Inside my skull, Kylie Minogue is Exhibit A for how the pleasures of pop music can be contextual. If I had spent the last twenty years living in London or Sydney, I would have heard Kylie’s countless singles on the radio, seen her tweak her image in dozens of videos, and read lots of glossy magazine articles about her start on an Australian soap opera and her relationships about Michael Hutchence and Nick Cave. Odds are, I’d revere her as a pop-music provocateur second only to Madonna.

But I lived in the USA. (Well, I spent 1998 in London, but she didn’t have an album out that year, so I didn’t even get a crash course in Kylieology; I did become a fan of Robbie Williams, another global superstar who rarely surfaces on the US charts, and hence enjoy their duet “Kids.”) For most Americans who weren’t trolling the imports section of their record store, the Kylie story was basically this: fluky hit cover of “The Loco-Motion,” then nothing until 2002, when she reappeared with the hypnotic dance groove “Can’t Get You out of My Head.” Missing out on her career is probably our loss, but I can’t say that it stings.

“The Loco-Motion” was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King; they got their babysitter, 16-year-old Eva Boyd, to sing on a demo so they could pitch the song to Dee Dee Sharp, who had just hit #2 with “Mashed Potato Time.” Mogul Don Kirshner liked Boyd’s vocals enough to release it as a single–when it topped the charts, “Little Eva” had to make up a dance to go along with the lyrics.

At the beginning of her career, Kylie Minogue hooked up with the songwriting/production team Stock-Aitken-Waterman, a three-man musical assembly line responsible for chirpy uptempo hits for Rick Astley, Bananarama, and about eight thousand other Brits. Their trademark sound was a pop version of the dance movement called “hi-NRG,” and that’s what we get on Kylie’s version of “The Loco-Motion.”

Opening shot: Kylie walks away from a private airplane with a small entourage trailing behind. There’s a jacket over her shoulder and a bounce in her step. We cut to a time-lapse video of some third-rate graffiti artists tagging a wall with a stylized “LOCO MOTION” logo. As a cultural reference, this feels about a decade too late to be hip, but maybe the Brits came late to graffiti? (They eventually mastered it, judging by the career of Banksy.)

Kylie strides through the airport, with a knot of twenty fans following her. She’s got her hair up, sunglasses on, and a big show-biz smile. Cut to a dance sequence, wherein we learn that Kylie has a bountiful mane of curly blonde hair and a toothy grin. She’s wearing a red tanktop and a red bow in her hair; they both match her lipstick. Lots of quick cuts: More graffiti. We see three backup girls–apparently hats and suspenders were fashionable for British girls in 1988. Kylie in red stands in front of a blue background, doing some minimal dancing (really, she’s just shimmying). She seems awkward and wholesome. She acquires six backup dancers, three boys and three girls. One of the girls has a short-cropped blonde haircut and looks a bit older; since she seems to be leading some of the dance routines, my guess is that she’s the choreographer. As in the video for Rick Astley’s “Together Forever,” a black-and-white tile floor is featured prominently, perhaps funded by the Council for Fifties-Themed Diners.

Some slightly more complicated dance moves for Kylie: she throws her hands in the air (but does not wave them around, so we cannot be clear whether she just doesn’t care) and then spins around twice. (In the middle of that sequence, through the magic of editing, she switches into a black top and a bomber jacket.) We see Kylie in what looks like a studio, singing into a microphone; this part is visually dull enough to suggest that it’s authentic documentary footage of the song’s recording sessions. (It’s probably not, though–the lighting and makeup are too polished.) Kylie leans over the mixing board and playfully fiddles with some of the knobs.

Back to the dancing girls. Kylie pulls out a camera and takes a picture of them. More quick cuts of previous scenes (graffiti, the studio), and then a “dance rehearsal” where Kylie wears a black sports bra and a leotard, showing off her midriff. Some more quick cuts lead us to Kylie in front of a wall of static. The screen shifts to letterboxing, with black bars on the top and the bottom. Kylie, evidently a fan of pan-and-scan, flicks away the black bars with her index finger. The director is apparently pleased by this visual joke and how it punctures the pretensions of rock artistes with their fancy widescreen videos–so much so, he repeats it five seconds later.

A roundelay of jump cuts takes us through the settings we’ve seen before, much like channel-surfing at the end of the night before you give up and go to bed. Kylie’s lipstick seems to be getting redder and glossier as the video continues. We’re now also seeing some quick clips of “behind-the-scenes” action: the choreographer gets excessively hairsprayed, Kylie attempts a quiet, pensive look (she doesn’t succeed). Somebody hits fast-forward and we see sped-up video of the dancers moving around like spastic marionettes on amphetamines, which suits the music remarkably well.

Kylie Minogue’s version of “The Loco-Motion” hit #3 on the American pop charts (and went gold, hitting #1 on the sales charts). You can watch the video here.

posted 22 July 2008 in 1988. 5 comments

I was delighted to hear Snoop Dogg’s country-rock track “My Medicine” getting played on our local alternative-rock radio station; it was one of the oddball standouts of his latest album, Ego Trippin’–which I reviewed a few months back for Rolling Stone. I originally had cooked up a much longer version of the Sonny and Cher metaphor, where Snoop’s money ends up more popular than him and Snoop enters politics, becoming Congressman Dogg, but my sense of restraint reasserted itself before I handed it in.

For one of our leading rappers, Snoop is a surprisingly pedestrian lyricist. He comes up with a catchphrase here and there, but most of his raps aren’t particularly quotable. It’s not so much that he says cool things, and more that he says them in a cool way.

posted 21 July 2008 in Outside, Reviews. 1 comment

Two more pictures from my May trip to the California desert and the Joshua Tree National Park, one involving a crow leaving its perch on a pickup truck:

The other picture is probably my favorite from the trip:

posted 18 July 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

Back from the commercial break, we are joined again by Kevin Seal, wearing a black jacket over a black t-shirt. “This is the top funky one hundred of 1988,” he says, and then hypes the “Big Bang ’89” New Year’s Eve event later that night on MTV: “We’ll count down the minutes to midnight, in the east,” he says, rolling his eyes. “There’ll be crowd scenes, it’ll be very exciting, it’ll be very live.”

Seal turns his attention to Michael Bolton, recapping his year. “He got to go on the road with Heart, you know, which I’d really like to do,” he says, exuding sarcasm through every pore. “And then there’s rumors going around that he’d take over the lead vocals in Journey,” he continues. Obviously, that didn’t happen. It actually would have been an effective move, if blatantly taken from the Van Halen playbook: fill the lead singer gap with an overwrought and marginally successful solo act. “And he got a new house,” Seal adds. “And he got the storm windows finally replaced on his summer place.”

In 1988, Michael Bolton turned 35; he had been kicking around the music business for about half his life, releasing albums with the hard-rock act Blackjack and under his birth name, Michael Bolotin. (Like the Carpenters and the Five Satins, by the way, Bolton hails from New Haven, Connecticut.) He was having more success as a songwriter, writing “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You” and “I Found Someone” for Laura Branigan–you may recall Cher’s hit version of “I Found Someone” five spots back in this countdown. The year before, Bolton had a #19 single (“That’s What Love Is All About”), but he was by no means a commercial force yet; his album The Hunger peaked at #46. This was really his breakthrough single; it’s certainly the first time I remember hearing him.

“Hearing him” meant “wincing at this ham-fisted Otis Redding cover,” and time hasn’t improved matters. If Bolton were trying to break into the music business today, it wouldn’t take him two decades–he’d do great on American Idol. He’s technically proficient, has a veneer of soul (or maybe that’s just the Aqua Sheen), and oversings this song from start to finish, punching every single line as hard as he can. Redding’s mournful restraint on the original is much missed. And whoever’s playing guitar is flashy and aggressive, but lacks the soul of Steve Cropper.

So, the video. I am sure you will be surprised to learn that Bolton spends most of it, yes, sitting on the dock of a bay. The clip somehow manages to be simultaneously incoherent and dull.

We see a boat and a pier, and an olive-skinned guy in a hat, brooding. There’s mist blowing over the wharf, and then an artful cut to the steam coming off a pot in what looks like a crappy one-room rental. The squealing sound of the steam turns into the squawks of seagulls. We cut to a closeup of–a trumpet?

A few more establishing shots of the pier bring us to Bolton, in what looks like an open-air storage room on the dock. Bolton’s curly hair is flowing magnificently down onto his shoulders. He’s wearing jeans and an overcoat. Outside, men in coats and hats mill around, pulling their collars up against the cold. A rowboat rests on the sand. Bolton is not alone, it turns out–there’s an electric guitarist in the room with him. Who is this nimble-fingered hack? Why, it’s Neal Schon of Journey!

It’s not clear whether Schon’s been there the whole time, or whether the power of Bolton’s voice is so great, it compelled him to take that rowboat across the bay and plug into a waiting amplifier. But now the camera pans across the rest of the band, who have also mysteriously appeared, and it sure looks like the dock is hosting the Hall of Fame of Douchebag Eighties Haircuts. There’s also three female backing singers, who at this point in the song have no vocals, so are assigned the task of swiveling rhythmically. We alternate for a while between close-ups of Bolton, shots of the band, and more moody footage of the misty quay.

We reach the bridge of the song. At the risk of undermining his lyrical interpretation, Bolton stands up, leaning against a post. It appears to be later in the day; there’s now a fire burning in a trash can. (I’ve always had a soft spot for videos that were obviously filmed in one day and get dark towards the end just because they ran out of time. There’s usually a fire burning in the later scenes. Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike” comes immediately to mind; there are many more.) We now get some off-dock narrative: clips of a shirtless man in what looks like a cheap hotel room. He’s left his clarinet on a wooden chair, next to an ashtray with a burning cigarette. Slowly, as if he’s making an important decision, he picks up the clarinet.

Bolton has moved away from the post, so as better to be able to throw back his head and howl. Schon plays his solo; it’s dark now, so he stands in front of the flaming trash can. It’s cold enough that we can see the condensation on Schon’s breath. The backup singers have bare shoulders; they still don’t have any vocals, and seem to be dancing just to keep warm at this point. Some of the performance footage is from earlier in the day, so we keep cutting back and forth between day and night.

We see scenes of another hotel room, this one more expensive. A young man in an undershirt sits on a bed; a dark-haired model in a black slip is reclining on it, so still that she briefly looks like she’s dead. The guy stands up and pulls on a shirt; the model sits up and looks out a window. In the cheaper hotel room, the shirtless guy leans back and plays his clarinet. I don’t know if the director was trying for a multithreaded narrative about musicians making big life decisions about leaving their girls and going on the road, and then had his footage rendered incoherent in the editing–or whether there was just a record-company directive to shoehorn some good-looking people in their 20s into this video by any means necessary.

We’re reaching the end of the video: at last, the backup singers get to lip-sync. Final three images: The model slowly lies back down again in a state of languid exhaustion, Bolton sits on the dark pier with his hands in his pockets, the water washes against the shore.

When this single came out, Otis Redding’s widow Zelma said that it was “my favorite version of my husband’s classic.” That always made me sad.

Michael Bolton’s version of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” hit #11 on the pop charts. You can watch a slightly truncated version of the video here.

posted 17 July 2008 in 1988. 2 comments

Flipping through radio stations in the car yesterday, I heard Gavin Rossdale’s solo single, “Love Remains the Same,” which has not been a monster hit, but evidently is getting some airplay. In the ’90s, I wrote about Gavin (and his band Bush) often enough that Gavin and I called each other “my namesake.” This article was the first one, a cover story for the Details “Music Issue” in 1996. It includes a visit to the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium a week before they tore it down, and my front-row seat for the early stages of Gavin’s courtship with Gwen Stefani (now his wife). The story was written during that brief moment when grunge-flavored rock bands kept topping the singles charts. Bush were thought to live on the crass commercial end of that spectrum, but time favors catchiness over authenticity; their hits sound really good today.

Checking out the web, I see that Gavin’s birthdate is now generally reported as October 30, 1965; at the time, he was apparently shaving two years off his age. When published, this article had one of my favorite author credits ever: Before reporting this story, Gavin Edwards had never heard arenas full of women shouting his name.

posted 16 July 2008 in Archives, Articles. 1 comment

“Time to visit the Duke,” former Sex Pistol Steve Jones often says on his (excellent) Los Angeles radio show when heading into a commercial break. I had been listening for months before any guest asked him what “the Duke” meant; I had assumed it was a euphemism for the bathroom, but it turns out Jones was slinging Cockney rhyming slang: “Duke of Kent” rhymes with “rent,” so “visit the Duke” means “pay the rent.”

MTV visits the Duke, starting off with a network promo that hypes their own contests by parodying the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown commercials, with similarly portentous music and voiceover narration: “In Lake Carmel, New York, a young woman places a postcard in a mailbox. Weeks later, she becomes the owner of a trailer park. A major rock band mysteriously appears.” Footage of the “INXS Texas Trailer Park Hoedown” is followed by the “Wild Island Cruise,” wherein some guy in Michigan won his own Caribbean island. MTV broadcasts from a viewer’s home in Massachusetts (we see Ken Ober taking a sledgehammer to the drywall). A California woman wins a “Scrooge for a Day” contest (pegged to the Bill Murray movie Scrooged), winning an oversized check from Adam Curry and “the chance to run MTV for a day,” which appears to mean interrupting Kurt Loder in a highly staged fashion.

The tagline for the ad was “People really win on MTV.” The best thing about it was that eleven months later, they were able to reprise it with footage of Bill Clinton.

Coca-Cola Classic spot: two white suburban parents going out for the evening, telling their teenage daughters, “no parties.” Of course, as soon as they leave, the daughters hit the phone and a huge crowd comes over, moving the furniture, putting on music, and in the case of one young man overcome by the festive spirit of carbonated goodness, delivering a case of Coca-Cola by sliding across the living-room floor on their knees. The parents drive home, annoyed that their friends weren’t home, and then dismayed to find a party in full swing. But when they open the door, there’s a twist: they are greeted with a cry of “Happy anniversary!” and a cake full of candles (not customary on an anniversary, the last time I checked). “Can’t beat the feeling,” the jingle concludes.

And then, once again, for the third time in seventy minutes, we are treated a sixty-second spot for The January Man. I think at last, I’m ready to recap this ad in full detail. This is something I need to do to cleanse myself; if it all gets to be too much for you, just scroll down to the Gillette commercial.

The MGM lion is followed by a patrol car on a New York City street. “A serial killer has New York City by the throat,” Voiceover Guy tells us, as the patrol car, siren wailing, pulls up to a crime scene where a SWAT team is gathering. “Eleven murders in eleven months. They need a tough cop.” Cut to Kevin Kline (41 years old in 1988), with a particularly foofy mustache and shag haircut. “Listen!” he says, standing in somebody’s apartment. Susan Sarandon, annoyed, turns and says, “What?” “The wine,” he tells her. “It’s breathing.” He presses his nostril up to a decanter of red wine.

“Does anybody know this guy?” says an actor in a brown coat with a goombah accent. Cut to Kline leaning over the shoulder of a Computer Guy character, who in this movie is a tough guy with a leather jacket and a goatee. “Find it, superimpose it on the map, find it,” Kline instructs him, and then flails his hands, pointing at the screen. Cut to Rod Steiger, sitting behind his desk: “How do we face the terrifying spectacle of Nick Starkey, what he may do, what he may not do?” Cut to Kline sliding his desk chair across the floor, saying “Whoop-de-doo and la-di-da!” (His lips aren’t actually moving, so there was some creative editing, either for the ad or the movie itself.)

We’ve been getting the names of the actors in white type on a black screen as the ad rolls them out: KEVIN KLINE and ROD STEIGER are now joined by DANNY AIELLO, who says, “I don’t work for you, you work for me.” Another clip, where somebody off-camera is shouting “No matter what the mayor says!” Kline strides forward and says, “Did you miss me?” Cut to HARVEY KEITEL, who is asked “Did he agree without a fuss? by a different off-camera voice. ” Keitel, looking very dapper in a blue suit, says, “No, I’m letting him cook dinner for my wife tonight.” Cut to that dinner, which appears to be something in the cephalopod family. “I hate it,” says Susan Sarandon, spitting it out into her napkin. New scene: “I understand you had dinner with Nick,” Steiger says to Sarandon. “I think he’s much more interested right now in your daughter,” SUSAN SARANDON responds, finally getting her name on the screen. “What are you talking about?” Steiger asks. “Just look at your cigar and think of your daughter,” she replies.

Cut to Kline ineffectually trying to bust into an apartment, using first a sledgehammer and then his right shoulder. “So you’re going to go to bed,” MARY ELIZABETH MASTRANTONIO tells him. “And tomorrow, you’re going to catch the killer and save the girl.” Kline gets slammed against the wall in a hallway. “The January Man,” Voiceover Guy tells us. A bloodied Kline leans against the wall and says, “I hate this job.”

“Rated R,” continues Voiceover Guy. “Starts Friday, January thirteenth. Check newspapers.” The text block informs us that the movie was written by John Patrick Shanley (most famous for Moonstruck), with music by Marvin Hamlisch (who has been jazzily propping up this ad for the last sixty seconds). The director was Pat O’Connor, whose other third-tier credits include Inventing the Abbotts and Dancing at Lughnasa. His IMDB page informs me that he married Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in 1990, so at least one good thing came out of this movie. I’ve never seen it.

We move on to a Gillette Atra ad, mostly set around a wedding, but also featuring cleanshaven bicyclists and lots of father-son scenes (dad teaches his son to kick a soccer ball; adult father and son hug; dad cradles naked infant with, presumably, a smooth ass). The sports chosen are a little unusual for the States, making me wonder if they’re repurposed from a European ad. And yes, closer inspection reveals a car sporting a non-American license plate! “Gillette, the best a man can get,” is the tagline.

Another network spot: a “Ten-Second Film” called “Last Night.” A cliched detective-story saxophone plays as the camera zooms in on a man with eyeglasses and a mustache, sitting at a manual typewriter, with a telephone cradled to his shoulder. “I had a dream about you last night,” says a sultry female voice. He stops typing and leans back in his chair, about to reply–and then the film ends.

posted 15 July 2008 in 1988. 6 comments

One of my favorite albums this year is Portishead’s third studio album, creatively titled Third.

It’s been over a decade since Portishead’s last studio album (the equally creatively titled Portishead), but as far as I can tell from their recent press clippings, they haven’t changed a bit. (Their music certainly hasn’t: they still make exquisite slow drags of loss, marching forlornly to their heartbroken grooves.) So I fearlessly direct you to this profile I wrote of them back in 1997.

A footnote: So far as I can remember, I have been present at the taping of three live albums, of which Portishead’s Roseland NYC Live was one. My main memory of that show is being soaking wet from a rainstorm and dripping all over Roseland’s wooden floor. The other two live albums? Laurie Anderson’s Live in New York, taped on September 19 and 20, 2001–a show where I learned that “O Superman” was unsettlingly prescient about the 9/11 attacks. And Alice in Chains doing an MTV Unplugged session, which bore no such revelations.

posted 14 July 2008 in Archives, Articles. 3 comments

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. 7 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