Tuesday, January 3, 1978

We cabbed up to 86th Street ($2.75) and we finally hit Saturday Night Fever at the right time and were able to get in. Well, the movie was just great. That bridge thing was the best scene–and the lines were great. I guess it’s the new kind of fantasy movie, you’re supposed to stay where you are. The old movies were things like Dead End and you had to get out of the dead end and make it to Park Avenue and now they’re telling you that it’s better off to stay where you are in Brooklyn–to avoid Park Avenue because it would just make you unhappy. It’s about people who would never even think about crossing the bridge, that’s the fantasy. And they played up Travolta’s big solo dance number, but then at the end they made the dance number with the girl so nothing, so underplayed. They were smart. And New York looked so exciting, didn’t it? The Brooklyn Bridge and New York. Stevie Rubell wants to do a disco movie, but I don’t think you could do another one, this one was so great. But why didn’t they do it as a play first? What was this first, a short story? They should have milked it–done it as a play first and it would have run forever.

A paragraph that didn’t fit into the article:

What’s the most rock-star thing about you?
Spiral Stairs: “My name.”
Mark Ibold: “My expensive taste in liquors.”
Steve West: “My beard. And my glasses.”
Bob Nastanovich: “I can scream like a rock star.”
Stephen Malkmus: “I’m pretty fucking skinny.”

1. Jerry Harrison (Modern Lovers, Talking Heads)
2. Pat Smear (Germs, Nirvana)
3. David Robinson (Modern Lovers, Cars)
4. Jack Irons (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam)
5. Matt Sorum (The Cult, Guns N’ Roses)

That was off the top of my head, and I’m sure there’s plenty more. What resume-builders did I forget? Bonus points for naming non-drummers.

Three ways to look at Paul Carrack’s career: (1) He’s a second-tier Brit singer for hire, working with middlebrow acts that ranged from the good (Squeeze) to the craptastic (Mike + the Mechanics). (2) All those painful collaborations with Roger Waters and Don Felder just subsidized Carrack’s secret calling as a hipster, letting him play keyboards with Roxy Music, Nick Lowe, the Pretenders, and the Smiths. (3) He’s part of a controlled experiment to show what Daryl Hall’s life would have been like if he had never met John Oates: a white soul singer with good chops who drifted from project to project, never finding a mustache to call his own.

We return from the commercial break to find Carrack sitting at an electric piano, playing a pretty good solo version of Mike + the Mechanics’ “Silent Running,” a #6 hit from 1986 that he sang lead vocals on. Given that the group is the side project of a Genesis guitarist, a certain amount of geeky sub-Heinleinisms might be expected in the lyrics, but really–”Believe in me / I’m with the high command”?

We cut to Kevin Seal, sitting down in front of an electronic drum kit. “The very soulful Paul Carrack,” he says, “tinkling the plastics on our studio Korg Sampling Grand,” dutifully plugging the brand name. “Eighty-eight was a good year for Paul Carrack: he continued to get hits off his third solo album, he had a collection of hits put out, The Carrack Collection, which is some of his best work over the years from the many groups he’s been associated with. A new Mike and the Mechanics album came out, The Living Years, he plays on that, he’s going to go on tour in ‘89. He was in that hit comedy, Buster. No, who am I thinking of?” Seal puts his palm against his forehead. “The other guy.”

When the video opens, a luscious young female model is behind the wheel of a large American car: several pearl necklaces hang from the rear-view mirror. She wearily leans her head back, and suddenly the image is one of two on the screen, framed by blotches of paint and the words “El Centro” and a crossed-out “North Shore 10/87.” The technology that made this possible is probably the same that was used to hang images on clothing lines in the Belinda Carlisle video, but the conceit here is that it looks like a fashion photographer’s diary with Polaroids pasted in–we’re just getting a peek at a beautiful girl wandering around California, just north of the Mexican border.

The camera pans over a small sun-baked town. We get two simultaneous shots of the model, whose hair now looks darker–she’s wearing a man’s white shirt and not much else. In both close-up and a wide shot, she slams the door to a motel room.

Then we’re inside the car, with the windshield wipers going: according to the handwriting on the screen, we are now in Indio, which is about eighty miles north of El Centro, on the other side of the Salton Sea (and coincidentally, next to Coachella of festival fame). Two video panels show similar vistas of California desert. The model drives. She rests her left knee against the car door and doesn’t pay much attention to the road.

Carrack starts singing, and twenty-five seconds in, the director can no longer avoid the fact that his video is supposed to star a thirty-seven-year-old semi-fashionable Brit with thinning hair. Carrack stands in front of a pier, wearing what appears to be a black-and-yellow varsity jacket, and aggressively bobbing his head.

The model gets out of the car. It’s a big orange American mid-century boat of a vehicle. She preens in a gas station parking lot, in front of a hand-made sign promising ice-cold beer and soda and (presumably room-temperature) cigarettes. She looks like she’s waiting for somebody to deliver whatever water was fashionable for two weeks in early October 1987. If this video had been made today, she’d be on her cell phone.

Carrack keeps singing. He looks like the cool dad at the high-school basketball game. Somebody’s given him a microphone on a stand, which helps sell the notion that he’s not just some guy who wandered on camera at the video shoot. Carrack stops the head-bobbing and moves his shoulders forward rhythmically, one at a time, switching from side to side as if he were a Raelett.

The model wanders around aimlessly, through the plastic strips of an unused car wash. She checks herself out in a mirror, and then gets in the car and drives some more. We next see her on a beach, peering around with one hand shielding her eyes from the sun. For no apparent reason, she starts running on the sand, revealing that she’s wearing a tight black sleeveless top and sheer black stockings. Despondent over her failure to pack appropriate beachwear on her vacation, she falls to her knees in the sand.

In most of this video, there’s two shots going on simultaneously, usually of the model, but sometimes Carrack elbows his way in too. Model outfit #4: black dress with white polka dots, with a flimsy black scarf wrapped around her head. She stands around someplace vaguely industrial, with puddles and telephone poles. The wind blows in her hair, and then she covers her face with the scarf.

This song, by the way, is utterly forgettable. Neither the melody nor the lyrics (a kiss-off to a bad love affair) are memorable, and the whole thing is so overproduced, it just slides off your ears and makes a nasty stain on your shirt. Carrack’s sings, “Don’t shed a tear for me / My life won’t end without you,” but the model looks like she’s having a good time, not giving him a second thought.

Carrack reaches the bridge: the director takes the opportunity to do a quick montage of all the model’s various outfits so far. Then the model pulls up to what appears to be the takeout window of a closed Dairy Queen. She gets out of the car, now wearing a spaghetti-strap little black dress, and leans against the DQ, tossing her hair around, wondering why nobody’s bringing her food.

We head for the fade, and the model is asked to look tearful, presumably to tie her experiences in with the title. It doesn’t work, partially because she’s not a very good actress, partially because it makes more sense for this bad-news betty not to care, partially because Carrack looks more like her dad than her estranged lover.

The video ends with the model dangling a pair of pants that have been lit on fire. They’re burning pretty well, so they’ve been soaked in gasoline–or they’re polyester and she’s about to keel over from the fumes. She dangles them from her right hand, then tosses them towards the car. You get the feeling that the director’s original treatment said the car would blow up in a spectacular fireball, but the video didn’t have the budget.

“Don’t Shed a Tear” peaked at #9 on the Billboard charts. You can watch it here.

I’ve been working on this for almost six years–admittedly, with some long gaps along the way.

As usual, the above is just a teaser image; for the full picture and the story of how I got there, click here.

In coming weeks, I’m planning to tote up some of the data from the 48 walks. I may also try a Los Angeles flipwalk, although I’m not sure the project directly translates here.

When I went on flipwalk #48, I didn’t know that it was going to be the last one in the project, but I’m glad I ended up in one of my favorite places in New York (Battery Park) looking at the work of one of my favorite public artists (Tom Otterness). Downtown Manhattan was a place of great sorrow for me, but it was also a place of great joy. Thank you all for walking with me.

A scrap of paper isolated on a black screen has the single typed word “sexy.” It’s followed by two quick flashes of dancing bodies–a little bit of skin, and a whole lot of fringe.

Then we get a closeup on a light-skinned black woman, speaking with a British accent–why, that’s Downtown Julie Brown! This must be a promo for Club MTV! She says, “There are certain people that, um, come up with steps that I would never even dream of.”

Two scraps of paper: “the” and “Dancers.” A sweaty black guy pushes back his hair. Back to Julie: “People like R.J., who come up with some feisty little moves.” We see R.J., frantically stamping his right leg, and then a closeup on a girl’s bustier.

Another scrap of paper: “hot.” Back to Julie, who is wearing a black top hat and dangling silver star earrings: “There are a couple of people that I like to see dance together.” We get a quick clip of two people of indeterminate gender dancing, one light-skinned, one dark-skinned. Back to Julie: “It’s nice to see guys up there, freaking out.” She continues talking over more quick edits of dancers: “It’s nice to see the guys going up there and baring all. With their chest out and stuff.” Back to Julie, now grinning. “I like that.”

The promo ends with the Club MTV logo. In case you never saw it, Club MTV was a dance-party show that featured Downtown Julie Brown introducing the club singles of the day while teenagers danced to them: basically, American Bandstand with a modern haircut. It was much less stylish than this promo, mostly because Brown was a ditz who liked to say “wubba wubba wubba” a lot.

Again, the ad for the License to Drive videocassette. One of the Coreys (Haim, I think, although I can’t rule out Feldman) lays out the plot: “An innocent girl. A harmless drive. What could possibly go wrong?”

Next up, the hugely insane Coca-Cola ad featuring robots and Earth, Wind and Fire. The lyrics to the funky EWF jingle: “The feeling’s real / You know it can’t be beat / Get started to the system / You can feel it in your feet / Owww! / The taste is live / Feel the magic that it brings / The ultimate sensation when you’ve got the real thing / Coca-Cola Classic / You can feel it / Can’t beat the feeling!” Get started to the system?

Gillette, once more promising that they are the best a man can get, have another in their series of ads that blend European footage with some new American shots. Quick cuts: guys in tuxes, woman adjusting man’s tie, man on phone pumping fist in victory, guy running track and dripping with sweat, hero shot of AtraPlus razor, man putting shaving cream on his young son’s face, just-married couple heading for limo but interrupted by hug from groom’s father, football team scoring touchdown, father spotting young son as he lifts five-pound barbell, father and young son combing hair together in mirror, older guy dropping car keys in younger guy’s hand, father cradling infant son, and sweet mother of Christ, there’s only so much father-son bonding that one man can recap.

Another videocassette ad: The Presidio, which starred Sean Connery and Mark Harmon. Connery appears to be over-acting while wearing a military uniform and a fake mustache, while Harmon gets head-butted by a criminal he’s trying to slap handcuffs onto. And somebody runs, and there’s an exploding upside-down car. Nobody gets started to the system.

We end with a comedic bumper for MTV, featuring a tourist in a Russian airport, tied and gagged at customs, struggling while the Russian customs agents look through his suitcase. “Do you have anything to declare?” asks the female agent. “In this sock, you have other sock?” She breathes in the aroma of the sock. “Declare something!” she cries. This promo is pretty much the last gasp of Cold War humor: the following year, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and soon after, Yakov Smirnoff’s career was on the rocks.

A short excerpt from our conversation:

Where do you live now?

I live in the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. It’s rent free, and they’ve got free food in the cafeteria. Everything we need. It’s like, dorm rooms. They’re nice rooms, but I could use some more space.

How did you decorate your room?

I’ve got a poster of Muhammad Ali, a poster of Crazy Horse of the Nez Perce tribe, and some meditation posters. And posters of lions–that’s my animal. I love big cats. We have a cat at home.

What kind?

A tabby.

Would you want your own tiger?

That’d be awesome. Let him have his own forest out back.

What’s always in your fridge?

Strawberry Quik. In the summer, me and all my friends go out for long bike rides. Everybody else takes water, but I bring two bottles of Strawberry Quik. It heats up in the sun, and it gets nasty. I always end up having to borrow somebody’s water bottle.

Do you remember your dreams?

Yeah. Recently, I dreamed that I was racing–but I was really, really, really old. So I was in my bed, skating around the rink. There was a whole bunch of us, we were all in beds, and we were constantly racing–but nobody ever won. I woke up and thought, What the hell?

(About half of the previous was published as part of “Apolo in Flight,” in issue 893 of Rolling Stone (April 11, 2002).)