Joan Baez - Three songs from "Silent Running" (1972)

Often labeled as the first ecological Sci-Fi movie, Silent Running experienced a similar fate as "Harold & Maude": after and after it became more famous among fans of the genre. Strange enough, Peter Schickele's soundtrack never came out on CD after several incarnations on vinyl. The original Decca album became a collector's item especially for three songs sung by Joan Baez which never appeared anywhere else, not even on one of her many "Best of"-collections (except for a short-lived single with two of them).
Some years ago I was happy to find an expensive CD on eBay, but it proofed to be a pirate album presenting the original LP content together with a spoken word version of one instrumental together with a re-recording of another instrumental as "bonus tracks". Too bad the producers of this illegitimate CD treated their source's sound to death with some cheap noise killer software. In 2007, the webmaster of Schickele's website responded to my questions about the CD offers on eBay via e-mail, remembering that "the CD sounded like it was recorded off of an LP, complete with the surface noise and some scratches. The bonus track in this case is copied from a videotape of the movie (not even a DVD but a videotape with tape hiss)." The result is absolutely terrible, muffled and no fun at all to listen to.
He added: "I continue to believe that there is no CD reissue of the soundtrack, and that the LP is hard to find. Since it is out of print, you may have no other way of hearing the music but to buy one of these suspicious offers, but beware of low quality. My preference would be to find someone selling the LP on eBay and transfer it to CD myself. Or get the DVD and listen to the music in the context of the movie. The only legitimate CD that contains music from 'Silent Running' that I know about is 'Space 3: Beyond The Final Frontier' by the City of Prague Orchestra. That 2000 recording of selected science fiction themes included four minutes of 'The Space Fleet' from 'Silent Running', which isn't much, but it's something. You can hear samples of that recording on Amazon. I'm sorry that this music is not easier to obtain."
So am I! The more I'm happy to offer here clean versions of Joan Baez' songs; the rest of the soundtrack might follow later.

Tracks

1. Rejoice In The Sun
2. Silent Running
3. Rejoice In The Sun (Reprise)

Here