THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
815) Alessandro Alessandroni — “Bandidos”
Spaghetti western ecstasy from a friend and collaborator of Ennio Morricone — from the 1967 movie Bandidos directed by Massimo Dallamano as Max Dillmann. (https://www.discogs.com/release/2578148-Egisto-Macchi-Bandidos-Colonna-Sonora-Originale)
As Tom Seldon tells us, in the movie:
Renowned gunman Richard Martin is traveling on a train, held up by Billy Kane, a former student of Martin’s. Kane spares Martin, but only after shooting his hands. Years later, Martin meets an escaped convict, wrongly convicted for the train robbery. Martin trains his new student and both men seek out Billy Kane.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062706/
As to Alessandroni, Bruce Eder writes that:
By his early thirties, he was making a living touring Germany as a singer, pianist, and guitarist, and he later formed a group in Rome called the Four Caravels whose sound was modeled on the work of the Four Freshmen . . . . Alessandroni was soon to become one of the busier session musicians in Italy . . . . During the early ’60s, [he] crossed paths professionally with a slightly younger former boyhood friend, Ennio Morricone, who, after a few years as a musician working in jazz clubs, had begun to emerge in the field of movie music. Morricone had just scored his first Western and was working on another, and wanted to add some new sounds to his work. Alessandroni’s guitar and his abilities as a whistler came to the fore on the resulting score for Guns Don’t Argue . . . . But that success was merely a toe in the water in terms of their collaboration — Morricone had another project in the pipeline, called A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a Western that was anything but traditional, and it was here that Alessandroni began collaborating with him in the making of some much more important music, and utilizing far more of his range as a guitarist as well. With a lonely, echo-drenched whistle over a repetitive guitar figure, with added flutes, whip-cracks, and Alessandroni’s Duane Eddy-style electric guitar coming in along with a wordless male chorus — courtesy of Alessandroni’s vocal group, now expanded to a dozen or more members and renamed I Cantori Moderni — the haunting title track redefined the sound of Western movie music. . . . Alessandroni subsequently worked with Morricone on most of the latter’s Western scores of the period . . . . He was all over the main title theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/alessandro-alessandroni-mn0000623589/biography
Here’s the trailer:
Here’s the whole movie:
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