated to discovering movie synch-ups—this entire website, it’s completely ridiculous—and we posted on their message board and basically said, “If anybody likes this, it’s gonna be you guys!”

Roger: We thought we’d have like instant 73 fans, but the only response was a question mark underneath the posting… just like “wtf?”

Man! And that’s your niche right there! I had no idea what the hell your band name was supposed to be when I first heard it, but when I found out what it referred to, I for one was pretty excited.

Roger: Yeah, didn’t someone think it was a comment on the police state?

Marco: Yeah. Some people have actually accused us of using racial undercurrents—it’s like, no! “Dark Side of the Moon,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” it’s not that much of a stretch! I mean, I sort of felt like a huge asshole when they said that—having no real good answer except, “Well, I just sort of chopped one phrase and added the other…”

As far as the lyrics go—how did you approach that angle? Let’s wax philosophical about Eddie Murphy.

Marco: We originally decided we were going to write an alternate plot—the love story between him and the secondary character. After we decided that, it sort of just opened it up to be an album of love songs with a lot of stupid references thrown in. We tried to actually make it convincing, to have this same sort of tortured sad man like Eddie Murphy or something like that, and sometimes it just would end up being borderline ridiculous, because the project was sort of ridiculous… so hopefully it doesn’t take itself too seriously. We were hoping to write a whole hundred minutes of music for the movie, and then we basically decided that was not really a worthwhile endeavor—we sort of just wanted to be a band, you know, play shows…

Roger: Yeah, we played a bunch of shows, and we were like, “Wow, this is pretty sweet—let’s do this.”

So I guess there’s no more synch-up projects on the horizon, then?

Marco: No, we’re just gonna do an album.

Roger: Yeah, the next album people can feel free to play along with their favorite movie if they want.

Maybe it’ll work better with Willy Wonka than 2112.

Marco: Yeah, haha… It’s silly, I mean… we kinda feel like assholes a lot of the time—getting attention with a sort of gimmick—but hopefully it’s good enough music, so… you know, people won’t be pissed off after they come to our shows.

(I wasn’t, for the record. Check out Dark Side of the Cop’s album on Auger Down Records)

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