While on a routine errand to buy a baseball mitt, Tom Petty pulled up to a stoplight and glanced over at the car waiting next to him. The other driver was uber producer Jeff Lynne. It was 1987 and Petty had been listening to George Harrison’s triumphant Cloud Nine, which Lynne had produced. So impressed was he by the sound and the songwriting of Harrison’s record that Petty had the former ELO frontman pull over in order to compliment him. Then he uttered the words that would change Petty’s life and kickstart the second phase of his career: “How’d you like to work on some songs together?”
At the time, Petty was in rebuilding mode. He and his storied band, the Heartbreakers, had just completed a world tour behind their album, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough).The Florida native was worn out from the constant battles with MCA, his record company, the tension within the band (in particular between Petty and drummer Stan Lynch), and just the grind of being on the road for most of the ’80s. Making matters worse, just before the tour an arsonist had burned Petty’s home to the ground. Literally, he was at a crossroads. The chance meeting with Lynne led to Petty co-writing Roy Orbison’s comeback single, “You Got It,” as well as the formation of the Traveling Wilburys, a laid back supergroup that included Petty, Harrison, Orbison, Lynne, and Petty’s old touring mate, Bob Dylan. Soon thereafter Petty and Lynne commenced on the landmark record, Full Moon Fever, Petty’s first solo recording without the Heartbreakers. (more…)
On the morning of November 21, 1980, the Los Angeles fire department responded to Don Henley’s call to help someone at his house who apparently was having a seizure. The person turned out to be a naked 16-year-old prostitute who had been taking large amounts of cocaine and Quaaludes. While Henley pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and admitted the girl arrived after he called a madam to find girls to party with, he still claims that he didn’t have sex with her, didn’t know how old the prostitute was, and didn’t know how many drugs she was doing–he seems to place the blame for her mass ingestion on roadies who were at his house. In the end, Henley got a fine and two year’s probation, and avoided any harsher drug or sex-related charges. [1]
If this was merely an isolated speed bump along the road of life…well, I wouldn’t be writing this article. Fact is, Henley has had a long history of debauchery in his past. The book You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again — a tell-all from four high-priced call girls with celebrity clientele — goes into Henley’s love of coke orgies. I once saw a comic in Los Angeles that “acted out” a supposed event from the book, where multiple prostitutes visited Henley in his hotel room. I won’t go into detail, except one of the call girls mentioned that she had never in her life been around anyone who reeked more of alcohol than Henley. (more…)
Janet Jackson may have declared her independence from her famous family with 1986’s Control, but the youngest of the nine Jackson children made it known that she would be more than a one-album wonder three years later with Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814. Guided by the production team of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis for the second time, Jackson made one of the decade’s most forward-thinking R&B albums, fusing pop and soul melodies with a hard-edged, hip-hop derived sound. As audacious as Control was (and I can’t think of that kind of album made by a female R&B singer before it), Rhythm Nation is (and probably will always remain) her career’s crowning achievement.
With Rhythm Nation, Janet decided to look at the world around her and make an album that was themed around having a social conscience. Of course, political music was nothing new in R&B music. Back in the Seventies, Marvin Gaye, The Isley Brothers and Stevie Wonder, among others, spent as much time singing about political and social issues as they did singing about love and relationships. However, by the late Eighties, R&B had almost completely moved to the bedroom, while hip-hop had taken over as the genre to check out if you wanted to know what was going on in the world (to say nothing of rock acts like U2, Midnight Oil and Tracy Chapman).
Jackson got the idea for the album after learning about “nations,” groups of young people of various backgrounds who banded together to form sort of an intelligent alternative to street gangs. She decided to create a “nation” of her own, one that would center around music and dance as a means to discuss modern ills like racism, illiteracy and homelessness. Heady topics, to be sure, and granted, you’re not going to get much in the way of profundity here; after all, this is a Jackson we’re talking about . However, Jackson’s utopian, colorblind worldview resonated with her young, multi-ethnic group of fans, and with grooves as slammin’ as the ones Jam & Lewis cooked up, who cares about the words anyway? (more…)
Do young people still read Doris Lessing? When I was a youth, The Golden Notebook was, after a generation or more as part of the underground canon — those books that are passed hand-to-hand with a friend’s reverent assurances that This will totally blow your mind — beginning to pass into the academic curriculum. And once those books land on the syllabus, they are often never read again. Not really read, anyway. Oh, the undergraduates still struggle through them out of a sense of duty, but they’re not found and absorbed as they once were. Certainly, at the time, The Golden Notebook was still much talked-about both as a vital text of second-wave feminism and as a great novel in its own right; Lessing uses the semi-autobiographical figure of Anna Wulf to express, in a distinctly female voice, nothing less than the discontents of the modern human condition.
When I finally got around to reading The Golden Notebook, I was taken with its craft, its control, its insight. Most of all, Lessingimpresses with her ruthlessness. The book is unsparing in how it dissects the ways in which we damage each other while trying to create a finer world — how readily we will betray and sacrifice one another when a sufficiently lofty goal is dangled under our noses. It’s a novel of enormous power, even today; but if The Golden Notebook was not a blinding revelation to me in the way it examines the pitfalls and possibilities of love and art, and the traps of economics and activism, I cannot entirely chalk it up to the forty years of transformed social and sexual landscape separating me as a reader from Doris Lessing as a writer.
No, mostly I think it’s because, by the time I read The Golden Notebook, I had already heard and absorbed Kirsty MacColl’s album Kite. (more…)
By the time Shawn Colvin signed with Columbia Records in 1988, she was a beloved figure at folk-music clubs around the nation – and particularly on the East Coast, from the Birchmere in Alexandria, Va., to Club Passim in Cambridge. She had been kicking around the scene for years, first fronting rock bands during the ’70s and then emerging (along with her friend Suzanne Vega) as perhaps the quintessential Girls With Guitars for the ’80s. She usually (though not always) toured without a band, and she got her piercing songs across with nothing more than her emotive alto and the astounding colorations she coaxed from her acoustic instrument.
The cassette Colvin sold at her gigs while she was still an unsigned artist – which she creatively titled Live Tape – had become something of a sensation, as soundboard recordings sold at folk clubs go. It showcased a fully formed artist with a trove of terrific songs, and it got passed around so much that its audience far surpassed the number of people who had actually seen her perform. (I obtained a copy of it from a friend a couple months before attending my first Colvin concert, an opening slot for k.d. lang at the Birchmere during the summer of ’88.) Her ascension to major-label status was clearly just a matter of time, and the folk community was understandably thrilled when reports surfaced that she had signed a contract and headed into the studio with her boyfriend, John Leventhal, producing.
They weren’t quite prepared for the album that would emerge in October ’89. (more…)
In Bull Durham, Kevin Costner’s character Crash Davis chides Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins) for his laziness and lack of focus on the game of baseball. “You got a gift,” he says. “When you were a baby, the gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt. You got a Hall-of-Fame arm, but you’re pissing it away.”
Likewise, when Michael Bolotin (later, Bolton) was born, the gods reached down and gave him lungs of reech Coreenthian leather—a multi-octave range, filtered through a gruff, almost sandpaper-like delivery. But saying Bolton can sing is like saying George Bush can speak English: big deal, what’s he done with it? The issue is context. His early solo work in the 70s was crap—miscast as a Joe Cocker wannabe, he tried his hand crooning stuff like “These Eyes” and “Time is on My Side,” with no particular distinction. His two-album stint as the lead singer of Blackjack was similarly underwhelming—muddy production and faceless instrumentation (by Bruce Kulick, Sandy Gennaro, and Jimmy Haslip, all of whom would go on to more distinctive work elsewhere) left the listener feeling damaged in some significant way.
No, it was shortly after Blackjack, 1983 and ‘84 to be exact, when Bolton found a niche that worked—that of the arena rock god. On both his self-titled ‘83 album and Everybody’s Crazy, which followed the next year, he was backed by flashy, hairsprayed sidemen, who provided the echoed drums and WEE-diddly-diddly gee-tar that helped put Bolton on the road, opening for Ozzy, Loverboy, and their corporate rawk brethren. In arena rock, he found a musical backdrop where his tendency toward histrionics fit, where it was even encouraged. Had he stayed with that style, who knows what might have become of him? He could be co-headlining with Poison this summer, or releasing a Journey-like comeback record through Wal-Mart. (more…)
It still seems strange that Tears for Fears, two Janov-loving introverts from Bath, were one of the biggest bands of the ’80s. In a decade defined by excess (Motley Crue, Guns ‘n Roses), sex (Madonna), outrageous fashion (Cyndi Lauper), blue-collar values (Springsteen, Mellencamp) and, conversely, fundamentalism (U2), Tears for Fears were the textbook definition of ‘one of these things is not like the others.’ That mantra applied to their albums as well; with the possible exception of Talk Talk, you’d be hard pressed to find a band that evolved over the course of its first three albums at the rate that Tears for Fears did. It stands to reason that they wouldn’t play gloomy synth pop forever, but no one could have predicted that they would trade it in for Beatle-esque grandeur.
The transition would not come easy, though. It would take three years, four producers (Clive Langer, Alan Whitstanley and Chris Hughes would all come and go before the band decided to produce it themselves, with the help of engineer Dave Bacsombe), and wheelbarrows full of cash. And it would all start with a piano player at a Kansas City hotel bar, of all places.
Touring behind their monster hit Songs from the Big Chair (1985) was taking a toll on Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith. They loved their new songs, of course, but the manner in which they were constructed — barring “I Believe,” the album was programmed and sequenced within an inch of its life — was starting to get to them. They felt paralyzed by their music’s lack of flexibility. One night, after a gig, Orzabal and Smith showered and headed down to the hotel bar to unwind, and promptly had their minds blown by a no-nonsense piano/bass/drums trio fronted by one Oleta Adams. Orzabal and Smith knew what they needed to do next: kick out the style, bring back the jam. (It would be almost 20 years before I realized that Orzabal may have been asking Paul Weller to quit his then-current band in favor of his former one with that line.) Their next album would be more organic, the work of men and not machines. And its lead single would be one of those unforgettable, ‘Holy shit I can’t believe what I’m hearing’ moments that simply doesn’t happen anymore.
I still remember the first time I heard “Sowing the Seeds of Love” on the radio. The big hits during the summer of 1989 were, well, there’s just no other way to say it: they were shit (Michael Damien, Martika, Bette Midler, New Kids, Milli Vanilli, “Batdance”). When “Sowing the Seeds” dropped in late August, it positively exploded out of the speakers, and exposed everything the DJ played before and after it for the pap that it was. From Chris Hughes’ spot-on Ringo impression to the mile-wide and sky-high chorus, “Seeds” wasn’t just Tears for Fears attempting to fix themselves; they were out to change the world. Unfortunately, the latter goal didn’t pan out — 1990 still stands as one of the worst years for pop music, in my mind — but with The Seeds of Love, they more than achieved the former. (more…)
For fans of pop music with integrity, the pop charts of 1989 were a desolate place. Between an avalanche of soul-sapping covers (Michael Damian, Michael Bolton, Martika), the blatant New Edition ripoff that was New Kids on the Block, and Paula Abdul dancing with a frickin’ animated cat … well, it was a tough year for those of us who had been raised on pop’s true originals, from Elvis and Pat Boone to the Monkees and the Archies.
How refreshing, then, that the biggest-selling band of 1989 was all about the music, not the image. Milli Vanilli sold 6 million albums and 4 million singles with an innovative blend of R&B and hip-hop that served as a template for the pop music of the ’90s. Best of all, the group resisted the movement toward video-friendly prettiness and vapid dance moves that characterized so much late-’80s pop.
Indeed, it’s a mark of Milli Vanilli’s trend-bucking pursuit of substance that, for months, record buyers gobbled up the band’s debut album Girl You Know It’s True without even once seeing the singers’ faces.
Milli Vanilli began in the fertile mind of German uber-producer Frank Farian, who previously had concocted the funky reggae-disco of Boney M in 1978 before hatching the brilliant idea of joining the musical genius of Toto with the iconic grandeur of Led Zeppelin – the result, of course, being Far Corporation’s 1986 classic “Stairway to Heaven.”
Two years later, armed with a new vision of an R&B/rap hybrid that could take over the pop charts, Farian assembled a crack lineup of expatriate-American vocalists in his studio outside Frankfurt. He named his new act Milli Vanilli, and later claimed the phrase meant “positive energy” in Turkish. (In fact, the phrase translates directly as “National Vanilli.”) Forsaking glamour in his search for the ideal marriage of voices and songs — he even released the group’s album in a plain black-and-white sleeve, to preserve an air of mystique — Farian emerged with an irresistible sound that dominated first the European charts, and then American pop radio for much of 1989.
Milli Vanilli’s initial recordings were released on a small independent label in Europe, which laid the groundwork for the band’s success by securing a dancefloor hit, “All or Nothing,” in 1988. It was their second single, however, that broke the European market open and captured the attention of American labels. “Girl You Know It’s True” was a cover version of a modest European club hit of a couple years before, by the group Numarx. (The song was co-written by Numarx’s leader, Bill Pettaway, who eventually was able to quit his job as a gas-station attendant and parlay his Milli money into a career as a session guitarist for Justin Timberlake, Missy Elliott and others.) (more…)
I was a pretty confused kid in 1989. Well, not a kid, really — I was 17 going on 18. I had a couple of hundred vinyl records, and David Foster was my guiding light , but when I bought my first CD player that year, I didn’t really know which direction to take my budding CD collection. I had calculated that Lionel Richie would release his fourth solo album in 1989. That didn’t happen. I hated my old favorite band, Chicago, with a passion after they disposed of David Foster and released the Diane Warren-infused trainwreck Chicago 19 in 1988, so I couldn’t care less what they were up to. Level 42 were more or less in shambles after the departure of Boon and Phil and I didn’t expect a new Toto album until the next year. Pet Shop Boys released the glorious single “Left to My Own Devices” but I wasn’t really into singles, and their 1989 remix album (Introspective) wasn’t great. The whole New Romantic/Sophisti-Pop movement was waning, and while I was still listening to Johnny Hates Jazz and trying to make my hair look like Clark Datchler’s with Studio Line, the girls in my class got into Guns ‘n’ Roses and suddenly they dug long-haired dudes on motorbikes.
I had one foot planted on the dancefloor at the time as well, but Italo Disco didn’t sound quite as appealing to me as it had in 1986, and Black Box’s “Ride on Time” wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. I tried to get into house music and bought a volume in the “House Sound of Chicago Megamix” series, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t for me. I was getting sick and tired of the synth gurus that used to thrill me in the mid-’80s — Jean-Michel Jarre was turning into Napoleon Bonaparte with a Laserharp, Tangerine Dream swapped their Moogs and ARP’s for rhythm presets on a cheap Korg Wavestation, and the Miami Vice/Jan Hammer thing wasn’t really happening anymore. And where was David Foster? Foster was almost invisible on record in 1989. Rock wasn’t really an option yet, and I didn’t get rap at all. So what was I to do?
One day after school I listened to the radio. They presented a batch of new releases, and suddenly I heard these sweet piano tinklings that reminded me of David Foster’s “Winter Games,” only slightly jazzier and with a snappy beat. Oh, yes. Jazzy David Foster with a snappy beat. Groovy. This couldn’t be wrong.
1989 found Elvis Costello in the throes of a full-on identity crisis. He had always been more than what the general perception gave him credit for; some of his earliest recordings were actually of a country-western variety, he had recorded an album of neo-soul (Get Happy!!,) cut a pop tune with Daryl Hall (”The Only Flame in Town”) and also a jazz track that could have put those who made their bones in the genre to shame (”Shipbuilding”) but still, the fans shouted for “Pump It Up” and “Radio Radio.” Perhaps his most obvious pitch for freedom from his alter ego’s tyranny came on the King of America album, credited to The Costello Show, with writing credits going to his birth name, Declan MacManus. The album featured almost all his signature styles in some form or fashion, but in 1986, the audience wasn’t having this de-invention. It would be his last album for Columbia.
Three years later, in what could only be considered a case of having your cake and eating it too, MacManus returned on a new label, Warner Bros., with a look vaguely similar to his feral Buddy Holly, only this time he was painted like a ghastly harlequin, beheaded, and mounted on a royal blue WB logo frame, a placard beneath the bizarre tableau reading “The Beloved Entertainer.” Here lies the genius of Elvis Costello, giving the public what they wanted AND the middle finger at the same time, for the album Spike is as much a departure as it is a symbol of everything the fans loved about him.
Reteaming with King Of America producer T-Bone Burnett, Costello and Kevin Killen brought a tight and focused sound to the proceedings, starting with the acerbic “…This Town…” where the musical machinations are paired with veddy-British misfit characters, all doomed beneath the chorus’ motto: “You’re nobody t’il everybody in this town thinks you’re a bastard.” EC was back — but ah-ah-ah, not so fast. The second song, a shuffling crime drama based on an infamous incident when Derek Bentley told Chris Craig, in reference to Sidney Miles, to ‘let him have it,’ was a sudden shock to the ear. “Let Him Dangle” recounts the event, the public reaction, and the underlying question: did Bentley mean “shoot him” or “hand over the gun” when he said, ‘let him have it’? This was as far from “Watching the Detectives” as one could get. (more…)
While on a routine errand to buy a baseball mitt, Tom Petty pulled up to a stoplight and glanced over at the car waiting next to him. The other driver was uber producer Jeff Lynne. It was 1987 and Petty had been listening to George Harrison’s triumphant Cloud Nine, which Lynne had produced. So impressed was he by the sound and the songwriting of Harrison’s record that Petty had the former ELO frontman pull over in order to compliment him. Then he uttered the words that would change Petty’s life and kickstart the second phase of his career: “How’d you like to work on some songs together?”
Janet Jackson may have declared her independence from her famous family with 1986’s 
The cassette Colvin sold at her gigs while she was still an unsigned artist – which she creatively titled Live Tape – had become something of a sensation, as soundboard recordings sold at folk clubs go. It showcased a fully formed artist with a trove of terrific songs, and it got passed around so much that its audience far surpassed the number of people who had actually seen her perform. (I obtained a copy of it from a friend a couple months before attending my first Colvin concert, an opening slot for k.d. lang at the Birchmere during the summer of ’88.) Her ascension to major-label status was clearly just a matter of time, and the folk community was understandably thrilled when reports surfaced that she had signed a contract and headed into the studio with her boyfriend, John Leventhal, producing.
In 
The transition would not come easy, though. It would take three years, four producers (Clive Langer, Alan Whitstanley and Chris Hughes would all come and go before the band decided to produce it themselves, with the help of engineer Dave Bacsombe), and wheelbarrows full of cash. And it would all start with a piano player at a Kansas City hotel bar, of all places.
Two years later, armed with a new vision of an R&B/rap hybrid that could take over the pop charts, Farian assembled a crack lineup of expatriate-American vocalists in his studio outside Frankfurt. He named his new act Milli Vanilli, and later claimed the phrase meant “positive energy” in Turkish. (In fact, the phrase translates directly as “National Vanilli.”) Forsaking glamour in his search for the ideal marriage of voices and songs — he even released the group’s album in a plain black-and-white sleeve, to preserve an air of mystique — Farian emerged with an irresistible sound that dominated first the European charts, and then American pop radio for much of 1989.
Three years later, in what could only be considered a case of having your cake and eating it too, MacManus returned on a new label, Warner Bros., with a look vaguely similar to his feral Buddy Holly, only this time he was painted like a ghastly harlequin, beheaded, and mounted on a royal blue WB logo frame, a placard beneath the bizarre tableau reading “The Beloved Entertainer.” Here lies the genius of Elvis Costello, giving the public what they wanted AND the middle finger at the same time, for the album 