Okay, confession time: I am exhausted. Usually, when we have a big day like Oscar Sunday, I write out all my posts like a week ahead of time. I did not do that this time. So, I spent a good deal of Sunday just trying to keep up with the site and the day.
So, instead of doing my usual rambling about today’s music video of the day, I’m just going to thank all of our readers and subscribers and visitors. Your likes and your comments are really what makes this site worthwhile. We’ve been doing this for 10 years now and I still love writing for the TSL as much as I did my first day. Thank you for reading. Thank you for your indulgence. Thank you for being there.
“The story here is the miracle that we ever found that track. I was convinced – and I think Mick was – that it was definitely a reggae song. And we did it in 38 takes – ‘Start me up. Yeah, man, cool. You know, you know, Jah Rastafari.’ And it didn’t make it. And somewhere in the middle of a break, just to break the tension, Charlie and I hit the rock and roll version. And right after that we went straight back to reggae. And we forgot totally about this one little burst in the middle, until about five years later when somebody sifted all the way through these reggae takes. After doing about 70 takes of ‘Start Me Up’ he found that one in the middle. It was just buried in there. Suddenly I had it. Nobody remembered cutting it. But we leapt on it again. We did a few overdubs on it, and it was like a gift, you know? One of the great luxuries of The Stones is we have an enormous, great big can of stuff. I mean what anybody hears is just the tip of an iceberg, you know. And down there is vaults of stuff. But you have to have the patience and the time to actually sift through it.”
— Keith Richards on Start Me Up
Since today is Oscar Sunday, let’s start the day with a video that was directed by an Oscar winner.
Hal Ashby got his start as an editor and a favorite collaborator of director Norman Jewison. Ashby won his only Oscar for editing the 1967 best picture winner, In the Heat of the Night. Ashby then went on to become a director himself and, in that role, he was responsible for some of the most important films of the 1970s. Check out this list of credits: Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, Being There, and Let’s Spend the Night Together. All of these films were directed by Hal Ashby.
Let’s Spend The Night Together was a Rolling Stones concert film and I imagine that his work on that film is probably what led to Ashby directing this music video. Like a lot of the great 70s directors, his career struggled as people like Don Simpson took over Hollywood and the industry’s focus shifted away from empowering directors to keeping studio executives happy. While Ashby found himself practically unemployable in Hollywood, he was still able to make a living with work like this video and directing television episodes.
Hal Ashby died in 1988 of pancreatic cancer. Bruce Dern famously said that the way Ashby was treated in Hollywood was the “most disgusting thing” that he had ever seen over the course of his long career. Fortunately, movies are forever and Ashby’s work has since been rediscovered and continues to influence aspiring filmmakers all over. Richard Linklater is a huge fan and paid homage to Ashby with Last Flag Flying.
It takes a certain amount of courage to sing while a rat’s crawling on your shoulder and, in honor of that courage, here is today’s music video of the day!
The thing I like about this video is that it features a disco ball.
Seriously, every room should come with a disco ball. During my first semester away at college, I had a disco ball hanging in my dorm room. (Unfortunately, my roommate took it with her when the semester ended.) And I’ve currently got a disco ball in my bedroom that I occasionally hang from the ceiling. It just really livens up the house and, even more importantly, it keeps the spirit of disco alive. Plus, you don’t have to worry about a disco ball exploding or transforming into a carnivorous goo, like you do with a lava lamp.
Anyway, this is a simple video but I like it. It’s got a nice and calming atmosphere to it.
Now seems like as good a time as any to take a trip back to the 60s or the 70s and here to help us do just that is today’s music video of the day!
Myself, I always love these retro videos. My personal theory is that it’s because I was born a few decades too late. I love to dance and I love to have a good time and I used to love a few other things that were popular back in the 70s but I won’t go too much into too much of that here. It’s hard for me not to feel that I should have been born earlier so that I could have hit the discos or the go-go clubs or whatever else there was to hit back then. Hell, I probably would have even tried the whole punk thing. Sure, why not?
For the record, if I had been born like in the 50s or the 40s (or even the 30s, who knows), I probably would have voted for Kennedy in 1960 because he was Catholic and then I would have had to vote for LBJ in ’64 because he was a Texan. And I probably would have voted for Nixon twice and Ford once because why not? After the election of 1976, I probably would have said, “Forget voting, let’s dance!”
(Of course, if I had been born back then, I’d be like really old and bitter today so I guess I should just be happy that I was born when I was.)
Anyway, I like this video and I like this song. Good work all around!
So this video starts out with a good beat and two people getting close and really, that’s what we need in the world. There’s so many angry and bitter and angst-filled people out there that sometimes, we need a video to remind us that love is the best thing that there is and that there’s nothing wrong with getting close to one another and that….
OH MY GOD, DID SHE JUST RIP OUT HIS HEART!?
Well, maybe. She definitely removed something from his chest but he doesn’t look like he minds. I kind of think of this video gives us an opportunity to see what Grease would have been like it had been directed by David Cronenberg.
Once upon a time, there was a televangelist named Oral Roberts. Oral was very successful and he even had his own university in Oklahoma. One day, Oral said that he had a vision of someone telling him that he needed to build a hospital on the campus of his university and that, of course, he would need people to send him money to help him do that. That someone was Jesus and, according to Oral, Jesus was 900 feet tall.
Mark Griffin, a classically trained musician who had recently graduated from the University of North Texas, happened to hear what Oral said. Griffin, who had played in several local Dallas bands, was on the verge of launching a new career as a rapper. Griffin took the name MC 900 ft Jesus and the rest is history.
As MC 900 ft Jesus, Mark Griffin developed a strong cult following. He still has one, even though he retired from the business in 2001. (He had performed a few times post-retirement and there are annual rumors that he’s on the verge of making a comeback.) If I Only Had A Brain was one of his more popular songs, thanks to this music video from Spike Jonze.
“‘Grey Day’ was a definite step on for Madness. I remember going to a club with a copy of it and Joe Strummer was DJing. I asked him to put this on, because I thought I’d finally done something that he could dig, not just jumping up and down – but he wouldn’t play it.”
— Madness lead singer Suggs on Grey Day
Grey Day may not have been good enough for Joe Strummer but I definitely appreciate it.
The first version of Grey Day was first performed by Madness when they were still known as The North London Invaders. Three years later, they revisited the song and recorded it in the Bahamas “for tax purposes.”
The video was directed by Chris Gabrin, who was active in the 80s. He also did videos for The Cure, Culture Club, John Mellencamp, and Pat Benatar.
Through the Shattered Lens