Music

Jun102010

Staggering Insecurity

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Rick Springfield’s upcoming memoir, has posted one of its “Author Revealed” interviews with my main man. It’s pretty meme-ish and inconsequential, but Rick’s answers to three particular questions are indeed revealing:

Q. What’s your greatest flaw?
A. Staggering insecurity
Q. What’s your best quality?
A. Wow, I don’t know if I have one (see above)
Q. If you could be any person or thing, who or what would it be?
A. A better version of me

Not exactly what you’d expect from a rock star who looks as good for his age as he does and who still has women throwing themselves at his feet every night. But that, quite honestly, is part of the reason why I like the guy so much. When I was a kid and “Jessie’s Girl” was on the radio every five minutes, I liked him because I thought he was cool and he recorded music I liked and he was on TV and the girls all thought he was cute. Years later, after I’d rediscovered him and learned where he’d been throughout the ’90s, I liked him because — surprise! — he was a human being with some major frailties, and he wasn’t afraid to talk about them or work them into his music. Moreover, he shared many of the same frailties as yours truly; that “staggering insecurity” thing strikes very close to home for me.

In a weird kind of way, learning that my boyhood idol struggles with his ego and with depression, the same way I do, has been kind of like what happens as you grow up and come to understand your parents as real people instead of omnipotent lords of the household. There is a certain sense that something has been diminished, and that sense is tinged with sadness (at least for me), but your relationship with them is ultimately richer for the discovery of their flaws. You identify more with them because they have been diminished, if that makes sense.

Wow. Did I just say that Rick Springfield is a father figure for me? I don’t think I did, but it certainly sounds that way, doesn’t it?

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May282010

Friday Evening Videos: “Do You Believe in Love?”

I’m posting our weekly music feature a little early this time; I’ll be on the road by this afternoon, heading west to Wendover, Nevada, a.k.a. Salt Lake’s moral exhaust port. I’m going out for a concert, and no, it’s not Rick Springfield for a change. It’s these guys, actually, another favorite band of mine from the Awesome ’80s:

Ah, the ’80s, when images of six guys standing around watching a woman sleep weren’t considered creepy at all. It really was a different time… a better, more innocent time in a lot of ways. Sorry about the dodgy picture; The Man has disabled embedding on all the decent-quality Huey Lewis videos, at least the ones I could find in two minutes of Googling.
“Do You Believe in Love,” from the album Picture This, was the first charting single from Huey Lewis and the News. I remember hearing it quite a lot back in the day and I always liked it, but the band wouldn’t really break through into “household name” status until the next album, Sports. Sports was a monster hit, with four of its nine tracks hitting the top 10 singles charts, and a fifth breaking into the top 20. The album itself was the second bestseller of the year, right behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The Arbiters of Cool never thought much of Huey and the boys, and I suppose I can understand why. Their image was more cuddly than cutting-edge; Huey himself was a bit older than the usual pop star, with rugged yet average features that appealed to the housewives; and a lot of their lyrics admittedly tended toward the cutesy and/or sappy. But then, so did the early rock ‘n’ roll and 1950s doo-wop that so obviously influenced their sound. And anyway, you can’t listen to Lou Reed and The Ramones all the time. Well, I suppose you can, but if you do, I don’t want to hang around with you.

We have time for one more, my personal favorite by Huey Lewis and the News, the one that drove the strait-laced, finger-wagging set into hissy fits because they didn’t understand what the song was really about:

Yeah, good stuff. Any band that can come up with that opening wail is rock-and-roll in my book. Incidentally, that dunking-your-face-in-a-sink-full-of-ice-cubes gag was done by Paul Newman in at least two movies that I know of: Harper, from 1966, and 1973’s The Sting. And one final thought: I always admired that red suit with the black t-shirt that Huey’s wearing. I still like the look, actually; if I ever find myself in the position of having to wear a suit, that might not be a bad way to do it…

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May262010

You Just Earned an Extra Life!

Bummed because Google’s 48-hour tribute to the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man — a fully playable version of the game standing in for Google’s homepage banner — is over? Maybe you missed the whole thing and you’re feeling really lame and out of the online fad-loop that all the cool kids seem to be plugged into? Well, have no fear, because Google has apparently decided to keep the game page up indefinitely, if not permanently. Just go here and drop virtual quarters ’til your heart’s content.

My thanks to Evanier for cluing me in about this. And now I think I’m going to go play a quick round…

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May222010

Friday Evening Videos: Ronnie James Dio Commemorative Edition

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the late heavy-metal singer Ronnie James Dio, who died last week at the age of 67. His music was a little too far to the headbanging side of the spectrum for my tastes (well, except for that one song on the Vision Quest soundtrack; I liked that one). But even so, he was a pretty formidable presence out there in the culture during my formative years, a familiar face and voice, and I seem to have reached a point in my life where I feel a pang at the loss of any iconic figure from my youth, whether I was a fan or not. So, to honor the recently departed Mr. Dio, I’m going to post one of his videos, “The Last in Line,” which is admittedly kind of ridiculous even by MTV standards, but is nevertheless… interesting.

To be honest, I’ve been thinking about posting this clip anyhow, as an example of what I like to call “narrative videos.” I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis or anything, but it seems to me that the vast majority of music videos are little more than performance clips. That is, they’re really just footage of the band playing the song. They may be wearing weird costumes or performing in bizarre settings or something, but there’s usually not much story happening. Some vids, though, have a definite plot: the three famous ZZ Top clips involving the Eliminator hot rod, for example, or more obviously, a-ha’s justly praised “Take on Me” video, in which a young woman is sucked into a comic-book world and proceeds to have adventures with the band’s hunky lead singer as they’re pursued by sinister guys in dark uniforms and helmets. And then of course, there’s Dio’s “The Last in Line,” which is perhaps single-handedly responsible for the entire “heavy-metal hell” sequence in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey:

As I said, pretty ridiculous, but it has the virtue of being far more ambitious than most videos, as well as a piquant commentary on the social concerns and fads of the early ’80s (i.e., the kids whose punishment is to play arcade games for all eternity — wonder which sin warranted that?). I think the similarity to Bogus Journey is pretty obvious, if you remember that movie at all, and you could also argue that the demon guy with the hoses sticking out of his neck was an inspiration for the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. (It would seem that American culture has been uneasy with the idea of cybernetics for a very long time.)

Lastly, a brief trivia note: You may have recognized the young man who’s taking the tour of hell. That’s Meeno Peluce, a child actor who was all over the boob tube during the late ’70s and early ’80s. He’s best known for the short-lived but well-loved time-travel series Voyagers!, and as fate would have it, he’s also the brother of Soleil Moon-Frye, a.k.a. Punky Brewster. I always thought Peluce was a cool kid, as well as a natural and appealing actor; he’s a little younger than me, but close enough that I easily identified with him in Voyagers! and other roles. This video, made in 1984, was the last time I remember seeing him in anything, although Wikipedia says he’s appeared in a number of made-for-TV movies since then. He apparently grew up to become a history teacher — interesting, considering his character on Voyagers! was a history buff and, as I recall, the son of a teacher — and he’s also an accomplished photographer who has shot Courtney Love and Lady Gaga. Not bad, kid… not bad at all…

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May212010

Thirty Years? Really? No, Really?!

Yes, I know, two posts with nearly identical titles in only one week’s time… but by some weird coincidence this year is turning out to be packed with landmark anniversaries for things that really don’t seem like they happened all that long ago. Today’s impossible-that-so-much-time-has-passed event is the release of the arcade video game Pac-Man, which holds the Guinness World Record for “the world’s most successful coin-operated game.”

There are a handful of video games that were so mind-boggling to me for one reason or another that I can still remember the place and circumstances in which I first encountered them. Space Invaders, for instance — I saw my first SI game at a grotty old movie theater called the Greenbriar, which ran a special program of Saturday double-features for the kids every summer, in association with the local PTA. (Most memorable bill: Clash of the Titans with Dragonslayer… now that was an afternoon’s entertainment!) One weekend, though, nobody seemed much interested in the movie… instead, we were all in the lobby, clustered around this tall wooden cabinet from which some really weird sounds were emanating. I can still recall the feel of a quarter clenched in my moist palm, the knurled edge biting into my skin; the smell of musty carpet, fresh popcorns, and overheated (i.e., sweaty) kids; and the pleasure of shooting down 8-bit aliens on the march, only to become clenched by a ratcheting sense of anxiety as that last little bugger evaded my turbolaser and raced for the surface. It was, in a word, an amazing experience unlike anything I’d ever done before, and it obviously etched itself deeply into my memory.

Pac-Man, not so much. I mean, I played Pac-Man, I liked Pac-Man, but it was a different experience from my first encounter with Space Invaders… or Zaxxon, which upped the realism factor by adding a third dimension to your avatar’s maneuverability… or Gauntlet, which could be played by four people simultaneously, and was really just a kick-ass game anyway. Pac-Man, on the other hand, was simply a ubiquitous part of the background noise of my early adolescence. A very pleasant noise, to be sure… the opening theme song and the pathetic little “zoink-zoink” sound when ol’ Packy gets eaten can still bring a smile to my face. But I can’t remember the first time I saw or played the game; it seems like all of a sudden, it was just all over the place, appearing fully grown overnight like dandelions on the front lawn. And it still is all over, if you’re paying attention. Arcades have gone away and cabinet-style coin-op games are pretty rare in general, but if you encounter a vintage game out there somewhere, odds are good that it’s going to be a Pac-Man… or at least one of those combo units that have several classic games in one cabinet, and Pac-Man is always an option in those. The longevity of the cute little yellow mouth and the pop-eyed ghosts who are his mortal enemies is nothing less than astounding.

If you haven’t seen it already, Google has done something pretty cool to celebrate 30 years of that “wocka-wocka-wocka” sound. The search engine site has replaced its usual banner with a fully playable (if weirdly elongated) recreation of the game:

Just click the “Insert Coin” button and you’re right back in middle school, gobbling those power-pills and chasing Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde around the maze at breakneck — well, okay, maybe not so fast — speed. I’ve been hearing the opening theme and the sound effects all over my cube farm this morning, and it’s making an otherwise stressed-out Friday a lot more enjoyable. Also a lot less productive, but given the pace we’ve been keeping lately, I’m all for that…

Anyhow, there’s a brief article on the anniversary and Google’s commemoration of it here, or you can just hit Google’s homepage and commence to playing.

Check out the official Pac-Man page too!

 

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May072010

Friday Evening Videos: “I Drove All Night”

I’ll bet you all had a hunch when I started prattling on about Roy Orbison last night who was going to be be appearing in this week’s Friday Evening Videos, didn’t you? Smart little Loyal Readers.

You’re quite correct: I was planning to post what I thought was Roy’s final hit, “You Got It,” from the 1989 album Mystery Girl, which was a favorite cassette of mine during my sophomore year of college and the following summer. But as I started poking around looking for the video clip and any interesting background information I could find, I discovered that this was not, in fact, Roy’s last charting single, and Mystery Girl was not his last album. Remember that he’d been working a lot with producer Jeff Lynne in the year or two prior to his death in 1988; it turns out he recorded more material than what ended up on Mystery Girl, enough to fill out one more album, which Lynne compiled and released four years later. Somehow, I completely missed King of Hearts in 1992, and I also missed the two final, posthumous hits it generated, a duet of Roy’s classic “Crying,” sung with k.d. lang, and this song:

“I Drove All Night” reveals a fairly tangled history when you delve into it. The song was written specifically for Roy, and he recorded it in 1987, a full year before his death, but for some reason it wasn’t selected for Mystery Girl, and of course it wouldn’t appear until King of Hearts came out in ’92. In the meantime, Cyndi Lauper, of all people, scored a top-10 hit with it in 1989, and I’m willing to bet a lot of people probably think the song was hers, and Roy’s version was the cover. It has since been covered again by a band I’ve never heard of, Pinmonkey, and most recently by — shudder — Celine Dion in 2003.
Since I was unfamiliar with the song, I obviously had never seen the video either, until this afternoon. I think it’s absolutely magnificent. The imagery is a perfect match for the audio, it’s very clever how the director covers for the fact that Roy had been dead for four years, and the young stars are simply beautiful to gaze upon. (If you can’t place them, you’re looking at Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, seen here at the peak of her Rocketeer-era detectability, and Jason Priestley, who was then riding high on the success of Beverly Hills, 90210.) Everything about this evokes a particular time in my life, a time I often miss, to be honest. I was old enough in ’92 to know something, but still young enough to believe in a lot of things. I acted tougher than I really was, and I was in love with the idea of love itself. In other words, I was a lot like the character that Priestley is playing here. Or at least, that’s how I used to imagine myself, and how I like to remember myself.

Hell, I could just reacting to the car, I guess. Priestley is driving a 1964 Galaxie, a little bit different than my older ’63, but close enough for this video to stir up a lot of sense memories.

For our second feature this evening, I wanted to post “End of the Line” by The Traveling Wilburys, another fabulous song that combines a catchy hook with some truly authentic and wise lyrics; unfortunately, the foul Copyright Lords have forbidden anyone from embedding it, so if you’d like to see it, you’ll have to click through. If nothing else, it’s worth a look to see how this one handled Roy’s absence.

Finally, here’s a little something by request, a B-52s song for my friend Keith. To be honest, I really don’t care for The B-52s — I find the majority of their stuff obnoxious, what with the herky-jerky delivery and a sound that generally rubs me the wrong way — but their 1989 hit “Roam” isn’t too bad, and it’s kind of in the same thematic ballpark as “I Drove All Night,” at least in the sense that it’s about traveling and love. Enjoy, Keith!

 

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May062010

Changing Perspectives

Roy Orbison in a publicity still from A Black and White Night

You’d never guess from the songs I’ve been waxing nostalgic over in my Friday Evening Video segments, but sometime around my junior or senior year of high school, I developed a serious affection for the music of the 1950s and ’60s, better known as the oldies. I don’t remember what, precisely, triggered my interest in the stuff my parents used to listen to, but I suppose you could probably blame my car, my ’63 Ford Galaxie, as much as anything. You see, my old Cruising Vessel had only a stock AM radio, and there wasn’t much music on the AM band by the late ’80s. When I was bombing around the valley with the top down, pondering the unfathomable mysteries of growing up — i.e., girls — I had a choice of either the oldies station or the country station, and at that point in my life, there wasn’t any question of which I was going to prefer. I ended up building a lot of my identity as a young adult around that car, and by extension, around that music.

One of my favorites artists from that period was Roy Orbison, a strange-looking man who had an even stranger voice. Everyone knows him for “Oh, Pretty Woman,” of course, but the larger percentage of his work tended to comprise haunting, melancholy tunes about loneliness, heartbreak, insecurity, and longing — in other words, the perfect soundtrack for your teens and early twenties, when nobody understands you and every perceived slight is a tragic thing that hits you like a baseball bat in the gut. I recall many evenings when I was driving along the dark roads on the south end of the valley — there wasn’t much traffic then, and not a lot of street lights either, so it often felt like my big old car was gliding through deep space — with the air temperature turning brisk against my face and arms as I passed irrigated fields then warming again as I left them behind. The dashboard lights bathed the car’s interior in a greenish light, and Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” or “Only the Lonely” was fading in and out of the static-y background noise like messages from another dimension. Eerie… and, as I noted, perfect.

As fate would have it, Roy was experiencing something of a comeback right around then. In 1987, he recorded, along with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra, and Bob Dylan, the astounding Traveling Wilburys, Volume I — there’s not a bad cut on that album — and his older music was starting to turn up in movies. In November of 1988, he releasedrecorded a solo album called Mystery Girl, which spawned his first all-new hit in years, “You Got It.” His star was definitely rising again. And then, right at the end of 1988, when I was a sophomore in college, Roy Orbison died unexpectedly of a heart attack. I remember being really depressed that I’d lost him just as I’d discovered him. It didn’t seem fair, somehow.

I also remember thinking that he was quite old.

Well, I’ve just been reading a retrospective on Roy — NPR has named him one of its 50 Great Voices — and it turns out that his age upon his death was all of 53 years old. Fifty-three. I don’t mind telling you, I’m a little freaked out by this realization, both because 53 no longer seems old to me, and also because I was such a dunce back in ’88 as to think that it was. I’m going to have to ponder this whole thing for a while, I think.

In the meantime, go check out that article. It’s an interesting read, especially if all you know about Roy is that he did the theme song for some Julia Roberts movie…

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May032010

A Public Service Announcement

I think this speaks for itself (click on the image if you can’t read the fine print and need to enlarge it):

Rick Springfield book announcement

My man Rick has actually had a pretty colorful — and sometimes difficult — life: He became a teen idol at the improbably advanced age of 32 (when “Jessie’s Girl” hit number one) after years of struggling to find an American audience, and he’s struggled ever since to find respect as a genuine musician instead of a one-bubblegum-hit wonder; he lived for several years with Linda Blair of Exorcist fame — she was all of 15 when they moved in together, and he was a decade older (I imagine that raised a few eyebrows, even in the anything-goes 1970s); he collapsed into a deep depression in the late ’80s, when it seemed his moment had come and gone in such a brief span of time, and he actually contemplated suicide; and now at the age of 60, he’s rebuilt both his musical and acting career, and consistently puts on one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, even if it’s only his hardcore fans who ever actually see it.

Assuming that he can write prose at all (or has found himself a good ghost writer), I expect all this ought to make for a hell of a read…

At least, that’s my hope. I still remember all too well my excitement at the news that Jimmy Buffett was writing a memoir, and the crushing disappointment when I finally got around to reading it. All those wild experiences and people that surely inspired his songs about swashbucklers and vagabonds, the rumors that he’d made ends meet for a while by smuggling weed from Cuba to Key West, the beer-drinking-and-hell-raising early days of his career… that’s what I expected from A Pirate Looks at Fifty. Instead, I got a fairly boring travelogue written by a middle-aged capitalist who thinks he’s more clever with a turn of phrase than he often is. Rick, old buddy, don’t let me down the way Jimmy did…

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May012010

Friday Evening Videos: “In a Big Country”

Friday evening, Saturday morning… it’s all the same for some of us, right?

Anyhow, I received some feedback earlier this week about our musical feature here: Loyal Reader Keith expressed some dissatisfaction with the songs I’ve been choosing for Friday Evening Videos. He lamented the fact that, despite our long years of friendship, he’s never been able to drag me over to the dark side — his words, not mine — of post-New Wave/alternative music.

This is an old, old rivalry between us. The battle lines between rockers and Wavers were drawn by forces larger than ourselves way back in high school — maybe even middle school — and I picked my tribe very early. I was a rocker. Not a metal head, mind you — that’s a whole other kettle of guitar picks — but I always identified far more with the earthy, long-haired fellows in the leather and acid-washed jeans than the twee weirdos who played that bloodless synthesizer crap. At least, that’s how I thought of things back in the day.

The irony, of course, is that most of my friends and girlfriends — including Keith and The Girlfriend — were Wavers. The universe can be truly perverse at times.

In any event, I’ve come in recent years to appreciate (or at least tolerate) a lot more alternative music than Keith probably realizes; hell, I took Anne to see Depeche Mode last year, the very epitome of everything I always disliked about New Wave synth bands, and I even had a reasonably good time. My mulleted 17-year-old self would be stunned to hear that, I’m sure. But the fact is, the label “alternative” covers a pretty broad spectrum, and I started realizing at some point that it wasn’t all bad, and that I’d actually liked a fair amount of it all along, even back in my militant teen years. Without realizing it, of course. I mean, they played The Cars on Rock 103, so that made them okay, right?

If I could trace this awakening to any one song or event, I think it would probably be learning a few years ago that Stuart Adamson, the lead singer of the band Big Country, had died in an apparent suicide. Not that I was ever a fan of Big Country back in the day; if I was aware of them at all in the ’80s — and I don’t think I was — I would’ve sneeringly dismissed them simply because the radio stations on which they were played were not my stations, i.e., the rock stations. But a funny thing happened as I was perusing the online tributes to Adamson: They all referenced Big Country’s hit single “In a Big Country,” and when, purely out of curiosity, I tracked down this song, it turned out that I liked it. I liked it a lot. It wasn’t sung in that weirdly passionless style that so many British imports of the ’80s had, and which I’ve always found so off-putting. The orchestration was sweeping and dramatic, the chorus was catchy. And what was that? Was there a guitar in there? I was, quite frankly, surprised by this song:

(Apologies for the crappy video quality; this was the best version I could find.)

“In a Big Country” caused me to re-evaluate a few things about music and what was cool. As I told Keith, I don’t think I’ll ever love alternative music the way I do the more traditional varieties of rock and roll — too much of it simply fails to resonate with me either emotionally or viscerally — but I’m hopefully a little smarter now about what I’m willing to sample, and what I’m willing to let myself enjoy.

Keith, I’m not dismissing your list of suggestions; I’ll see if I can work in some of the things you mentioned in the coming weeks.

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