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 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


"sing a simple song but keep the swing strong." -de la soul


"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


"i’ve still got things inside me—sad things, happy things—that people don’t know about." -loretta lynn


"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


"gotta think straight, keep a clean plate." -joanna newsom


"keep a clean nose, watch the plain clothes." -bob dylan


"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


"i'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset." -lou reed


"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. -john cale


"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


"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?'" -tom wolfe


"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."


"i'm going to boogie my scruples away" -lowell george


"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


"the only word is love." -john lennon


thelonious monk's middle name: sphere


"think about something else. was art tatum talented?" -charles aznavour in shoot the piano player


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


"i don't rap fast, i rap slow, 'cause i mean every letter in the words in the sentences of my quotes." -lil' wayne


"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


"the moon is clear, the sky is bright, i'm happy as the horse's shite." -the pogues


"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."


see album covers, photos, posters, quotes & staches


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2008: j. f. m. a. m. j. j. a. s. o. n. d.


2009: j. f. m. a. m. j. j. a. s. o. n. d.


2010: j. f.


Creative Commons License
January 14

#512: chrissie hynde (with nick cave) - i’ll stand by you (bbc, 1999)

it’s wrong that the 80s gets all the power ballad attention. with no disrespect to every rose has its thorn, it was in the 90s that stephanie seymour walked down axl rose’s aisle for ten and a half minutes while aerosmith outdid all the gems on get a grip with an interstellar slow jam. and then there’s the pretenders’ monumentally under-appreciated i’ll stand by you: this performance includes the velvet underground’s john cale looking on and nick cave slightly messing up key changes, plus there’s a joke about oasis. and god bless chrissie hynde, who came close to starting a band with the clash’s mick jones and marrying the kinks’ ray davies, but could beat both in arm wrestling.

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August 10
the only thing better than ray davies’ late-60s songs were his mid-60s trousers.

the only thing better than ray davies’ late-60s songs were his mid-60s trousers.

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#427: the kinks - autumn almanac (1967)

nostalgia for elderly english agrarian ideals doesn’t sound like it would make for good late-60s pop music, but this is the world’s least boring song about rheumatism, roast beef, dew, breezes and toast—just like village green preservation society is history’s best album about saving “little shops, china cups, and virginity.” one reason ray davies got away with so many victorian ditties about the weather and his tea (or sunsets) is that they were always at least half-ironic—the other reason is that his songs were smarter than everyone else’s, except lennon/mcartney’s.

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“oh, my autumn almanac, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“oh, my autumn almanac, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

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March 24

#337: kinks - holiday (1972)

wobbliness is the world’s great secret weapon. one of the enormous pleasures of listening to billie holiday or gram parsons or ry cooder or neil young or wayne coyne or tom waits or shane macgowan is having to pray quietly that they don’t stagger and stumble and fall overboard. but a good wobble always maintains itself! except then there’s early-70s kinks (and late-60s kinks, too), who didn’t just sound like a klezmer band lost on new orleans highways, they sounded like their schoolbus had fallen into a pit of rusted clarinets and hooch.

their wobbliness made it impossible to even do proper band introductions (“john gosling on the organ! mr. john gosling!! gosling!!”), but it’s also a kind of wobbliness that sounded awfully good when there was a 3-man brass section playing along.

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the kinks were a sharp group of lads before all the dizzy wobbliness kicked in.

the kinks were a sharp group of lads before all the dizzy wobbliness kicked in.

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December 8
another reason kinks guitarist dave davies may greatly dislike kinks frontman ray davies is that ray got to be in all the magazines, as evidenced above. i think i would really, really adore ray davies if he were my brother—on account of the fact that he wrote waterloo sunset and that in 1973 he turned up in whittingtom hospital in london dressed as a clown (!!) and said, “i’m ray davies and i’m dying.” why did he do that? “because i’d just come offstage and sunk a bottle of downers because i wanted to kill myself,” he later explained. “then i changed my mind. i was dressed as a dandy, it might have looked like a clown to everyone else. but even clowns can have bad days. i didn’t have time to change because i would have died. was it a cry for help? no, i liked that outfit.”

another reason kinks guitarist dave davies may greatly dislike kinks frontman ray davies is that ray got to be in all the magazines, as evidenced above.

i think i would really, really adore ray davies if he were my brother—on account of the fact that he wrote waterloo sunset and that in 1973 he turned up in whittingtom hospital in london dressed as a clown (!!) and said, “i’m ray davies and i’m dying.” why did he do that? “because i’d just come offstage and sunk a bottle of downers because i wanted to kill myself,” he later explained. “then i changed my mind. i was dressed as a dandy, it might have looked like a clown to everyone else. but even clowns can have bad days. i didn’t have time to change because i would have died. was it a cry for help? no, i liked that outfit.”

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#268: the kinks - death of a clown (1967)

the great tragedy of brotherly rock bands is that the lesser-known sibling always ends up going slightly insane—especially poor dave davies.

despite his famously fizzy, whirring guitar playing for the kinks, the third-best band in british history, he’s never gotten the ga-ga adoration bestowed on main kink ray davies, his older brother. and isn’t that a tad unfair? after all, dave davies co-wrote and sang death of a clown, which, even when compared to ringo starr’s octopus’ garden, is a pretty peppy late-60s whirligig. boozy but morbid psychedelia should make a comeback.

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dave davies’ susannah’s still alive isn’t bad either, but death of a clown wins because it has the verb “clag” in its opening line.

dave davies’ susannah’s still alive isn’t bad either, but death of a clown wins because it has the verb “clag” in its opening line.

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November 4

#243: the kinks - muswell hillbillies (1972)

the hillbillies and the novelists and the veterans and the rabbis and the welders and the professors and the flight attendents and the divorcees and the bellboys and the dentists and the roadies and the real estate brokers and the guitarists are all voting for change. down with the 20th century’s acute schizophrenia paranoia blues! up with hope!

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March 24

#80: elliott smith - waterloo sunset (1997, arizona)

at any point in time, from arizona to alaska, there is a sad and acne-scarred man in a teeshirt playing kinks songs on an acoustic guitar. and none of them will ever sound this humongously good and seem so massively upsetting.

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#79: kinks - waterloo sunset (1967)

if i had ten songs to take to a desert island, this would be one of them. the lyrics are hermitic, claustrophobic, cold and slightly creepy (“i stay at home at night”), but the music is feathery, sweet, and angelically harmonized (especially the sha la las). and that quiet clash makes for the loneliest song about love ever written.

but it’s not really a love song—unless it’s possible to be in love with the couples walking through the dusk outside while you’re alone at your window.

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