YouTube being what it is, I don’t expect these clips to stay up indefinitely, but I’ll post links to the videos I write about in the 1988 countdown when they’re available.

(I tried embedding them, with nasty results–when I’m feeling more industrious, I might try downloading the plugin that allegedly solves the problem. For now, you’ll just have to click over.)

Catching up on the last couple:

#100, Keith Richards, “Take It So Hard.”

#99, Crowded House, “Better Be Home Soon.”

Thanks to Tom for the suggestion.

posted 14 May 2008 in 1988, Links. no comments yet

My favorite unpublished piece ever might be this profile I wrote of the late, lamented Darkness. It got spiked for wholly unremarkable reasons: two issues in a row it got bumped because pages were tight in the magazine, then One Way Ticket to Hell… and Back (the band’s second album) came out and did a big belly-flop on the American charts, which reduced the RS editors’ enthusiasm for a big article on the group. I salvaged some of my favorite bits from the interview in a chapter introduction to Tiny Dancer, but now you can enjoy the whole thing.

Words to live by from frontman Justin Hawkins: “If you’re going to be subtle, you should really fucking be subtle.”

posted 14 May 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet

The lower reaches of this countdown seem to be filled with tracks that weren’t actually hits, but were presumably beloved of somebody in the MTV programming department. (Or maybe some favors were owed to record companies.) Take, for example, the non-hit “Better Be Home Soon,” from Crowded House’s second album Temple of Low Men. My mighty Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop informs me that when Neil Finn was putting together Crowded House after the demise of Split Enz, he went straight to American record companies, skipping their Australian imprints, and that it took most of a year for the band’s debut album to break down under. The followup, in contrast, flopped everywhere except Australia.

(Before we continue, a paragraph devoted to the next entry alphabetically in the aforementioned Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop, since at this writing, “magician/illusionist/actor/musician” Jeffrey Crozier lacks a Wikipedia page. Crozier, 1948-1981, “reputedly died while rehearsing the illusion of self-hanging.” He was billed as the “voodoo psychedelic magician.” Crozier appears to have done better abroad, leaving Australia with an act called The Moon Rock Circus, which he followed up with The Kongress, an act in the Alice Cooper idiom, “replete with electric chairs, smoke bombs and anarchic rock music.” In 1978, Crozier returned to Australia, “where he continued to be ignored by all but a dedicated few. He was even voted Australia’s top magician at the twelfth Annual Wizards Convention.” It is unknown whether Michael Hutchence was among those select fans.)

At any rate, “Better Be Home Soon” is a pleasant lovelorn ballad, saddled with a hopelessly twee video. Large sums of money were spent on creating the image of a low-rent theatrical production. Finn stands on the stage of an empty vaudeville theater. A crescent moon lights up the scenery. Stagehands drag large piles of chairs across the background. The rest of the band join Finn onstage. Cheap clouds dangle from ropes, knocking over some of those piles of chairs. More and more chairs appear on the scene. The propsmaster appears to have cut a deal with a local furniture warehouse, or maybe the stage is being set up for a production of Chair: The Australian Tribal Furniture-Love Musical. Finally, a red velvet curtain comes down, protecting humanity from all those chairs.

Advice for musicians: No matter how persuasive directors are, there are some things you should never let them talk you into doing for a video shoot. Among them are (1) sitting on an oversized chair with your legs dangling like a four-year-old (2) wearing what appears to be a red sweater-vest along with a suit and polka-dot tie.

posted 13 May 2008 in 1988. 1 comment

Last month, The New Yorker published a fine profile of George Clooney by Ian Parker, which quoted from my 2005 Rolling Stone conversation with Clooney on the subject of suicide bombers and the afterlife: “But really, who wants seventy virgins? I want eight pros.”

So I’ve put my interview with Clooney up in the archives. Unsurprisingly, Clooney turned out to be prescient on the subject of Lindsay Lohan.

This piece is one of two I’ve done only a few hours after getting off an international plane flight, almost blind with jetlagged exhaustion–in this case, I was returning to New York City from New Zealand, where I had been talking with Peter Jackson and his associates. The first was many years earlier, with Oasis–I’ll post that one sometime soon.

posted 12 May 2008 in Archives, Articles. 5 comments

With the encouragement of the mighty Bill Tipper, I’ve been doing some book reviews for the Barnes & Noble Review (which hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, but is worth your time–there’s some real good stuff in there).

Last year I reviewed Clapton: The Autobiography (who knew he had slept with Yvonne Elliman?); last week I tackled Pope Brock’s book Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flim-Flam (who knew the role goat testicles would play in Johnny Cash’s love life?). Go check it out.

posted 9 May 2008 in Outside, Reviews. no comments yet

The first time I ever saw this video was in my college’s basement TV room, where I watched MTV and not much else (The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, and election results rounded it out, I think). The camera swooped dramatically over a black-and-white lunar landscape as a dirty guitar riff came out of the speakers. Then Keith Richards’ croaking vocals started, one of the least melodic squalls ever to come near the charts. We sat in stunned silence.

“Oh, that’s right,” somebody finally said. “He can’t sing.”

Between 1968 and 1988, Keith Richards made some of the greatest rock albums in history, including Let It Bleed, Some Girls, and Exile on Main St. Between 1988 and 2008, he fell out of a tree.

In 1988, Keith turned 45, and although he was not yet in his full Cryptkeeper glory, the director of this video presents him as some sort of wizened last survivor of rock: the microphone stands are covered with cobwebs, and the clip has fake signs of aging (vertical white lines and other signs of abuse, like somebody stomped on the film stock in the shower). The proceedings are helped by this being a great song (vocals and all), the leadoff single from Keith’s solo debut, Talk Is Cheap. When this video was made, the Rolling Stones’ astonishingly long great run had come to an end (with the underrated 1986 album Dirty Work). Afterwards would come Steel Wheels: from here on in, every Stones studio album was just going to serve as bait for a lucrative worldwide tour. But here, unshackled from Mick, Keith sounds loose and looks like he’s having a blast, curling his lip and (literally) kicking his feet.

Rewatching reveals that what I always took as a lunar setting is something quasi-apocalyptic (rockalyptic?): the camera appears to be moving through a burnt-out gas station, or maybe a burnt-out arena. It also demonstrates that Waddy Wachtel, fine guitarist though he is, is one of the least attractive men in rock, with frizzed-out hair on loan from Dee Snider. Video cliché alert: towards the end of the clip, drummer Steve Jordan hits a cymbal and dust flies everywhere (reinforcing the theme that Keith Richards is too old to live, but not too old to rock). Did they cover the cymbal with talcum powder before each take to get it just so? Was there a talcum wrangler on the set? Video cliché alert #2: although the band is outside, somehow there is a ceiling fan.

posted 8 May 2008 in 1988. 1 comment

Contrary to the musical wisdom of Albert Hammond Sr., sometimes it does rain in Southern California. This past January, Los Angeles had rainstorms of Biblical proportions. A few weeks later, we discovered that a whole bunch of stuff we were keeping in cardboard boxes in the garage had gotten drenched, and were now covered in mildew like the “before” sequence in a household-cleaner ad.

I dried out most of the books but pitched most of the videocassettes–we don’t even have a VCR hooked up to the main television anymore. If I ever get the urge to watch The Minus Man (bought for $2.99 from the late lamented Record Explosion in NYC), I’ll just Netflix it. Three tapes, however, were carefully preserved, for they contained the 1988 MTV year-end countdown of the top 100 videos. In its entirety.

Two decades ago, I watched that countdown at my good friend Ted Friedman‘s house. Various friends came by, but only our pal Wendy Greene stayed for the duration. (Ted’s a professor at the University of Georgia now; Wendy’s a documentary filmmaker who does a lot of work for the Discovery Channel.) It was the winter break of my sophomore year from college: we decided that binging on video clips would be a lot more fun than any suburban New Year’s Eve party. We were pretty punchy by the end, but I think we were right.

I haven’t watched these tapes in twenty years (and in fact, they were degrading pretty badly–thanks to Morgan for transferring them to DVD for me), but I’m going to roll through them one song at a time and see how they hold up. Join me in the coming weeks and try to remember an era when MTV played videos….

posted 7 May 2008 in 1988. 1 comment

A few months ago, I went to New York City and South Carolina to write a profile of teenage country superstar Taylor Swift for Rolling Stone. (Between New York and South Carolina: a private jet flight. Between Greenville and Spartanburg in South Carolina: not much except a BMW plant.) The piece got dropped from the issue due to last-minute space constrictions, but is now available for your reading pleasure on the RS website.

posted 4 May 2008 in Articles, Outside. 1 comment

One of the reasons I started this website was to archive some of my articles. Then, well, a few years went by.

Let’s try again, shall we?

This is an interview I did with Joss Whedon the week his Serenity movie was released. It’s funny and enlightening, yet previously unpublished.

posted 27 April 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. no comments yet

Welcome (back) to rulefortytwo.com. You may have noticed that I’ve made some changes around here (and there’s more to come, including an Exciting New Blog Project). Kick off your shoes and poke around. I want to thank the very talented Nathan Swartz for his design work, and point you towards the biggest addition: Secret Rock Knowledge.

Two years ago, the good people at Three Rivers Press published my fifth book (and continued my tradition of having absurdly long titles): Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton’s Little John?: Music’s Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed. Collecting and enhancing my “Rolling Stone Knows” columns, I strove to answer all the questions you didn’t realize you had about rock music, from “Is it true Stevie Wonder has no sense of smell?” to “Did Mick Jagger get good grades at the London School of Economics?” Your life will be enriched if you pick up a copy, of course–but what good is a book like that if it can’t settle arguments on the Internet?

So I’m pleased to tell you that you can now find every question and answer from the book as part of the Secret Rock Knowledge section–and even better, you can use this site’s spiffy new search function to find the page you’re looking for, so when you want to win that argument over the subject of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” you can do it with a minimum of hassle. Enjoy!

(Thanks once again to Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 for providing me with one of the best book blurbs ever: “Gavin’s the best writer ever. Shakespeare’s an asshole next to this guy.”)

posted 26 April 2008 in Buy My Stuff, Self-reflexive. 1 comment