Wild at Heart is a positively maniacal 1990 David Lynch film that follows Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) as they run from a string of deranged hitmen Lula’s mother has hired to kill her lover. It’s campy; it’s bizarre; it’s erotic; it’s goofy. It’s graphically violent and sexual (and sexually violent). It’s an unmissable entry in the Lynch canon, and it features Willem Dafoe in possibly the most upsetting role of his career, which is saying something.
And there’s one scene, about 20 minutes in, where Lula paints her toes, Sailor dons his snakeskin jacket (it is, as he’ll repeatedly tell people through the film, a “symbol of [his] individuality and belief in personal freedom”) and the two hop in their ’65 Ford Thunderbird to go dancin’.
The band they’re going to see? The band that’ll soon have Sailor karate-kicking across the dance floor, and then back him as he sings a rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me” to Lula? Why, it’s Minneapolis thrash metal band Powermad.
“I was probably too young to have a ‘this is once in a lifetime’ kind of perspective, but I certainly do now,” Powermad guitarist Todd Haug tells Racket. “It’s like, I don’t even know how it happened. It’s like it didn’t even happen to me, or us.”
Haug was in high school when he joined Powermad in 1984, and he remembers his slightly older, 20-something bandmates introducing him to Lynch’s films.
“Nowhere else would I have been shown Blue Velvet, and I watched it with Joel [DuBay, vocalist and guitarist],” Haug recalls. “Our drummer at the time was into it too, and then my mom and I got into Twin Peaks really, really hard.”
The band signed to Warner’s Reprise Records in the mid-’80s and got to work on Absolute Power, their first full-length. They also started bothering their A&R rep, Kevin Liffey, about getting David Lynch to film a Powermad music video.
“Every time I went to Minneapolis during the recording of Absolute Power, Joel Dubay, Todd Haug, and Jeff Litke (the core of the band) would corner me and ask, ‘So, is David Lynch going to direct our video?’” Liffey wrote in a 2015 blog post. “What I didn't tell them was that once we'd mastered the album, I had to drop by David's Lloyd Wright designed home in the Hollywood Hills for a meeting.”
After the meeting, Liffey asked Lynch for his opinion about Absolute Power.
“He placed the test pressing on the platter of his Bang and Olufsen straight arm turntable, part of his audiophile's wet dream of a stereo system,” Liffey recalls. “He pointed me to the crushed red velvet’ couch across the polished cement floors beneath the vaulted ceilings of the otherwise empty living room of Wright's 1963 ‘Johnson’ home. We sat equidistant between two, tall floor-standing speaker towers and he used the remote to pump it up loud.”
Lynch’s response was immediate. He got up from the couch, walked over to the stereo, and turned the record off after about 15 seconds.
Neither of us said a word. He just stood there with a poker face. Then for some reason he lifted up the needle, dropped it and started side one again. (Was something wrong with the stereo?) After another fifteen seconds, though, tops, he stopped it once again. He would draw the arm back and start the track again about six times—lift the tonearm, drop the needle, listen to the opening chords and play “Slaughterhouse” over and over. I was between mortified and mentally speechwriting my apology. When he was done, he only had a few choice words for me and I left. It was a David Lynch movie in real time, but without the cameras.
Unfortunately for the guys, Lynch wasn’t interested in directing a Powermad music video. He was, on the other hand, hoping that Powermad might be available to appear in his next movie.
Haug remembers hopping on the phone with the folks from the film; he was working at a garden center in Minnetonka at the time. “We were just kind of blown away,” he says. “I remember being on that call, hanging up, and being like, ‘I have to go back to this job,’ which, it wasn’t a horrible job! But it was just so hard to not tell everyone. I was so excited.”
Lynch flew the band out to L.A. for the shoot, which took place over one long day at a bar Haug can’t remember. He does remember Nicolas Cage was “very, very nice,” and that he told the band he really liked the music. “And he was in character the whole time, so it was kind of interesting,” Haug says. “We were like, ‘Is he always like this?’”
He also remembers chatting with Lynch, who didn’t know much about Minnesota but had been out on one of the lakes.
“He was fascinated with the outboard, like the older outboards that used to have some oil that would come out from the cooling water. It would leave a little mini oil slick in the water, and he was enamored, or fascinated with, how that looked,” Haug says. “We were like, ‘Whoa, that’s super trippy.' But I think he just walked around and observed everything… obviously it stuck with him, because he brought it up with us.”
“Slaughterhouse” plays more than a half-dozen times throughout Wild at Heart: during the opening scene, in which Sailor beats a man to death; when Lula picks Sailor up from prison and they make for a motel; when Lula’s mom hangs up the phone after talking to one of her hired guns. When Lula is driving down the highway and freaks out because she can’t find any music on the radio, Sailor fiddles with the dial and finds a station playing “Slaughterhouse,” and the two dance in the dust along the road.
Almost every time the song kicks in, it’s just for a handful of seconds, not unlike the way Lynch listened to it with Liffey on the massive speakers at his home.
“He definitely wielded it as a motif—it was, as he felt, a powerful thing,” Haug says. “I think the music kind of steered some of the scenes, which is crazy to think about.”
Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival in France, which was controversial. (Here’s Lynch grinning as the crowd boos the judges’ decision.) The film was also poorly received by critics, who called it “profoundly unaffecting,” “half-hearted,” and “empty at heart.” “I’ve seen the movie twice now. I liked it less the second time,” Roger Ebert wrote.
Locally, the film premiered at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis, and of course, Haug was in attendance with his bandmates, his friends, and his mom.
“The opening scene—I was sitting next to my mom, and there’s our music, and the lead character’s beating a guy to death,” he laughs. “I was 19, I was just like, ‘This is crazy.’ And that was the whole intention, was to make people uncomfortable.”
Haug really liked Wild at Heart, although he says it was a little different from what the band had read through ahead of filming. It was violent and weird, but it wasn’t just violent and weird, it was also hopeful and a little romantic, dark but beautiful “in a way only David Lynch can do,” he says.
To this day, he and his bandmates aren’t really sure what it was about their music, and about “Slaughterhouse” specifically, that landed so intensely with the director.
“Laura Dern screams, ‘Powermad!’, and that was all—David wrote all that in there after he heard ‘Slaughterhouse.’ He interjected everything about the band into the whole movie. I don’t think anyone does that; you can’t pay a director to do that,” Haug laughs.
“But also,” he continues, “I talk to people a lot who love that movie but still have no idea that it’s me, or the band, that was in it.”
Wild at Heart isn’t currently streaming anywhere, but you can catch a screening at Emagine Willow Creek on Thursday February 27 or at the Alamo Drafthouse in Woodbury on Sunday, March 16.
