Behind the “Boring” Country Song Made Famous Again by This 1990s Soundtrack

When you put on a song, usually you want it to inspire. The idea is to get the music in your bones and let it work its magic. Maybe you want to be in a better mood, maybe you want to remember what love feels like, or maybe you just want to dance.

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But then there are songs that celebrate being bored. What are we to make of those? Well, in the 1990s, a significant movie soundtrack turned a boring song about boredom into a hit all over again.

‘Pulp Fiction’

The 1990s brought movie fans a slew of great offerings, from Titanic to Forrest Gump. But the movie that may rise above all the others from the decade is the 1994 gangster film, Pulp Fiction, which was written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.

While film students have dissected the work in class for decades, we wanted to highlight the movie’s beloved soundtrack here. Tarantino has a knack for needle drops in his work. He often knows just the right song to play in a scene at just the right time.

Sometimes that song is familiar. But more often than not, Tarantino surprises us. He goes deep in his bag for a B-side or a one-hit wonder or a once-beloved country track that has since slipped through the cracks. And it’s the latter category we wanted to explore here.

“Flowers On The Wall”

Originally recorded in the mid-1960s, The Statler Brothers re-recorded “Flowers On The Wall” in 1975 for their greatest hits album, The Best Of The Statler Brothers. And it’s that version that landed on the 1994 soundtrack for Pulp Fiction some 20 years later.

Never before has a song about boredom captured the public consciousness so well. The Statler Brothers’ 1966 rendition earned them a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary (R&R) Performance—Group (Vocal or Instrumental). It also hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.

But then the song seemed to vanish—at least until Tarantino got his hands on it.

Bruce Willis

In Pulp Fiction, actor Bruce Willis plays a boxer who double-crosses a dangerous mob boss. As he’s trying to escape the mob’s clutches, he realizes he needs to get his father’s watch from his apartment. It’s been left behind. So, he drives to retrieve it.

Amazingly, he finds the watch and gets away, victorious. And as he does, The Statler Brothers come on the radio, gloriously. Willis’ character (Butch) begins to sing “Flowers On The Wall” along with the radio, mouthing the lyric, “Smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo“.

Well, that scene became so famous and so synonymous with Willis that he brought it back a year later for the 1995 film Die Hard with a Vengeance, a sequel to his breakout, Die Hard. In that movie, Willis’ character again references the country song, saying at one point that he is “working on a nice fat suspension, smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo“.

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The Muppets

The song has become so famous again since Pulp Fiction in 1994 that The Muppets even covered it for one of their shows in 2015. Above, you can see Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker sing it together with a group of rats. Now that’s fame!

And that would never have happened without a movie soundtrack, without a director with a great ear for music, and without an appreciation of boredom. Indeed, sometimes boredom does the work you thought excitement should.

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