The L.A. punk of the Repo Man soundtrack kept its cult alive

Is there a more entertainingly batshit movie from the ‘80s than Repo Man?

English filmmaker Alex Cox’s 1984 directorial debut is a satirical black comedy set in a version of Los Angeles (undoubtedly inspired by Cox’s years studying film at UCLA) where the food—even the alcohol—is blandly, blatantly generic, everybody is either hooked on drugs or religion, you could get your ass handed to you by a ska band (played by California proto-mods The Untouchables), and a bunch of thrill-seeking car repossessors (including a pre-Brat Pack Emilio Estevez as a buzzcut-rocking punk) are looking for a Chevy Malibu that has some body-obliterating aliens in the trunk.

Cox, along with producers Peter McCarthy and Jonathan Wacks, assembled a soundtrack that’s as wild and weird as the movie he wrote and directed. It’s proudly, unabashedly L.A.-based, featuring songs from many of the city’s most iconic punk bands: Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, and The Circle Jerks. The only artist who isn’t L.A.-born-and-based is Iggy Pop, who performs the title theme—along with Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and Blondie members Clem Burke and Nigel Harrison—during the end credits. Cox did approach the OG punk rocker when Pop was living in Hollywood (“…with a Japanese girl who couldn’t speak English, and a futon, and a Stratocaster guitar,” Pop confirms in this 2013 interview), about doing a song. It’s like Cox felt that if he was going to make a picture about how fucked-up La La Land is, he might as well compile some fucked-up music from the town to go with it. 

The soundtrack is what saved Repo Man from becoming a forgotten flop. Universal pulled the movie from theaters after one week, but the soundtrack—released on MCA Records’ “edgy” new subsidiary San Andreas Records—sold fifty thousand copies, six months after the movie’s less-than-stellar opening. This prompted Universal to re-release the film in theaters, where it began its rep as a cult fave that would get even more devoted fans once it eventually hit video and cable.

For many an alienated youth, the Repo Man soundtrack (which sadly isn’t available on Spotify or Apple Music, although there is a tribute album available to stream) was their introduction to the renegade, hardcore punk scene that was happening on the West Coast. As A.V. Club contributor Noel Murray wrote in 2013, “The punks in my high school used to say that nobody ever bought the Repo Man soundtrack. Everyone’s copy had either been borrowed or duped from a friend, or stolen outright. (Me, I did all three at once: I stole a duped cassette from a buddy, who’d borrowed it from someone else.)”

As punk AF as the soundtrack is, it often takes a backseat in the film. The noisiest tunes are usually just that: background noise. We first hear the Circle Jerks’ “Coup d’État” when Estevez’s Otto celebrates quitting his supermarket job by moshing with his fellow brethren at a party. (The Circle Jerks appear later in Repo Man as a cheesy lounge band, doing an acoustic guitar-and-drum machine cover of their tune “When the Shit Hits the Fan.”) Then, we get two landmark, L.A. punk tunes: Suicidal Tendencies’ “Instutionalized” and Black Flag’s “TV Party,” when Otto tries and fails to hook up with a girl. (Otto sings a few verses of “TV Party” afterwards, while drowning his sorrows drinking beer by the train tracks.)

The soundtrack’s true stars, though, are The Plugz, a Latino punk trio which included actor/Robert Rodriguez regular Tito Larriva and the late Social Distortion drummer Charlie Quintana. Although they disbanded the same year the film came out, their surf-rock sounds, along with an instrumental version of the title song, serve as its score. Their Chicano-punk number “El Clavo y La Cruz” appears on the radio when Otto repos his first car in a sketchy Latino neighborhood, and their cover of Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man” (titled “Hombre Secreto”) pops up when Otto is driving next to some suspicious G-men. 

In fact, the rest of the soundtrack is driving-around music for our characters. With the exception of Otto’s coke-snorting repo mentor Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), who drowns out the sounds of “ordinary fuckin’ people” with the uncredited music of Louis Armstrong and The Andrews Sisters, everybody’s listening to some sort of punk. 

Otto picks up a girl while listening to Burning Sensations’ cover of Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ oh-so-apt “Pablo Picasso.” (“Some people try to pick up girls and get called an asshole / This never happened to Pablo Picasso” is how the song begins). Otto’s other mentor Lite (Sy Richardson) plays “Bad Man,” a badass Blaxploitation-ish ditty he actually recorded with future Jerks bassist Zander Schloss (who plays Otto’s dorky pal Kevin and would appear on soundtracks of later Cox films) as the one-off group Juicy Bananas, whenever he’s tracking down rides. And Fear’s “Let’s Have a War” can be heard out of a car occupied by two punk bandits who rob and steal throughout the film.

Repo Man remains influential as a cool, crazy, refreshingly multicultural vision of L.A. at its most punk and pulpy. (Whether he likes to admit it or not, Quentin Tarantino took a lot from this film.) As critic Sam McPheeters wrote in the essay that accompanies the 2013 Criterion Collection DVD release (Criterion released a 4K + Blu-ray edition this week), the movie is “an apocalypse tale with no doomsday, a punk movie with no concert, a science-fiction story with less than ten seconds of aliens.” As for the soundtrack, it gave a lot of young outcasts some sweet music to slam-dance to back in the day.