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 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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November 4

#475: tom tom club - wordy rappinghood (1981)

in 1980, david byrne put the talking heads on hiatus, so naturally bassist tina weymouth took her sisters and her husband and some friends to a dancehall in the bahamas to make the tom tom club’s debut album, a giant gulp of neon colored, double funky, triple poppy awesomeness. it’s also sort of a feminist triumph, considering the circumstances. and wordy rappinghood definitely made blondie’s rapture run home crying to its parents.

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August 19

#432: kraftwerk - tour de france (1983)

there would be none of aphex twin’s window licking, umbrella dancing and face melting, none of dr. dre’s world class wrecking, none of talking heads’ globe-trotting skinny-tie soul and none of the cure’s drip-drip-dripping, just to think of a few random examples, if düsseldorf’s bionic superstars, kraftwerk, hadn’t realized that hardware has so much technicolor funkiness.

so it’s gleeful news that the band has a tectonic remastered box set called 12345678 the catalogue coming out soon. computers everywhere are shedding tears of human joy; men are turning into electrons; computation is procreation! information is medication! vibration is sensation! transformation is revelation! conversation is desperation! discrimination is isolation! interpretation is termination!

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January 28

it’s always seemed unfair that the police were called new wave. isn’t new wave too cool to include the police? from now on only elvis costello, nick lowe and the talking heads can be called new wave, plus these guys on the cover of le new wave, plus maybe the cure’s first album, plus whichever members of blondie that is who’s standing far right on the cover of parallel lines. he had good hair. everyone else has to find a new genre name, like sad old synth-pop, or maybe something like power-mod, sire-squeeze, or electro-plastic.

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November 19

#255: talking heads - cities (1980, rome)

david byrne puts the arty in party.

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music magazines in april 1982 were way sweeter.

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June 20

#149: fatboy slim ft. david byrne & dizzee rascal - toejam (2008)

first of all, music videos are the new pornography.

secondly, why did fatboy slim just release an incredibly good song? is it 1998? the last time i listened to fatboy slim i was getting ready to ask lauren berkovitch to the laurel south summer camp social. (she said yes).

thirdly, david byrne is the only man alive who can begin a song with, “i was asking new york city, ‘do you like my clothes?’”

fourthly, i can’t understand a fucking word dizzee rascal ever says.

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February 7

good band photo #4: tina weymouth and grandmaster flash (laura levine, 1982)

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February 6

#24: tom tom club - genius of love (1981)

maybe this original version and its puppydog/girls-in-prison cartoon music video is better than the later live one? hard to say.

on the bright side, this has the verse: “i’m in heaven/ with the maven of funk mutation/ clinton’s musicians such as bootsy collins/ raise expectations to a new intention,” which was probably left out of the concert because george clinton’s musician bernie worrell (from his band parliament/funkadelic) was playing keyboards in the talking heads’ live band.

also, that rap with the word “bohannon” is better here, even though it’s still unclear who that is. (for the record, it was this man).

you may remember this song from mariah carey’s wondrous 1995 hit fantasy, which samples it. i remember mariah’s video because it was shot near my town (at creepy rye playland), and also because she roller-blades in it wearing heavy protective gear. plus, ol’ dirty bastard raps on the remix! the 90s were so swell.

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#23: talking heads/tom tom club - genius of love (1983)

you don’t think of the talking heads as a husband-and-wife act (like sonny and cher), probably because david byrne always seemed like the kind of guy who would only marry a quirky bowtie or a banana or maybe a big pink button.

but, sure enough, bassist tina weymouth was married to the drummer chris frantz—which is weird, because here he annoyingly yells out “james brown” a lot and has bad hair, while she looks like a perfect american apparel billboard (18 years before those ads existed.)

this is the only song in jonathan demme’s stop making sense (the insanely good talking heads concert movie) without david byrne, who leaves the married couple to play a song by their spin-off band, the tom tom club.

it kind of steals the show, especially her strobe-lit dance-off with the backup singers, or her two-legged side-to-side stomp at the end, or the lyric “we went insane when we took cocaine,” which isn’t in the original. the 80s were a groovy time.

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