max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

1960s on mon
1970s on tues
1980s on wed
1990s on thurs
2000s on fri

featuring the fine musical stylings of: the beatles, the rolling stones, t.rex, serge gainsbourg, yo la tengo, the kinks, harry nilsson, ike & tina turner, antony, aretha franklin, wilco, elvis, talking heads, stephen foster, dr. dre, bonnie 'prince' billy, elvis c., neil young, the smiths, dusty springfield, al green, jimi hendrix, r.e.m., ray charles, belle & sebastian, randy newman, cat power, the cure, queen & pavement

i write for the n.y. observer, email me at mabelson at observer.com

"mtv makes me want to smoke crack." - beck

see the archives, or a random post.

"i just happen to be here, and it's okay." - caetano veloso

"it took me about three or four weeks to toilet train my cat, nightlife. most of the time is spent moving the box very gradually to the bathroom. do it very slowly and don't confuse him." - charles mingus

"his wife was a spent piece of used jet trash, made good bloody marys, kept her mouth shut most of the time, had a chihuahua named carlos that had some kind of skin disease and was totally blind." - tom waits

"after cheesecake with all of your friends and family, who's gonna front the bill? me... say you want to take first-class trips, well i want to work those first-class hips. yes i do." - r. kelly

"situations arise because of the weather. and no kinds of love are better than others." - lou reed

"my mother used to tell me about vibrations. i didn't really understand too much of what that meant when i was just a boy. to think that invisible feelings, invisible vibrations existed scared me to death." - brian wilson

"hey there, hey now, well, you can make a pacemaker blink, yeah, easy thing, make a man's heart go bibbity bom like a gentle drum, dirty ass rock and roll, dirty ass rock and roll. - john cale

"i got the hardest bars, call me the warden. yeah excuse me, pardon, i break a bitch down like tonya harding." lil wayne'

"i'm dealing in rock and roll. i'm not a bonafide human being."- phil spector

"at a certain point phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the revolver into my neck and said, 'leonard, i love you.' i said, 'i hope you do, phil.'" - leonard cohen

tom wolfe mentioned about phil spector: "we were having coffee or something to drink, i forget, at 2 am at the plaza hotel. phil had this long hair, down to his shoulders, he’s a very strange looking guy, it’s, well, anyway, this was before longish hair was everywhere, it goes back. i could see at this table nearby, there were two couples, i remember, they were older people, at least in the 60s, they’d whisper at each other and look at phil and whisper at each other. finally this lady, tanked, comes over to phil and says, 'alright, sonny, what’s your problem?' and he said, 'premature ejaculation, what’s yours?'"

"i bite my nails and if that fails i go get myself stoned, but when i do i think of you and head myself back home" - gram parsons

woody allen's reasons to live: "i would say groucho marx, to name one thing, and willie mays, and the second movement of the jupiter symphony, and louis armstrong’s recording of potatohead blues, swedish movies, naturally. sentimental education by flaubert, marlon brando, frank sinatra, those incredible apples and pears by cézanne, the crabs at sam wo’s, tracy’s face."

"the first time i got stoned on grass was with john paul jones of led zeppelin. we'd been talking to ramblin' jack elliott somewhere and jonesy said to me, 'come over and i'll turn you on to grass.' he had a huge room with nothing in it except this huge vast hammond organ, right next door to the police. i ate two loaves of bread. then the telephone rang. jonesy said, answer that for me will you? so i went downstairs to answer the phone and kept on walking right out into the street." - david bowie

brian eno songs that will make good book titles for my 10-volume memoir, in order: here he comes, baby's on fire, golden hours, brutal ardour, taking tiger mountain, events in dense fog, through hollow lands, some of them are old, everything merges with the night, dead finks don’t talk

ry cooder albums that every man should own: into the purple valley, boomer's story, paradise and lunch

#1 song on the white album (tie): long long long, happiness is a warm gun

"it's the word i'm thinking of, and the only word is love." - john lennon

thelonious monk's middle name: sphere

"really, we don't want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff" - radiohead

"if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed." - bob dylan

"i love songs about horses, railroads, land, judgment day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak and love. and mother. and god." - johnny cash

"i hope that you all out there, young, old, tall, short, fat or thin, quick or slow, no matter what kind or color or shape or person you are, if you like to make music, why, go ahead, don't let the microphones and loudspeakers faze you, make some yourself.” - pete seeger

"but chuck berry isn't merely the greatest of the rock and rollers, or rather, there's nothing mere about it. say rather that unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports chuck berry as well as it does marcel proust, we might as well trash it altogether." - robert christgau

mashable.com says about the spectacular: "you can expect the unexpected with this awesome gem. groovy."

the 33 1/3 book series' blog says: "whenever i start playing around on youtube i always end up watching that lady fall over while stomping grapes, so it's nice to have someone steer me in a more worthwhile direction."

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February 8

i forgot to mention my piece in last week’s observer, hank paulson’s dry heave, which is about the former treasury secretary’s very strange new autobiography. his book basically says that he and his colleagues were “making it up as we went along,” and it charmingly describes how he spent the financial crisis getting ill in front of an american flag, in a bathroom stall, and in front of senator judd gregg. also, his memoir is like tolstoy: it gives the very unsettling sense that world history is decided by an assortment of guys who are improvising, and may not be particularly good at it. except in mr. paulson’s book people are constantly dry heaving.

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#527: bill monroe - uncle pen (1965)

the nice thing about bluegrass is that even the jolly songs about fiddle-playing uncles end in death. it was like goth music with no black makeup and ten-gallon hats.

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February 7

what in tarnation was grizzly bear thinking when they sold a song for a super bowl commercial? truly, the wonderful piano plunks on two weeks will never sound as innocent. (although, on the plus side, i’ll forever associate drew brees with grizzly bear piano plunks). volkswagen should know that if you feature stevie wonder punching someone in your ad, you might as well just play a stevie wonder song. and plus they should have just quit while they were ahead with that nick drake ad.

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February 6

david bowie’s station to station: best inner sleeve of all time? weirdly the internet didn’t have a picture of it, so i took this photograph of my very own copy of the album just now.

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i forgot how good david bowie’s station to station was, but it’s the only thing that’s saving this non-snowy day. first of all, tvc15 is one of the best pop songs of the 1970s, and not only because it’s about an incident in which iggy pop thought his television was eating his girlfriend. but then word on a wing sneaks up on you, golden years is a toe-tapper, and the title song is terrifying and classic. david bowie learned that station to station was recorded in los angeles only afterwards, and it shows.

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February 5

#526: hercules and love affair - hercules theme (2008)

i spent a whole hour looking forward to the perfectly crisp half-sour pickle i’d be enjoying with my honey-ham-with-lettuce-and-swiss hero today, only to bite into a soft and mealy catastrophe. where has the world’s crunch gone? the winter is limping. new york droops. funk just hit its 52-week low. that’s why it’s important to watch haphazardly made clips of pulp fiction’s vincent vega dancing to 21st-century disco made by people who grew up in denver leather bars run by lewdly named hostesses. wasn’t it george clinton who used to say that you can’t put the crunch back in the pickle, but you can put the pickle back in the crunch?

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February 4

#525: portishead - wandering star (1994, live on jools holland)

“are you ready and comfortable and lovely?” was not the right question for jools holland to have asked portishead just before they started playing a song that’s explicitly about blackness and darkness, and whose opening line goes, “please could you stay awhile to share my grief.” i wonder if any of the six million people who are going to be listening to portishead’s dummy during tonight’s carnal relations will be listening to the lyrics, which are about the masks monsters wear to feed upon their prey (those are actual words from this very song).

to be fair, jools holland was probably not thinking about portishead at the time he introduced them—i’ve always assumed he spends absolutely every single waking moment of his life regretting that he quit squeeze before they recorded tempted.

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February 3

#524: t.p.o.k. jazz - testament ya bowule (1987)

besides the fact that he made 150 albums of sorcerous congolese rumba, the insanely great thing about franco is that his band, t.p.o.k. jazz, fostered generations of outrageously good musicians. and so even though he doesn’t play on this clip (the singer is malage de lugendo), his band sounds like silk. they show that you only need four acoustic guitarists playing incredibly finely for nine minutes straight to turn a song into something so fluid you can drink it with a straw.

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February 2

franco sounds as good as he looks (just listen to this and this).

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#523: franco & t.p.o.k. jazz - kadima (1975)

from now on i’m only listening to music that sounds like a cotton candy pillow on a bed of marmalade in a room of clouds in a house of bubblewrap overlooking a river of extra-pulp o.j. that feeds into a city where the citizens are short story writers and centerfolds from mid-70s playboys and their mayor is françois “franco” luambo makiadi.

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February 1

#522: willie nelson - funny how time slips away (and medley) (1965)

the fact that all five of last night’s grammy rock nominees are older than 50, and that their average age, according to my calculations, is 61.4 years, would lead a reasonable viewer to conclude that young people were not interested in (or good at) making superlative rock music last year. that is wrong.

so in january 2011, instead of nominating bob dylan, john fogerty, bruce springsteen, eric clapton, steve winwood, jeff beck, stevie wonder, booker t. jones, david byrne, elvis costello, levon helm, rambin’ jack elliott, loudon wainwright iii, willie nelson and (of course) neil young for grammys again, the academy should spend some of the ceremony showing clips of these glorious veterans in their prime (see above), take a few minutes to bring everyone up to speed on what they’ve been up to lately, and then dedicate the rest of the broadcast to serious quality time with the gloriously gaga and grizzly youth of today.

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January 31

i’m as happy as anyone that neil young won his first-ever grammy tonight, but i hope everyone across the globe can set aside their differences and agree that awarding the 64-year-old his first grammy for a boxed set makes as much sense as giving salinger a long-awaited pulitzer for the grocery list he penned last spring. maybe a few years ago the national academy of recording arts and sciences could have given a grammy to any of his seven absurdly perfect first albums? not to mention csny’s déjà vu. or songs like don’t let it bring you down, only love can break your heart, cortez the killer, down by the river, helpless and harvest moon. please see here for a list of neil young’s career highlights expressed as inequalities, if you’re into that kind of thing.

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January 29

#521: yoko ono (with antony hegarty) - i’m going away smiling (2009)

this morning i had a delicious breakfast bar, drank some o.j., and then spent a half hour on the phone with yoko ono, who turns out to be a radically lovely person to talk to. “it’s just that i’m myself, and me, and whatever comes to me, at the time, tends to be something probably, i don’t know, au courant, but then, it’s me, as usual,” she said. she offered some more future classics (to be used in an upcoming nyo article) like: “i think i’m wiser now. well. i hope i’m wiser. i make so many mistakes every day—oops!”

it turns out that she does not listen to 60s pop music. “i’m an emotionally frail person,” she explained. “i don’t listen to anything. i just listen to the music in my mind. it’s wrong to say i don’t listen to anything. you know what i listen to? i listen to john’s songs, because i have to. have to is not the right word. almost every day, i listen to it because people request it—‘can i use it?’ and for relaxation i listen to indian music, old.”

on eric clapton, paul simon, thurston moore, jim keltner, and the other guests at her upcoming brooklyn academy of music concert, she said: “each one of these people—people? these stars!—i know them personally.” basically it was like conversing with the inspiring elementary school art teacher i never had. “just remember, you’re talking to me,” she said at the end. “we’re talking the same way, we’re on the same page. you’re 25—don’t think i’m not 25.”

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January 28

why a close-up from joan of arc was never put on the cover of a smiths album (or single!) is anyone’s guess. this charming man got jean marais and what difference does it make got terrence stamp, so morissey could have at the very least considered renee falconetti for pretty girls make graves and/or cemetery gates.

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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

cat power playing her version of the velvet underground’s i found a reason at her joan of arc concert in viking union hall, may 1999. download it here, and rejoice.

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