max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

#470: r.e.m. - wendell gee (live, 1985)

young michael stipe fit three decades of extremely good hair styles into r.e.m.’s two best years: first the ’70s curls for the band’s 1984 t.v. debut, which a year later had grown into the ’60s jumble sported here (with ray bans, naturally), followed a few months later by the very short and very bleached 90’s look. bill berry’s hair changed too, but not for the better—though he looks quite good whistling here. more importantly, wendell gee, which doesn’t sound very interesting on record, quiets down to a pretty little attic ballad here, like tom waits’ georgia lee but slightly less devastating.

#390: tom waits - innocent when you dream (1988)

give tom waits a bathtub to stand in and a fezzed accordion player to sing along with and he’ll explain memory, sadness, love, sleep, infinity, friendship, softness and death. he casually gesticulates and women swoon; he rhymes “in the belfry” with “the arms that held me” and men weep.

#250: tom waits - time (1988)

logic, aesthetics, ethics, epistemology and metaphysics will never be able to fully explain the rapturous thing that happens when music is combined with video and the music video occurs. this is the super groovy music video extravaganza’s 250th video in its time on earth, and it’s a song about time, and it will fill your heart with rainwater.

#202: little feat (lowell george) - china white (and interview) (1977)

watching the near-death lowell george smoke cigerettes, make dirty jokes about tuning up to b flat (versus “taking it in the a”), explain slide guitar to what i think are a bunch of germans, playing them something quickly, and then impersonating ry cooder, is like sitting on a park bench with manet while he just sketches something quickly to amuse himself. except lowell george used more heroin than manet (which is what china white may or may not be all about).

by the way, some super funky little feat is here.

also, this rockpalast clip reminds me of this tom waits rockpalast version of step right up, which reminds me of this mysterious, magical scene of tom waits suggesting a threesome to an old woman after offering her hard candy, which, if you haven’t seen, is pretty much worth dropping everything for and watching over and over immediately.

#152: irma thomas - it’s raining (1962) (from down by law, 1986)

jim jarmusch, the man who can make dancing alone in a black and white kitchen to a tape cassette of screamin’ jay hawkins’ i put a spell on you the saddest thing in the world, makes roberto benigni waltzing quietly with his (real-life) wife to new orleans r&b—while tom waits and john lurie look on angrily—the sweetest, softest two minutes in film history. god bless down by law.

#125: tom waits - ‘til the money runs out (1980)

any man who writes a song as suave as this one (or this one, or this) owes the world nothing else, but tom waits decided to release an interview today, an interview with himself, that’s so incredibly good that it’s going to be the new testament for a new religion i’m founding called tom waitsism. (there’s even a heaven in the religion: “me and my wife on rte. 66 with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door.”)

this is his introduction, and it only gets better from there: “i must admit, before meeting tom, i had heard so many rumors and so much gossip that i was afraid. frankly, his gambling debts, his animal magnetism, coupled with his disregard for the feelings of others, his elaborate gun collection, his mad shopping sprees, the face lifts, the ski trips, the drug busts and the hundreds of rooms in his home. the tax shelters, the public urination. i was nervous to meet the real man himself.”

#83: tom waits - all the world is green (2002, new york)

you know what, i’m just going to come right out and say it here: all the world is green is my favorite tom waits song. it has everything anyone ever wanted: a vibraphone bass line that sounds like it was recorded somewhere below the oceanic crust, a double-lung clarinet solo that reminds me of new orleans, even though i’ve never been there, and lyrics like “i fell into the ocean/ when you became my wife,” or “marie, you’re the wild blue sky/ and men do foolish things.”

this is a song that cures disease, it makes crying infants giggle, it turns beggars into kings. and, cute tom waitsisms aside, it made the best scene in julian schnabel’s diving bell and the butterfly almost too moving to watch.

but is it really his greatest song? surely. 70s tom waits like closing time and small change are lonely lothario ivory-tickling classics (see here for proof), and 80s tom waits like rain dogs and swordfishtrumbones are caked in holy water and monkey barrel-aged whiskey, and 90s tom waits like mule variations has storytime sweetness.

but here there’s orange dew, white light, yellow silver, and scarlet velvet. and it even comes with an interview afterwards, with zingers like “the children seem to like me as a driver” and “everybody knows you at the dump.”

#74: monochrome set - eine symphonie des grauens (1979)

jesus fucking christ. the observer’s managing editor, tom mcgeveran, whose knowledge of incredibly cool british post-punk bands (usually that no one has ever heard of) is shockingly deep, just introduced me to something called the monochrome set. they wear sunglasses, sound like lou reed without wimpiness, and name their songs for german expressionist silent horror films.

here’s the band playing somewhere in minnesota in 1979, before they ever had an album out. i think this is the kind of music that tom mcgeveran and tom verlaine and tom waits (and maybe the ghost of serge gainsbourg?) listen to when they hang around chewing the fat, thinking about pompadours, arguing about the moral imperative and string theory, not answering the phone calls of doting models, and just generally being awesome. also they all smoke winstons.

#69: antony and the johnsons - hope there’s someone (2005)

when antony gets halfway through the line “oh i’m scared of the middle place, between light and nowhere,” he stops to cry.

it’s the most upsetting thing ever filmed—worse than if tom waits started weeping while singing the opening of train song: “well I broke down in east st. louis, on the kansas city line…i  fell down at the derby, and now the night’s black as a crow. it was a train that took me away from here, but a train can’t bring me home.”

#25: pavement - range life (1994)

the first (or maybe second?) thing i look for in a lady is a heartfelt appreciation of men with sub-par singing voices. bob dylan? tom waits? pavement’s stephen malkmus? they all made classic music, but god knows none weren’t blessed with pretty pipes at birth.

pavement is the favorite band of anyone who went to college in 1994, but i myself was 10 years old then, so the truth is i’m not completely crazy about the band. (still, i’ve always though slanted and enchanted and crooked rain, crooked rain were really top-notch album titles).

but this song, crooked rain’s twangy, mumbly, stoned indie-country gem, is hard to resist. especially the falsetto chorus! and the video tells us everything we always wanted to know about being an alt-rock superstar during the first clinton administration.

PS STONE TEMPLE PILOTS ARE ELEGANT BACHELORS

#16: joanna newsom - clam, crab, cockle, cowrie (2007)

last night i saw one of the most ecstatic, lovely shows of my life. this is what i wrote for the new york observer:

The hummingbird-voiced harpist Joanna Newsom played the first of two shows with the Brooklyn Philharmonic at BAM last night, and it wasn’t cutesy or quirky or kitschy.

It was glorious.

But four years ago, when she was 22 years and two months old, Ms. Newsom’s debut, The Milk Eyed Mender, an album of squeaky folk yarns about bridges, balloons, beans, books, peaches and plums, came awfully close to irritating. Here, the whimsical top-of-her-range squeals (“But ships! are fallible, I say/ And the naut!ical, like all things, fades”) were gone, and her soprano and harp glistened together.

Her album Ys, a five-song epic named for a flooded mythical city, was huge and pristine onstage: violins, voices, the harp, horns and harmonies shook and bent and swelled together until everything bulged and burst, and bubbled up again.

Whimsey is out, grandeur is in. The orchestra, arranged by the pop maestro Van Dyke Parks (he collaborated with Brian Wilson, produced Ry Cooder’s debut, and once declined to join the Byrds), has turned Ms. Newsom’s music around. She now sounds less like Joni Mitchell and more like Duke Ellington.

And, oh, did the beautiful Brooklyn audience like it. There were three standing ovations from the swooning young crowd. In the span of five rows, Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers sat with Andy Samberg (rumored to be dating Ms. Newsom); David Byrne was dressed in white with a yellow helmet, and was that Francis Ford Coppola filling out a BAM questionnaire alone?

The orchestra left for the second half, when her band—a drummer and a violinist who both sang, plus a banjo player that sometimes switched to a tambura—played old songs and two new ones. It was even prettier: “Inflammatory Writ,” the most irritating song on Milk Eyed Mender, had a honky-tonk lull; “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie” became a Tom Waits-worthy lullaby.

Even the banter was good. In the second set, the barefoot drummer held up an Obama shirt: “He has a more liberal voting record, more progressive, than Kucinich, even!” Ms. Newsom said. “My friend Jamie went to Nevada. We really love Barack Obama.”

“If anyone wants to talk,” the drummer said, “if you’re leaning in the other direction, just give me 30 seconds. I went door to door in Iowa!”

The world tour for Ys, backed by different local orchestras, ends tonight at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House.

#10: tom waits - tom traubert’s blues (1977)

i swear to god i’m not a crier, but tom waits makes me cry. in fact, right now i can’t make it all the way through tom traubert’s blues, because i’m in the new york observer’s newsroom, and there’s no crying at the new york observer.

what is it about tom waits’ godly voice? it’s catastrophic, it’s sickly, it’s ashy, it’s battered, it’s preposterous, it’s pained, it’s two decades too late for the beatniks and three too late for noir: it’s drugged, it’s funny, it’s boozy, it’s broken.

but when he sings about the old men in wheelchairs and the girls down by the strip-tease shows, and when he plays a little piano with a saxophone sideman, you’ll tear your shirt open and fall on your knees.