For the love of Zombie Choreography! How could I post anything but Thriller on Halloween? This was groundbreaking stuff. Dancing Zombies, moving make-up, Vincent Price saying “y’alls”. It all started when The King of Pop went to see an American Werewolf in London and decided that he liked it and wanted his next video to resemble it. So he called up the director, John Landis, and asked him what he was doing.
He’s not like other guys.
AWiL was groundbreaking itself because before 1981 movies did not actually show the werewolf transformation. You would see a guy acting like red hot hair follicles were about to burst out of his face, then he stepped behind a curtain or something and when stepped out, he was much hairier. Then he covered his face and screamed. This scared a passing squirrel so completely that the camera guy just had to cut away from the werewolf action to get a close-up of the horrified look on the little nut-nibbler’s furry little face. By the time he cut back, the terrifyingly hirsute transformation was complete, and the man-beast was celebrating with an arched-backed howl straight at the moon that started all this trouble to begin with.
Landis saw this whole hide-and-seek werewolf thing as a big problemwhen it came to suspension of disbelief, so he created a new kind of Werewolf transformation make-up. If you know how a squib works…you’ve got a basic idea. I know what you kids are thinking…why didn’t they just use CGI? Because, youngster, there was no CGI in 1981. That’s right. And before Landis came along, we had to pretend that werewolf transformations didn’t look stupid, but they really did…especially what with the frightened squirrel thing…and we liked it. No. Wait. We didn’t like it.
Speaking of not liking things…now that you can have real-time, non-squirrel-assisted werewolf transformations, where the heck are all your werewolf movies? And no, Wolverine does not count. Bah! Ungrateful kids! Just watch this video, and maybe I’ll tell you how Ola Ray got her pants so tight. (Hint–squibs were also used.)
Melinda’s been doing some warmups for Halloween, and while this isn’t specifically a monster song, it’s fricking spooky. Like spooky and also sexy, in the way that Phil Collins can somehow be sexy, especially when he’s grayscaled and soft-focused into a Michael Myers mask.
Also, like so many songs on this feature, it’s often inspired by what I happen to hear on the radio. I was driving during this particular song, and I’m not a terribly experienced driver; I tend to hold my hands tightly on the 2-and-10 positions most of the time. Except for when this came on, when I had to air drum. I had to. So do you. If you don’t believe me, hold your hands still while watching this, and try not to air drum at the 3:15 mark.
Try.
You can’t do it.
If you can, you’re clearly on Thorazine and stuck in one of those rooms in that hallway. Listen closely. Do you hear the doorknob jiggle? That’s Phil Collins. He’s looking for you.
P.S. This song also gets major bonus points for being the on the soundtrack to “Risky Business,” which will someday be covered as a Nomi’s Blue Book feature.
The guy in the baby Stewie costume has been waiting for his Butterfinger for like 20 minutes.
Halloween is almost here, and what could be a more perfect Friday Morning Video than Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me? It has zombies, haunted paintings, dogs in masks, a dude who showers while wearing a towel and enough old-school Halloween decorations to make that one guy on your block who goes over-board every year and end up scaring the crap out of a bunch of small children super jealous. Not enough? Oh come on. This song is a classic…and just so weird in a Scooby-Doo Halloween special kind of way. At one point Rockwell sings in an affected accent that is surely meant to be Bela Lugosi. Or possibly Lou Costello. He blames his paranoia on Alfred Hitchcock*, and the IRS. What? Michael Jackson’s Thriller? A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Besides, who do you think that golden throated soulster singing to-the-front back-up on this track? Which leads me to the best part of this song. The story. I used to think that Rockwell was able to get Michael Jackson because his father was Berry Gordy, but then I read this from the song’s Wikipedia page:
At the time of the recording Rockwell was estranged from his father and living with Ray Singleton, his father’s ex-wife. Singleton served as executive producer on the project and would occasionally play some demo tracks to Berry Gordy. The elder Gordy was less than enthusiastic about Rockwell’s music until he heard the single with a familiar voice featured prominently on background vocals
Holy crap! If that story is true, I feel so bad for Rockwell. And that is why I say, “Back off with your Michael Jackson talk. It’s Rockwell’s turn to shine.”
* Rockwell included several nods to The Master. Can you spot them…before it’s too lat?! Mwa ha ha! Just kidding. Take your time.
I got horrible news a few weeks ago, during the presidential debate. No, not that Obama had been replaced with a pod person, although I can see how you’d think that. Rather, an old friend, Jim, got in touch with me–the first time in 20 years–to tell me his cousin, Drew, had kidney cancer, and was in pretty bad shape. He wanted me and my sister to know. For a few summers in the early 90s we spent nearly every entertaining moment with Jim and Drew, and while I hadn’t heard from them in years, I was thoroughly upset.
Jim told me Drew’d love to get letters from Samantha and I, and I told him I’d write to him. And then the week happened, and I suddenly realized it was the next Friday, and I knew that after work I’d have to sit down and write to Drew.
Only I opened Facebook Saturday morning to find I was too late. The cancer they’d discovered four weeks earlier had finished its work, and Drew with it. He was 38, and newly married, and he was gone just like that.
We wrote to each other my senior year of high school. He was a freshman at PSU, so I kind of had a college boyfriend, even if it was of the no-touching long-distance kind. We talked on the phone a lot. He was magnificently hilarious, incredibly intelligent, and could be petulant and moody in the way that 18-year-old guys are–especially 18-year-old guys who are still shedding the last vestiges of high school dorkiness. But lord, was he funny.
At the time I was deep into my Broadway musical phase, and after an especially spirited discussion about How Broadway Sucks, I sent him a mix tape of my favorite show tunes. He was unimpressed, although he did like “One Night in Bangkok” and thought “Master of the House” would be well-performed by Muppets, a comparison I still hang onto this day. Accompanying the rest of his blistering rhetoric on the awfulness of West Side Story, Hair, and Les Miserables, though, came his own mix tape, compiled from years of poaching his older brother’s music collection, and, I suspect, a few John Hughes movies.
He called it “Unfathomably Good Music,” and I was blown away by it. I listened to it ALL the time, and made my sister a copy. It introduced me to the music of many bands of which I’d only heard, and several that were previously unknown to me. It traveled with me to college, to New York, to San Francisco, and back to Pittsburgh again. It lost its cover en route, but the tape is still listenable and intact.
So when I found out about Drew, I ran downstairs, into the last remaining box of cassette tapes, and unearthed “Unfathomably Good Music.” The tape lost its cover over the years, so I had to listen to it again to pull together the full playlist. As a result, I’m kind of a teary mess at the moment. But here you go, folks: the playlist of the first mix tape I ever received from a boy.
SIDE A
Ceremony by New Order
Into the Mystic by Van Morrison
Pictures of You by The Cure
Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode
So in Love by OMD
Motion of Love by Gene Loves Jezabel
Just Like Heaven by The Cure
Satellite by Echo and the Bunnymen
Chorus by Erasure
Put the Message in the Box by World Party
Learning to Fly by Tom Petty
SIDE B
No Woman, No Cry by Bob Marley
Lips Like Sugar by Echo and the Bunnymen
Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo
Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order
Love Will Tear Us Apart Again by Joy Division
Every Day Is Like Sunday by Morrissey
This Is How It Feels by Inspiral Carpets
One More Time by The Cure
See a Little Light by Bob Mould
The Perfect Girl by The Cure
I know what you’re thinking, San Francisco friends, and you’re wrong. I submit to you track 1 of Side B, “No Woman, No Cry,” aka, the anthem of freshmen who want to get laid by girls. Drew wasn’t gay. He just had really, really fabulous taste in music, in all senses of the word, and it’s because of this mix tape that I knew how to turn on The Cure when I really wanted to get my cry on. It’s because of Drew that I entered college with any kind of musical street cred.
Listening to these songs again, I felt nostalgic and sad, of course. I saw myself sitting on the floor of my bedroom, crying to “One More Time” after I’d called it quits with him. But the song that really killed me–the one that had me sobbing hardest–was this one. It’s the exact opposite of sad. It’s joy and beauty and heavenly boys spinning madly in a mirror-balled dance floor, and harmonizing with choirs of synthesizers. It’s life and fun and the exact opposite of cancer.
Drew started a blog to write about his experience with illness, and called it http://drewgoesthereandbackagain.wordpress.com. He only had time to write two entries, but he never thought for a minute he wouldn’t come back again. I thought he would’ve, too, or I wouldn’t have taken so much time to sit my ass down and send him a letter.
So fuck you, cancer. This is what I think of you. Take your bad cells and your short notice and stuff it in the back dumpster at The End-Up, because your kind is not welcome here. These boys are here to harmonize your ass back to hell.
We bought an awesome phases-of-the-moon calendar back in March, and it’s nice to track when the full moon’s going to be high in the sky. Even better, though, is that last night, apropos of seemingly nothing, my husband began singing, “It’s a NEW MOON ON MONDAY!”
I knew he wasn’t singing it because the song popped randomly into his head and he was forced to loop it until another song purged the earworm like a toothpick through stuck glitter glue; no, I knew he’d consulted the calendar.
So here we are, opening our week with the second-best video from a band that became famous solely because of its videos, although if you say that’s proof that their songs suck, I’ll stab you with this freshly sharpened eyeliner pencil. I always carry it, in case someone disses Duran Duran.
Of course, not realizing the import of the lunar calendar, I decided to work in our downtown office today, instead of at home, where I’d have the luxury of watching the video and pointing out the especially fantastic parts. But I’ll leave the deep examination to Melinda, and point out, from memory, why this is one of the best videos of Duran Duran, and also ever.
There are four versions. FOUR. They range in length from the one you saw on MTV to a 17-minute edition that can only be found through an Easter egg on their greatest hits DVD, after watching the video three times. This YouTube video is “extended,” but it’s only 6:08.
The extended edition features Simon LeBon in a dressing room with a hot French spy, and at one point, he says, “It looks like you’ve already got my back against the wall,” at which point, any viewer must squeal giddily, take control of the remote, and rewind. Yes, rewind. Don’t skip back or run it back or any of those crazy newfangled things discs do; you must find a way to rewind.
It features a semi-futuristic French revolution, I think. There are French-looking cobblestones and French-looking flags and soldiers on horseback, and also Simon LeBon.
There’s also something about this time, la luna, and lighting one’s torch and waving it for a new moon on Monday, which I think is some kind of insignia, or possibly a rallying cry for la revolucion, I’m not really sure, but it rhymes really well, and Simon LeBon sounds really sexy saying it.
At one point, late in the video, the soldiers on horseback–or it might just be palace guards on foot, I can’t remember and can’t watch it right now–chases the hot Frenchie spy down an alley, and she stops the charging horses (OK, maybe they ARE horses) by waving a giant flag and being very brave and revolutionary, totally like Tianamen Square, only without the grocery bag or actual fear of impending death. That act of bravery is not the important part, though. The important part–and the part that makes this video the most rewinded in the Handley house– is that Simon LeBon is watching her wave the flag from far away, and is totally charmed by it, and ducks his head and smiles and then sneaks another look at her because she’s so darn cute when she’s being all death-defying like that. Pick up remote. Rewind. Repeat. Feel funny in ways you don’t understand yet. Rewind. Repeat. Pause. Squeal.
Back to the salt mines. Or, as we like to say around here, back to feeding the capitalist pig dogs.
P.S. The first best Duran Duran video is View to a Kill, because it intersperses scenes from the James Bond movie seamlessly, and features the entire band in their natural habitats: Nick Rhodes as a fashion photographer, John Taylor shooting at Grace Jones, Roger Taylor as a gunner in the back of a van, Andy Taylor as an evil blind accordionist, and Simon LeBon as a terrible pun-teller.
A few weeks, ago, I paid tribute to The Bangles, and in the process, apparently kicked AM Gold in the teeth a little. Specifially, I suggested that Simon & Garfunkel don’t rock. I stand by that statement: they don’t. I listen to them frequently and find the songs beautiful and melancholy, but it’s not the kind of thing I crank up during a long stretch on the turnpike, or in the shower.
Melinda, whose favorite bands are The Scissor Sisters and everything on AM Gold, called me out on it. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to make it up to her, and then yesterday, on my way back from Lowe’s, new space heater in the passenger’s seat (my home office has no heating vent, and I got tired of wearing gloves by the end of the day), 3WS, Pittsburgh’s home for oldies, kicked out with the most rocking tune ever to be played in a dentist’s office: Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”
Here’s the funny thing about “Baker Street”: I’ve heard the song five thousand times, give or take a million, and I don’t think I ever knew the title. Or if I did, it was one of those things where I’d hear the title and think, “Oh, yeah, it’s ‘Baker Street.'” And then: “Oh, right, Gerry Rafferty.” And then I would forget the name and artist, because I would spend the next half hour trying to remember who had sex to the song in which movie.
And by George Michael’s yacht: someone did. Either that, or the saxophone conjures a false memory of having sex in an urban landscape, with a view of the wet pavement, silhouetted against louvered blinds. The sex partner is someone with whom you had an affair ten years ago, but he’s married and you’re engaged, and his marriage is failing and your fiance is in a coma, or drives a Camaro. Or else you’re a teacher and he’s a former student. Or you’re dating his best friend.
Which scenario was it? I don’t know. I don’t remember. It’s right there, at the corner of waa-waa and do-do-doooo, but it keeps slipping away. Andrew McCarthy and Ally Sheedy. Kim Basinger and Mickey O’Rourke. Somebody had sex to this song, damn it, and the internet’s no help at all.
In any case, I knew I’d feature it this week, although there’s no video, since it was released in 1978. Just this live TV clip. And thank the heavens for the mid-morning DJ, because she said the name of the song, which I repeated five times, and then made my daughter repeat, for good measure. So I’ll never again forget that the name of this song is “Baker Street.”
One thing, though. Listening to it on the radio again, I realized something truly astounding: did you know this song has lyrics?
Was there really a period piece starring Carrie Fisher and Chevy Chase, set in 1930s Hollywood and revolving around the munchkin auditions for Wizard of Oz? And did it really culminate with Billy Barty, as a womanizing Nazi, being chased by a crowd of little people through the set of Gone With the Wind? Or was that just a flashback to some bad acid we did at a Phish back in the early 90s. Well, … I … erm … I’m not sure. Those Phish heads had some seriously mind-bending sh#t. So I’m probably to wrong person to ask. Here, look at this video and tell me if you see it too.
slumber party movies 