George Lucas has never explained quite how the bulbous-headed musicians of Mos Eisley got hip to hot jazz. Maybe Jabba the Hutt got a hold of a hijacked cargo of scratchy 78s. Whatever happened, the players onstage — toting space-age clarinets of various sizes — sure are cooking when Luke walks into the smuggler bar where he first meets Han and Chewbacca.No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I’m always captivated by the music known as the “Cantina Theme,” perhaps because its loose-limbed vitality contrasts so sharply with the Wagnerian pomp that otherwise dominates John Williams’ scores for Episodes I-VI. As music designed for pleasure, it was a rare commodity in the dingy Republic that Luke, Leia and Han strived so hard to save.With the franchise in full swing once again, it’s high time to celebrate one of the most underappreciated facets of the Star Wars universe over the last four decades: its relationship with the dancefloor. You see, I wasn’t the only one struck by that cantina sound. A trombonist and producer who’d worked with Gloria Gaynor and Carol Douglas, Domenico Monardo was so obsessed with Star Wars and its score, he pitched the idea of a dancefloor-friendly revamp to Casablanca Records’ Neil Bogart. He also sweet-talked 20th Century Fox into green-lighting his scheme for a full-bore disco treatment, complete with 70-piece orchestra and an arsenal of synthesizers. Released under the droid-y artist name of Meco, the single supercharged both the main theme and the cantina music, and was a smash hit in 1977.Of course, Monardo wasn’t the first to fuse science-fiction tropes with earthbound grooves. Sun Ra, Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire had all gotten plenty pan-galactic already. Futuristic fantasies had also become a core piece of code for electronic music, too, as evidenced by works as diverse as Bebe and Louis Barron’s score for Forbidden Planet (1956) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s sci-fi opera Sirius (1975). But Meco’s success still ushered in a dazzling new age of space disco by American masters and European mavericks. It would also inspire similarly disco-fied themes for other movies and TV shows with starry settings and laser guns.The harder rock sound that Meco adopted for The Empire Strikes Back was a sad indication of disco’s waning potency by the turn of the decade. Yet the futuristic fantasies he sparked persist in the music that sometimes fills our cantinas. And as was the case for Monardo, sometimes they’re even sanctioned by the Lucasfilm empire, a fact that suggests there may be more going on in those rebel bases than the usual mission briefings.
