I wouldn’t normally post this for a Friday Morning Video–I wasn’t much of a Hüsker Dü fan back in the day–but I was inspired this morning. We’ve had constant rain for six days–and when I say constant, I mean rain has not stopped falling from the sky in six days. Monday morning I came downstairs with my daughter, who protested, “Mommy, it’s not day yet!” That’s what it’s been like around here. Not just gray, but dark.
So imagine my delight this morning when I awoke to an almost-dry sidewalk–it hasn’t rained in six hours, at least!–and from my current vantage point, I can see bright clouds over the neighborhood of Munhall. Not sunshine or anything, mind you. Just brighter clouds. In fact, they’re the light yellow that an old bruise gets. Yesterday, the whole sky was a fresh black-and-blue mess. Today? more of a sickly ivory.
In celebration of this almost-break in the weather, I share this song, which you might recognize from my Unfathomably Good Music mix tape. Seeing as how the bright spots are over his neighborhood, I choose to thank the late, great Drew Martin for this little bit o’light brightening up our morning.
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.
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?
Someday we’ll do a Tuesday Tribute to the hilarity that is Julie Brown (not Downtown Julie Brown, because she was the opposite of funny) but the Julie Brown who brought us “I’m a Blonde,” “Just Say Julie,” and a dozen other brilliant moments from when the M in MTV stood for music.
But not today, because it’s Friday and tomorrow is Homecoming, bitches. That’s right: I’m heading to my 15th college reunion. Like in 1-5, like in if I’d had a baby when I graduated from Bethany College, she’d be studying for PSATs and getting her learner’s permit. Fortunately, though, I postponed parenthood and the internet went viral, so here I am, sharing this gem with you.
What I really love about this particular YouTube clip is that it was recorded from “Just Say Julie”–and I think it might even have been the episode in which Julie has PMS and fires her entire crew, and spends the entire show eating Oreos and weeping. It’s also the episode in which she’s watching “Lost in Your Eyes,” and she says, “Debbie Gibson’s wearing a hat. I don’t have the CHEEKbones for a HAT!” a line which my sister and I still use when we have the opportunity to try on a fedora.
Of course, this song would never have been written today, because in the intervening years, too many kids actually HAVE gone Carrie on their classmates. So this tribute to psychopathic, gun-toting high school students, waging a massacre against their fellow partygoers, is really a swan song of a more innocent age. We miss you, Debbie.
I returned from vacation this week to find that fall had fallen like Robert Downey Jr. down a K-hole. (Did they have K-holes in the 80s? No matter, he probably did it at some point.) So it’s no coincidence that all week I’ve been singing this spectacular song. No, the leaves aren’t brown yet, but the sky is most definitely a hazy shade of winter.
Unless it’s anything ever written and performed by Bob Dylan, I usually like original versions of songs better. “Hazy Shade of Winter” is an excellent example of a number that that started as a reasonably well-performed ditty by two of the greatest harmonizers in history; it rocks a little harder than most Simon & Garfunkel songs, but that’s like saying James Spader was slightly less douchey in “Pretty in Pink” than he was in “Less than Zero.” Enter The Bangles, who started off in the LA punk underground, but leaped into the 80s pop scene with all the energy of 99 luftballoons rising into the German sun. A few crocodiles and donuts later, and they had all the street cred of Justin Timberlake, pre-SNL.
Then they got hired to do a song for a soundtrack. “Less Than Zero,” for those that have forgotten, stars James Spader in the 80s with a twist (he’s a drug-dealing douchebag, instead of just a plain ol’ douchebag), Andrew McCarthy as a sensitive friend, Jami Gertz as the sensitive girlfriend, and Robert Downey Jr. as himself. The movie has cocaine and blowjobs for cocaine and sports cars and hot tubs, and it’s currently being used as a tutorial for speechwriters too young to know how fucking radical the Reagan years were.
But that’s aside from the fact that The Bangles took Simon and Garfunkel and turned that shit up to twelve. Rumor has it that Art Garfunkel’s hair straightened in response to the four-part harmony, driving guitar and pounding drums. No firm report on what happened to Paul Simon, but it’s said he disappeared into Africa for several years, wondering how four young lassies had managed to rock harder than the guy who actually was a rock.
Aren’t you lucky? I randomly heard this blaring from the PF Chang’s parking lot last weekend. (No, I wasn’t eating at PF Chang’s.) The whole video’s pretty spectacular, but really, the reason we love it is the last minute, featuring the greatest outburst in a theater, ever. I like to think that she spent the last month or so of their terrible relationship quiet as a mouse, just knowing that he had tickets to Debussy or some equally lame symphony, and that she knew his boss would be there, and that he spent $400 per ticket, and that he got a demotion on Monday.
OK, so it’s not a video. It’s a movie clip. But I’m in Chicago for business, staying at the corner of Madison and Wabash, and I had to share something appropriate. I tried to think of Chicago-themed videos, but I could come up with was 1) songs sung by Chicago, and “Stay the Night” will likely be featured here someday; and 2) John Hughes movies.
But really, most teen movies in Chicago occurred in the suburbs, with occasional excursions into Big Scary Downtown, or Big Scary South Side. This movie was no different, except traveling into Big Scary Downtown was actually what the entire movie was about: stealing mom’s car, running away from home, clinging to the side of a building, Elisabeth Shue, and a slightly embarrassing, completely gratuitous musical number: this is what hijinks were all about.
P.S. If I remember correctly, my sister promptly asked for a wool duster and long scarf after the movie came out. I wonder if the few true geeks that lived in the 80s thought she was emulating the Fourth Doctor.
My brother gets married tomorrow, to a fabulous woman named Anne. I love them both and can’t wait until she’s in our family, so she can commence abusing him the way we big sisters always have. My daughter is one of her flower girls, and tomorrow is sure to be a long, exhausting day for all of us, and it’s going to be a blast.
In honor of the occasion, I wanted to post a wedding video. There’s “White Wedding,” of course, and that Dixie Chicks song from the awful Julia Roberts movie. I’m sure there are loads more. But none of them qualify so well as this 1986 classic from the Georgia Satellites: guys on a flatbed playing southern rock, tooling along a summer countryside, probably batting away mosquitoes and chiggers between guitar strums. Granted, this landscape looks too flat to be in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley, but it’s pretty damned close, what with the rockin’ spirit, spiked punch, humidity and tradition. All that’s missing here is the rigatoni, halupkes, and tarantella.
So Anne and Jimmy, here’s your e-card. Yeah, yeah, you say you’re not producing any nieces and nephews for at least another twelve or so years, so no shotguns will be involved. But an auntie can dream.
P.S. SO EXCITED for the rigatoni. And also wedding soup. There better be wedding soup.
The first time I saw this video, I was sitting on the floor of Amy Brezovsky’s living room, eating popcorn, at 12:30 on a Friday night. We had just gotten through doing our own videos upstairs (mine was “Like a Surgeon”) and ran downstairs to catch FNV.
I find his pants every bit as amazing as I did that night.
slumber party movies 