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.
In other news, I’ll be on the road most of the time from now through Labor Day, so posting here until then will be light (and feature the musings of Mr. Andy Warhol). The 1988 MTV countdown will resume in September.
posted 13 August 2009 in Articles, Self-reflexive. no comments yet
I don’t hear Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” as much as I used to, which is for the best, really. But it came up last week on the Sirius-XM ’80s station, and I thought of something that I never noticed twenty-four years ago–you don’t need to “install” microwave ovens. You put them on the counter and plug them in! So the narrator has a pretty cushy job himself and probably shouldn’t have so much resentment towards rock stars.
posted 11 August 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments
Photographed a few years back in a rural graveyard in New Zealand.
posted 7 August 2009 in Photos. no comments yet
I realized this morning that two recent albums–Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion and Wonderlick’s Topless at the Arco Arena–have something unusual in common. Their titles include the names of concert venues despite not being live records. Can anybody think of any others?
(The MPP is a Gehry-designed shed in Maryland; Jackson Browne recorded “The Load-Out/Stay” there. The Arco Arena is in Sacramento; Wonderlick is Tim Quirk and Jay Blumenfield, formerly of Too Much Joy.)
posted 6 August 2009 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments
Part two of my two-part “Where Are They Now?” series is Right Said Fred. As with the Spin Doctors, this is up-to-date as of 2004.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: RIGHT SAID FRED
By Gavin Edwards
A detailed yet incomplete list of the things Right Said Fred were too sexy for: their shirt, their car, their hat, your party, Milan, New York, Japan, their cat–poor pussycat. The campy number-one hit “I’m Too Sexy” was 1992’s most buoyant novelty song: over a club groove, Fred Fairbrass expostulated the point of view of a model who was cursed with an excess of sexiness: it was Zoolander in two minutes and fifty seconds.
Before “I’m Too Sexy” took off, Fairbrass and his brother Richard had been working as managers at a London gym, the Dance Attic, and scrabbling on the fringes of the music industry. Once the song hit, they became famous for their shaved heads and the brief sensation caused when Richard outed himself as bi (“I’m too sexy for just girls,” he said). Profoundly silly dance acts have longer shelf lives in Europe than the United States: although Right Said Fred had other hits in the UK (such as “Deeply Dippy”), none of their three followup albums (Sex and Travel, Smashing!, Fredhead) even received American distribution.
“We made the mistake of starting our own record label,” says Richard Fairbrass of Right Said Fred, who hit #1 in 1992 with the novelty song “I’m Too Sexy.” “If you don’t want to own a luxury yacht, it’s a good way of spending lots of money.” None of their three followup albums were even released in the United States.
So after Smashing! flopped in 1996, the group took some time off. Third member Rob Manzoli quit, disappointed that the group wasn’t pursuing a harder sound in the vein of Funkadelic. Richard turned to hosting British television shows, including Gaytime TV, Britain Behaving Badly, a car program called Pulling Power, and a game show filmed in the Jordanian dunes, Desert Forges.
Meanwhile, Fred “didn’t do anything very much. I drunk a lot and went to a lot of parties for about eighteen months. I went to Ibiza and stayed up far too late and hung out with people maybe I shouldn’t have been hanging out with.” Then the eternally scrappy group signed another deal with Ministry of Sound in Germany, where they’ve had success with the song “Stand Up,” and have served as the opening band on a stadium tour by Nena (famous in the States for 1984’s “99 Luftballoons”). As ever, the Fairbrass brothers are enjoying themselves, and sound irrepressibly optimistic. Speaking of “Stand Up,” Fred says, “It was turned into this anthemic sports song. I think with the interest we’re getting out of the States, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a college-radio sort of hit. It sounds a bit like the Hives, quite edgy.”
(It wasn’t a sort of hit. Since then, they’ve released two more albums, For Sale and I’m a Celebrity. They still play live, and are planning a greatest-hits disc (perhaps less superfluous in territories other than States).)
posted 3 August 2009 in Archives, Unpublished. no comments yet
These garbage cans are all over Disneyland:
Every time I saw one, it seemed like a friendly request to be more wasteful. The politest form of antienvironmentalism possible!
posted 31 July 2009 in Photos. no comments yet
Another entry from the Andy Warhol Diaries.
Sunday, July 3, 1977
Some blacks recognized me a few times this weekend, and I’m trying to figure out what they recognize so I can somehow sell it to them, whatever it is.
posted 30 July 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet
Last week, I went to Las Vegas for the opening date of the reunion tour of Blink-182 (a band I’ve written four articles on previously, including this 1999 feature, this 2000 cover story, and this 2003 account of playing for troops in the Middle East). If you’re curious about whether the boys had matured during their time apart (spoiler warning: no), you can read my dispatch for the Rolling Stone website here.
I was in Vegas for 24 hours, and I spent 23 of them at the Hard Rock Casino. Being there was surreal, and not just because I had a choice between spending my money at Nobu or the in-house tattoo parlor. The hotel walls are covered with photographs of people I’ve interviewed, and even some replicas of cover stories I’ve written. I know rock music is already a commodity, but it normally doesn’t feel as thoroughly commodified as it is at the Hard Rock. Never in my life have I felt so much like a cog in the rock-industrial complex.
posted 29 July 2009 in Outside. no comments yet
Five years ago, I started work on one of those rock-magazine perennial “Where Are They Now?” features. This version was going to focus on musicians from the ’90s, so a moderate amount of diplomacy was needed, given that the musicians in question might think of themselves as vital artists on the verge of a major comeback. The euphemism I settled on was “career update.” I don’t think it fooled anybody–“This is a ‘Where Are They Now?” article, isn’t it?’ demanded Soul Asylum’s manager–but the politeness seemed to be appreciated.
At any rate, the higher-ups changed their mind about the feature before I really got rolling–but after I had finished three of the “career updates.” The Natalie Merchant one was rather dull, so I’ll let that remain on my hard disk, but I think you might enjoy the other two. The reporting’s current circa 2004, but not much has changed with these acts since then. First up: a once-omnipresent jam band.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: THE SPIN DOCTORS
By Gavin Edwards
“In the midst of a lot of grunge, some great music that was kind of nihilistic, we had a message of hope.” Chris Barron, lead singer of the Spin Doctors, is reflecting on 1991, when the New York music scene improbably became the home of hippie jam bands like Blues Traveler, and his group became the biggest of them all. Their live shows featured lots of improvisation, but what sold records were a pair of catchy singles, “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong,” which the group used to call their “white-bread hits.” They sold a lot of Wonder Bread: their debut, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, went quintuple-platinum. “I got sick of seeing myself on TV,” says drummer Aaron Comess.
They recorded a less-successful followup, Turn It Upside Down; guitarist Eric Schenkman left the band on Labor Day 1994, soon after its release. He says, “We made too much money–the whole thing was fucked. When I left, I figured they’d call me back one day, but they never did.” Schenkman moved up to Canada, where he worked on music for commercials, including ads for Budweiser and Sprite.
Bassist Mark White quit the same year, and started obsessively bicycling around the perimeter of Central Park. “I felt like I was on another planet,” he says. “I was doing anywhere from 30 to 60 miles a day, pumping away every day for three years, in temperatures from zero to 105. I was just obsessed–I was riding like a crazy person.” Three years ago, he moved down to Houston, and at age 37, finally got his driver’s license.
Meanwhile, Barron and Comess stayed in New York, continuing with the Spin Doctors and various side projects. Barron’s beard grew to Rip Van Winkle proportions–“People comment a lot on that Grizzly Adams look,” he says, “but we were touring so much, I didn’t have it together to get a haircut and a shave.” The band’s sales dwindled to nothing on 96’s You’ve Got to Believe in Something and 99’s Here Comes the Bride, but they had salted away a good chunk of money from the glory days. “I bought a nice apartment,” Barron says. “And I bought a BMW for tooling around, but it just wasn’t me. I started freaking out all the time and worrying about where I had parked it. People were saying, ‘Who are you and what have you done with Chris?'” He sold the Beemer, buying an antique 1942 Ford station wagon instead.
In 1999, Barron thought his career was over–and not just because of low sales. His right vocal cord became spontaneously paralyzed, and he lost his voice. “It’s a really rare freakish thing that happens to one in sixteen million people,” Barron says. “It forced me to do a lot of serious soul-searching. I had been a singer my whole life, and now I had to think: What am I gonna do? Who am I gonna be? I came up with nothing. I could pick up mule-skinning or flower-arranging.” After whispering for seven months, he regained his voice.
The Spin Doctors had played dozens of shows at Wetlands, the New York club, so when it closed in 2001, they reunited the original lineup for a farewell show. They found the original chemistry was still there, so they started writing new songs and playing together, and found that they were enjoying themselves again. Their manager is considering record deals and pointing out that the group is only a few years older than the guys in Maroon 5. And Barron has grown a beard again. “But it’s under control,” he promises.
(They ultimately released another album in 2005, Nice Talking to Me, and apparently still gig.)
posted 20 July 2009 in Articles, Unpublished. 4 comments
