I’ve posted the official video for “Crazy in the Night” before, but if you’ll forgive a little repetition, I just stumbled across a really terrific variation put together by YouTuber CM Wournell, which lays Kim Carnes’ 1985 hymn to paranoia over imagery from some of the classic horror films of the 1980s. Wournell has an impressive talent for matching the right scene with the right lyric or emotional note, and I really enjoyed the hell out of this.
Hope y’all like it too… Happy Halloween!
(Incidentally, I’m ashamed to confess that I can’t identify all of the movies referenced in the video; if anybody watching this can, I’d love to see a list… )
This week’s musical selection was inspired by the sad news that Cory Wells, one of the founding members of the classic rock group Three Dog Night, passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday. He was 74.
Three Dog Night came together in 1967 and went on to score an astonishing twenty-one top-40 hits in the US over the next six years, with three of those songs — “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” “Joy to the World,” and “Black and White” — reaching the number-one slot. Interestingly, each of those number-one records featured a different one of the band’s three vocalists on lead: the aforementioned Wells on “Mama,” Danny Hutton on “Black and White,” and Chuck Negron anchoring “Joy.” The band broke up in 1976, but reformed in the early ’80s and has been recording and touring more or less continuously (with some variations in personnel) ever since.
“Shambala,” again featuring the late Mr. Wells on lead vocals, was a number-three hit for Three Dog Night, peaking in the summer of 1973. I was just a wee lad then, which is probably why this song always conjures associations with my very early childhood: the smell of freshly cut alfalfa, the flavor of Fanta Red Creme Soda, and sundogs arcing across the curved windshield of my mom’s ’56 Ford pickup truck. (Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” and “Baby Don’t Get Hooked on Me” by Mac Davis stir up the same memories, which I suppose tells you a lot about my mom’s musical tastes at the time.) Whether it’s those idyllic, harvest-gold memories or just the upbeat sound of the group’s signature electric organ, this is one of a handful of songs that have an inscrutable ability to always make me feel better, no matter the circumstances.
Music videos weren’t a thing in Three Dog Night’s heyday, of course, but I did locate this, a clip from the band’s 1975 appearance on the PBS program Soundstage. It’s good stuff to head into the weekend with, I think…
Okay, this will probably be more like “Early Saturday Morning Videos” by the time I get it written and posted, but hey, I’ve had one of those weeks…
I was vaguely aware of Chris Isaak’s breakthrough hit “Wicked Game” back in college — I remember thinking of him as “that guy who sounds like Roy Orbison” — but I didn’t really discover him until after I was out of school and trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life. It was a good time for his music, which tends to be a bit downbeat, to really resonate for me, and I spun his CDs a lot for a couple of years. In point of fact, he does sound a lot like Orbison, and a bit like Elvis, too, and even sometimes like Johnny Cash, and while he can and does perform plenty of uptempo rockers, his real specialty is dreamy, melancholy songs that are best played at two in the morning. But Chris Isaak’s music isn’t the sitting-in-the-bar-at-two-in-the-morning kind of stuff; rather, it makes you think of driving through the desert in the wee hours, with the windows down and a fragrant breeze pouring over you, and a full moon riding over your shoulder and painting the landscape silver.
I still like Chris Isaak, and earlier this week, Anne and I, along with our friends Geoff and Anastasia, saw him live for the second time. On both occasions, I found myself wondering why this guy never made a bigger splash. He’s not unknown, of course, but he’s should’ve been huge. He’s a talented musician and singer, a romantic crooner with a face that’s matinee-idol handsome, and he’s funny as hell, too. His live shows include nearly as much humorous banter — nearly all of it at his own expense — as music. I can only surmise that his deliberately retro sensibilities were too hard to categorize and market back when he was starting out. He loves the early rock era, the music that came out of Memphis’ legendary Sun recording studio in particular, and much of his own stuff is modeled after those old classics. He sprinkles many of them into his live sets, too, great old songs like Great Balls of Fire,” “Ring of Fire,” and “Only the Lonely.” And that’s not all: he and his band present themselves in a very old-fashioned manner, dressing in suits with a cowboyish flair and slicking their hair into pompadours. Personally, I love all that stuff, but I can see how it might have been hard to sell that in the era of grunge and boy bands and hip-hop.
Perhaps I underestimate Chris’ appeal, though. The Sandy Amphitheater, where he and his band the Silvertones performed Wednesday night, seemed to be a sell-out, and he’s a regular on the Salt Lake-area music scene. Anne and I tried to catch one of his shows for years before finally making it to one in 2013. Now I think we’ll probably go every chance we get. He is a consummate entertainer, and you definitely feel like you’re getting your money’s worth from one of his shows.
He always does “Wicked Game” in his concerts, of course, but the one I wait for, my favorite Chris Isaak song, was released a few years after “Game.” One of three singles from his 1995 album Forever Blue, it only reached number 45 on the charts, but that was high enough to be his second biggest hit, and it also earned Chris a Grammy nomination. (It lost to Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”) It’s sad, but it’s catchy, and it always takes me back to those yearning, questing years of my mid-twenties. Here’s “Somebody’s Crying.” Enjoy, have a good weekend, and good night!
We dig Bryan Adams around this place. Not as much as we dig Rick Springfield, of course, but Adams is pretty dang cool in his own right. I’ve seen him live three times: back in 1985 when he first hit it big with his Reckless album, then again in ’92 for the “Waking Up the World” tour, and most recently on an acoustic tour that became an excellent live collection called Bare Bones (I can’t remember what year that was, though — guess I’m getting old!). And of course his ode to nostalgia, “Summer of ’69” is a personal favorite that I’ve featured on this blog before.
Although Adams is best known for work he did 20 or 30 years ago, he, like my main man Rick, has been writing and recording new material more or less continuously since his heyday. He just recently announced that a new album called Get Up will be hitting the streets in October, and he’s already released the first single from it, “You Belong to Me.” It’s a fun little number with an old-fashioned rock-a-billy jangle that reminds me of some of George Harrison’s later work. (Which makes sense, since it was produced by ELO’s Jeff Lynne, who also worked on Harrison’s Cloud Nine and the Travelin’ Wilburys project.)
Anyhow, I think this selection is just perfect for listening to with the car windows down as you head home from work on a late-summer Friday night. And the video is pretty sexy, too, although you probably shouldn’t look at that while you’re driving… Enjoy!
When I was 15, I developed a mild obsession with the song featured in this week’s video; I recall a period of a several weeks when I listened to it every single morning as I got ready for school, doing the classic lip-sync-into-a-hairbrush routine. (The fact that I was ‘syncing a female vocalist didn’t matter in the slightest to me.)
“Better Be Good to Me” was the fourth single from Private Dancer, Tina Turner’s enormously successful album released in the epochal year 1984. With a tough, street-smart attitude underlying a polished pop-rock sound, the album was widely seen as Tina’s big professional comeback some eight years after the demise of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Songs like “I Might Have Been Queen,” “Show Some Respect,” “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” “Steel Claw,” and the title track also led to Private Dancer being read as an ode to female empowerment, as well as Tina’s personal declaration of emancipation from Ike himself (even though their divorce was finalized in 1978).
Of course, I wasn’t aware of any of that at the time, or would have cared if I had been. All I knew was that the slinky, sexy voice of that woman with the million-dollar legs and wild hair did good things to me when it hit my ear canals. “Better Be Good” — which, honestly, I’ve always thought was a better song than Private Dancer‘s (and Tina Turner’s) biggest hit, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” — especially appealed to me. I don’t have any particular reason for liking it, no association with an event or place or anything like that. I just like the song’s sonic profile: the slow, mysterious intro, the confident middle portion that rises to a big dramatic climax… it’s just cool.
I’ve owned Private Dancer in several different formats over the years, and I still listen to it fairly often, although apparently not recently, because it gave me a bit of a start, followed by a big smile, to hear “Better Be Good” this morning as I crossed the plaza below my office building on the way into work. I’ve been humming it all day.
I don’t recall ever seeing the video before this afternoon; it’s not anything remarkable, but it is representative of the era, and Tina looks damn fine in her leather ensemble:
Incidentally, the blond guy who comes out on stage toward the end is Cy Curnin, the lead singer of the band The Fixx, which scored a pretty massive hit of their own a year earlier with the song “One Thing Leads to Another.” He and The Fixx’s guitarist Jamie West-Oram (also seen in this video) performed on the Private Dancer album, a little factoid that probably would’ve blown my mind when I was 15 and insisting that the lines between rock and New Wave were very clear and impermeable… eh, what did I know?
Live Aid has been called my generation’s Woodstock — Joan Baez herself made the comparison when she took the stage in Philadelphia to kick off the U.S. half of the show — but I wonder if the globe-spanning charity concert really had that same level of cultural impact. I suspect the name “Woodstock” would still mean something to kids today, two generations removed from that epochal event, but would those same kids recognize the words “Live Aid?” I just don’t know. As big a deal as it was at the time, I haven’t heard much about it in the intervening years, at least not until today, its 30th anniversary.
Ah, but thirty years ago today, I was fifteen years old, and Live Aid was just about the coolest thing that I’d ever seen, aside from Star Wars and the space shuttle: a day-long concert taking place simultaneously in two separate venues on two different continents, broadcast live on multiple television networks to a globe-spanning audience of over a billion people, all in the name of charity. I didn’t watch all sixteen hours of it, of course. As I recall, the TV was on all day while I was in and out of the room, going about my lazy summertime routines, and I would stop from time to time when one act or another caught my attention. But even though I wasn’t giving it my full attention, just having the event playing in the background made me feel as if I were… connected… a participant in something of tremendous significance, something bigger than myself. I was a witness to history. Or so it seemed at the time. It could that I was just a 15-year-old music fan who was blown away by the line-up of stars marching across the stages in London and Philadelphia. You can see some of them in the poster above, although that’s not a comprehensive listing. Basically, anyone who was anyone was there, either at Wembley or JFK Stadium.
My main man Rick Springfield, for example:
And then there was Phil Collins, who appeared on both stages, thanks to a supersonic hop across the pond aboard the late, lamented Concorde:
Yes, the ’80s were a very different time, and a lot more things seemed possible then. Even a Led Zeppelin reunion, probably the highlight of the whole day for me:
The mighty Zep had disbanded only five years before Live Aid, but this reunion performance nevertheless felt like something that had been a long time coming, as if the gods of legend had returned briefly from Olympus long enough to remind we puny mortals that the Earth had once been theirs, before vanishing again into realms beyond our ken. The fact that their performance was widely panned by the critics, and even by the surviving band members themselves (who refused to allow its inclusion in the official DVD set released a while back because they’re embarrassed by it), didn’t change the momentous atmosphere that surrounded it.
And that, I suppose, is a handy metaphor for the entire event. Looking back at Live Aid across a chasm of thirty years, I honestly have no idea whether it ultimately mattered, or did anything to help the people it was supposed to help. But at the time, we believed it would help. We really did, all of us who watched. And that was what made Live Aid such a big deal. That simple, naive faith that the world could be united by music to do something good felt… momentous. Sadly, though, it was fleeting. I can’t imagine a similar event happening today, for a lot of different reasons, but mostly because people just don’t have the right attitudes anymore. It’s not that we no longer feel compassion, but rather because, as a society, we just don’t have the same optimism we did then. About anything. So in that regard, I guess I really was a part of a historic event… or at least, of history. Because while it’s difficult to believe 30 years have passed, that optimistic world of 1985 seems as remote to me now as the one where men wore powdered wigs and velvet breeches.
Oh, wait. They did that in the 1980s, didn’t they? Some of them, anyhow. Well, you know what I mean…
The news started rippling out across social media last night before authorities had even confirmed the identity of the body: the Oscar-winning film composer James Horner was dead, killed in a plane crash.
I write about celebrity deaths all the time; it’s kind of become the schtick I’m known for, weirdly enough. I write about the ones that produce an emotional response in me, the ones I feel some degree of sorrow about. Some of them affect me more than others, especially if they’re sudden and/or unexpected. I’m positively numb over this one.
I’ve always had a few movie soundtracks in my music collection, going all the way back to the double-LP Empire Strikes Back album, but my interest in the genre really took off when I was working that notorious theater job in my early 20s, when I was immersed in the movie industry and exposed to film music constantly. Horner quickly became a favorite of mine, second only to the master, John Williams. He wasn’t always the most inventive of composers — he had a habit of reusing certain melodies and effects over and over, something I’m sure Kelly will address with more expertise than I can when gets around to writing about this — but he was a solid and prolific craftsman who turned out a lot of work that I love.
There’s not much else I can say right now. I don’t have any anecdotes about James Horner or his work, no personal recollections to speak of, beyond “I like his stuff.” And really, Horner’s music kind of says it all anyhow. So I’m going to take the easy way out and just share some of my favorite pieces with you, my Loyal Readers. I hope you’ll take the time to play the clips below, and that you’ll like what you hear. This music has, in a sense, been the soundtrack to my own life. Or at least a part of that soundtrack.
First up is a pulse-pounding track from Jim Cameron’s Aliens (1986), which accompanies the scene in which the Colonial Marines have made contact with the xenomorphs and are getting their asses handed to them; back aboard the armored personnel carrier, their inexperienced lieutenant is paralyzed with indecision, until Ripley finally takes matters into her own hands and seizes control of the APC and drives to the rescue. It’s some of the most adrenaline-triggering film music ever recorded, in my humble opinion:
If that sounds really familiar to you, it’s probably because it was became the standard “action-movie cue” used in countless trailers for several years during the ’90s. For an interesting exercise, compare it to “Surprise Attack” from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). This is the moment when the Enterprise encounters another Federation starship, not realizing it’s under the command of the villainous Khan, who closes to point-blank range before opening fire on our unsuspecting heroes. You’ll hear a lot of similarities to the Aliens piece, including something I’ve never been able to identify but which sounds (to me) like someone rapping on a pipe with a drumstick, a sort of “ting ting” effect. But while Horner is guilty of relying on some of his favorite tricks on this one — the general sound goes back to Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), as far as I’ve been able to determine — he also introduces a nautical feel, suggesting the starships are two giant galleons exchanging broadsides under full sail. And he subtly incorporates a little flourish from the original Star Trek television series and a couple of callbacks to the cosmic weirdness that Jerry Goldsmith created for the previous installment, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, making this score, in many respects, the most “Star Trek-y” of them all:
For Glory, Edward Zwick’s 1989 film about the first African-American infantry unit to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War, Horner incorporates a vocal chorus and a generally softer tone. I’ve always found this track, from near the movie’s climax, especially moving. Its elegiac tone as the men of the 54th Massachusetts prepare for what they know is likely a suicide mission, followed by the rising pace of the martial drums as they begin their final charge, breaks my heart and brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it:
And finally, here’s the main title from what is probably my favorite James Horner score, The Rocketeer (1990). It’s beautiful, upbeat, optimistic, and it perfectly captures the feeling of leaving the ground. A couple weekends ago, Anne and I took her father for a ride on a historic B-17 Flying Fortress, and this was what I heard in my mind as the runaway started to roll past the gunport I was looking through, and then fell away as the big old bird slipped into the crystal-clear sky with more grace than you’d expect…
Although the selections I chose here are all 25 years old (or more, in the case of Khan), Horner was no has-been. He worked steadily from 1978 right up to the present moment, and no doubt had a lot left to do. Three films featuring scores by him are due out this year: Wolf Totem, The 33, and Southpaw. He was only 61.
For a time in my teens and early twenties, I had a serious thing for the music of the 1960s. I remember I was becoming disenchanted with the direction contemporary pop music was headed by the late ’80s; meanwhile, the ’60s were very alive and accessible in the culture at that point, with constant media chatter about various landmark anniversaries, and period TV shows like The Wonder Years, China Beach, and occasional episodes of Quantum Leap. Probably the biggest reason was that I was spending every available moment of free time in the driver’s seat of my old ’63 Galaxie, which had only a stock AM radio, and there wasn’t much else to listen to on AM.
But whatever the impetus, I responded to this uncharted sonic territory like fanboys have done from time immemorial, by diving in headfirst and trying to learn everything about it I possibly could. I fondly recall afternoons at the library, paging through the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll and fat tell-all biographies of Jim Morrison, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys. I loved discovering the connections between bands that I knew and ones I’d never heard of, and learning how the whole thing evolved. And I loved having this thing I could call my own. A lot of kids latched onto punk or Goth or some other form of “alternative” music. Later on, they’d have their grunge. Me, I expressed my individuality by digging the Sixties.
Eventually, the passion cooled and I moved on to other things, as one does. But there is still a lot of music from that era that I enjoy. Some of it is very badly dated now — the psychedelic stuff sounds really lame to me these days — but as with any musical genre or era, there are some songs that transcend their origins and continue to resonate. This week’s “Friday evening” selection is one of those.
“For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield was written by Steven Stills, who would later become part of Crosby, Stills & Nash (and occasionally Young), and later still enjoy a successful solo career. The song is often said to be about the infamous Kent State massacre, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fired on unarmed college students during an anti-war protest, killing four of them; in reality, the song was written in 1966, four years prior to the events at Kent State, which occurred in 1970. Released in 1967, it would become the band’s highest-charting hit and is today ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
It’s a song that has haunted me at various times in my life. It comes to mind whenever the world feels like it’s spinning a little too fast, or is about to tip all the way over. The lyrics about paranoia and battle lines never seem to lose their relevance, and just lately, with all the back-and-forth about police brutality and who’s got privilege and who doesn’t, the bit about a man with a gun “telling me I got to beware” is downright chilling. Especially today, the day after Charleston. I’ve been feeling an angry energy building out there, like static electricity in the air. At times like this, when all the troubles of our nation lay exposed on the ground beneath an unflinching sun and civilization itself feels most precarious, “For What It’s Worth” starts playing in my head.
The video clip I’ve found for tonight is a live performance from the Monterrey Pop Festival, a landmark concert event that predated the more famous Woodstock by two years. It’s a bit more upbeat than most versions of the song I’ve heard, and we’ve got some nice imagery of cute little hippie children and balloons to take off some of the edge. And just for fun, Buffalo Springfield is introduced by Peter Tork of The Monkees:
And with that, as they used to say back in the days of flowers and love, “Peace.”
This is nifty… a guy named John Huldt has arranged several of John Williams’ best-known movie themes for acoustic guitar and recorded a medley of them. I’ve heard music from the Star Wars movies performed in a number of idioms — I even own a CD of Star Wars“lounge” music — but this minimalist approach yields some pretty interesting results, in particular the Superman theme, which takes on a subtly Mexican sound, and the theme from Jurassic Park, which I’ve always thought was one of Williams’ greatest pieces, a simple little melody that at various points in the movie conveys grandeur, wonder, adventure, and deep melancholy. In Huldt’s hands, it’s simply lovely… I wouldn’t mind an entire album of this stuff!
Here’s something that will blow your mind, assuming you’re of the same general age as myself: Today is Pac-Man’s 35th birthday. Yes, Pac-Man, that minimalist yellow avatar of insatiable hunger, made his debut in Japan on May 22, 1980. (He wouldn’t arrive in the U.S. until October.)
Younger readers won’t see the significance, I’m sure, but to those of us who were there, Pac-Man was a very big deal indeed. Video games were still in their infancy in 1980, but were fast becoming a generation-defining fad, thanks to the popularity (and near-ubiquity, it seemed then) of Space Invaders and Asteroids. But then came Pac-Man, the first video game that was predicated on an activity other than shooting things (eating things, in this case) as well as the first game (as far as I know) that centered on a relatable, appealing character, unlike the so-called “space shooters” where you controlled a starship of some sort with no personality. Because of that cute little protagonist (and let’s be honest, Pac-Man’s enemies, the ghosts, were pretty cute too), the game actually appealed to girls, expanding a market that had been pretty much limited to the male of the species up until that time. Add the doubled audience to its fiendishly addictive gameplay, and it’s little wonder Pac-Man became the most popular arcade game of all time. The game’s manufacturer, Namco, sold nearly half a million units of the original version (not counting the sequel, Ms. Pac-Man), and continues to produce variations of it for every gaming platform now in existence. It’s still not unusual to run across a vintage Pac-Man cabinet these days, and it remains as fun and compelling as it ever was, unlike its contemporaries (when was the last time you saw, let alone dropped a quarter into a Space Invaders game?).
But it wasn’t just a popular game. Pac-Man the character became a genuine cultural phenomenon as he was licensed to all sorts of ancillary products and media. Pac-Man turned up on t-shirts and school folders, there were (still are!) toys of every description, there was a Saturday-morning cartoon series on television, and you could even eat Pac-Man cereal… if you were brave enough.
And on the radio there was the novelty song “Pac-Man Fever” by a duo called Buckner & Garcia.
Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia had had some success with novelty songs before, and even co-wrote the lyrics for the extended version of the WKRP in Cincinnati theme song, which was released as a single in 1979. But it was a silly little ditty about a hot new fad that really gave them their 15 minutes. The song hit number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in March 1982. Here’s a clip of them performing it on the television series Solid Gold, which if you don’t recall — and if you don’t, I’m really sorry, because the Solid Gold Dancers were something, man! — was a syndicated television countdown of the top-ten pop hits of the week, featuring live (or more often lip-synched) performances by the stars themselves. I never missed it back in the day.
Ladies and gentlemen, Buckner & Garcia in a perfect time capsule from a better era:
