1980s

REM on Letterman in 1983

REM performing “So. Central Rain” and “Radio Free Europe” on Late Show with David Letterman

Amazing time capsule video of R.E.M. making their national TV debut on the Late Show with David Letterman in October 1983. On this appearance, they played two of their earliest hits – ‘Radio Free Europe’ (off of their first album Murmur) and ‘So. Central Rain’ (off of their second album Reckoning). The performance of ‘So. Central Rain’ was such an early cut of the song that they actually had not given it a name – it was the song’s national premier! What is even more unique is that they actually played two songs on the show. On most late shows (SNL being the exception), bands only play one song, a trend that generally conveys to this day.

First – look at how young they all look! From Letterman to the band itself. This was from a time when R.E.M. was literally just getting started and had just released the aforementioned album “Murmur”. Michael Stipe was so shy in those days that he did not even engage with Letterman when he greeted the band after playing ‘Radio Free Europe’. Second – look at the set of the Letterman show where they played! It looked like someone’s basement – which was probably in keeping with the venues they were playing in at the time!

I think everyone has ‘concert regrets’ – shows that you had the opportunity to go to but did not attend for any number of reasons – apathy, conflict, punishment, etc. For me, one of several concert regrets is not going to see R.E.M. at Drew University’s Baldwin Gym in 1985. Look at that set list. Amazing! I had just moved to a new town in New Jersey at the time and for whatever reason, I did not go to this show. They were gaining in popularity and on the verge of exploding, but were just not there yet. It was *the perfect time* to see them.

R.E.M. continues to be one of my all time favorite bands. Listening to R.E.M. today brings back a flood of smiles and memories that are attached to their songs. If you are a fan, Michael Stipe just sat down for an interview on the podcast Smartless.

Footage from first discovery of Titanic in 1986

I am just a sucker for these types of stories – where footage of a seminal event is unearthed. As long as I can remember, the story of the Titanic checked all the boxes for me, way before James Cameron’s movie of the same name was released. So when the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute this week released previously unseen footage from their very first exploration of the wreckage site in 1986, I was all in. Yes, I sat and watched the whole video. Imagine being the scientists in 1986 and being the first humans to see the wreckage since it hit the ocean floor on that fateful night in 1912?

In a milestone that will definitely make you feel old, this year marks the 25th anniversary of Titanic’s (the movie) theatrical release and to celebrate, the studios re-released it in select theaters! So last weekend, I went to see it with my son – primarily because he had never seen the movie before! The movie has been made fun of, has been meme-ed to death, and has received its fair share of criticism, yet watching it again on the big screen was spectacular (!!!), I have to say. I picked up things I had not remembered or noticed the first few times I’d seen it. Seeing Leo and Kate 25 years younger was pretty awesome. And the scenes at the end when (spoiler alert) the ship is sinking and the stern of the vessel starts to raise out of the water were just stunning on the big screen! You can try all you want, but you won’t get that same experience watching it on your TV in a living room. Yes, the movie could have been shorter. Yeah, the water that breached the ship was ice cold in real life, yet the actors in the on-ship scenes made it feel like they were wading in the town pool on a 75 degree day. Yeah, Jack could have fit on the piece of wood with Rose. For all it’s flaws, seeing Titanic in the theater was an outstanding experience and I would recommend you take advantage of this opportunity to see it on the big screen!

First Few Hours of MTV

It all started with “Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles. This may not seem like much, but back in the early 1980s, MTV was an earth shattering shift in the music and pop culture landscape. We had never, ever seen anything like this before. And over the years from its debut through to the mid-late 1990s, MTV set the trends and made or broke music/pop culture stars. For me, the show 120 Minutes was a must watch. For others, Yo! MTV Raps was the vanguard. And all of that started with these few hours. What an amazing time!

h/t Austin Kleon

The Importance of Live Aid

Live Aid was a seminal day and event in rock and roll history that has been discussed and analyzed numerous times over the 35 years since it took place. What is amazing to me about Live Aid is that it went from hair-brained idea to a once in a lifetime event in just about a year.

Live Aid, which took place on July 13, 1985 for a global audience of 1.9 billion people, was a massive, bi-continental pop concert created to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. It was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, leader of the Irish new wave band The Boomtown Rats. Geldof was spurred to philanthropic action after seeing a BBC report in October 1984 that featured footage of starving children. His first thought was to make a charity single.

Of course, Live Aid wasn’t just about fundraising. It also had to be a great show—or else why would people bother to watch it in the first place? As it happened, the day was filled with memorable performances on both sides of the Atlantic. The consensus pick for Live Aid MVP is Queen, whose 21-minute Wembley set included “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “We Will Rock You,” and “We are the Champions.” Mercury “strutted and preened, carrying his microphone on a metal pole that he treated as a vaudevillian’s cane, an air guitar, and, of course, a phallus,” The New York Times wrote of Mercury’s performance. “He was a rock star playing a rock star, leather-lunged and imperious but also grinning to let everyone share the joke … For 21 minutes, Freddie Mercury undeniably made the world his stadium.” In 2005, Queen’s Live Aid set was voted the greatest rock gig in history by a panel of music industry experts.

The diversity of the acts that performed during the Live Aid concerts in Philly and London was a downfall of the event, but it was not for a lack of trying. While it was an important day for artists like Run-DMC, other larger black artists such as Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Prince declined to participate. Hindsight is 20/20 and I am sure there were things that could have been done to get a more diverse palette of artists to perform. The impact that the event had on Run-DMC was real and was an important opportunity to expose a worldwide audience to the emerging ‘hip hop’ genre of music.

As a teenager in the middle of high school when this event took place, I will never forget spending that Saturday watching the concert unfold. It was an amazing thing to witness live and I only wish I could have been there in person in Philadelphia.

You Spin Me Round

Like we needed a reason to love Paul Rudd any more? He and Jimmy Fallon re-made the iconic 1980s one hit wonder video “You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)” from ‘Dead or Alive’ and it is just genius. Rudd has the mannerisms and nuances of the leader singer Peter Burns down pat.

The original video is below so you can compare.

Restored Version of Queen At Live Aid

A beautifully restored version of the quintessential Queen performance at LiveAid in July of 1985. If you are curious, you can see a comparison of the original video and the new one just to see the improvement.

From Chief Mouse, the person who did the restoration:

Fixed the line interference issues, microphony or however you want to call it. This Queen performance deserves to be viewed at its best, so naturally I did my best to bring this project to fruition. Also included the introductory parts. The audio is BBC FM broadcast for everything except for ending of CLTCL, WWRY (I like the loud audience in the DVD mix) and ITTWWC due to feedback and technical issues.

Chief Mouse

Queen has been receiving a lot of love recently as a result of the release of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rami Malek’s Oscar nominated winning performance portraying Freddie Mercury, and I think it is well deserved. Queen is one of the great bands in rock and roll history that were never fully appreciated.

Boundless Informant

The inevitable next step after a major leak of information is the media actually publishing it.

The NSA has a massive, data mining tool called Boundless Informant, that essentially enables NSA to track and analyze practically all communication happening around the world, going as far as color coding those areas of the world that are ‘hot zones’ (appropriately colored red):

The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, “What type of coverage do we have on country X” in “near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure.”

via The Guardian UK

Death of the Arcade

Here is a pretty fantastic article about the social centerpiece of growing up in the late 1970’s and 1980’s – the video game arcade. From the evolution of the arcade from pinball machines to Pac Man and Frogger, it has been a part of American youth for many many years, although it it could be argued that it did not hit it’s heyday until the 70’s and 80’s. Today, they are another casualty of the digital revolution with gaming consoles migrating to living rooms and basements around the world.

Whenever I visited an arcade, I usually found myself cursing at Galaxian, Galaga and every racing game within the joint. Today, I get my fix by heading out to the Pinball Wizards event, held every year at the Allentown Fair Grounds. And there is always the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park, NJ.

via The Verge

Max Headroom

The iconic 1980’s show Max Headroom is being released on DVD by Shout! Factory.

Max was really an actor wearing prosthetics, and that illusion epitomizes the television-mad future in the show. The series, to be released on DVD by Shout! Factory, follows Network 23’s star reporter, Edison Carter (Matt Frewer, who also played Max), through a corporate-ruled wasteland where new technology beget new forms of abuse. The show, datelined “20 minutes into the future” stirs together future-shock speculation with contemporary influences: roving live broadcasts, cyberpunk, MTV, camera-ready Reagan-like artifice, television evangelism, video art and the thousand-channel universe.

Ferris, The Geek And Bender

Those are a few of the characters that John Hughes created through the numerous films that he wrote and/or directed during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Sadly, John Hughes died today at age 59. So I thought I would take a second to acknowledge him.  The movies that he was responsible for, and the influence his movies had on those who grew up in the 1980’s and 1990’s, is beyond compare. Dare I say that Hughes was the most prolific and influential director of this era? It’s not that far fetched. Let’s take a look. They may not have been Oscar winners, but their influence and cult like status is unmatched. Between 1984 and 1986 here are just a few of the movies he directed, produced, or wrote: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink, Mr. Mom, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Some Kind of Wonderful, and National Lampoon’s Vacation/European Vacation. To this day, these movies still make me laugh. The characters he created were funny, quirky, unique, and more than anything, real. We lost a little bit of our youth today.

The Internet Killed the Radio Star

MTV has released an online video site that houses all the videos that have ever run on the network (we won’t talk about its name – MTV Music or Music Television Music – or the fact that these days MTV is anything but Music Television).

Check out the very first video ever played on MTV, The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star or this Internet classic or Devo’s Whip It or one of my favorites, the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl”.

The Most Popular area, which as of today looks like a retro 1980’s top video list with video “classics” like Dire Straits Money for Nothing, aHa’s Take on Me, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, or – wait for it – Toto’s Africa.

Big hair is back, kids.

Enough Already

OK, so I am genuinely sad to hear of the passing of Ronald Reagan. In many ways, he was the great figurehead of the 1980’s, a time that was definitely an interesting period in my life. Don’t get me wrong, he was a very important figure in the history of the US and at the time, he was probably the best choice the country had as we were emerging out of the Vietnam and Watergate eras. But he was really not that great of a President IMHO and, similar to a certain current President, it was brutally obvious that there were people pulling the strings and he was the puppet. His tenure was marked by the Iran-Contra scandal, a scandal that for some reason did not nearly get the type attention and fallout on his Presidency that it deserved. And to say that Reagan ended the Cold War is just silly. All this talk about putting his bust on Mount Rushmore, or renaming something in every state for him, is just loony. Go ahead and name some streets, a river, and some place out in California that was important to him, but lets not get carried away here folks.

Chucks

Chucks on the Syracuse University campus, before it shut down. Photo from early 2000's roughly.

I was listening to the 80’s Alternative station on Radio@AOL and the song “Eighties” by Killing Joke (Album: “Laugh? I Nearly Bought One”) came on. While an udergrad at Syracuse, my friends and I went to a great watering hole called Chuck’s (Hungry Charlies). Every time this song came on, this one guy whom I never actually met, would get up on one of the tables and just start stomp dancing. The coolest thing was that when the song came on, and if he was there, everyone in the bar knew what was going to happen and would stop what they were doing and just watch. Listening to that song brought me back there.

A Flock Of Seagulls

I was driving around yesterday and the seminal 1980’s one-hit-wonder song “I Ran” by A Flock of Seagulls came on the radio, and in seconds it sent me hurtling back to the teen angst of high school. Listening to this song and being exposed to all the recent retro stories about the 1980’s makes me realize what a unique period that was in the history of music.