The latest issue of Rolling Stone, still on newsstands, has an article by me about Aziz Ansari, who you might know from Parks and Recreation, Funny People, Human Giant, or his recent gig hosting the MTV Movie Awards. Since my profile didn’t get Ansari summoned to the White House and then fired,  I have to regard it as a failure.

Like most Rolling Stone articles these days, it’s available online only behind a paywall; if you pick up issue 1108/1109, you can find it beginning on page 56. But if you’re itching to click on something, you can read Ansari’s Twitter feed where he pretends to be the spokesman for P.F. Chang’s.

posted 7 July 2010 in Articles, Links. no comments yet

Taken two weeks ago, on a walk around the Silver Lake reservoir.

As far as I can tell, that’s an annex to the reservoir–currently empty except for what appears to be a whole lot of black foam rubber.

posted 2 July 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

I wouldn’t have guessed that a Chicago video would prompt one of the liveliest discussions we’ve had about any aspect of the 1988 countdown, but there you have it–if you haven’t read the comments on “Look Away,” go join the party.

The debate over songwriter Diane Warren inspired me to dig up one of my first professional bylines: a 1990 Spin article about her. (I believe it was the second profile I wrote for Spin, after an interview with the short-lived “supergroup” Bad English.) There’s lots of sentences in this piece I’m tempted to rewrite twenty years later, but in the interest of historical accuracy, I’m leaving them all untouched (except for correcting the spelling of Diane’s first name–somehow she made it into the magazine as Dianne).

DIANE WARREN
Michael Bolton calls her the “Hit Bitch.” She calls herself “the luckiest person in the world.” Most people don’t call her anything; they just walk around humming her songs.

Her name is Diane Warren and she’s the most successful songwriter in America. She’s written five Number One songs, including Milli Vanilli’s “Blame It on the Rain,” Bad English’s “When I See You Smile,” and Taylor Dayne’s “Love Will Lead You Back.” Some of her songs never transcend formula (Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” another Number One). The best, however, are seamless songcraft, disposable but timeless (Belinda Carlisle’s “I Get Weak”). All of them seem most at home on the Billboard Hot 100, where she’s had as many as seven singles simultaneously. “I write songs that I’d like to hear, and I grew up listening to hit radio,” Warren says. “So I guess if I love it, it’s going to be pretty damn commercial.”

Seven days a week, twelve hours a day, Warren is in her Sunset Boulevard office–alone with her grand piano and DX-7 drum machine–writing songs that sound like pop hits. Six months later they are, but for years no one would listen to them. Her big break came in 1983, when she wrote the lyrics to Laura Branigan’s Top Ten “Solitaire.” (Warren spent her royalties on a lawsuit with her publishers.) Two years later she wrote DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night,” and soon became a prime source of the nation’s pop wealth. Now Warren could retire and live off her royalties, but she doesn’t even slow down. When she leaves her piano to eat dinner, she feels guilty for wasting time she could use to write a song.

Even when she was a child, reading the fine print on record labels, Warren knew she wanted to be a songwriter rather than a performer, although she did make a few errant stabs at fame, including a gig at a restaurant when she was fourteen. “I played one song and the guy paid me fifteen dollars to get off the stage,” Warren laughs. “The first money I ever made in show business was to be asked to stop.”

Warren succumbed to her stage fright and retreated into happy anonymity; people know her music but not her face. “You know what was really neat?” Warren asks. “I was at the magazine stand a couple of days ago and this girl next to me starts singing one of my songs, ‘I’ll Be Your Shelter’ by Taylor Dayne. I look at her and I go, ‘I wrote that song!’ and she says, ‘Oh! Oh, right, yeah!’ She didn’t believe me.”

Warren doesn’t mind obscurity: Her place in the industry affords her other pleasures–like flipping radio stations while she drives, looking for her songs. Her greatest frustration comes when singers don’t want to record a song she knows will be a hit. Rod Stewart turned down two Warren tunes that hit Number One for other people. Tina Turner rejected “I’ll Be Your Shelter” before Taylor Dayne snatched it. Cher didn’t want to record “If I Could Turn Back Time.” When it became her biggest hit in 15 years, she passed on a message through an engineer: “Tell Diane that she was right and I was right. Isn’t it nice that we can both be right?”

“True Cher style,” snorts Warren. “That was her way of saying thank you.”

(Article by Gavin Edwards. Originally published as “Solid Gold, Easy Action,” in the September 1990 issue of Spin.)

You can also read that entire issue of Spin online, if you like; it also includes pieces on hot breaking artists like Monie Love and the Lightning Seeds.

I hadn’t thought about it until just now, but the Warren article is a nice bookend to my recent profile of Dr. Luke–they’re two very different characters, but they’re both insanely prolific L.A.-based pop songwriters.

posted 1 July 2010 in Articles. 3 comments

As you may have noticed, there’s a World Cup going on. Google seems to have changed their search algorithm since the last time we had one of these hootenannies, so searching for “World Cup songs” no longer takes you to my essay about that very phenomenon (in my collection of 1998 letters home from England).

Which means that this time, I’m not getting my quadrennial barrage of outraged emails explaining that England and Scotland are separate countries and it’s totally valid for them to have separate World Cup teams.

posted 28 June 2010 in Archives. no comments yet

Michael Jackson died one year ago today. These are a few more of my photographs from last April’s auction-house exhibition of the contents of his Neverland compound; previous installments can be seen here and here and here.

Rest in peace.

posted 25 June 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

We hear a horribly dated plinkety synth sound; it sounds like somebody got a new keyboard for Christmas 1987 and left it on the preset. On our video screen: a New York City street scene, specifically a Hot Video Babe walking down the sidewalk. She is walking two rottweilers. She is wearing a short peach jacket; it’s unbuttoned, so that we can catch glimpses of the skimpy black outfit underneath. She is styled in an angular way that in this era of MTV signified either “intimidating high-class woman” or “Sheena Easton.”

The Hot Video Babe is arguing with a boyfriend who’s clearly not worthy of her: short, balding, smoking a cigar. The lyrics start: “You called me up this morning, told me about the new love you found.” We quickly cut away from the cigar smoker to a more suitable proxy for 41-year-old lead vocalist Bill Champlin: a young handsome man with bleached hair, moping around an expensive apartment. Bleach Job talks on the phone, pretending to be happy for his ex-girlfriend. He slams down the receiver, and we learn that the art director found an antique rotary phone at the prop house.

Wearing sunglasses and a gray tank top, Bleach Job walks down the middle of the street–New York is pretty tolerant of jaywalkers, but he’s pushing it. An old-fashioned yellow Checker cab, selected by the same art director, pulls up to the curb. A different Hot Video Babe steps out with an armful of packages; as the chorus swells, she drops them into a puddle.

The reasonably catchy chorus: “If you see me walking by / And the tears are in my eye / Look away, baby, look away.” This is another Diane Warren composition (her second in the countdown after Belinda Carlisle’s “I Get Weak”), and although it’s an effective piece of pop craft, it’s also utter dreck. We cut to a nighttime scene: in the back of a limo, Bleach Job (still wearing his sunglasses) is arguing with Hot Video Babe (the first one, I think, although all the women in this video are similarly styled brunettes, so it’s hard to tell).

The limo parks in Times Square, right in front of a Sbarro and a movie theater playing Running on Empty. Alternately waving her hands and holding her head, HVB #1 steps out of the limo. She’s wearing black gloves and what looks like a pink taffeta dress. The limo pulls away, but her dress is caught in the door. She spins around, letting the dress (actually, the carefully draped pink sheet) fall off her to reveal sheer black foundation garments. She looks pissed, rather than embarrassed.

Cut to another apartment, dimly lit, looking down on Times Square nighttime traffic. There are three more Hot Video Babes; like all the other women in this video, they are wearing hot pastel outfits, accessorized with black. Two of them are sitting; the third one pirouettes to the refrigerator and opens it, revealing that it holds no food but does contain an industrial-strength light source on loan from Shea Stadium.

Still nighttime: one of the Hot Video Babes walks down the middle of the street of the meatpacking district. Behind her is a car, tipped over on its side, going up in flames. She doesn’t look back, but strips off one piece of jewelry after another, casting them aside. When she gets far enough away, the car explodes in an impressive fireball.

Dawn. Bleach Job stands on top of a tall building, looking at the Empire State Building. Later, on another balcony, two more hot video babes are playing with a telescope. One of the babes twirls a gold watch around her finger. She dips it in a glass of red wine, and then tosses it over the side of the building. We get reaction shots from Bleach Job, looking up as if the watch landed at his feet, and a third HVB with a bow in her hair, sunning herself and laughing. This is where I gave up on trying to figure out any semblance of a plot; I can’t tell if these women were dating Bleach Job or the cigar smoker or both. Judging by the wholesale disposal of jewelry, either there’s been a bunch of unpleasant breakups or this is a crowd really into conspicuous consumption. And don’t even ask me why that car was on fire.

One more HVB walks down a city street, hair piled high and perpendicular, wearing a hot pink vinyl dress that, unsurprisingly, is coming open at the front. She’s holding a large bunch of flowers, but she’s struggling with them, giving us an opportunity for a closeup of her garters and stockings. She throws the flowers up in the air. Bleachie leans against a wall; the camera pans by him and into a blue-lit nightclub. Three minutes into a four-minute video, we get our first view of the band.

Peter Cetera had been gone from Chicago for three years at this point; replacing him on bass and vocals was the eighteen-years-younger Jason Scheff. Vocals on “Look Away,” however, were handled by guitarist Bill Champlin, who had been in the band since 1981. Judging by this video, he’s still rocking his haircut from 1973. He’s also got a black tank top, a white vest, and exactly two stage mannerisms: bouncing on the balls of his feet and pumping his right fist in the air. We get a quick overview of all eight members of the band; the horn players try to look busy despite not having anything to do on this song.

A Hot Video Babe gets into a hotel elevator, drying off her hair with a towel, wearing a hot-pink bathing suit. There are already three men in business suits there. The doors close and open again; the HVB is pulling an orange jacket over a black bra, implying that she completely stripped down and changed clothes in the elevator. Also, her hair is now perfectly coiffed. One man wipes his brow, another adjusts his tie, the last one fans himself with a newspaper. She leaves the elevator with a smirk.

Obviously, this clip was intended to ramp up the sex appeal of the unphotogenic Chicago; it’s far from the only video on this countdown to do that, just the most relentless. The unusual thing about it is that while other prurient videos of the era (Poison, Van Halen) rely on the stripper trope, the girls in “Look Away” are presented as confident, tough women whose clothes just happen to keep falling off them. So they look more like classic cheesecake illustrations–the sort of stuff you would have seen in 1950s men’s magazines with names like Bachelor or Cad. Even when Chicago are trying to be crass, it feels dated.

Another HVB runs into an open fire hydrant, deliberately soaking herself.

Bleach Job is back on the phone in his apartment, lip-synching the lyrics “I’m really happy for you,” looking a little more sincere this time. In the nightclub, Champlin holds the microphone and looks into the middle distance, wondering how long Chicago can keep giving their albums numbers instead of names.

“Look Away” topped the singles charts for two weeks (putting it in a three-way tie for Chicago’s biggest hit, alongside “If You Leave Me Now” and “Hard to Say I’m Sorry.” You can watch the video here.

posted 24 June 2010 in 1988. 17 comments

As recently noted by Chris in the comments to a different Jack-oriented article, I have a Q&A with Jack White in the new issue of Maxim (July 2010, with Nicole Scherzinger on the cover), another in the “Icon” series of interviews I’ve been doing for them. We had a short but fascinating conversation about drumming, taxidermy, and being a control freak.

A part of the interview that there wasn’t room to print:

What do you like better–songs about death or songs about love?

They’re the same thing, aren’t they? Falling in love takes up time. And when there’s something new in your world, something has to die in its place. It’s like when there’s two friends, and then one of them gets a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and their friendship suffers. Or when two overweight people are friends, and one of them loses weight–I always feel so sorry for the other one.

For more, pick up Maxim or read the interview on their website.

posted 21 June 2010 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

Found recently on the beach:

posted 18 June 2010 in Photos. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

Kevin Seal promotes the “Big Bang ’89” celebration with as little sincerity as he can muster: “Oooh, whee, let’s get some excitement.” He then continues with the countdown: “In at a pretty solid 54 is Whitesnake.” He notes that “Give Me All Your Love” was the fourth video from the Whitesnake album, and the first one not to feature “the lovely and talented” Tawny Kitaen. Oh, that makes me very sad.

“Good year for Whitesnake in general,” Seal continues. “I took a train down to Daytona for spring break along with the band. And David Coverdale, he finally found a place where he can get beluga caviar for under $400 a pound. It’s that kind of year for them.” It’s always hard to calibrate Seal’s sincerity–he raises an eyebrow after he finishes that story–but I get the impression the caviar detail is true.

We open with footage of a small private plane flying over the mountains. Given that every expense was spared for the rest of the video, I suspect this is stock footage–if it were actually Whitesnake’s airplane, wouldn’t there be a band logo painted on the nose? Or Tawny Kitaen crawling out a window and then doing a split on one of the wings? (For too many reasons to detail, I’d rather be writing about the chart-topping “Here I Go Again” (1987, alas) than this weak effort to squeeze one more hit out of the octuple-platinum Whitesnake. Okay, I’ll share one reason: I love that David Coverdale makes his girlfriend do all the stunt work.)

A pair of motorcycles emerge from the fog, followed by a limousine. The members of Whitesnake stride through a parking lot, adorned with long white scarves and flowing locks. (Most of this introduction has double-exposed images, so we’re seeing both those things at the same time, along with a crowded arena, presumably filled with Whitesnake fans.) The band walks through the backstage tunnels of the EnormoDome where they will be playing. The drummer has his shirt off; we know he’s the drummer because he’s holding some drumsticks. Other than that, I can’t tell one member from another, and given how many personnel changes Whitesnake had, I suspect that David Coverdale couldn’t either.

Finally, the music starts, and I wish it hadn’t. “Give Me All Your Love” is a big slice of generic uptempo rock pomp. Coverdale does an acrobatic move that involves jumping in the air and bouncing the microphone stand on his knee, sending it flying over his head. One male fan is so overcome by the power of Whitesnake, he has taken off his shirt and is waving it around in circles.

Coverdale struts forward, letting us take a good look at his outfit, which appears to be new white sneakers and fringed denim that somebody has attacked with a Bedazzler. He then struts backward, as if he left his keys by the drum kit. He sings. First line: “When I first saw you, baby, you took my breath away.” Okay, a bit clichéd, but not awful. Second line: “I knew your name was trouble”–and now Coverdale rubs his fingers and thumb together, in the international symbol for “money.” I suppose he’s trying to communicate the notion that the girl he was singing about had expensive tastes, or was actually a hooker, but it just looks like he doesn’t know the idiom, and that he should be singing “I knew your name was Money.”

The bassist holds up his bass and, without ever stopping playing, licks it. Ewwww. Does he know where that thing’s been?

Lots of reaction shots of the crowd, including some of women, who look suspiciously like they’ve been planted by the video crew. Also lots of quick cuts of the band–Coverdale wobbling his left leg, the shirtless drummer pounding on his red kit, a guitarist in a puffy white shirt. Notably absent is a keyboard player, despite the synth riff being the dominant musical element in this song.

A guitarist walks around, playing his instrument over his head. This would be more impressive if the music being played was good. Coverdale throws his microphone stand around some more. He was 37 at the time of this countdown, and he’s looking a bit weather-beaten, but he’s still got a lot of energy onstage, and he’s still got a lot of hair. He periodically shakes it around to demonstrate its volume.

Guitar solo, on a polka-dot guitar. One shot frames the guitarist between Coverdale’s gyrating legs. The director deploys the camera he’s kept stationed in the bass drum. And then the bassist licks his bass again! Why, oh why? Did that trick get him girls? Did the bass taste like cinnamon?

Coverdale clutches the microphone with his right hand and lets his left arm flail around, not completely unrhythmically. I would say that this video seems like obvious source material for Spinal Tap–an aging hack British metal star trying to put himself over in ridiculous fashion–except that it came out four years after the movie.

The band finishes the song in an explosion of random strobes; the video cuts back and forth between the drummer and Coverdale spinning around with the microphone stand. Was there really no way for them to work in Tawny Kitaen doing a cartwheel?

“Give Me All Your Love” peaked at #48 on the Billboard singles chart. You can watch it here. Or you can just watch “Here I Go Again.”

posted 17 June 2010 in 1988. 4 comments

Byline alert: I have a one-page article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone (#1107, Jay-Z cover) about Jack Johnson and the free show he played on the Santa Monica Pier. (There was “valet parking” for bicycles and the light show came courtesy of the Ferris wheel.) As usual, it’s not up on the Rolling Stone website, so get your mitts on a paper issue and look for it on page 19.

Career milestone: I don’t believe I’d ever previously reported any part of an article while on a roller coaster.

posted 14 June 2010 in Articles, Outside. 2 comments