Hello. I’m Gavin Edwards, a writer living in Los Angeles. You might know me from my work for magazines (Rolling Stone, Details, Wired, lots of other places), from my ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy and Other Misheard Lyrics series of books and page-a-day calendars, or from my long-running career as a freelance know-it-all.
I’ve added flipwalk #31 to the 48 Hours from Ground Zero section. A teaser image:
A tip of the hat to artist Julian Opie, who’s done some of my favorite public artworks of the past few years.
I’m also pleased (and a little surprised) to say that I’ve found my missing notes, and have accordingly updated flipwalk #28 with the report of what happened on my walk. (I’ll fix up #29 and #30 soon.)
posted 11 July 2008 in Photos. no comments yet
Very little happens in this video. But then again, very little needs to. Somebody clearly made the calculation that having George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison in one room would provide enough entertainment value by itself, and they were right. Twenty years later, the appeal of the Traveling Wilburys and their pleasant music is exactly the same as it was back then: saying, “These guys are really in a band together?”
We open with a slow pan across racks of guitars. A pickup truck overladen with chairs rolls down a dusty road, presumably arriving with the surplus furniture from the Crowded House video. We have a brief shot of George Harrison singing, which kind of spoils the dramatic buildup of the rest of this introductory sequence. Five men enter a cavernous warehouse, carrying their guitar cases. Light streams in behind them, and we see them only in silhouette. It’s actually a lovely composition.
The camera wheels around like it’s filming the pot-smoking circle on That ’70s Show, remaining at foot level of the Wilburys, ending with their bass drum. We get a brief glimpse of drummer Jim Keltner, who in a stunning display of overliteralism appears to have rested his hat on his high-hat cymbals, and then see Harrison in a big floppy white jacket. The Wilburys are standing in a circle around a microphone dangling from the ceiling, looking reasonably well-groomed and playing guitar. Tom Petty’s doing a little shimmy. Roy Orbison is sporting a long ponytail that doesn’t help his appearance any; the video makes sure we catch only fleeting glimpses of it. (Much like Rick Allen’s left shoulder.) Bob Dylan appears bored and vaguely contemptuous. I love that somebody thought it was a good idea to put together a group where Dylan would sing backup vocals.
The song, written by Harrison, is a bit odd. The chorus feels pasted in from another song (or since it’s the section where Orbison, Petty, Dylan, and Lynne take the microphone, maybe four other songs on four different albums). I initially had a hard time even identifying that section as the chorus –it feels more like a sequence of bridges. If Harrison sang the whole composition straight through, it’d feel a lot clunkier, but the track gets by on the kick of other famous voices (which I suppose was basically the point of the Wilburys). The lyrics start off as the plea of a battered heart (“I’m so tired of being lonely / I still have some love to give”), and slides into complaints about his musical career (“Overexposed, commercialized”). Basically, it’s a big lump of undigested self-pity.
The video continues with the five men standing around the microphone, with the camera moving around in a desperate effort to keep things interesting visually. Shafts of light come in the side of the warehouse, and a roadie walks around in the background, doing important roadie things. As the clip continues, we see a black-and-white photograph of each Wilbury as a boy: generally, a shot from when he was twelve years old or so. But Bob Dylan don’t play that: he appears to have given the video-makers a photo from his early twenties.
Petty is playing bass, as he did in his first band, Mudcrutch; everyone else has a guitar. (Lynne steered the Wilburys towards a lumpenacoustic guitar sound on most of their tracks.) As mentioned previously, top session man Jim Keltner is on the drum kit. It’s nice of the band to include Keltner in the video, but it points to a huge missed opportunity: shouldn’t they have recruited Ringo Starr to be a Wilbury?
As the song fades out, there’s a harmonica part that nobody bothers to mime and a guitar solo that Harrison doesn’t replicate on-camera: filmed from behind, he wiggles his hips and gyrates to suggest the great passion he’s feeling. The video ends with the pickup truck rolling out, leaving Lynne, Harrison, Petty, and Orbison sitting amidst their luggage by some railroad tracks. Then Dylan rides past them on a red bicycle. I suppose a motorcycle would have been in poor taste.
“Handle With Care” peaked at #45 on the Billboard singles charts. You can watch the video here.
posted 10 July 2008 in 1988. 5 comments
John (Cougar) Mellencamp has a new album out next week, called Life Death Love and Freedom (a title in the tradition of the BoDeans’ Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams and the Godfathers’ Birth, School, Work, Death). So the latest addition to the archives is a profile I wrote of him back in 2004, which includes entertaining stories about his grandmother and late-night phone calls from Bob Dylan.
Since the story was published, his musical collaboration with Stephen King has been renamed Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and is scheduled to open in Atlanta in April 2009, with a Broadway run possibly following. And Mellencamp was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year.
This article is probably the closest I’ve ever skated to the deadline edge. Rolling Stone has a two-week production cycle; normally, they like to have most copy in house by the end of the first week. But I got this assignment on the Wednesday of the second week, when they suddenly had room for an extra page. I flew to Indianapolis on Thursday morning, ate lunch in the car en route to Bloomington, spent the afternoon with Mellencamp, stayed up all night transcribing the interview and writing the story, emailed the article to my editor around 5 am, and caught a plane back to New York a few hours later. They got the page off to the printers later that Friday, just under the wire.
“The red ass” was a new idiom to some readers; I learned it (and many other things I probably wasn’t supposed to know) at a tender age from Jim Bouton’s classic baseball memoir Ball Four.
posted 9 July 2008 in Archives, Articles. 4 comments
Top of the hour: MTV does a 30-second station ID. The network had retired the classic astronaut footage by 1988, but kept the theme song. This spot is a nifty piece of animation featuring the MTV logo in a gyroscope, with close-ups on doors and windows opening up all over the logo, revealing naked bicycle riders and barking dogs and such.
On to our second hour of videos, starting with Natalie Cole’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.” A few words in praise of cover versions: they’re one of the few aspects of our current copyright system that just plain works. For decades now, if you want to cover somebody else’s song, for reasons inspired or banal, you can just do it. The songwriter gets a reasonable royalty, and you get to show your stuff.
“Pink Cadillac” was a funny rockabilly song, the B-side to “Dancing in the Dark.” On New York City radio, at least, it got heavy airplay in the summer of 1984. Natalie Cole, who’s always been a generic R&B singer, gives the song a generic pop-house feel; the track is a lightweight cousin to Aretha Franklin’s “Freeway of Love.” In the narrow category of “female R&B singers doing Bruce Springsteen compositions,” this single ranks behind the Pointer Sisters’ “Fire” and Donna Summer’s “Protection.”
The video starts off in black and white, with some key items colorized, a high-tech effect in 1988 also employed in Hershey’s commercials and Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” video (which I’m sure we’ll see later in this countdown.) The most famous example of the technique is probably from five years later: the little girl in the red dress in Schindler’s List. (For me, at least, the use of colorization in videos like this blunted some of the horror in Spielberg’s film.)
We’re in an old-fashioned gas station, with a couple of guys leaning over the hood, trying to get a car started. One of them has a bright blue bandanna hanging out of his left pocket. According to the hanky code of the 1970s, this means he’s a gay man looking to engage in 69. His desires will not be fulfilled in this video, I’m afraid.
A white guy cruises up the pumps in a Cadillac convertible, a car that is apparently so astonishing that the black mechanics just point and stare. Its owner is a greaser type in a leather jacket; he starts talking to another white guy with a similar look. The car catches the eye of Natalie Cole, who is in the gas station for reasons unknown, wearing a leather jacket and hoop earrings. The mechanics get extremely excited and start dancing, shimmying from side to side. Cole strides towards the car, pushing away Greaser #2 en route.
Cole touches the Cadillac and, mirable dictu, it turns pink. (It appears to be a particularly sickly coral shade, but I’m going to chalk that up to the ravages of two decades on my videotape.) Meanwhile, Greaser #2 collects the three auto mechanics, and they all return to the Cadillac so that they can boogie around it and rub their thighs against it.
Four girls in a jeep roll into the gas station, and the video shifts to full color, the better to show them off. The girls look like they came straight from Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” video, seeking political asylum as refugees from a hairspray-intensive war zone. The auto mechanics are eye-poppingly excited to have girls to dance with. One passenger in the jeep, a white girl in denim, is also overstimulated: she writhes on the hood of the jeep, in a mini-tribute to Tawny Kitaen’s star turn the previous year in Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” video.
Inevitably, the four girls and four guys do a dance routine together, partnering up based on ethnicity. Cole joins the dance, and then struts over to the Cadillac. (The video briefly flickers back to black and white, to remind us of the good times we all had ninety seconds ago.) Cole sits on the Cadillac’s hood while the girls push it backwards, into the part of the garage labeled “LUBRICATION.” The gas station also has an early-’80s Coca-Cola billboard, with a pile of tires put in front of it to obscure the “Coke is it!” slogan.
Greaser #1 (the Cadillac’s owner) watches the dancers from the sidelines, fondling a bottle of soda in an unsubtle fashion, gazing longingly, twisting his hands back and forth. The girls start lip-synching the backup vocals for Cole, using the nozzles of the gas pumps as simulated microphones. They’re rendered in black and white, except for their lipstick. More dancing, getting ever sassier. Cole wanders through the scene like ZZ Top in their videos, the facilitator of automobile-related sexual hijinks. The Cadillac’s owner keeps fondling that soda, getting more excited, noticing only at the last moment that Cole is driving off in his car.
“Pink Cadillac” hit #5, one of only two singles by Cole to get that high on the pop charts (the other being 1977’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind”). The video isn’t on YouTube, although there is this clip of Cole performing the song on an awards show. Interestingly, somebody at YouTube has put up audio of the original Springsteen demo (from the Nebraska sessions).
posted 8 July 2008 in 1988. 3 comments
I’ve been listening to U2’s “I Will Follow” for over 25 years (not continuously). But only recently did I pay attention to this lyric:
Your eyes make a circle
Two eyes, of course, make a line.
So I am forced to conclude that the person whom Bono is addressing has more than two eyes. Actually, since three eyes make a triangle and four eyes, however you position them, don’t really look circular, I think he must be singing to somebody with, at a bare minimum, five eyes.
The entire staff of Rule Forty-Two HQ wishes you a happy Fourth of July.
From those benches, you can see the Statue of Liberty.
posted 4 July 2008 in Photos. no comments yet
If you’re just joining us, here’s the deal: I unearthed some old videotapes that contain the entirety of MTV’s year-end countdown from 1988. I haven’t watched them since 12/31/88, but I’m slowly rolling through them now, writing about the videos (yes, MTV used to play videos) and the ads and VJ segments.
Since we’ve made it through ten of the videos (and one hour of the countdown), this seems like an opportune moment to provide links for the new arrivals and remember the good times from these past two months.
#91: Eric Carmen, “Hungry Eyes”
#92: Pet Shop Boys, “Always on My Mind”
#94: Michael Jackson, “Another Part of Me”
#95: The Bangles, “In Your Room”
#97: Rick Astley, “Together Forever”
#98: Vixen, “Edge of a Broken Heart”
#99: Crowded House, “Better Be Home Soon”
#100: Keith Richards, “Take It So Hard”
Plus:
An introduction to the project
A video not on the countdown that MTV played anyway: Def Leppard, “Armageddon It”
A note on the absence of Debbie Gibson’s “Foolish Beat”
YouTube links for Keith Richards and Crowded House (all other YouTube links are included with the post on the relevant video)
posted 3 July 2008 in 1988, Self-reflexive. no comments yet
As you may have heard, Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, comes out next week. (A couple of months ago, I interviewed Beck and wrote a short preview of the album. Beck’s changed some of the song titles since then; after some back and forth, “Beggar’s Shoes” became “Gamma Ray.”) I thought this would be a fine time to add another Beck article to the archives: at the beginning of this year, he and I sat down for over an hour to discuss Odelay, the details of how he made it with the Dust Brothers, and many of the bonus tracks included on the recent deluxe edition. Which, as I told friends at the time, was really the ideal topic for a long conversation with Beck.
“I had all these Moog synthesizers,” Beck told me. “The only people using them were Stereolab and a couple of indie bands, so you could go to pawn shops and get them for sixty bucks. I had a pile of them and I’d bring one in and use it until it broke, and then go get another one.”
The version printed in Rolling Stone some months ago was truncated for space reasons, but there’s no reason not to enjoy the whole magillah. (Obviously, the unnamed producer in the article is Danger Mouse.)
posted 2 July 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet
As previously noted, deciphering the plot of a movie from an associated music video is a subtle art. My best guess on It Couldn’t Happen Here: the Pet Shop Boys drive around England, picking up hitchhikers and ultimately becoming professional tour guides, leading paying customers around the United Kingdom by train and by plane.
I’ve never seen Dirty Dancing, some scenes of which are contained within the video for Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes.” Here’s what we’re shown of the movie: Patrick Swayze dancing with Jennifer Grey, while a blonde girl stands behind Grey with her hands on her hips, moving in time with them. It’s presumably a dance lesson designed to rev up the three-way sexual tension. The next clip: Grey swaying with a shirtless Swayze. Soon, she’s taken off her shirt too (revealing a reasonably demure bra), arching her back as far as the human spine will allow. They start kissing. We switch to soft-focus backlighting as they get intimate.
As far as I can tell from this video, Dirty Dancing was a porn movie. There was a fig-leaf of plot involving dance instruction, and then a three-way that didn’t make it into this video, and then later, a hardcore scene between Swayze and Grey, and presumably after that, some girl-on-girl action.
The rest of the “Hungry Eyes” video: Eric Carmen is sitting in a darkened room, watching a 16-mm print of Dirty Dancing, wondering where all his Raspberries royalties went. (In theory, the Raspberries seem like the sort of band I should love, but I’ve never clicked with them. I recently learned that after the Raspberries’ demise, Carmen continued as a songwriter, placing “Almost Paradise,” sung by Mike Reno and Ann Wilson, on the Footloose soundtrack in 1984. So this hit and “Make Me Lose Control,” both (see comments for correction) on the eleven-million-selling (!!) Dirty Dancing soundtrack marked the fusion of the two stages of his career and, presumably, set him up for life financially.) The Dirty Dancing footage ends, and Carmen stands before the white light of the projector. He opens a window as footage of himself is projected on the wall, giving the whole scene a bit of a Norma Desmond tint, made stranger by the fact that he looks less like a star reliving his glory days and more like a lawyer who hasn’t quite made partner yet.
Cut to a blondish white girl in a black evening dress with a plunging neckline and off-the-shoulder straps. She’s gathering red flowers. In an abrupt non-continuity cut (not the last one in this video), she’s suddenly wearing a red satin jacket and caressing her own collarbone, with her fingers then sliding down between her breasts. Her lips are parted. The editing suggests that she’s just outside Carmen’s window, but then she’s projected against his own wall (without the jacket, but with long silver gloves), leaning beneath the red flowers. She steps forward in the projected film, and then steps into the frame with Carmen and touches his face. She walks out the door, vanishing into thin air as she goes. He takes it all in stride: presumably he’s been having these hallucinations for a while.
The song, by the way, is catchy but dull, a churning midtempo pop number notable only for the phrase “I’ve got hungry eyes / I’ve got you in my sights,” which makes for a ballistic/cannibalistic twist on what would otherwise be utterly standard lyrics about gazing longingly upon a desired one.
We hit the chorus, and footage of Carmen singing is projected on a big outside wall. (This video appears to have been shot in a single night in some industrial district.) Beneath the Eric-O-Vision is a hastily art-directed “nightclub,” so denoted by a couple of potted trees and a striped awning. Carmen strolls under the awning, where there are neon signs reading “Cerveza,” “Disco,” and “Club Entrance.” The fantasy girl spins around, hugging a brick wall, and then shimmies against a white background, and gazes longingly into the camera while artificial rain falls behind her. She pulls on her hair. The camera comes in for an extreme closeup on her throat.
The fantasy girl appears outside the club, now wearing a gold evening dress that barely contains her cleavage. In front of the fake rain, she puts her hands on her hips. Footage of her alternates the gold outfit with the black outfit. Carmen stands on a staircase, hands behind his back, lip-synching. For the song’s saxophone solo, the fantasy girl appears with a sax, allegedly playing along–although she doesn’t seem to be moving her fingers at any point.
Across the parking lot from the “nightclub,” Carmen sits in the “charming outdoor café,” so denoted by the checkered tablecloths and the neon sign saying “Café.” His table has no plates or silverware, but does feature a small candle. There’s a statuesque blonde girl sitting across from him. Carmen looks across the industrial zone and sees his fantasy girl, who has wrapped herself around an aging guy with sunglasses and a mustache, who is either her pimp or Stan Lee. She kisses him, and when she breaks the kiss, she is a different girl, an Asian one.
The video ends with Carmen sitting alone with his projector again, meditating on the patriarchal gaze.
“Hungry Eyes” peaked at #4 on the Billboard charts in early 1988. You can watch it here.
posted 1 July 2008 in 1988. 5 comments
The second season of everybody’s favorite new TV show, Mad Men, starts July 27 on AMC. I recently visited the show and saw the capacious set of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency: the desks had IBM Selectric typewriters, the ashtrays were filled with lipstick-stained cigarette butts, and the secretaries were wearing tight dresses and foundation garments. “We all have girdles and weird garters,” said Christina Hendricks, who plays office vixen Joan. “You have no idea how uncomfortable I am right now. It’s like my inner organs are slowly being shifted.”
I wrote a short preview of the new season for Rolling Stone. It’s now up on their website here.
posted 30 June 2008 in Outside. 2 comments
