Hello. I’m Gavin Edwards, the public speaker and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Tao of Bill Murray, the ’Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy series, and Kindness and Wonder: Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever. If you’re interested in hiring me, click here for more information.
Our benevolent Google overlords have somehow acquired the rights to put the entire back catalog of Spin up on the Web. The search functions aren’t what they might be, so you’ll just have to browse. Pick a random issue in the late ’80s and have some fun. My professional career started at Spin–the first piece of writing I ever got paid for, in 1989, was a review of Oaktown 357, a girl group put together by MC Hammer. It’s in there somewhere, but the issue I’m linking to today is about a decade later, cover date July 2000. (For a few weeks that summer, I had the unusual distinction of having written simultaneous cover stories in both Rolling Stone and Spin.) Leading indicator of the magazine industry’s health: that issue ran 174 pages, roughly twice the length of a current Spin pamphlet. Go here, and if you want to read my cover story on Matchbox 20, type “92” into the little box at the top of the screen (just to the right of Contents). If you just want to see a picture of me wearing a cowboy hat, type “34.”
A picture from a few years ago of the clock promoting The Sun, the defunct New York newspaper. (At the time, the name had been revived by The New York Sun, which kicked off in 2002 with an issue that included the solution to the crossword puzzle in the last issue of The Sun–from 1950. Now that version of the paper’s defunct too.) The location is the corner of Broadway and Chambers.
We kick off with an MTV promo, repeating from about three hours ago, for their show Now Hear This: MTV’s Guide to New Music. “On this week’s special year-end wrap-up,” Adam Curry says in voiceover as we see the members of R.E.M. doing their “Stand” jumps, “we’ll take a look back at world premieres, the best albums of ’88, and the new artists that we introduced to you.” We can only hope we get lots of quality time with Curry’s hair.
Oh, it’s The January Managain. For the first time, I notice a striking background detail: Kevin Kline’s character keeps a large blue-and-yellow macaw in his apartment. How did I not see that the first eight times this ad came up?
A classic MTV promo follows. It’s white capital letters on a black background, in the following sequence: “WORDS / THESE ARE WORDS / BLIND PEOPLE CAN’T SEE THEM / DEAF PEOPLE CAN’T HEAR THEM / FOREIGNERS DON’T NTEURSDNAD THEM.” (The nonsense word then rearranges itself into UNDERSTAND. There are various other clever tweaks of the basic white-on-black text in this sequence–the word SEE has a delayed entry in the BLIND PEOPLE line, for example–but detailing them all would get tedious.) “BUT YOU CAN / NOWADAYS, PEOPLE WHO MAKE TV / COMMERCIALS / USE WORDS JUST LIKE THESE / TO COMMUNICATE / A / MESSAGE / SO THAT THOSE PEOPLE WHO DO NOT / LISTEN / UNDERSTAND / THIS PRACTICE IS SUPPOSED TO BE / SIMPLE / AND / EFFECTIVE / THESE WORDS DON’T REALLY SAY ANYTHING / THEY COULD BUT THEY’RE NOT / THEY WANT TO BUT THEY CAN’T / SO, THEY WILL HANG OUT FOR FIFTEEN SECONDS / UNTIL IT’S TIME / FOR / ANOTHER / COMMERCIAL / THESE ARE WORDS / THAT COULD BE SAYING SOMETHING / FUNNY OR COOL OR INTERESTING / BUT THEY’RE NOT / THEY’RE JUST SITTING THERE / LIKE YOU / mtv.”
The “fifteen seconds” claim to the contrary, that spot takes a full minute. There’s some ethereal music behind it that sounds like synthesized medieval chanting. The whole thing is riveting. Of course, the words in question are funny and cool and interesting, which softens the criticism of the audience.
Some very familiar local spots: WWF Royal Rumble, Season’s Greetings from UA-Columbia Cablevision, and then, for the second time in this countdown, we see the tail end of the Freedom Rock ad. “Man, you should get Freedom Rock too!” says one of the hippies.
We close out with a repeat of the MTV promo spot touting their dedication to new music. Some of the acts being hyped here will chart on the countdown (Escape Club, Information Society); others will not (Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, Living Colour, Siouxsie & the Banshees, White Lion). We see quick clips from all the videos, and so are reminded of how the New Bohemians had to play their instruments while sitting in toy cars. And what do Living Colour and Siouxsie have in common? Excess vowels!
Only once in the past decade has my wife taken the cassette from my tape recorder as soon as I finished a phone interview, popped it into her own Walkman, and then listened to the entire conversation, laughing gleefully throughout. That was when I interviewed Samuel L. Jackson, four years ago.
Jackson was exactly as cool as you would hope. (And now my son loves him too; his favorite characters in The Incredibles and “The Clone Wars” are Frozone and Mace Windu.) Unfortunately, the movie he was promoting was the not-so-cool Freedomland, so almost all of this Q&A remained unpublished–until now.
Click here to read about Jackson’s golf games with Michael Jordan, his taste in clothes, and his two favorite words (for a clue, look at the title of this post).
It takes only three seconds to wave away the fetid smell of Paul Carrack: some squealing tires and a synthesized drum roll announce the arrival of Robert Barisford Brown. Immediately, “My Prerogative” whacks your eardrums with its greatness. New jack swing never got any better than this. Criminally, I don’t think I’ve heard this single since it fell off the charts two decades ago, either because oldies stations shy away from ’80s R&B, or because Bobby Brown became more famous for getting stupid with Whitney Houston.
A hyperactive band gets into a funky groove onstage. We cut away to a Mercedes: getting out of the driver’s seat is Bobby Brown. He walks down an alley, moving briskly but not hurrying. I didn’t know it was possible to saunter at high speed. He’s wearing a black quasi-military outfit and although it appears to be night, sunglasses. Brown gets into an old-fashioned elevator and pulls the collapsible metal door shut.
As the elevator goes down, Brown starts singing (the chorus, which in this song comes before the first verse). He’s acquired a headset microphone–maybe he carries one in his pocket? His elevator delivers him right to the stage and he bursts out dancing. Brown then takes off his sunglasses, which seems a little odd, since he’s now under the bright stage lights and might actually want them.
Brown’s dancing between two scantily clad girls, one with a large white keytar, the other (somewhat less plausibly, given the backing track) with a saxophone. Each of the girls is flanked by a male dancer; most of the time, the guys are kept out of the frame.
Brown, it turns out, is an excellent dancer. It’s not just his superior footwork and rhythm–it’s how he swaggers his way through the whole routine. Brown waggles his finger, letting us see the expensive gold watch on his wrist. He does a side-stepping move, showing off his groundbreaking trousers: they’re loose in that harem-pants way, although not as extreme as the baggy-diaper look that MC Hammer would employ in 1990. (I remember an interview around that time where a mystified Brown reported that Hammer had phoned him asking for permission to wear those pants.) Speaking of harbingers of future fashion statements: Brown’s hair is styled in a conventional flattop in this video, not the asymmetrical Gumby cut he would soon adopt.
Closeup on the drummer, who appears to have wandered in from a pirate mariachi band: he’s got a black-and-orange jacket, a wide-brimmed black hat, a large hoop earring, a bolo tie, and a rakish mustache. Well, at least he looks happy.
Second chorus: Brown athletically throws his shoulders into his dance moves, and we get to consider how “prerogative” is a distinctive four-syllable word to build a song around. We get quick cuts of three different guys singing and playing banks of synthesizers. If this were an actual live show instead of a video, I would suspect them of being the musical muscle behind this song. (I believe one of them is producer Teddy Riley.)
We’re treated to lots of reaction shots of the audience, who are predictably enthusiastic and mostly female. “Ego trips is not my thing,” sings Brown, in the least convincing lyric in the song. He’s got a metallic piece of jewelry on the left breast of his quasi-uniform–I suspect it’s meant to evoke military medals, but it looks more like the captain’s wings they used to give young children on airplanes.
Brown hops from one foot to the other, doing a pumped-up version of a Pee-Wee Herman dance. The saxophonist pretends to play her instrument. We reach the bridge, which seems like a good time to mention that when I watched this countdown the first time, on New Year’s Eve 1988 with a bunch of friends, we got into an argument about whether the word was actually “prerogative” or “perogative.” I thought the latter and went so far as to find a dictionary to prove my case. Um, I was wrong.
Brown steps behind the keytarist, moving in time with her, and plays her keytar. “Yo, Teddy, kick it like this,” Brown says, and the keytarist ducks down to the ground, letting him swing his right leg through the air in a roundhouse kick. That’s an awfully literal interpretation of “kick it.” Then for good measure, Brown grinds against the saxophonist, although he doesn’t bother to finger her instrument.
Brown struts down to the lip of the stage, shaking his shoulders, and delivers his monologue, pointing at the audience and talking straight into the camera: “What is this, a [mystery word] that I can’t have money in my pocket and people not talk about me? This world is a trip! I don’t know what’s going on these days. I got this person over here talking about me, this person. Hey, listen, let me tell you something, it’s my prerogative, I can do what I want to do. I made this money, you didn’t. Right, Ted? We out of here.” I initially thought the mystery word was “business,” but it doesn’t really sound like it. Some online lyrics sites say “blizzard,” but that makes no sense (plus it doesn’t sound right either). “Visit,” maybe?
As the song heads to the fade, Brown shakes his pelvis like somebody selected “puree.”
“My Prerogative” hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. (So what’s it doing all the way down at #57 here? It was still climbing the charts, and wouldn’t reach the top until 1989. I don’t know whether it also placed on the following year’s countdown.) You can watch the video here.
Another excerpt from the Andy Warhol Diaries. The other person in “we” is Bianca Jagger:
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.
Recently, I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview the gentlemen of Pavement for Rolling Stone. You can now read the resulting article, detailing what they’ve been doing for the past decade and how they got back together–but it’s not online, so you’ll have to pick up a copy of the new issue (featuring my old friend Shaun White on the cover). Delightfully, the same issue also includes an interview with Billy Corgan, meaning that the magazine appears to be doing its best to reignite the old “Range Life” feud.
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.”
I was thinking about musicians who have belonged to at least two major rock bands. There’s a lot of them, so let’s narrow it down: I’m interested in the sidemen, not stars like Dave Grohl or Eric Clapton. For our purposes today, spinoff projects don’t count (where two or more people from one band start another band together), and supergroups don’t either.
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.
Our benevolent Google overlords have somehow acquired the rights to put the entire back catalog of Spin up on the Web. The search functions aren’t what they might be, so you’ll just have to browse. Pick a random issue in the late ’80s and have some fun. My professional career started at Spin–the first piece of writing I ever got paid for, in 1989, was a review of Oaktown 357, a girl group put together by MC Hammer. It’s in there somewhere, but the issue I’m linking to today is about a decade later, cover date July 2000. (For a few weeks that summer, I had the unusual distinction of having written simultaneous cover stories in both Rolling Stone and Spin.) Leading indicator of the magazine industry’s health: that issue ran 174 pages, roughly twice the length of a current Spin pamphlet. Go here, and if you want to read my cover story on Matchbox 20, type “92” into the little box at the top of the screen (just to the right of Contents). If you just want to see a picture of me wearing a cowboy hat, type “34.” 
