The Choose Me soundtrack gave Teddy Pendergrass a seductive second wind

It’s kind of wild that there has never been an official soundtrack album for Choose Me, Alan Rudolph’s 1984 kooky-but-foxy ensemble rom-com. For starters, the movie was distributed by Island Alive, a joint venture between then-indie company Alive Films and Island Records co-founder Chris Blackwell. Secondly, the songs in the film could’ve made a nice quiet-storm mixtape—and Teddy Pendergrass’ suave-but-commanding voice would be all over it.  

The late R&B singer/Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes alum has three of his songs in the movie. Hell, if it wasn’t for Pendergrass, this picture most likely wouldn’t exist. Executive producer/Pendergrass’ manager Shep Gordon, approached director Alan Rudolph about making a music video for Pendergrass’ “You’re My Choice Tonight (Choose Me).” The Luther Vandross-produced song was a single off Love Language, his eighth album and his first one after a 1982 car crash that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Gordon hoped a video would get Pendergrass’ name back out there and help pay his medical bills, which the label wasn’t helping out with.

Rudolph, a Robert Altman protégé who previously directed the amorous ensemble dramedies Welcome To L.A. and Remember My Name, didn’t want to direct a music video. He told Gordon that he could make an entire movie for the $835,000 budget he was offered. (There is a video, but it’s a collection of scenes from the movie.) After listening to a radio call-in show where people were spilling their guts to, as he called her in a 1993 Artforum interview, “Doctor Tony somebody-or-other,” he went home and wrote the Choose Me script in a week.

Rudolph introduces “You’re My Choice Tonight (Choose Me)” in a rather flashy, funky fashion during the neon-lit opening credits. Set outside Eve’s Lounge, where most of Choose Me takes place, a Black couple walks outside the bar dancing to the song. The guy then starts dancing with one of the several streetwalkers that are on the sidewalk. Then, Eve (Lesley Ann Warren), the lounge’s proprietor, comes from around the corner. As she walks to the bar, she also dances with some of the folk on the sidewalk, feeling the music with every step she takes. As critic Jim Emerson once wrote, “No movie has ever announced itself with a more sexually confident and pulchritudinously entrancing opening shot.”

“You’re My Choice Tonight (Choose Me)” appears in stripped-down form a couple times during the movie. Whenever Eve gets up close and personal with Mickey (Rudolph regular Keith Carradine), a smooth-talking drifter who may or may not be a pathological liar, you hear the chorus from the song’s background singers (I’m assuming Vandross, credited with backing vocals, is one of them).

But “You’re My Choice Tonight (Choose Me)” isn’t the only Pendergrass song that figures prominently in Choose Me. “And If I Had,” a Gamble and Huff-produced song from Pendergrass’s self-titled, 1977 solo debut, pops up several times. The bluesy number serves as melancholy background music (“And if I had / Someone to love me,” Pendergrass sings at the beginning) for Mickey and Eve’s somewhat unstable new roomie Anne (Geneviève Bujold), who secretly has a day job as radio host Dr. Nancy Love. As Rudolph told an audience after a Choose Me screening last year, Gamble and Huff asked for a hefty sum—$75,000—to have the song included in the movie. Luckily, Rudolph finagled the money from the producers of the 1984 Willie Nelson-Kris Kristofferson flick Songwriter (which also starred Warren), who were in dire need of a director to save the production. “In My Time,” another song from Pendergrass’ Love Language, appears during a daytime scene of Eve heading to the bar.

Apart from a couple of reggae tracks from Toots and the Maytals and Augustus Pablo (both on Blackwell’s Island Records roster), played on the radio in scenes with Rae Dawn Chong’s jilted wife Pearl, and a Japanese folk instrumental that accompanies Mickey playing poker at a sleazy hideaway, the rest of the score is all jazz. 

Three tunes from the duo of saxophonist Archie Shepp and pianist Horace Parlan show up, including their rendition of “Trouble In Mind,” a title Rudolph would use for another movie starring Carradine. “Goodbye Mr. Evans,” a sultry track from The Phil Woods Quartet, is all over a scene where Mickey seduces Anne/Nancy in Eve’s home. There’s even live jazz music played at Eve’s Lounge, courtesy of pianist Evelyn Roberts and saxophonist Ernie Fields Jr..

While the reviews for Choose Me ranged from glowing to dismissive, the reviews that mention Pendergrass gave him high marks. Pauline Kael thought Pendergrass was “just right—he does what Tom Waits is supposed to do,” while The Californian’s William Wolf stated the movie “is built around the haunting voice of Teddy Pendergrass, the songs suggesting a jazz-blues feeling that perfectly complements the conflicted emotions of the characters.”

“No one really wanted to record Teddy after he became a paraplegic,” producer Carolyn Pfeiffer said in 1984. “None of the labels thought he could do it.” Choose Me may not have not had a physical soundtrack, but it did show that Teddy Pendergrass was back and ready to hit audiences with more seductive, soulful sounds.