(There was actually one more ad in that last commercial break, a promo spot for MTV, featuring a guy tied up on the floor of an elevator, being forced to listen to the elevator operator sing along to a swelling orchestral melody.)

“Five of the top 100 videos of 1988 are Michael Jackson videos,” Kevin Seal tells us, “meaning that fully five percent of the top 100 videos this year are Michael Jackson videos.” He cracks himself up, he does. “Bad is the second widest-selling album of all time,” he says (which I’m pretty sure was not true, unless he was using “widest-selling” as code for some technical qualification that was not equal to “best-selling”), “only beaten by Thriller. Of course, Thriller clobbered it.”

The “Another Part of Me” video is a live recording “From The Bad Tour / Live From Kansas City,” according to the credits. The text block does not add “Trying to save a few bucks on the sixth single from Bad by repurposing some live footage we had in the can.”

“Ho! Ho! Hey!” Jackson says, to kick things off. The track is played by a live band, seen mostly in a closeup on a yellow guitar as the song begins, and then consigned to the background shadows. We never see the audience. Are they demographically unsuitable? Was somebody too cheap to hire an extra cameraman? Or is the vision of mere mortals deemed likely to sully the Glory of Michael?

The song is competent but uninspired R&B: a clunky groove that just chugs its way through the song for three and a half minutes. Jackson gives a commensurate performance, never really busting out the first-rate dance moves (or any backup dancers). He struts back and forth across the stage, and periodically bobs his head or swivels his hips or throws a few limbs around. He’s a magnetic enough performer that he gets away with it.

“This is my planet / You’re one of us,” Jackson sings, unintentionally echoing the Ramones’ “gabba gabba hey” sentiments. Back in 1988, I remember thinking that Jackson looked so freaky and mutilated by plastic surgery. I had no idea how much worse things would get. Now I see this footage and he seems relatively normal–his nose hasn’t collapsed yet, for example–although I worry about the military buckles up and down the sides of his pants.

“Another Part of Me” peaked at #11 on the pop charts, and reached #1 on the R&B charts. It had multiple videos; another one with a wider variety of footage (screaming fans pounding security barricades, high-stepping backup singers, Princess Di, etc.) was much more entertaining, and really, I don’t know why MTV chose the version that I wrote about for the countdown, but you can watch it here.

posted 12 June 2008 in 1988. 2 comments

I’ve interviewed Mark Wahlberg three times over the past two decades, during which time he turned into an movie star and improbably complex screen presence. (He’s playing the lead in this week’s new M. Night Shyamalan joint, The Happening.) The first interview was back in 1991, when he was still the frequently-shirtless rapper known as Marky Mark. The third one was last year, when he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Departed. This is the second (and I think most entertaining) of our conversations, from 2005. Topics of conversation include Four Brothers, Entourage, and Harvey Weinstein. Wahlberg’s final three sentences in this piece may have the highest use of profanity, percentage-wise, of any interview I’ve ever done.

posted 11 June 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

MTV plays a promo for a Michael Jackson video debuting on New Year’s Day at 5 pm, 8pm, 9pm, and 10pm: “Leave Me Alone.” In the clips we see, Jackson rides a toy airplane and dances with the Elephant Man’s bones. A stack of newspapers has fake tabloid headlines (“Michael Weds Alien”). I believe in 1988 it was still possible to imagine a tabloid headline referring to Michael Jackson that did not call him “Jacko.”

“And cap off the week with Michael Jackson Sunday, including exclusive scenes from his brand-new home video Moonwalker,” the MTV voiceover guy says. Moonwalker was released theatrically overseas, but in the States, it went straight to video. Failures in spin: The “Leave Me Alone” video was clearly meant to be an ironic skewering of Jackson’s own image, letting us know he was in on the joke. But it has a hyper-defensive tone that starts with the title, and instead managed to cement the notion that something just wasn’t right. (Child-molestation charges against Jackson wouldn’t come until 1993.)

There’s a short ad for Rain Man, with images flashing by of cars and casinos and kisses. Somewhat incongruously, “Iko Iko” is playing in the background the whole time. Tom Cruise looks young and dewy–and has puffy ’80s hair. Dustin Hoffman looks like he’s working really hard for that Academy Award.

A new scene, of a woman tidying up a kitchen while dramatic synth music plays. Portentous voiceover: “How would you explain it? A woman in Wisconsin is doing the dishes when suddenly, she’s possessed by a terrifying feeling.” The woman gasps as the screen fades to white. Footage of a little girl playing with a ball against a white screen. “She’s positive that her young daughter has just been in an accident.” Back to the woman in the kitchen. “She quickly makes a desperate phone call, only to learn that her feeling was true.” A green phone receiver dangles against a mustard kitchen wall.

We are presented with more incidents: alien encounters all around the world, a man sees a blinding light on the hospital bed, four guys enter an Anglo-Saxon fort and one of them floats in the air for thirty seconds. “And how can you explain the growing number of people who feel that they’ve had a brush with something beyond our everyday understanding?” says the voiceover guy (who, incidentally, is of higher quality than MTV’s voiceover guy). “Maybe no one can fully explain these things, but they can no longer be ignored. That’s why Time-Life takes a serious look into this world with a remarkable new series, Mysteries of the Unknown.”

Stock photos: Stonehenge, crop circles, the pyramids. Then some of the volumes in the series: Psychic Powers, Mystic Places, The UFO Phenomenon. This is a very long commercial. The commercial ends with the Wisconsin woman hugging her unharmed daughter–dramatic catharsis in just 120 seconds!–and then info on how you can order the first volume (and sign up for a subscription) for just $12.99 plus shipping and handling.

According to Wikipedia, Mysteries of the Unknown became the most successful series ever for Time-Life Books, with 33 separate volumes. Four years later, Chris Carter would repackage this free-floating belief in the paranormal (and government plots) into The X-Files. In a coincidence as yet unexplored by conspiracy theorists, the debut of The X-Files and the first civil lawsuit that charged child abuse by Michael Jackson would come within a week of each other, in September 1993.

posted 10 June 2008 in 1988. 2 comments

Marv Albert’s my favorite sportcaster of all time. I’ve spent more hours than I can calculate listening to him. I’ve kept watching bad basketball games just because he was the guy calling them. The best description of his style: “Albert broadcasts like a man who has bet every penny he has on the game, and desperately needs for both teams to win.” (That’s by Bill James, in The Baseball Book 1990, as part of the excellent but never-completed “Biographical Encyclopedia.” Albert hasn’t called baseball games in a long time, but he had a last name starting with A.)

I was lucky enough to interview Marv in 1996. It took months of wrangling with NBC (I had to wait until the Olympics were over), but once I got him on the phone, he was great–as funny and sharp as you’d hope. And he took my final question (“Would Marv Albert ever get a Prince Albert?”) with good humor, requiring explanation as to what a Prince Albert was, but ribbing me about it being a Details-type query.

The following year, he became the center of a lurid court case when a woman with whom he had a long-term sexual relationship accused him of rough sex and sodomy. Kinky details soon were plastered across the front pages of the tabloids: Marv had bitten her repeatedly, they had threesomes with another man, Marv liked to wear women’s underwear in bed. Ultimately, Marv plea-bargained to a misdemeanor charge of assault and battery and got a suspended sentence. He was promptly fired by NBC, producing the best tabloid headline of all: MARV GETS THE PINK SLIP.

My point in revisiting this decade-old scandal: Marv Albert totally knew what a Prince Albert was.

posted 9 June 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

I’m delighted to say that after a hiatus of several years, I’ve returned to my flipwalks.

If you’re not familiar with my flipwalk project, you can click here for the whole “48 Hours From Ground Zero” gallery. The short version is that while living in New York City, I would leave my house and determine a random course for an hour by flipping a quarter. At the end of that hour, I took photos of the block I was on. I picked one representative photo and put it up on this webpage, along with information on where it was taken and and how I got there. (These are probably my three favorite pictures so far.)

I originally intended to do one hundred flipwalks, but moved from New York to California after forty-eight (leaving with a healthy backlog of unposted walks and photos, which I’m now trying to work my way through). I discovered after I began that my project is considered by academics to be part of the psychogeography field.

That’s the thumbnail for the walk; you can see the larger version along with the full report here.

I received an interesting email from my good friend Robert Rossney earlier this week on the math of the project, taking issue with my description of the odds of ending up twice in the same place (walk #21 and walk #1) as “infinitesimally small”:

I don’t know if anyone else pointed this out to you, but the odds of two random-walk traversals of a simple graph terminating at the same node aren’t infinitesmally small. It’s analogous to the birthday paradox: there are 365 days in the year, but get 17 random people in a room and the odds are quite small that there won’t be two among them with the same birthday.

I ran a little Monte Carlo simulation (assuming perfect 4-way-intersection grid and 50 decision points per walk) and in 70-80% of trials I had more than one intersection at which a walk terminated twice or more.

Now, the odds that the last walk would end where the first one did, that’s a little trickier. But I can tell you that when I run 5,000 random walks, between 1,600 and 1,700 end on one of the 100 intersections in the 10×10 square surrounding the origin.

So I’m guessing, not infinitesmally small.

posted 6 June 2008 in Photos, Self-reflexive. 2 comments

Kevin Seal explains that the top-100 countdown will, in fact, have more than 100 songs in it. He doesn’t actually say they’re including the videos so they can pad out the countdown’s running time, but that’s the gist of it: “There are quite a few top-notch videos that you won’t see on this little countdown because they made it in just a little too late for the slow person who makes up our list to put them on, but they could easily be in the top 100 of 1989–like, for example, ‘Armageddon It’ from Def Leppard.”

I should say up front that I am still a big fan of Def Leppard’s music, and that I hugely admire the band for the way they retained drummer Rick Allen as a member, even after he lost his left arm (in a car crash on New Year’s Eve, 1984). I would hazard that 99% of the world’s rock bands would cut their one-armed drummer loose before people were singing “Auld Lang Syne,” some with a more generous check than others. (I was going to call it a “severance package” before good taste intervened. And then I remembered that things are about to get considerably more tasteless.)

When I watched Def Leppard videos with friends in 1988, the thing we were most interested in was something that wasn’t there: Rick Allen’s left arm. Initially this was gruesome rubbernecking combined with genuine curiosity as to how Allen would play the drums single-handedly. (The answer: he had lots of foot pedals and automatic sequences that he could trigger.) But then we became fascinated by how delicately the directors of the videos handled the subject, doling out views of Allen’s dangling sleeve in careful amounts, presumably because they were worried about squicking out the audience (I don’t think they were trying to increase the titillation factor for amputee fetishists, although anything’s possible). Cries of “stump shot!” were periodically heard.

The only other time I can remember a series of videos handling a member of the group as being taboo was two years later, with harmony trio Wilson Phillips. You may recall that two members of the trio–Wendy Wilson and Chynna Phillips–were slender young women. One–Carnie Wilson–was hefty. And so the Wilson Phillips videos went to unusual lengths to minimize Carnie’s presence, putting her out of focus at the back of the frame, or panning over the members of the group and cutting away just as they reached her. Yes, an overweight young woman was considered to be as horrifying a sight for MTV’s audience as a disfiguring amputation.

“Armageddon It” was towards the end of the skein of hit singles from Hysteria (many of which we’ll be seeing later in this countdown, I suspect). The chronological order was “Animal,” “Hysteria,” “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Love Bites,” “Armageddon It,” and “Rocket.” At the beginning, in “Animal,” any stump shots were fleeting–but by this time, over a year later, everyone seems to have relaxed more. By my count, Allen appears seventeen times this video (not counting extreme wide angles where he’s just a dot at the back of the stage), and we see his dangling left sleeve in eight of those shots.

Amputee fetishism and memories of Moulty aside, this video isn’t very interesting. It’s framed by some backstage footage, including singer Joe Elliott in big fuzzy slippers, but basically recycles live footage from the same show that was edited down for the “Pour Some Sugar on Me” clip. Inevitably, it seemed less thrilling the second time around: the band is performing in the round once again, there are lots more reaction shots from beautiful female fans in the crowd, guitarist Phil Collen hasn’t found his shirt yet, and Elliott is still wearing heavily torn jeans and a Def Leppard t-shirt, presumably so we don’t get confused as to what band we’re looking at.

(R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills brought up this topic unprompted when I interviewed him last week: “I hate that shit, when bands wear their own shirts onstage. Yeah, I know who you are. Why are you wearing your own shirt? It just reeks of ego to me.”)

And while there are many reasons to love Hysteria— the glammed-up disco-metal rhythms, the yearning pop melodies, the extreme studio polish from Mutt Lange that rivals Spector’s Wall of Sound –this song isn’t one of them. The tempo is plodding, the lyrics are an extended complaint about a girl who won’t put out, and although few people like a dumb pun more than me, the one found in the title here has always made me cringe.

“Armageddon It” peaked at #3 in 1989. You can watch it here.

posted 5 June 2008 in 1988. 4 comments

I almost wrote a college recommendation for Rivers Cuomo. Between Weezer and Pinkerton, he had decided to go back to college, and so he left me a voicemail asking if I would write him a recommendation for his Harvard application. We weren’t able to connect on the phone for a few hours, and by the time we spoke, he had found somebody else. It worked out fine for him; he got in.

The reason he was asking me was that I had edited two articles of his at Details, both very funny pieces about life in a rock band. The first one was about the band’s workaday life in the first six months after the release of their record; the second one was a diary of a day on the road that didn’t go very well. If any graduate-school admissions committees ever consult with me, I am more than happy to testify that Rivers Cuomo was an exemplary contributor. His copy was clean and on time–if this rock-band thing doesn’t work out for him, he would do well as a writer.

I visited Weezer in Lawrence, Kansas, to write a story during their tour for Pinkerton; everyone involved thought it would be smooth, given my history with the group, but it proved to be one of the band’s rockiest times, as detailed in my article. Bassist Matt Sharp was playing his last shows with the group (he officially quit the following year). Talking to me turned out to be one of the last interviews Rivers did for years: he went back to Harvard and then into seclusion. (Harvard, obviously, is the unnamed Ivy League college in my article.)

I spoke on the phone with Rivers a couple of months ago for a short Rolling Stone preview of their latest self-titled record, generally called The Red Album–our first conversation in many years. (The piece is apparently not available online; maybe I’ll put it up at some future point.) We marveled at the fact that we were both still in the business.

posted 4 June 2008 in Archives, Articles, Links. no comments yet

Another interview clip: all four Bangles sitting on a couch, not looking especially happy.

“The idea you have in your head,” says guitarist Vicki Peterson, pointing to her head in case we’re not familiar with that part of her body, “is not going to get directly translated onto film. It just isn’t. There’s so many people throwing things in–”

There’s murmurs of agreement from the group.

“It’s better to accept the fact that you’re not going to have any control,” adds Susanna Hoffs. “Or very little.”

On that cheerful note of accepting the life of working for a major label, we proceed to the “In Your Room” video, directed by an unnamed woman. Hoffs cowrote the song with Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, who were the powerhouse hacks-for-hire of the day (“Like a Virgin,” “True Colors,” “Alone,” etc.) It’s a fluffy piece of ’60s-inflected pop: Hoffs sings about how she likes to go into your room and try on your clothes, and oh yeah, she also likes making your dreams come true with you in your room.

So the video has lots of opening doors, because doors lead to rooms, and lots of spirals, because they’re a cheap visual effect. It opens, daringly enough, with spirals superimposed on opening doors. A door opens to a room where we switch to black-and-white film, and a big glowing turquoise flower is floating in the background. The Bangles are playing, wearing all-white outfits. Hoffs is showing the most leg, plus quite a bit of midriff. Bassist Michael Steele has been assigned a pantsuit.

Another door: drummer Debbi Peterson is reviving the Batman dance, beating John Travolta in Pulp Fiction by six years. Another door: the band is hanging out, chewing gum and playing with a yo-yo, while a pantsless Hoffs looks through some shirts.

Then we look through a keyhole and see Hoffs gyrating in a black one-piece bathing suit. She is not actually holding a sign that says “For more of this, go rent the video of The Allnighter, the flop exploitation comedy written and directed by my mom that I starred in last year,” but she might as well be. This seems like as good a time as any to mention that the Bangles broke up the year after this video, basically because Hoffs had turned into the star and the other members weren’t crazy about playing backup. The tension comes through in the video: the band members don’t seem especially comfortable around each other, and Hoffs plays much more obviously to the cameras than the others do, whose closeup shots all seem carefully measured out.

A door opens to the white-outfit room, only now the Bangles are in fabulous color. Michael Steele has big puffy damaged red hair, like she let Vince Neil blow it out for her. Another door opens, and we’re on an obviously fake outside set. The Bangles rock out in a “forest”; I’m not sure what room this is supposed to be. Let’s call it the Foliage Room and hope this is part of Graceland that we don’t get to see on the tour. Another door takes us to the Go-Go Room (I’m pretty sure Graceland had one of those), where Steele plays the sitar and the other members dance. Many more spirals here, plus the camera spins upside-down.

Many doors open, one after another, while the song has a key change. Back to the white-outfit room. Whenever the director cuts from one Bangle to another, she quickly includes a flash of a Grecian column–was somebody in the band an art-history major? The doors are opening faster now: Debbi Peterson keeps dancing, her sister Vicki gets some motionless glamour shots against a white background that don’t seem to have anything to do with the rest of the video, we return to the Go-Go Room, then back to the Foliage Room, and make one last visit to the Room of White Outfits, where the director blows the rest of her budget with little painted squiggles on the screen as the Bangles take turns giving their most seductive looks into the camera, a contest that Hoffs once again wins.

My copy of Everything, the album that included “In Your Room,” had a note under the songwriting credits: “One side of this program is of longer duration than the other to preserve the album continuity.” That was the standard-issue warning on cassette tapes of the day–but my copy of the album was vinyl. For me, that was the turning point when I knew that the days of twelve-inch black vinyl albums were numbered.

“In Your Room” hit #5 on the Billboard charts. You can watch the video here.

posted 3 June 2008 in 1988. 3 comments

Two short items by me went up in recent days on the Rolling Stone website: a review of R.E.M.’s show last week at the Hollywood Bowl and an item on Joe Perry writing the music for “Walk This Way” (part of the “100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time” package).

I am pleased to report that Perry still has a strong Boston accent.

The R.E.M. setlist in full:
Pretty Persuasion
Living Well Is the Best Revenge
What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?
Sitting Still
Ignoreland
Man-Sized Wreath
Circus Envy
Drive
Accelerate
Hollow Man
Fall on Me
Houston
Electrolite
Final Straw
I’ve Been High
Let Me In
Losing My Religion
Horse to Water
Bad Day
Walk Unafraid
I’m Gonna DJ

Encore:
Supernatural Superserious
The One I Love
Until The Day Is Done
Happy Birthday to You
Man On The Moon

(Hollywood Bowl, 29 May 2008)

posted 2 June 2008 in Articles, Outside, Reviews. no comments yet

Over Memorial Day weekend, we went out to the Palm Springs area. We visited the nearby Joshua Tree park, and I learned that it is almost impossible to take either a good picture or a bad picture of the park–the subject just overwhelms whatever photographic point of view you might bring to it. (Or whatever moody Irish rock band you have in the car.)

Nevertheless:

Also spectacular were the hundreds upon hundreds of windmills down the road from the park, spread across the landscape just as profusely as the Joshua trees.

posted 30 May 2008 in Photos. no comments yet