Road House Soundtrack

Instrumental Score

Primary Composer(s): Michael Kamen

Road House featured the following pieces of instrumental music:

Click/tap highlighted track names for full Soundtrack release info.
Composers are linked if they worked on other featured movies.

Opinion

Michael Kamen scored the dramatic storylines of Road House while performances by The Jeff Healey Band provided the prominent source music nightly at the Double Deuce, where bouncer Dalton (Patrick Swayze) tames the rowdy clientele. For most of the film’s nearly two-hour running time, Kamen scores the drama and romance with an array of keyboards, guitar, drums and synthesized strings. His main theme is gentle Americana, with a feel for the outdoors. Other cues are subtler, underscoring both blossoming romance between the leads and the growing tension that builds throughout the picture, ultimately exploding in violence. Then, in a flamboyant example of dramatic film scoring, Kamen switches to a large orchestra for the climactic fight and final showdown, providing a pair of powerful orchestral action cues that add weight to the violence on screen.

There is some evidence that Kamen was originally scoring the entire picture with his smaller keyboard/guitar-based ensemble, with the climactic confrontation music being recorded initially with the small ensemble during the London scoring sessions, then again later with a large orchestra during sessions held in Los Angeles at The Burbank Studios. Quite possibly, at some point during post-production, a decision was made by the film’s producers that the climactic fight scenes required more “punch” than what the small ensemble could provide, but this is not confirmed information. But it is interesting that the large orchestral music was only recorded for the final 3 reels (10, 11 and 12) of the picture.Update Us

Score Trivia