I Want My Empty Vee!

My All-Time Fave Music Videos



An eclectic countdown...

OK, my GF Amy looked at my list and blew it off with a perfunctory raspberry, saying, "Pffft! You just like videos with girls shaking their butts around." I do not deny it. But I also like a lot of other videos that don't appeal to my inner Beavis or Butthead...videos that may be basic but also primal or seminal in that they were the first visual cues I had for a favorite group like Devo, Buzzcocks, or Pizzicato Five. Iconic images that stick with you through the vestiges of time in an age of constant over-stimulation (admittedly those shaking butts don't help!) Videos like...

Pizzicato Five - "Sweet Soul Revue"


This was my first glimpse of my fave J-Pop band Pizzicato Five and the images of Miss Maki Nomiya shaking those maracas and evoking the style and charm of Audrey Hepburn in the roof concert scene while P5 mastermind-maestro Yasuharu Konishi boogies away on his Hofner bass and original guitarist Keitaro Takanami strums his Fender guitar have become iconic for me...This was my first transmission from a band that never made a bad or uninteresting video and it always stuck with me. I read that this song was a big hit in the Philppines and that it was used on Japan's Ranma 1/2 syndicated TV show. A real treat!

***

OK, here are the the requisite "girls on film" viddies to get out of the way straight away!


Make The Girl Dance "Baby Baby Baby" ( official video )


Visually arresting (in fact, I'm amazed no one was!) and educational to boot (it's a great way to learn "street" French!).

Cheeky Girls - "Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum)"


When the Cheeky Girls sing "This is life: Touch my bum" it's an ontological refutation of philosopher George Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne)'s "immaterialism" theory, which held that individuals can only know life through ideas and not physical matter. Samuel Johnson famously refuted this theory by kicking a stone; Cheeky Girls refute it by clenching the taut junk in their trunks. These babies have back, and it matters.

And speaking of back...

Sir Mix-a-Lot - "Baby Got Back"


Sir Mix-a-Lot offers an urban refutation of Bishop Berkeley's ontological theory of "immaterialism." A literal exercise in Form over Substance.

***

Food For Worms - "It Needs a Haircut" (1983)


Food For Worms were the cleverest/funniest band of My Generation...This was the video they made in 1983 and submitted to MTV, only to have it rejected for being too morbid. Shame, because in the early "desperate" days of MTV, just about anything got on air (remember the local Slickee Boys and Bootcamp videos on there?). My GF Amy Davis is in there somewhere as a veiled mourner, as well as her friend Liz.

I actually helped inspire this song when I told FFW songwriting-keyboardist Mark O'Connor about my barber Charles, who used to groom corpses for funeral viewings; this was back when they had that barber shop in Cross Keys and I recall Charles regaling me with stories about how he worked with morticians to restore the faces of the deceased who had met with violent ends from traffic fatalities and homicides (he even gave me a coffin crank-lever that I still have). It was actually a conflation of influences, because Mark then recalled having a long-haired biker friend who died in a motorcycle accident and, upon his passing, was promptly "cleaned up" by his parents to look like a choir boy. It seemed like a sure-fire idea for a summertime hit, kinda like going to the beach...

And speaking of going to the beach (and the Slickee Boys)...

Slickee Boys - "When I Go To the Beach" (1983)


I love(d) DC's Slickee Boys and was delighted to see a local band appear on MTV! Now, of course, MTV doesn't play music videos anymore and this stab-from-the-analog-past has been relegated to YouTube. But the song itself was featured in the 1987 retro-surf movie Back To The Beach, which starred Frankie, Annette and an O.J. Simpson cameo!

Thomas Dolby - "She Blinded Me with Science"
(Director: Thomas Dolby, 1982)


My heavens Miss Sakamoto, you are beautiful! And, truly, poetry in motion. I wonder who she was and where she is today (finding outremains remains one of my life's great quests).

The old man shouting "Science!" is real-life British scientist and TV presenter Magnus Pyke.

Amy likes this viddy because the guitar solo was courtesy of XTC's Andy Partridge.

OK Go - "Here It Goes Again"


Brilliant. What else can I say? Other than I wish OK Go's treadmill routine would become part of the gymnastics program at the next Summer Olympics.

OK Go - "This Too Shall Pass"


Wow, they did it again! This is the famous Rube Goldberg video. Never has educational instruction in physics been so entertaining!

Devo - "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"
(Director: Chuck Statler, 1978)


All the Chuck Statler "videos" (actually shot on film) are great, but General Boy chaperoning, Booji Boy sticking a fork in a toaster, the punk rock kid somersaulting himself, the herky-jerky robotic band footage...these are enduring images I'll never get out of my head.

Buzzcocks - "What Do I Get?"


This is a "bare-bones, no frills" standard band-lip-synching-to-recorded-track video that is no great shakes on a technical level, but it was my introduction to the Buzzcocks when I saw it on a (late 70s/early 80s?) TV music video show called Rock World. As such, it is indelibly stamped on my cerebellum (right next to its expiration date)

Bob Dylan - "Subterranean Homesick Blues" (1965)


Another simple video that remains iconic and revolutionary at the same time. One of the most parodied/reference music videos of all time. (Check out "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody "Bob"!) Most people first saw it as the opening segment of D. A. Pennebaker's film Dont Look Back, which documented Dylan's 1965 England tour. The cue cards were written by Donovan, Allen Ginsberg (who can be seen standing in the background), Dylan crony Bob Neuwirth and Dylan himself. I love the cue card spelling of "Suckcess." Conceptually, it spawned everything from VH1's "Pop-up Music Video" to Make the Girl Dance's "Baby Baby Baby."

David Lee Roth - "California Girls"


David Lee Roth actually won a technical award for this video - and it wasn't for the girls' silicone injections! (It was for color effects - in his bio, Diamond Dave claims he was zonked out on chemicals and just mucked around with the saturation until he achieved...genius). I don't know why I find DLR so amusing, but I do, especially when he leers at healthy young women and croons "Hot diggity dog!"

Robert Palmer - "Addicted To Love"


Greatest. Backing. Band. Ever. OK, I'm not a deep thinker, but this one really grabs me - for all the wrong reasons!

Chemical Brothers - "Let Forever Be"
(Director: Michel Gondry, 1999)


Ah, the great Michel Gondry. We showed this on Atomic TV back when we used to get all the Astralwerks promo videos...like Daft Punk's "Around the World"...

Daft Punk - "Around the World"
(Director: Michel Gondry, 1997)


Cibo Mato - "Sugar Water"
(Director: Michel Gondry, 1996)

The Memento of music videos, with everything filmed backwards to forwards, and yet another Michel Gondry film (and yet another video aired on Atomic TV!).

Prodigy - "Smack My Bitch Up"


Greatest. Music. Video. Ever. I'm proud to say Atomic TV aired the uncensored version on Baltimore City cable years ago, as this is what many of my friends would call "a perfect night out on the town." Sex, drugs, rock & roll - and Asian carryout! How can you not love that?

Pardon the commercials at the beginning, but it's hard to find an uncensored version. Why did rock music have to get so clean and Disneyfied? Hip is what is centrally located between the toe and the tip, as they say. That is hip.

DEVO on SNL

October 14, 1978
Set: "Satisfaction," "Jocko Homo"

After seeing DEVO play their debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! live at the 9:30 Club in D.C Sunday night, I thought back to the first time I saw the Spudboys. I know my college pal and erstwhile Katatonix bandmate Tom Lehr turned me onto DEVO's music sometime during our late '70s school daze at Towson State University, but I don't recall seeing them before 1978, when I saw them with Tom at Georgetown University in D.C. and later at Painter's Mills in Owings Mills, MD with the fledgling Katatonix lineup of Katie Katatonic and Adolf Kowalski (a gig I vividly recall because when Mark Mothersbaugh came into the audience - which was pretty cool in and of itself, as wireless mics and guitars were a new thang - Adolf tore off a patch of Mark's yellow jumpsuit and gave it to me - I later had it laminated and carried it around in my wallet as a memento!).

But I'm pretty sure the first time I saw them was on the historic Fred Willard-hosted episode of Saturday Night Live, October 14, 1978. And when they played their robotic cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfation" it was both a visual revelation and a sonic epiphany. I got chills and the kind of nervous excitement kids get when all riled up and without their Ritalin...and I recalled where I was and who I was with just as vividly as I recalled JFK's assasination (yup, I'm old enough have seen that on black-and-white TV as well!), or initially seeing Blade Runner at the Timonium Theater, hearing about Pee-Wee Herman's sex scandal, or seeing the breaking news report about former Maryland Terps star Len Bias' coke-overdose death - for some reason these were and are the momentous, life-changing touchstones of my life to date. Each one filled me either with eye-opening awe or an unbelievable sense of great loss.

I was at party with a bunch of Deadheads and pot-head pixies. When Devo came on, it blew everyone's minds. They had no frame of reference to prepare them for this, for there are only two timelines in the course of human history: B.C. (Before the Coming) and A.D. (After Devo). Devo's performance gave the past the slip and plunged pop culture consciousness into its rightful role of Duty Now for the Future. Thanks Spudboys!

(Apparently, the SNL appearance was just as momentous for Devo as it was for the SNL cast and the rest of America. Mark Mothersbaugh started dating Laraine Newman and Gerry Casale later claimed that John Belushi "snorted the entire contents of the first gram of coke I ever purchased." And Dan Akroyd became a fan, later getting Devo to write the theme song to his movie Doctor Detroit.)

Unfortunately, I can't post a video clip of Devo's historic performance, as NBC-Universal has pulled all copies off the Internet.

*** But wait - this just in! ***

Thanks to Scott Huffines for finding me the "Satisfaction" video on Videosift!


via videosift.com

Kiss/Devo Tour Program

Found this official "Tour Program" for the inaugural Atomic Books "Kiss/Devo" party held March 17, 1994 at Memory Lane. (The program lists the venue as The Hour House and that's where it was originally scheduled to be held, but the event got shut down for some reason or other and bumped to the following week at Memory Lane.) Local bands were invited to play songs by Atomic Books owner Scott Huffines' two all-time fave favorite bands (um, Kiss and Devo). Includes the set lists - and Scott's reminder to tidy up afterwards!





The only known salvageable footage of this historic event is Blister Freak Circus (Skizz Cyzyk and Joe Tropea) performing Devo's "Gut Feeling" - with the backbeat provided by Pong! Scott Huffines filmed this at Memory Lane, brilliantly inserting stock footage clips that evoke the Devo aesthetic (think "It's a Beautiful World").


"Gut Feeling" by Blister Freak Circus
from Atomic Books' "Q: Are We Not Kiss? A: We Are Devo!"
Memory Lane, early 1990's

Here's Scott's backstory on this event:

Peruse the City Paper nightclub listings and you are likely to find a plethora of hipster-ironic musical mash-ups with clever names like "Johnny Clash's Planet of the Apes 80's Flashback" or "The White Strokes versus Wu Tang & Wang Chung."

But in the early days of Baltimore hipsterdom this was not the case.

That is until the tax man came knocking at Atomic Books' door.

A $5,000 tax bill loomed large. How was Huffines to pay? A book sale? Although during the 90's Baltimore was referred to as "The City That Reads," the fact was, no one read. Of course they occasionally bought books -- but only to decorate their living spaces with. What was he to do?

Suddenly a light bulb appeared above Huffines' head, a 150-watt illuminated marquee scrolling a message: "Put on a show, Little Rascals style!"

And since Kiss and Devo were his favorite bands he decided: What better way to beg for money than to force feed the grunge-loving public the music of his youth? And thus was born:

"Q: Are We Not Kiss? A: We Are Devo!"

The show was a rollicking success, even garnering a coveted City Paper "Best Of" award. Huffines and Warner videotaped the event, utilizing antique VHS cameras the size and weight of cinderblocks. They stored the tapes away never knowing that they were Atomic TV's legacy, their Dead Sea Scrolls, their Book of Genesis.

Many years passed.

And so these tapes sat, deep in the Atomic TV archives until one day the spectre of unemployment revisited Scott Huffines and gave him time. Time to panic and time to worry about his future. But eventually he grew bored and nostalgic, as men in their 40's often do, and he used this time to review hundreds of unlabeled videos, trying to make sense of his past.

He is still confused.

Sit back and enjoy one of Atomic TV's earliest clips, our own "Cavern Club" footage.

-- Scott Huffines