Bill Murray is in a limousine heading for the Tokyo airport. He sees her familiar profile and asks the driver to stop. He begins the pursuit, slowly, methodically.
He doesn’t run, but his brisk walk eventually brings him to her – her being Scarlett Johansson. They embrace. He whispers something indecipherable into her ear. She tentatively nods, mumbling, “OK.”
He is weathered, his pockmarked skin representing the fragility of his body and mind. She is young and gorgeous. He kisses her briefly on the lips, and then again on the cheek. He awkwardly says, “Bye.” She responds in kind. He says it again, and so does she. He sets off, walking backward looking at her. She pushes her hair to the side, fighting back tears.
And cue the music.
Sofia Coppola, like Wes Anderson, has a way with music in her films. This famous closing scene in “Lost in Translation,” shot on a bustling Tokyo pedestrian-only street, was Coppola’s gift to aficionados of cinema. As lush as it is stark, as disjointed as it is fluid, it’s one of those beautiful movie moments that you watch over and over again.
And what ties it all together is the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” a gauzily melodic rock ballad that, like the scene, is a butterfly kiss that feels like a punch to the gut. The song – which can be heard on the band’s revamped MySpace page, ampmarychain – has long been one of the most loved and recognizable tracks from the influential band that never made much of an impact commercially. Borrowing freely from Phil Spector and the Velvet Underground, the band managed the blurry, echoey tones of its instruments with an unusual care.
Their cavernous songs combined Spector-like pop – expansive wall of sound, heavy on the echo – with a primitive, feedback-laden guitar sound straight out of the Velvet Underground.
And “Just Like Honey” is a museum-quality example of their deft musicianship and their keen ears. It’s always helped, too, that the voices of brothers William and Jim Reid had a way with matching the music’s sporadic moods. They sometimes sounded as electrically charged as the storms of their native Scotland. And other times there was a tenderness to their voices – a softness that cannot be learned. It’s that softness that is our narrator in “Just Like Honey,” keeping the track as steady as that rudimentary drum kit keeping the beat like a metronome.
The track is always the centerpiece of the group’s live sets, as it surely will be when the group plays the Gothic Theatre on Sunday. (When the band reunited earlier this year, after breaking up in 1999, actress-turned-singer Johansson, in a nod to “Lost in Translation,” sang the song with them at the Coachella Music Festival in April.)
“Just Like Honey” isn’t as revved as “Head On” or as melodic as “Snake Driver,” but it’s a fine ambassador of the band’s noise-focused catalog. Oftentimes the Jesus and Mary Chain get slighted in the history books, with more credit being given to My Bloody Valentine for engineering that grand shoe-gazey sound.
But the numbers don’t lie. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s debut LP “Psychocandy” – home to “Just Like Honey” and other groundbreaking tracks that still hold their value today – came out in 1985. And while My Bloody Valentine did release a record that year, it wasn’t until 1988’s “Isn’t Anything” that MBV made a truly great full-length.
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Noise/shoe-gazing rock. Gothic Theatre, Englewood; 8 p.m. Sunday with Darker My Love. $35. or 303-830-8497
