Soundtrack Albums Get Wordier

For years, the key to a hit soundtrack album was sending movie audiences home humming a song. Now, the idea is to send them out of the theater--and into record stores--mouthing snappy dialogue.

People buying the new “Pulp Fiction” album are apparently drawn as much by its priceless patter between John Travolta and Samuel Jackson about French cheeseburgers as by Urge Overkill’s version of “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.”

And earlier in the year, radio station phones rang off the hook when deejays played the “Natural Born Killers” mix of “Sweet Jane” by the Cowboy Junkies, which features verbal exchanges between the film’s stars, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.

Several other notable soundtrack albums also sport dialogue, including the one for “Pulp Fiction” director Quentin Tarantino’s previous movie, “Reservoir Dogs,” and the recent independent film “Clerks.” And coming up in January: the album for John Singleton’s “Higher Learning,” mixing music and dialogue, including both a song and some lines by rapper/actor Ice Cube.

“People from our distribution department are coming up to me and saying, ‘There’s a tremendous amount of interest in the dialogue--can we have more?’ ” says Kathy Nelson, who as senior vice president and general manager of MCA Soundtracks supervised the production of both the “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs” albums.

She says that she introduced the idea at MCA with the album for “The Fisher King,” featuring several bits of rants by Jeff Bridges as a radio talk-show host. Another soundtrack in this tradition was “Good Morning, Vietnam,” featuring deejay Robin Williams.

“I would never have guessed that the reaction for this would be so strong,” Nelson says. “I hoped people would enjoy it, but I never guessed it was the selling hook.”

Nelson says Tarantino’s films are naturals for such treatment. For all the talk about his use of blood and violence, the director, influenced by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, centers his films on dialogue that sticks with the audience.

So can we expect every film soundtrack album to use dialogue?

“Because we’re getting a lot of attention, it will probably become a trend,” says Nelson. “But think of all the films you see and imagine how boring it would be to listen to the dialogue.”

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LEARNING LESSONS: John Singleton drew on a different tradition from Tarantino in designing his dialogue-utilizing “Higher Learning” album.

“It started for me as a thing I heard on hip-hop records,” the director says. “Often they’ll put little ‘scenes’ between the songs. It’s natural for me and it’s nice for the movie to have an affinity with the soundtrack and the soundtrack to have an affinity with the movie.”

The worst-case scenario for Singleton would be people writing dialogue specifically because it would sound good on an album, just as songs are often commissioned to sell a movie rather than serve the story.

“I get disgusted with that,” he says. “A lot of films now seem where they’re made just for excuses to make a soundtrack album. I make films to be films, whether or not there’s an album.”

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UNCONTROLLABLE URGE: The success of Urge Overkill’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” single shows how you can find hits in the most unusual places. The song (written by Neil Diamond in the late ‘60s) is featured in “Pulp Fiction,” but it wasn’t recorded for Tarantino. The director found it on an EP that the Chicago band released two years ago on a small, independent label.

MCA’s Kathy Nelson says that Tarantino found the EP in a London record store and loved the track so much that he actually constructed a key Uma Thurman-John Travolta scene around the song.

The record’s success makes Diamond the latest unlikely avatar of hip--right on the heels of Tony Bennett. There’d been talk about his joining Urge Overkill for a performance at the recent Billboard Awards show in Los Angeles, but Diamond was off recording an album in Nashville.

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THE BOSS IS BACK: Bruce Springsteen, who is always working on new songs, has been going overtime in the studio lately and will likely have a new album in stores by summer. But despite overtures from wishful-thinking concert promoters, he’s not planning to reteam with the E Street Band--which he dismissed several years ago--for a new tour.

Promoters, flushed with the success of this year’s blockbuster treks by the Eagles, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, say that a Springsteen/E Street tour would be one of the top attractions of ’95. Speculation that it could happen heated up last fall when E Street drummer Max Weinberg--currently the bandleader on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien”--sat in with his ex-Boss for a performance on the MTV Video Music Awards show.

Says a Springsteen spokeswoman, “It’s just not going to happen.”

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CALIF-PHOBIA: Can a rock band succeed without ever setting foot in California?

That’s the question surrounding the touted Seattle quartet Sunny Day Real Estate. While the band did play at one of last weekend’s KROQ Acoustic Christmas concerts, it had to do so as a trio--guitarist Dan Hoerner simply will not come to the Golden State.

The band refuses to do interviews, but Nils Bernstein, spokesman for Sub Pop, the group’s record label, says that Hoerner just doesn’t like California--he grew up here and apparently as a youth had some unspecified bad experiences with state officials.

That’s definitely put a crimp in the band’s career progress. Last fall the group was inundated with offers from major labels, but those have diminished some given Hoerner’s aversion.

Bernstein says that the group couldn’t care less: “They’ve already gotten a million times more attention than they’d ever hoped for. They won’t go to California just to sell records, though the other members wanted to play there for their fans.”

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LORD ALMIGHTY: As if there’s not enough controversy surrounding Courtney Love already, a new feud could make rock headlines next year when Mary Lou Lord releases her debut EP on the small Olympia indie label Kill Rock Stars. Love has already been attacking Lord in her computer on-line missives--and she even chased Lord out of the Hollywood Palladium and down Sunset Boulevard after Hole’s concert last month.

The squabble is over the fact that Lord once had a brief fling with Kurt Cobain (before he and Love were married) and Love is charging that Lord is using that as a key point in her resume. Lord denies this and, says Margaret Mittleman, who signed Lord to a publishing deal at BMG, the Boston-bred singer hopes to downplay this conflict.

Nonetheless, Lord’s EP features a song titled “That Kind of Girl,” written for Lord by songwriter Mark Keating, that makes thinly veiled references to Love, including a mention of a connection with Smashing Pumpkins, whose Billy Corgan was once involved with Love.