Here's Inga!!

Mp3 Friday! Back with a vengeance! This week we present the rocking Middle of Nowhere by The Good Grief, the title tune of the 1968 Swedish skin flick Inga. (Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling) 1.8M

"The most acclaimed masterpiece of erotic cinema ever created!" claims the blurb on the cover of the "Collector's Edition" DVD of Joe Sarno's Inga, or, as it was known in Sweden, where it was produced, Jag - en oskuld (I, a Virgin). Surely another case of an adman's hyperbole, as the film, a taciturn soap opera with some nudity, clearly does not live up to its billing (what film could, really?). The blurb itself seems quaint, from a time (not that long ago) when the promise of art could be used to push sex, at least making it high-minded enough to make the sex seem respectable. Pick up a copy of any Playboy from the 60s, and in between the gatefold and "The Girls of Rio" pictorial, you would find Nabokov, Bertrand Russell, and Marshall McLuhan. Sex became the thinking man's sport. In the arts, loosening the bounds of decency statutes became the province of poets and prurient hucksters alike.

The sex films of the period exemplified this odd dichotomy. Filmmakers like Sarno and Radley Metzger had pretensions to art, but still had enough T&A to appeal to the raincoat crowd. Inga is not an exception. With its crisp b&w photography, Swedish locations, and Scandinavian quietude, some have made the comparison to Bergman. This is a stretch. While a lot of it is artfully done, it shows nothing that compares to Bergman's moral weight. It's essentially a story of a woman who attempts to pimp out her teenage niece to a wealthy publisher "who likes young girls" in order to have the money to keep her much younger boyfriend. The niece ends up sleeping with the boyfriend, and the aunt finds herself with nothing in the end. Not necessarily a bad story, but it would have been better without the arthouse pretensions. Better as a Sirk, not a Bergman.

The main title for Inga is the song "Middle of Nowhere", written by Clay Pitts and Robert Sterling, and performed by The Good Grief. A very fuzzy guitar lead snakes around a classic mid-60s "shake" beat. The lyrics (in English) offer a critique of the nihilism and angst of youth: "Everybody's playing, but nobody's really winning...It's a paradox, they don't know if it's joy or pain...Believing that their friends are in hell (spooky sound from the organ)...And where does it take you to, if you refuse to care...The middle of nowhere!" I'm assuming The Good Grief are Swedish. The heavy fuzz gives it away, along with the singer's accent. I found nothing about the band on the web. The imdb has The Bamboos listed (they're listed as The Good Grief in the credits). While I couldn't find anything about The Bamboos, there is a Swedish band called Bamboo, whose claim to fame is that it launched singer Mikael Rickfors' career, first as a member of the 70s version of The Hollies, then as a solo artist. So, are The Good Grief The Bamboos in disguise? Does anyone care? One of the song's writers is Clay Pitts. The only other credit I could find for him is the soundtrack for another sex film (from 1970) Female Animal. There's an interesting discussion about the Inga soundtrack on the Mobius Euro Cult Board (scroll down to Scoring with INGA), alas with no resolution.