Showing 121 posts tagged Music

fred-frederator-studios:

My wife, Robin Sloane, is getting some great props in the new book by Craig Marks and Rob Tannebaum, I Want My MTV!, for her role in some groundbreaking music videos like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Here’s an excerpt from New York Magazine: 


(Photo: Jeff Kravitz/Filmmagic/Getty Images)

Nirvana
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991) 
Seattle punks start a revolt, and snuff hair metal.

Robin Sloane, Geffen Records Exec: Kurt Cobain was the only artist I’ve ever known who had brilliant, fully realized ideas he could express in one sentence. With “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Kurt said, “My idea for the video is a pep rally gone wrong.” He looked at director Sam Bayer’s reel and loved it, so I hired Sam. But there were a lot of problems between Sam and Kurt. 
Courtney Love: Kurt hated Sam Bayer. For “Teen Spirit,” Kurt wanted fat cheerleaders, he wanted black kids, he wanted to tell the world how fucked up high school was. But Sam put hot girls in the video. The crazy thing is, it still worked.
Dave Grohl, Band Member: The idea was, the kids take over and burn down the gymnasium, just as Matt Dillon did in Over the Edge, with the rec center. Kurt was a huge fan of that movie. We walked into that whole thing really cautiously, because we didn’t want to misrepresent the band. There were certain things we found to be really funny about videos—tits and ass and pyrotechnics, shit like that—and when we showed up at the shoot, we were like, Wait a minute, those cheerleaders look like strippers.A lot of people we worked with didn’t understand the underground scene or punk rock. 
Samuel Bayer: I scouted L.A. strip clubs for the cheerleaders. Kurt didn’t like them. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to put unattractive women in the video. I think Kurt looked at me and saw himself selling out. So anything I did was construed as corporate. But to me, these were nasty girls. They had rug burns on their knees. In my eyes, the whole video was dirty. It’s all yellows and browns. It was the opposite of everything on MTV at the time; every video was blue and backlit with big xenon lights. I was a painter. I was trying to rip on Caravaggio and Goya. 
Sloane: All the kids in the bleachers were drunk.
Grohl: We did a couple of takes, and the audience just started destroying the stage. The director’s on a bullhorn screaming, “Stop! Cut!” And that’s when it started to make sense to me: This is like a Nirvana concert. 
Bayer: The day of the video shoot was pure pain. Kurt hated being there. Maybe it was his venom coming through, but I’ve been on 200 music-video sets since, and that was the best performance I’ve ever seen. 
Amy Finnerty, MTV VP of Programming: Initially, my boss said, “Look, the visuals are great, and they have a catchy name, but beyond that, I don’t really know what this is gonna do.” I said, “I understand why we’re playing Paula Abdul and Whitesnake. But if there isn’t a place for this, I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
Love: The first time Kurt and I slept together was at a Days Inn in Chicago. We were having our first postcoital moment, and we’re watching MTV and the video came on. I pulled away from him, because it was his video, his moment, he was the king of the fucking world, and he put his arm around me and pulled me closer. Which was symbolic, like, “I’m letting you into my life.” That really endeared him to me. The next time I saw the video with him was at the Omni Northstar Hotel in Minneapolis. I’d flown there to fuck Billy Corgan, who still had lots of hair. I didn’t even know Nirvana were playing that night. Kurt and I wound up at the Northstar, and our daughter, Frances, was basically made that night. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was on MTV every five fucking minutes.
Bayer: That video gave me a career. Everyone wanted to do a Nirvana-type video: Ozzy Osbourne, Johnny Lydon, the Ramones.
Kip Winger, Hair-Metal Singer: I watched “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and I thought, All right, we’re finished. 
Kevin Kerslake, Director: “Teen Spirit” crossed the Rubicon. Nirvana became the mold for success, the way Poison had been four years before. There are many ironies within the history of MTV, and that is one of them: The revolutionary fights the dictator, and ultimately becomes the dictator. It’s just swapping chairs.

Adapted from I Want My MTV, by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum (October 27; Dutton, a member of Penguin Group [USA] Inc.). Copyright © 2011 by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum.

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Really nice.

Also, “The next time I saw the video with him was at the Omni Northstar Hotel in Minneapolis. I’d flown there to fuck Billy Corgan, who still had lots of hair” is perhaps my favorite Courtney Love quote ever. 

“Finally, Axl, I think we might have had a misunderstanding regarding my previous notes. When I wrote in colored pencil “Where do we go now?” I wasn’t offering that as a lyric. I was simply observing that, in narrative terms, the song needed to progress in some way. You love the girl, she’s helping you work through some issues, whatever. So where do we go now? But instead of providing a satisfactory conclusion, you simply took my note and repeated it over and over again before ultimately just stating the title of the song. This is unacceptable. Don’t ask us, the listeners, where we go. That’s up to you as the writer! Tell us where we go now!”

McSweeney’s: Notes on “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” as Delivered to Axl Rose by His Editor.

This, though very funny, kinda ruined GnR for me when the wedding band played this on Saturday.

High-res I too love the Freddie Mercury Google doodle thing, though I’m a little disturbed at how much it’s just an ad for Google. But it’s mainly a reminder of a really nice bit Richard Corliss wrote about the Queen frontman years ago:  Queen was a pretty cool blend of studio band and slam-glam touring band. One could say that the quartet had the musical ambitions and harmonics of the Beatles and the sexy front man of the Rolling Stones. This would be both to exaggerate the band’s achievement (they weren’t near the Beatles, though they were great pretenders) and to sell Freddie short. Mercury was a meta-Jagger in his gaudy frocks, his pansexual performance art, the luscious mouth and diagonal overbite made for fellating the concert-stadium mike. The band’s chief songwriter for Queen, Freddie was also its face, heart, lungs and loins — his generation’s true dancing Queen. “He had everything, in extremis,” said Lyricist Tim Rice (“Evita,” “The Lion King”). Dave Clark, whose quintet briefly rivaled the Beatles in popularity nearly 40 years ago, called Freddie “the 80s Edith Piaf.” The singer’s life and artifice are naturals for documentary treatment, and he got it in the feature-length, Grammy-nominated “Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story” by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, who also directed some of the band’s videos and an earlier documentary, “The Queen Phenomenon.” The brisk, comprehensive and ultimately affecting “Untold Story” has loads of telling archive footage, some questionably recreated scenes of the singer’s youth and a dozen or so telling interviews (from which the quotes here come). Born Farouk Bulsara, in 1946, to a Parsi family on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar — his father was an accountant with the British High Court there — he was sent at age 8 to St. Peter’s English Boarding School, in Panchgani, in western India. There Farouk formed his first band, the Hectics. At London’s Ealing School of Art, where he showed burgeoning talent as an illustrator and graphic designer, he met May, Taylor and John Deacon, then in a group called Smile. They became Queen, and Freddie their lead vocalist. In an early Queen song, “My Fairy King,” Freddie had written the lines: “Mother Mercury, Mercury/ Look what they’ve done to me.” He told his mates that, since he’d written about his mother, he was from now on Freddie Mercury. It allowed a shy boy to turn his latent artistry into blatant theatricality. “The young Bulsara person was still there,” Taylor says, “but for the public he was gonna be this different character—this god.” At 15, he had written a Harold Coffin aphorism into a schoolmate’s book: “Modern paintings are like women. You’ll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.” Freddie loved women; perhaps he understood them. His closest friend, former shopgirl Mary Austin, was for a time his wife. In the 80s he was close to the Met soprano Montserrat Caballé; they spent one whole night together, singing, and later recorded the “Barcelona” album of duets. (His fans, she says, would ask, “Who is the woman that screams so much with Freddie?”) But he was also a gay man — couldn’t everyone see this? — with a need to dissemble, to flaunt his effeminate eccentricity even as he publicly denied, until two days before his death, his gayness. As Queen’s popularity grew, so did Freddie’s instinct for extravagance, on stage and off. “There was the odd wild moment,” a smiling Rice said of Freddie’s at-homes, “which I would, I think, have to consult my lawyer before talking about in great detail.” Relocating to Munich in the 80s, he threw the odd wild party, like the notorious one for his 39th birthday. “You had to come dressed as your favorite person,” says Peter Starker, a friend of Freddie’s. “And he just came dressed as himself, obviously.” The band’s sound engineer, Trip Khalaf, recalls “a dwarf covered in liver. He laid there on a platter…and when anybody dug this dull knife into him…the whole plate of liver would quiver. So it was like a moving paté pastiche!” Khalaf is not easily shocked. “I’m used to seeing my grandmother crawl up my leg with a knife in her teeth.” Still, he describes the bacchanal as “pretty much Wretched Excess. That was the worst thing I’ve ever been to. I’ll probably go to hell because of that.” Beelzebub had a devil put aside for Freddie too: AIDS, which he probably contracted when he spent time in New York in the early 80s. Mercury spent his last decade with Jim Hutton, whom he called “my husband.” He loved Hutton as “someone to come home to.” Like the speaker at the end of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie had spent all his venom, all his passion. “I’ve stopped having sex,” he told a reporter, “and started growing tulips.” Toward the end, his costume designer Diana Moseley visited him; they played Scrabble, and as she was leaving he said, “Thank you for spending the afternoon with an old man.” At his death, on November 24, 1991, he was 45.

I too love the Freddie Mercury Google doodle thing, though I’m a little disturbed at how much it’s just an ad for Google. But it’s mainly a reminder of a really nice bit Richard Corliss wrote about the Queen frontman years ago: 

Queen was a pretty cool blend of studio band and slam-glam touring band. One could say that the quartet had the musical ambitions and harmonics of the Beatles and the sexy front man of the Rolling Stones. This would be both to exaggerate the band’s achievement (they weren’t near the Beatles, though they were great pretenders) and to sell Freddie short. Mercury was a meta-Jagger in his gaudy frocks, his pansexual performance art, the luscious mouth and diagonal overbite made for fellating the concert-stadium mike. The band’s chief songwriter for Queen, Freddie was also its face, heart, lungs and loins — his generation’s true dancing Queen. “He had everything, in extremis,” said Lyricist Tim Rice (“Evita,” “The Lion King”). Dave Clark, whose quintet briefly rivaled the Beatles in popularity nearly 40 years ago, called Freddie “the 80s Edith Piaf.”

The singer’s life and artifice are naturals for documentary treatment, and he got it in the feature-length, Grammy-nominated “Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story” by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, who also directed some of the band’s videos and an earlier documentary, “The Queen Phenomenon.” The brisk, comprehensive and ultimately affecting “Untold Story” has loads of telling archive footage, some questionably recreated scenes of the singer’s youth and a dozen or so telling interviews (from which the quotes here come). Born Farouk Bulsara, in 1946, to a Parsi family on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar — his father was an accountant with the British High Court there — he was sent at age 8 to St. Peter’s English Boarding School, in Panchgani, in western India. There Farouk formed his first band, the Hectics.

At London’s Ealing School of Art, where he showed burgeoning talent as an illustrator and graphic designer, he met May, Taylor and John Deacon, then in a group called Smile. They became Queen, and Freddie their lead vocalist. In an early Queen song, “My Fairy King,” Freddie had written the lines: “Mother Mercury, Mercury/ Look what they’ve done to me.” He told his mates that, since he’d written about his mother, he was from now on Freddie Mercury. It allowed a shy boy to turn his latent artistry into blatant theatricality. “The young Bulsara person was still there,” Taylor says, “but for the public he was gonna be this different character—this god.”

At 15, he had written a Harold Coffin aphorism into a schoolmate’s book: “Modern paintings are like women. You’ll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.” Freddie loved women; perhaps he understood them. His closest friend, former shopgirl Mary Austin, was for a time his wife. In the 80s he was close to the Met soprano Montserrat Caballé; they spent one whole night together, singing, and later recorded the “Barcelona” album of duets. (His fans, she says, would ask, “Who is the woman that screams so much with Freddie?”) But he was also a gay man — couldn’t everyone see this? — with a need to dissemble, to flaunt his effeminate eccentricity even as he publicly denied, until two days before his death, his gayness.

As Queen’s popularity grew, so did Freddie’s instinct for extravagance, on stage and off. “There was the odd wild moment,” a smiling Rice said of Freddie’s at-homes, “which I would, I think, have to consult my lawyer before talking about in great detail.” Relocating to Munich in the 80s, he threw the odd wild party, like the notorious one for his 39th birthday. “You had to come dressed as your favorite person,” says Peter Starker, a friend of Freddie’s. “And he just came dressed as himself, obviously.” The band’s sound engineer, Trip Khalaf, recalls “a dwarf covered in liver. He laid there on a platter…and when anybody dug this dull knife into him…the whole plate of liver would quiver. So it was like a moving paté pastiche!” Khalaf is not easily shocked. “I’m used to seeing my grandmother crawl up my leg with a knife in her teeth.” Still, he describes the bacchanal as “pretty much Wretched Excess. That was the worst thing I’ve ever been to. I’ll probably go to hell because of that.”

Beelzebub had a devil put aside for Freddie too: AIDS, which he probably contracted when he spent time in New York in the early 80s. Mercury spent his last decade with Jim Hutton, whom he called “my husband.” He loved Hutton as “someone to come home to.” Like the speaker at the end of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Freddie had spent all his venom, all his passion. “I’ve stopped having sex,” he told a reporter, “and started growing tulips.” Toward the end, his costume designer Diana Moseley visited him; they played Scrabble, and as she was leaving he said, “Thank you for spending the afternoon with an old man.” At his death, on November 24, 1991, he was 45.

  • TIME