'Keep Cool' - Jess Franco & Lina Romay
'‘This theme is a typical striptease blues, very ‘’noir’’, with a special nightclub atmosphere to it and a very simple and insisting riff.’' Jesús Franco, 1997 (from liner notes to the CD release, ‘The Manacoa Experience’, Crippled Dick Hot Wax! - CDHW 037.) Indeed, this dirty number had made its screen debut 22 years earlier in Franco’s crime thriller of 1975, ‘Downtown - Die Nackten Puppen Der Unterwelt.’ It originally took the form of a striptease/song, with Lina Romay taking on both the stripping and the vocals, accompanied by a simple jazz trio of double bass, piano and drums. The film was produced by Erwin C. Dietrich, and although Walter Baumgartner was responsible for much of the music heard in his other Swiss productions of this period, I am satisfied that ‘Keep Cool’ was the sole product of Jess Franco, (if he was assisted by anyone, it could only have been Daniel J. White.) The four descending notes of the bass line had already been well used in popular music, perhaps the most famous example being Percy Mayfield’s ‘Hit the Road Jack’ from 1960, (later covered by Ray Charles.)
Even within Franco’s cinematic universe, Daniel J. White had used a similar melody and bass line in his song, ‘Blue’, performed by Maria Vincent in the crime thriller, ‘Rififí En La Ciudad’, in 1963. The music and lyrics of ‘Blue’ were credited on screen to Daniel J. White and Jacques Mareuil, but Franco’s own influence could not have been far, given his growing friendship with the French musician at the time.
Whatever its genesis, ‘Keep Cool’ is a rather amateurish presentation, (and so much the better for it.) As the double bass lays down its four notes, a piano improvises very crudely around the A minor blues scale, (I can well believe this was the handy-work of Franco himself, it's certainly not the industry standard of White.) More inventive are the two slow sections, built on thick jazz chords. Meanwhile, Lina Romay provided the racy vocals herself (she confirmed this in 1996, when interviewed by Kevin Collins.) Although no match for Maria Vincent, (who had a second career as a pop-singer), Romay quietly croons her way through the filth, not unlike Marilyn Monroe –
‘Keep cool, if I come to you,
Keep cool, if I’m kissing you,
Keep cool, if I’m sucking you,
Keep cool, my love, my sweet, keep cool…
Keep cool, if you feel my lips,
Keep cool, if my tongue shifts,
Keep cool, if my sex widens,
To have your sex, your cock, your sperm…
I like to make love,
Forgetting about it all,
Let’s do sixty nine,
Sucking all over, meow…
Keep cool, if you come on me,
Keep cool, if I come on you,
Keep cool, kiss my pussy ring,
Keep cool, my love, my sweet, keep cool…’
Franco obviously liked this track enough to use it again in ‘Eugenie (Historia De Una Perversión)’, in 1980. This time he added a synthesizer backing, making Lina’s lines even less audible. The piano intro is also heard very briefly in one of the scenes that Eurociné Films added to Franco's 'Women Behind Bars' (released on VHS as 'Le Fouet').
When Franco later assembled his own B-Band for the album, ‘The Manacoa Experience’ in 1997, he recorded a new arrangement of this number, and renamed it as ‘Keep Cool, Candy’ (which can only refer to ‘Candy Coster’, Romay’s blonde pseudonym.)
This time he assigned the vocal line to a saxophone - ‘I tried to arrange it in the wonderful tradition of Henry Mancini, using the saxophone in the way that Brad Johnson did in Blake Edward’s ‘The Pink Panther.’
While Franco was obviously satisfied with his adjustments, I do wish his original recording with Romay could be found. It’s not great music, but it doesn't pretend to be, and I guess it does have historical value to some of us….
The same bass line made one final appearance in Franco's comedy/horror of 1998 ‘Mari-Cookie And The Killer Tarantula’, in a scene when the tarantula-woman (Lina Romay) gloats over two prisoners in her giant spider-web, and croons a little ditty -
''I’m the number one….
I’m the Queen of Death….
I’m the sadistic Black Widow!''
I am just an amateur and do not own any of this.