1979 was a strange year in music. A year of endings, in a way. Sid Vicious died, Ozzy Osbourne left Black Sabbath… an old guard faded away. On the other hand, U2 went into the studio for their debut, Kate Bush went on her first tour, and new wave emerged from punk’s end. It was also the year, notably or not, that Berlin/New York cabaret performer Klaus Nomi broke, sort of. Nomi had been performing Wagner and Vaudeville in New York, and David Bowie, always on the make for unusual traveling companions, invited him to appear as a backup singer on Saturday Night Live. Bowie himself was in transition, leaving behind his high concept work with Brian Eno on his Berlin Trilogy (Low, ”Heroes,” and Lodger) and entering another high pop phase. It was an abrupt, but natural, shift for Bowie; tapping into Nomi’s art-pop affectations may have seemed a perfect way to bridge the two.
Bowie, Nomi, and flamboyant New York performance artist Joey Arias do three songs, reaching back to Bowie’s folkier times for “The Man Who Sold the World.” Bowie launches next into Station to Station’s “TVC 15” in a skirt and heels, while Nomi and Arias drag around a pink plastic poodle. For the last number, Lodger’s “When You’re a Boy,” Bowie perhaps invents the look of 80s new wave videos to come—from Peter Gabriel to the Pet Shop Boys—while wearing a life-size marionette costume. Some amazing mechanism, puppeteers offstage or Bowie himself, operates the oversized arms, and the whole thing takes SNL musical performances to a place they’d never been. Nomi was so impressed with the costuming that he adopted the huge plastic tuxedo Bowie wears during the first song as his own, wearing one on the cover of his first album and performing in it until his death from AIDS in 1983. The broadcast above took place on December 15, 1979.
Today we think of music videos, perhaps quaintly and not always correctly, as the cradle of modern Hollywood’s sense-overloading, logic-sacrificing, teen-targeting, “quick-cut” style. But the medium, especially in its formative years, offered a wide-open canvas not just to hacks, but to auteurs as well. Case in point: the British director, artist, and writer Derek Jarman, well known for features like Caravaggio, The Last of England, and Blue, but maybe even better-known, depending on which circles you run in, for his short films meant to promote songs from a variety of musical-cultural figures: The Smiths, Marianne Faithfull, the Pet Shop Boys, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, Bryan Ferry. At the top of the post, we see Jarman pushing the boundaries of the music video, intentionally or unintentionally, as early as 1979, with a 12-minute visual suite interpreting not one but three of Faithfull’s songs.
Jarman goes a minute longer just above for another, 1986 three-parter: The Smiths’ “The Queen is Dead,” “Panic,” and “There is a Light that Never Goes Out,” songs which allow him to fully exercise his penchant for nostalgia-saturated styles of footage and acid criticism of the direction of England. He would also collaborate with his equally satirical countrymen the Pet Shop Boys in the late 1980s and early 1990s on no fewer than four separate videos, two of which, both from 1987, appear below: “Rent” and “It’s a Sin.” What’s more, he directed their 1989 live tour, which featured not only elaborate costumes but whole new short films projected onstage. With his combination of theatrical sense and interest in abstract visual expression, Jarman must have seemed a perfect fit for such an aesthetically minded outfit as the Pet Shop Boys. Those qualities also placed him well to define the nature of the music video itself — in which, at its best, we can still detect his influence today.
Judging by behind-the-scenes footage of a beardless Jim Henson animating “Drums West,” a 1961 homage to jazz drummer Chico Hamilton, one good sneeze and the party would’ve been over.
Animation is always a painstaking proposition, but the hundreds of tiny paper scraps Henson was contending with in an extremely cramped working space seem downright oppressive compared to the expansive visuals to which they gave rise.
The finished piece’s construction paper fireworks are everything iTunes Visualizer function strives to be. Speaking for myself, I can’t envision any computer-generated abstraction opening a magic portal that suddenly allowed even a philistine like me to appreciate a brush solo steeped in 50’s‑era West Coast cool.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
To some directors, the music heard in their films seems as (or more) important than the images seen or the dialogue spoken. Maybe you’d make that case about Jim Jarmusch after reading — or, more to the point, hearing — our post on the music in his movies. And surely many Quentin Tarantino fans would regard a Reservoir Dogs without “Stuck in the Middle with You” or a Pulp Fiction without “Misirlou” as not Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction at all. In the booklet that comes with The Tarantino Connection, a collection of soundtrack songs from Tarantino’s movies,Tarantino describes his perhaps unsurprisingly musically-inspired method of film conception as follows: “One of the things I do when I am starting a movie, when I’m writing a movie or when I have an idea for a film is, I go through my record collection and just start playing songs, trying to find the personality of the movie, find the spirit of the movie. Then, ‘boom,’ eventually I’ll hit one, two or three songs, or one song in particular, ‘Oh, this will be a great opening credit song.’ ” Hence his use of Dick Dale, the “King of Surf Guitar,” for the opening credits of Pulp Fiction.
“Having ‘Misirlou’ as your opening credits is just so intense,” writes Tarantino. “It just says, ‘You are watching an epic, you are watching this big old movie just sit back.’ It’s so loud and blearing at you, a gauntlet is thrown down that the movie has to live up to.’ ” He goes on to describe the taking of songs and arranging them in a certain sequence in a movie as “just about as cinematic a thing as you can do. You are really doing what movies do better than any other art form; it really works in this visceral, emotional, cinematic way that’s just really special.” And did he already know, as he set Reservoir Dogs’ un-unseeable ear-slicing scene to that mellow, then twenty-year-old hit from Stealers Wheel, that “when you do it right and you hit it right then the effect is you can never really hear this song again without thinking about that image from the movie”? Certainly his use of Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” has fused the song with Jackie Brown and not the eponymous 1972 picture for which Womack originally wrote it. And who has Kill Bill anddoesn’t associate it with Nancy Sinatra’s version of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”? “I don’t know if Gerry Rafferty [a member of Stealers Wheel] necessarily appreciated the connotations that I brought to ‘Stuck in the Middle with You,’ ” Tarantino adds. “There is a good chance he didn’t.” But when it comes to understanding a song’s cinematic potential, Tarantino has long since proven he knows what he’s doing.
Quick note: If you’re not familiar with it, NPR’s First Listen site lets you stream new albums by major artists. And this week’s lineup deserves a special mention. First Listen is featuring Robert Plant’s new release Lullaby And… The Ceaseless Roar. The album, writes NPR, is “an expression of many kinds of rich, autumnal love: of the English countryside to which Plant recently returned after several years living and working in Nashville and Texas; of the musical diaspora he’s been exploring since Led Zeppelin first connected its American-inspired blues to North Africa in ‘Kashmir’; of the Celtic and Romantic literary lines he’s always favored; and of a woman, whom the songs’ narrator treasures but, for reasons upon which at least half of the album dwells, leaves behind.” You can stream it here for a limited time.
While at NPR, you might also want to hear Ryan Adams by, yes, Ryan Adams. It’s his 14th album, and, says The New York Daily News, it “goes all in for neo-classic rock. It draws on the kind of serrated riffs Keith Richards likes to hone — but weighted with the heavy bottom and burning organ of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.”
In 1968, Van Morrison cut tracks for what’s been called his “revenge” or “contractual obligation album.” The backstory, provided by Top Tenz, goes like this:
After a pretty unhappy couple of years with his label Bang Records in the mid-60s, Van Morrison wanted out. They demanded he deliver some more short and poppy stuff like Brown Eyed Girl, while he wanted to release 11-minute renditions of lion impersonations (which he did on the album Saint Dominic’s Preview.) The singer became so distraught with his label situation, that he slipped into financial trouble and had problems finding gigs.
Just when it seemed Morrison might never deliver on his musical potential, Warner Music stepped in and bought out his deal with Bang Records. There was still one small contractual detail though. Morrison was obliged to record exactly 36 songs for his old label, who would also continue to earn royalties off anything he released for the first year after leaving Bang. Not a patient man at the best of times, Van did the only thing he could think of: he recorded more than 30 songs in a single recording session, on an out-of-tune guitar, about subjects as diverse as ringworm, blowing your nose, a dumb guy named George, and whether he wanted to eat a danish or a sandwich.
You can hear “Ring Worm” above, and both “Want a Danish?” and “The Big Royalty Check” below.
Deemed unworthy, the songs Morrison banged out (cheap pun, I know!) weren’t released in the 1960s. They eventually saw the light of day, however, on the 1994 album Payin Dues, which happens to be available on Spotify for free. According to rock critic Richie Unterberger, the album ranks as “the least commercial music ever recorded by a major rock artist, and the nastiest spit in the eye of commercial expectations and contractual obligations.” But, there’s certainly an entertainment factor to the collection, and it should be noted that Payin Dues also includes some worthwhile tracks, including all of Van Morrison’s studio masters from the Bang years, plus the demo of “The Smile You Smile” and an alternate take of “Brown Eyed Girl”.
Last month we featured the particulars of novelist Haruki Murakami’s passion for jazz, including a big Youtube playlist of songs selected from Portrait in Jazz, his book of essays on the music. But we also alluded to Murakami’s admission of running to a soundtrack provided by The Lovin’ Spoonful, which suggests listening habits not enslaved to purism. His books — one of the very best known of which takes its name straight from a Beatles song (“Norwegian Wood”) —tend to come pre-loaded with references to several varieties of music, almost always Western and usually American. “The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami,” Sam Anderson’s profile of the writer on the occasion of the release of his previous novel 1Q84, name-checks not just Stan Getz but Janáček’s Sinfonietta, The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil, Eric Clapton’s Reptile, Bruce Springsteen’s version of “Old Dan Tucker,” and The Many Sides of Gene Pitney. The title of Murakami’s newColorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,writes The Week’s Scott Meslow, references Franz Liszt’s ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ suite, “which plays a central role in the novel’s narrative. The pointed reference isn’t exactly a major detour from Murakami.”
Given the writer’s increasing reliance on music and the notion of “songs that literally have the power to change the world,” to say nothing of his “ability to single-handedly drive musical trends,” it can prove an illuminating exercise to assemble Murakami playlists. Selecting 96 tracks, Meslow has created his own playlist (above) that emphasizes the breadth of genre in the music incorporated into Murakami’s fiction: from Ray Charles to Brenda Lee, Duke Ellington to Bobby Darin, Glenn Gould to the Beach Boys. Each song appears in one of Murakami’s novels, and Meslow even includes citations for each track: “I had some coffee while listening to Maynard Ferguson’s ‘Star Wars.’ ” “Her milk was on the house if she would play the Beatles’ ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ said the girl.” “Imagine The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin minus ‘Mack the Knife.’ That’s what my life would be like without you.” “The room begins to darken. In the deepening darkness, ‘I Can’t Go For That’ continues to play.” It all coheres in something to listen to while exploring Murakami’s world: in your imagination, in real life, or in his trademark realms between.
To listen to the playlist above, you will first need to download Spotify. Please note that once you mouse over the playlist, you can scroll through all 96 songs. Look for the vertical scrollbar along the right side of the playlist.
Photo above is attributed to “wakarimasita of Flickr”
A truly spectacular event, 1967’s “Christmas on Earth Continued”—a super-concert described in one promo poster as an “All Night Christmas Dream Party”—gets sadly remembered as the last major show Syd Barret played with Pink Floyd—ending the set dazed and motionless onstage, his arms hanging limp at his sides. Barrett’s breakdown wasn’t the only thing that kept this massive happening, “the last gasp of the British underground scene,” from taking off as it should have.
As the blog Marmalade Skies recalls, the concert, held in the “vast London Olympia,” had “hopelessly inadequate” publicity.” This, and a “particularly severe winter freeze” meant sparse attendance and “financial disaster for the organizers.” In addition, a planned film of the event failed to materialize, “owing to poor picture quality of the footage.”
Despite all this, it seems, you really had to have been there. The lineup alone will make lovers of 60s psych-rock salivate: Jimi Hendrix Experience, Eric Burdon, Pink Floyd, The Move, Soft Machine, Tomorrow… The Who didn’t make it, but the unbilled Traffic did. We’re lucky to have some of the footage from that winter night. Check out Traffic below (with a very young Steve Winwood), playing “Dear Mr. Fantasy.”
Liberal England blogger Jonathan Calder calls the Traffic clip “priceless” and quotes Marmalade Skies’ vivid description of the nights festivities:
Soft Machine, with Kevin Ayers resplendent in pre-punk black string vest, climaxed with the ultimate Dada version of ‘We did it again’ as Robert Wyatt leapt into a full bath of water, that just happened to be on-stage with them! At least, we assumed it was water.
Tomorrow powered through their unique mix of heavily Beatles influenced psychedelia. During ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ Twink (drums) and Junior (bass) performed a mimed fight whilst being subjected to the most powerful strobe light effects I’ve ever witnessed. Steve Howe was a revelation, moving from raga to classical to Barrett — style anarchy with an almost arrogant ease.
Traffic, still with Dave Mason, even performed ‘Hole in my shoe’. Steve Winwood was into his white cheesecloth period, and their music was so unlike anything else around that they occupied a totally original space. The song, ‘Here we go round the Mulberry Bush’ was very typical of their trippy, watery sound at that time.
Hendrix — voom! All light shows were killed for his performance. Noel Redding was constantly niggling Jimi, playing bass behind his head as Jimi performed his tricks with his guitar. It was the first time I saw Hendrix with his Gibson Flying Arrow, and the tension on-stage produced some electrifying music.
At the top of the post see Hendrix in backstage footage, effortlessly coaxing some beautiful 12-bar blues from that Gibson flying V. The film clips of him onstage—blowing an obviously very turned-on audience’s collective mind—will convince you this was the only place on earth to be on December 22, 1967.
And that fateful Floyd performance? We don’t seem to have any film, but we do have the audio, and you can hear it below, slightly sped up, it seems. The band were debuting their new 3D lightshow, which—as much as Barrett’s sad loss of his faculties—left quite an impression on the crowd. One anonymous commenter on Calder’s blog, who claims to have seen been in attendance at the tender age of 18, writes, “I was so impressed with the Soft Machine and Pink Floyd lightshows that I bought an old movie projector from a thrift shop and me and my flatmate spent hours putting color slides into the projector grate and watched them melt psychedelically on the wall.” No doubt impressionable youngsters all over the UK indulged in similar kinds of good clean fun, with Piper at the Gates of Dawn on the hi-fi. If like me, you were born too late to experience the zenith of the psychedelic 60s, then flip off the lights, let your trippiest screen saver take over, and listen to Pink Floyd deconstruct themselves below.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
