Last May I got the chance to hang out with Keith Olsen at his home in Genoa (Nevada, not Italy). My friend Pat was close with Keith and his wife, and I tagged along when she and her boyfriend Frank stopped by to see them one beautiful sunny afternoon.
I was so fortunate to have the opportunity to meet Keith. I got to see his home recording studio that featured a wall of artists he's worked with: Rick Springfield (Keith produced "Jessie's Girl"), Fleetwood Mac, Journey, Pat Benatar, Foreigner, Heart, Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake, The Grateful Dead, and countless others. Anytime you tune into one of the classic rock stations on Sirius, you're almost guaranteed to hear something Keith produced.
The four of us hung out in his living room, drank some iced tea and listened to Keith reminisce. I was full of questions, of course, and Keith had some really amazing stories about his years in the music business.
Just before we headed back to Tahoe, Keith called us all outside so we could help him feed the deer that had shown up at his property for their daily snacks. All these deer, just hanging out in his yard. He handed us some buckets of whatever he fed them (deer chow?) and about a dozen of these little cuties gathered around us, waiting patiently for their treats.
It was a magical afternoon.
Keith passed away at his home last month at the age of 74. Cardiac arrest. He is survived by his wife Janice, three children, and two grandchildren. You can read his NYT obit here.
Rest in peace, dude. You are a fucking legend.
Friday, February 24, 2017
RESCUED FROM OBSCURITY
Samantha Fox - "I Only Wanna Be With You"
Okay, I'm not even embarrassed by how much I love this one.
Samantha Fox was more of a household name in the UK and Europe, but she managed a few Top 10 hits in the US during the late '80s. She started out as a topless Page 3girl in 1983 at the age of 16 (okay, that's gross--but the age of consent in England is 16, so 16 in the UK = 18 in the US). At age 20 she "retired" from modeling and released her first record in 1986, Touch Me (I Want Your Body), an experimental, high-concept album that explored existential angst in the Reagan/Thatcher era (just kidding! It was bubblegum pop, of course). The title track shot to #3 in the UK charts and reached #4 in the US, which surprises me to learn--as I don't remember hearing it on the radio all that much--although MTV played the shit out of the video.
Sam Fox in the "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)" video
I recall liking the song okay, but Sammy herself just didn't resonate with me at the time. Maybe because with her hair, the rhinestones, and all that denim, she looked more like a long-lost slutty Mandrell sister than a hip MTV starlet.
Who will get this reference?
Nobody born after 1980, that's for damn sure.
So then Sam came back in 1987 with a self-titled album and a new single, "Naughty Girls (Need Love Too)" (the girl liked parenthesis even more than I do). That song hit #3 in the US and the album itself was big in other markets--again, mostly in Europe and the UK, as well as Japan--they love blondes there, apparently. I had a French pen pal around that time and he and I would send each other mix tapes and magazine clippings; I remember he sent me a French fanzine and Samantha Fox was all over it, along with a cute 14-year-old gap-toothed pop singer called Vanessa Paradis, who became famous years later as the longtime paramour of Johnny Depp. Anyhoo, I found Sam's "Naughty Girls" song amusing, but not enough to buy the single or the album. I was happy to see that she'd hired a new stylist and was no longer dressing like a wayward Mandrell sister, though.
A subtle difference perhaps, but a big improvement.
Then in 1988, when I was 15 years old and entering my freshman year at boarding school, Samantha Fox came out with her third album. This time, I broke down and bought the thing because of this fucking song. It was a guilty pleasure and I couldn't get enough.
Not gonna lie, I still adore this.
It wasn't an original, of course; Dusty Springfield recorded it first in 1963, then the Bay City Rollers did it in the '70s, along with a ton of other artists over the years (it's one of those old pop songs that tends to get covered a lot). But I have to say, I dig Sam's version the most.
Looking at the video today, I'm struck by how, well, mature she appears. Samantha Fox was only 22 years old here, but in a lot of these shots she looks like someone's 40-year-old mom. She'd be the "cool" mom, though, the one who reads Jackie Collins novels and buys four-packs of Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers for her teen daughter and her friends, "as long as you drink it here at the house, girls. And don't get too tipsy, now--I don't want to get in trouble with your parents! Haha!"
Come on, I can't be the only one who sees it, right?
I also liked the title track, "I Wanna Have Some Fun," even though it hasn't aged as well as "IOWBWY". (In fact, it's a bit terrible.) Still, I have vivid memories of getting my groove on to that one at The Victory,* dancing in a circle with my friends, doing the white girl thing: feet planted, lots of hip swaying, elbow and shoulder action, along with the occasional hair toss. It's how we rolled in '88.
Samantha Fox is still a public figure, although she hasn't recorded an album in several years. Nowadays she mostly pops up as a guest host on Loose Women (basically a UK version of The View) and reality shows like Celebrity Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here. Although she was romantically linked to KISS's Paul Stanley (!) in the '80s, since 2003 she has been an out-and-proud lesbian and was in a long-term romantic relationship with her manager, Myra Stratton, who sadly passed away from cancer in 2015. Sam is apparently dating again, however, and has been pictured with new girlfriend Linda Olsen in recent months.
Yay, I love a happy ending! :-)
*An under-21 nightclub in Evansville, IN. Do underage nightclubs still exist? I think they must be a relic of the '70s and '80s, since I can't imagine today's helicopter parents allowing their teens to shake their asses to raunchy club tunes til the wee hours of the night in a dark warehouse, with no adult supervision.
Yesterday, August 19, 2013 (at 2:18pm, if you want to get really precise) I turned 40. I'm happy about it.
I'm thankful that I survived my twenties, a very difficult decade for me (I'm hardly alone on that one; most people my age say they hated their twenties). It wasn't all bad; I did have some great times in my twenties. But I wouldn't want to go back.
My thirties were decent overall. Things started out crappy. I had a few minor nervous breakdowns between the ages of 30 - 32. But by the time I was 33 (2006) I'd hit my stride. I was feeling happy and confident, and had finally landed a job I enjoyed. My love life was spotty--as it often was back then--but I had some great adventures. Even with all the mistakes and missteps I made during my thirties, I don't regret a thing.
So now I've made it to age 40. I'm a published author, I'm happy, I'm content, I'm married. Comfy home, purring cats, fantastic friends, great husband.
It's all good.
******************************
Now for some fun.
This milestone birthday has got me thinking. I've been writing a lot about my early childhood, and I'm amazed by how much I remember, especially about 1970's pop culture. I was born in 1973 and was only seven years old by the time 1980 rolled around. But, as I've discovered, I've retained a lot from that decade.
1970's Kid
My mom was a housewife (I guess "homemaker" is the correct term now) for a good part of my early childhood. She kept a small transistor radio in the kitchen of our house in Greensburg, Indiana--this was before we moved to "the big city" of Indianapolis in late 1978--and my first memories of pop music involved Paul Simon, The Carpenters, and John Denver, piped through that little radio in the kitchen.
The song: Paul Simon 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover. The memory: I was about four years old and my mom was standing in the kitchen, making me a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. She was singing along to "50 Ways" as it played on that little kitchen radio. When it got to the "Hop on the bus, Gus!" part, I collapsed on the floor in a fit of giggles, picturing a little man named "Gus" hopping up and down on top of a school bus. My mom started laughing at me while I laughed my crazy little "Snoopy laugh" (as she called it), and the more she laughed, the more I laughed, and the longer the song played, the more we both laughed until she had to sit down on the kitchen chair and I was rolling around on the floor and my stomach hurt from laughing but I couldn't stop so I just laid there, all giggly and out of breath. It's one of my favorite childhood memories.
The song: The Carpenters Top of the World. (Oh man. Watch the video I linked to. It's adorable. Why can't we all be sweet and innocent like that again?)
I loved this song when I was a wee one, even though I didn't quite have a handle on the lyrics, as you'll see.
The memory: My dad worked in advertising, and occasionally his colleagues and their wives would come over to our house in Greensburg for dinner and/or cocktails. I was about four or five years old, so naturally I took it upon myself to provide the evening's entertainment whenever my parents had "company" over.
The grownups would be sitting in the living room, enjoying cocktails and smoking cigarettes and talking about Billie Jean King or Barry Manilow or the energy crisis or whatever grownups talked about in the seventies. The living room was in full view of the staircase that led up to the bedrooms. We had this giant brown leather beanbag chair, and I'd drag it over to the bottom of the stairs, climb to the top of the steps (it was only about seven steps--we had a split-level home) and shout:
"I'm on the top of the world, looking down on creation, and the only essplanation.....I CAN FLY!"
Then I'd take a running leap and cannonball down the seven steps into the big brown beanbag chair, to the delight of (most of) the adults. Their applause and laughter were like catnip to me, so I did it again and again. After about my fourth encore, my dad would say, "Okay, you're getting all wound up now. Time for bed." And then my mom would shepherd me to my bedroom even though it was WAY before my official bedtime and I hadn't even had dessert or watched Donny and Marie or anything. (Shut up. I liked The Donny and Marie Show). So unfair.
Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.
Some years later, I learned that my dad's boss (one of the guests who frequented my parents' little cocktail hours) used to nudge my dad and say, "You gotta get that kid into commercials."
Alas, my parents didn't heed that advice, and so I was doomed to a childhood of anonymity.
The song: Any and all John Denver songs prior to 1982 The memory: Jeez. So many. My mom loved John Denver, and his music was ubiquitous in our household when I was a little kid. He was almost like a member of the family; the sweet hippie uncle I never had. (My mom's brother is a very nice guy, but he's a rich Republican--a white sheep in a family of black sheep.) I was devastated when John Denver died. It really was like losing a relative. I wish he was still around. I think he could have had a career resurgence, now that the Baby Boomers are all old and nostalgic.
If I could narrow it down, I'd probably say my favorite John Denver-related memory happened in 2000, when I was 27 years old and in love with a sensitive artist type, a 23-year-old painter who ate, drank, lived and breathed 1960's and 70's acoustic folk music. He loved the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Peter Paul and Mary, Don MacLean, Jim Croce, and John Denver. This guy--okay, let's go ahead and call him Louis, since he was the inspiration for that character in my novel and he's also very unlikely to read this--was the only person I'd met outside my family who shared my love for John Denver and his music. Louis and I drove from Indianapolis to Shades State Park in the summer of 2000, singing along to John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" on the tape deck for much of the journey. Yeah, that was a good time.
I kinda like writing about this music/memory stuff. I'll be posting more bits like this in the coming weeks.
"Watch out when you're headed for the waterfall..."
Man, I LOVED this song. I remember the video getting some airplay on MTV in the fall of '87, and I thought it was brilliant back then too. I even have recollections of my stepbrother's reaction to the clip: "Damn, that chick on guitar (Wendy) is SERIOUSLY hot." (I suspect this had a lot to do with the white bra top Wendy sports in the vid, but oh well). Personally, I liked Lisa. She looks awesome in this video, and I dug her funky, swirly-colored, water-filled piano.
"Waterfall" was the first single off the duo's debut album, and it didn't exactly set the world on fire. According to wikipedia (an unfailingly accurate source, as everyone knows) "Waterfall" only reached #66 on the UK charts in 1987. There was no mention of its chart position in the US; I tried to look it up on a message board devoted to Prince but the damn thing kept crashing my browser, so I gave up.
I did find Wendy and Lisa's website, and it seems that the duo is still going strong. Over the years, they've done session work with Liz Phair, Michael Penn, Pearl Jam, Grace Jones, Joni Mitchell, OK Go, Gwen Stefani, and Seal, to name just a few. At any rate, I'm glad they're still around and still making music. They're fantastic songwriters and talented musicians.
"(Growing up in Birmingham) you could either escape through football or music.
And I wasn't much good at football."
Funny guy. Great musician too. He's known for being the quiet, mysterious Duran who left the music biz in 1985 (just after DD's Live Aid performance) and sought refuge in the English countryside. A true introvert, I think his circuits were just completely fried after seven straight years of having to be "on" all the time, and I imagine the Duran Duran's 1984 tour was the whale that broke the camel's back, to turn a phrase. He was also a newlywed and wanted to spend time with his wife, Giovanna, which is another typically Roger Taylor-ish reason for craving anonymity. Speaking of Giovanna, one of the things I dug about Roger was his love of edgy women. Instead of the Platonicideals pursued by his bandmates, he was taken by his future first wife's shaved head/purple mohawk (accounts differ) back when she was working the cloakroom at the Rum Runner, where Duran Duran got their start as the house band.
Although they split in 2004, these crazy kids were married for 20 years! No small achievement in pop stardom.
Fun fact: Roger's son is tight with Andy Taylor's son, and they hung out a lot as kids. Now they're all grown up and they've started their own band together! How cool is that?
Roger, of course, did eventually come back to the DD fold. The first time was in 1995, when he was coaxed out of hiding to play drums on the track "Perfect Day" for DD's album of covers, entitled Thank You. Then Roger saw his shadow or something and disappeared yet again.
You can watch the video here (EMI is pissy about embedding).
Roger rejoined Duran Duran for the second time in 2001, when all five original members reunited for a new album and tour. He's stuck with them ever since (knock on wood), perhaps deciding that the pop life isn't so bad after all.
Roger Taylor turns 53 today. And he's aging quite nicely, I might add.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
PA-RA-NOIA THA DE-STROY-AHHH...
Um...Happy Halloween?
In honor of the holiday, I'm celebrating one of my favorite Halloween-ish songs. I saw it posted on my friend Kevin Kelly's "Eighties Greaties" Facebook group recently and remembered how much I loved it.
Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" was a big hit in 1984, but it wasn't released at Halloween. I'm guessing that with Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (the song + video) being so huge in late '83 and screening about once an hour on MTV, this song would've probably gone completely unnoticed (even though Rockwell turned out to be Berry Gordy's son...and Michael Jackson sings the chorus!).
My big memory of "Somebody's Watching Me," was at horse camp in the spring of '84 (horse camp was always during spring break) when I was 10, and I remember some of the cool "older" (14- to 15-year-old) girls reciting the spoken parts of the song in goofy voices as we saddled up our horses in the stable. Those cool older girls got the best deal at horse camp, dammit. They got to sleep out in the RV at night and stay up as late as they wanted, while us youngsters had to be in bed at 9pm and sleep all crammed together in sleeping bags on the floor of my riding instructor's living room. Yeah, I'm still bitter about it. But I digress...
As an adult, I really dig the song's whole "paranoid" vibe. The video is effectively freaky too, particularly the heads peering in the windows and the pig/boar/armadillo-looking thing that chases Rockwell down the hallway (spoiler--it turns out to be a dog).
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Thoughts on Whitney Houston
Whitney Houston’s death is incredibly sad, and it has an added shock value for us oldsters. This point has been driven home for me in the weeks since her passing, particularly when talking about Whitney with my younger friends. Most people under the age of 30 seem to only know Whitney as the tabloid “crack is wack” train wreck she became in the last decade, which is ironic considering the cheesy, churchy, “America’s Sweetheart” Whitney of the 1980’s. In a decade marked by decadence, the harshest chemical Whitney Houston was publicly known to ingest back in the day was Diet Coke.
Sheesh. It doesn't get more eighties than this.
I confess that I was never much of a fan, especially in her early days. In fact, when Whitney Houston burst onto the music scene in the summer of 1985, I didn’t pay her much notice. Between her first single You Give Good Love and the cover of her debut album, where she’s made up to look like Sade (a “lite jazz” singer from that era whose voice and musical arrangements put me right to sleep), Whitney Houston didn’t have a lot to offer a girl like me. She seemed way too adult contemporary and—even at the age of twelve—I was well on my way to becoming a new wave freak, obsessed with bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, a-ha, Blondie, and pretty much anyone else I read about in Star Hits magazine (my Bible).
Then about six months later, Whitney’s single “How Will I Know” exploded, she won like 80 Grammy awards, and suddenly there was no escaping her. Seriously, the woman was EVERYWHERE. My opinion of Whitney and her music went from mild indifference to outright revulsion. Her scream-singing on “How Will I Know” drove me up the damn wall and MTV played the song’s cutesy, annoying video every twenty minutes. And then—to add insult to injury—her next single, a ridiculously corny, faux-inspirational turd called “The Greatest Love of All” was even more loathsome and ubiquitous. When those two songs hit it big, Whitney’s record company appeared to ease up on the adult contemporary angle and began heavily marketing her to girls aged twelve and up…which happened to be my demographic.
To be a middle-schooler from 1986 to 1988 meant that I was surrounded by girls who were absolutely crazy about Whitney Houston. She particularly struck a chord with the kind of girls who did well in school and were active in their church youth groups, the same girls who swooned over Richard Marx ballads, grooved to Debbie Gibson, and insisted that George Michael was “way too cute” to be gay (!). Basically, Whitney Houston was for girls who were Not Me. She was a squeaky-clean, All-American pop princess who was apparently too pure to even go on a date. I remember reading a quote from her in a magazine where she said something about not needing a boyfriend because she had Jesus, or some such horseshit. That was exactly the kind of crap that made me roll my eyes, plug into my Walkman, and retreat even further behind the tattered copies of Star Hits I kept hidden inside my textbooks. I stared at pin-ups of Morrissey, willing him to deliver me from the icky sugar-coated mainstream American drivel that threatened to suffocate me.
Of course, at that tender age I was too naïve to realize that Whitney Houston’s goody-goody persona was a painstakingly constructed image; one that was manufactured by her record company and maintained by her publicists, her manager, and everyone else who had a stake in her music career. I was also blind to the notion that many of the artists I worshipped—Duran Duran, Deborah Harry, Echo and the Bunnymen, et al—also had a team of people who made sure they looked and sounded in a way that appealed to their core audience (i.e. kids like me). While I don’t think the acts that I adored were as tightly controlled by their people as Whitney was by hers, at the end of the day the record industry is just another business with a product to sell; a product that is deliberately packaged to attract the sort of people who will buy it.
At any rate, Whitney Houston’s virtuous façade seemed to work for her. Her second and third albums—released in 1987 and 1990 respectively—were multi-platinum sellers. She collected Grammys hand over fist and even made the national anthem a Top 20 hit when she belted it out at the 1991 Super Bowl, further cementing her status as America’s Sweetheart. Of course, I still couldn’t be arsed to care about Whitney. She was still inescapable all throughout my high school years, but she became easier for me to ignore—especially since by then I had made some friends who shared and respected my taste in music—a pretty major accomplishment when you’re in high school. I even hit pay dirt my senior year when I found a cool boyfriend who was into Depeche Mode and New Order.
In 1992—the same year I graduated high school—Whitney made her film debut opposite Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Despite Whitney’s involvement, I found myself intrigued by the film’s premise and surprised my New Order-loving boyfriend (and myself) by dragging him to the Cineplex to see it. We both ended up loving it; I’m a sucker for movies about impossible love affairs stamped with a fixed expiration date (see also: Before Sunrise, Harold and Maude, etc.). I also was impressed with Whitney’s acting chops. She was no Meryl Streep, but she wasn’t bad. I also liked that her character was a radical departure from her goody-goody image; she played a temperamental diva who drank, smoked, had sex and even said “fuck” (that last bit was particularly jarring—this wasn’t the same girl who once claimed to have a boyfriend in Jesus). I even dug her version of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” from the film’s soundtrack. It wasn’t enough to make me a bona fide Whitney fan, but she’d definitely gone up a few notches in my estimation.
Fast forward ten years. Whitney had starred in a few movies and scored a few more hit singles, but her personal life had seriously gone down the crapper, fueled by rumors of a hardcore drug habit and her shitshow of a marriage to Bobby Brown. The capper was that bizarre Diane Sawyer interview in 2002, which seriously screwed with my head. I mean, I was glad to see that Whitney (and/or her PR team) had long since dropped the Goody-Goody Jesus’s Girlfriend shtick, but it was sad and a bit shocking to see how far she’d actually fallen.
To put it in perspective, I’ll try to craft an analogy that makes sense in modern day terms: Imagine a twitchy, coke-eyed Taylor Swift acquiescing to a prime time sit-down with Diane Sawyer. And Diane Sawyer—in her best “concerned journalist” tone—gently pressing Taylor Swift to address the drug rumors that have plagued her, particularly ones concerning her alleged crack addiction. And Taylor Swift blurting out, “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Crack is wack.”
And Taylor Swift’s husband, which…hmm…who would be the modern Bobby Brown equivalent? Let’s see…abusive, petulant man-child with a string of mediocre R&B hits under his belt—Chris Brown, perhaps?—(the shared surname is a creepy coincidence when you think about it) fidgets next to Taylor Swift and first denies, then admits that he smokes weed, although “it’s not an every day thing. Um, it’s maybe every other day.” But, he assures Diane, he only does it to keep his bi-polar disorder “at a level.”
And if you can conjure up that freakish scenario in your mind, then you have some idea how surreal it was for aging Gen-Xers like me to watch Whitney “I-believe-the-children-are-our-future” Houston sidestep questions about a crack habit while Bobby “Humping Around” Brown lied his face off about his own drug use and his well-documented abusive tendencies.
The whole thing is hard to watch, from Whitney’s nervous non-answers about her addictions to the way she instinctively hugs herself and leans away from her husband when he sits down next to her. But what bugged me the most was the crap-a-doodle-doo spewing forth from one Bobby Brown. He’s not only an abusive, drug-addled douchebag, he’s a piss-poor liar. Seriously, this an actual exchange:
Diane Sawyer: “Have you ever hit her?” Bobby Brown: “No no no no no no no.” Whitney Houston (quietly): “What’s ‘hitting’ mean?” (like ‘hitting’ is some abstract concept that could be interpreted a number of ways). Bobby Brown (trotting out an old standby): “I have four sisters, four aunts, a mother, two daughters.” (Oh yeah, that’s right. Men who have female family members don’t abuse women.) He then piles it on even higher: “I love…I love the beauty of woman.” (?) Then, apropos of nothing, he grabs Whitney’s leg and says, “This is mine.”
Ugh.
Of course, we all know what happened next. While Whitney finally divorced Bobby in 2007 and went to rehab in 2009, her freedom was short lived. In the end, she was done in by her addictions.
R.I.P. Whitney. She wasn’t perfect, she wasn’t horrible. She was just human.
********* Edited to add: Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. but over the years I’ve warmed a bit to Whitney Houston’s music—a few select songs, anyway. Although I love the goofy girlie-ness of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” (and if you’ve never heard David Byrne’s AWESOME version of it, you must do so now), I'm more inclined towards her later stuff, when she laid off the scream-singing in favor of more subtle vocals and melodies. My favorites are these two from the “Waiting To Exhale” soundtrack (a movie that, for the record, I also liked).
