"Oh no. Don't say that it's true."

A dark day indeed. RIP David Bowie.
A true giant of the music world if ever there was one.

After a long time away during which I've been helping my friend Rich Chambers with his film projects I've decided to get the 80s party back on track as best I can while working around shooting schedules and post production obligations.

So, without further ado...

What better way to conjure the glorious 80s than with the desperate lyrics of Roger Waters and perhaps the greatest guitar solo in the history of rock from David Gilmour. Yes, we're going to get this party re-started with "Comfortably Numb" from Pink Floyd's "The Wall"; a snarling dragon of a concept album if ever there was one. No need to remind me it was released in November '79 because it doesn't matter. This album laid down the tone for the decade to come.

The modern "blockbuster" art show has come and largely gone over the last 30 years. Sure there are occasional exceptions like the recent Leonardo show in London but for the most part the day when a new year meant at least one new retrospective by some titan of art are dead and gone, killed off by insurance companies.

But lets wind the clock back to the happier days of 1980 when the art blockbuster - as an entire generation of art lovers came to understand the term - was born. The event which gave birth to the new cultural phenomenon was the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective. This massive, thrilling, disturbing, enlightening and exuberant show took over MOMA from May 22 until September 16 of that year and was as much an eye opener for museums around the world as it was for lovers of modern art. Hundreds of thousands of patrons moved through MOMA's turnstiles and were rewarded with a comprehensive overview of one of the most widely known yet little understood artists who ever lived. The exhibition took over the entire museum, an unprecedented occurrence but a necessary one as nearly a thousand works were included in the show. Day after day lines stretched down West 53rd Street . Inside awaited room after room of paintings that changed the course of visual history.

From "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon" to "Still Life with Chair Caning" to "The Three Musicians" to the to the mindblowing graphic work of the 1930s "Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective" prepared the ground and set the bar for blockbusters that followed and made the 1980s a golden age for art lovers.

Picasso - "Minotauromachy" 1935 - etching

Richard Pryor emerged from the 70s one of the biggest stars in the world. He seemingly had it all: money, fame and beautiful lovers. None of it though was apparently enough and like a lot of stars with money and time on their hands Pryor got into drugs. Most notably freebasing cocaine.

On June 9, 1980, in one of the decade's more bizarre celebrity-related events, Pryor was discovered running through the streets of Northridge California on fire. He was eventually caught and taken to the hospital by police where it is said he suffered burns on more than half his body. Initially nobody knew what to make of the incident but it wasn't too long before the facts began to emerge and paint a picture of a man who, in a fit of freebase-induced psychosis, had poured flaming 151 rum over himself then fled into the streets in panic.

Pryor spent six weeks recovering at the Grossman Burn Center and when finally well enough to resume his career didn't shy away from the incident. On the contrary in typical Richard Pryor fashion he faced it head on making frequent reference to it first in his standup routine and later in the movie "Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling" a fictionalized account of the incident and its aftermath.

Spanish Bombs is my favorite tune from the Clash's third album, the double LP classic "London Calling".  Some have said that London Calling is a 1970s record but the fact is that while it was released on December 14, 1979 in Britain it wasn't released in the US until January of 1980. That same month saw the release of the Pretenders self-titled debut album. What a great time for rock music.

On the heels of his success with "The Deer Hunter" director Michael Cimino was officially "hot". For his next feature he would take on the well-worn Western genre with a movie about Wyoming's Johnson County War of the 1890s. Cimino assembled an all-star cast which included Cristopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, Kris Kristofferson, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Mickey Rourke and others and set off for the wilds of Montana's Glacier National Park to capture what he was sure would be indelible images that would set the spirit soaring and underpin his epic tale of greed, pride and frontier fortitude.

Almost immediately the production fell behind schedule due to Cimino's, uh, let's be kind and say "attention to detail". This included tearing down and rebuilding entire sets for reasons that were never entirely clear to the crew and doing as many as 50 takes for some scenes. Another result of Cimino's obsessive behavior was that the $7.5 million budget ballooned to $44 million dollars, making it easily the most expensive movie ever made up to that time. Though the studio tired of Cimino's antics and considered replacing him at various points they never did and Cimino ultimately wound up delivering a movie that was 5 hours 25 minutes in length. United Artists forced him to edit it down for release but his edited version still wound up a corpulent 3 hours 39 minutes long. What's a studio to do? They released it on November 19, 1980.

After a week of empty theaters and scathing reviews the film was pulled, re-edited then re-released. Still, no one came. While the movie did manage to conjure up some amazing imagery any good vibes created by them were undermined by story telling that had all the energy of an empty room. The film wound up grossing around $3 million dollars - which qualifies it as one of the biggest bombs in movie history - and pulled United Artists down with it.

In the bigger picture Heaven's Gate almost single-handedly killed the Western as a popular form of film entertainment. It would take many years before the likes of Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" would breath some new life into the genre. Another result of Cimino's excesses was that studios would no longer be willing to simply sign the checks and get out of the way. In the aftermath of Heaven's Gate the director would almost always have a studio rep standing over his shoulder. The film would also receive an "unacceptable" rating from the American Humane Association (AHA) due to several reports that came from the set alleging animal abuse. Those reports would lead the Screen Actor's Guild to authorize the AHA to monitor the use of animals in all subsequent films. A practice that continues to this day.

As for Cimino himself Heaven's Gate closed behind him. Almost overnight he went from Hollywood hotshot to untouchable. He would ultimately direct four more feature films although all of them were box office flops with is last, 1996's "The Sunchaser" earning $21,508 at the box office.

"Heaven's Gate". A film still in search of an audience.

The Empire Strikes Back represents the absolute pinnacle of the Star Wars saga; before George Lucas decided to turn his franchise over to the marketing department, before his computer graphics fetish took hold, before he decided to move back into the directors chair and make a mockery of that profession and before he forgot how to write.

Directed by Lucas' old film school professor Irvin Kershner TESB is emotionally rounded, thematically rich, funny, compelling and imaginative. It doesn't pander to pre-teens as the disastrous "Return of the Jedi" would, doesn't have the kind of slapped-together-for-a-buck-three-eighty look that plagued parts of the original film and - perhaps as important as the fact that it was helmed by an actual film director - it's cast was first rate and had developed a kind of easy rapport with one another that gave the whole enterprise a sense of relaxed believability.

Picking up three years after the events of the first film TESB opens with the rebels in retreat and hiding out on the ice planet of Hoth. On a patrol mission Luke decides to check out an apparent meteorite strike and is attacked by a snow monster and dragged to its cave to await ingestion. When he fails to return to base his friends become alarmed and we're treated to some real character development. Leia and Han are interrupted during a touching and remarkably satisfying scene in which their true feelings for each other finally come to the fore. Han promptly takes control of events and heads out into the dark to find his friend. It's the kind of well modulated emotional sequence that is completely missing from later installments.

Han does of course find and rescue Luke and the story moves onward and outward from there as all the main characters escape the onslaught of the Empire that has tracked them down to Hoth on one of Darth Vader's hunches. Luke, though, is driven by a vision to go to the the Dagobah system where an apparition of Obi Wan told him he'll be instructed in the ways of the force by Yoda, the ultimate Jedi master. There among the fetid, claustrophobic, dimly lit swamps the story ascends into something approaching true myth as Luke is forced to examine his motivations and their possible consequences. It's also there that we're introduced to Yoda in the form of a puppet brought to life by the voice of Frank Oz and the wizardry of the puppeteers. Even after the story leaves Dagobah the emotional resonance remains and informs the remainder of the movie.

Luke returns to try and rescue his friends who've been double-crossed by Han's old buddy Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) and delivered to Vader lock, stock and barrel in return for Vader's promise to leave Calrissian's Cloud City alone. Vader of course has no intention of letting Cloud City retain something like autonomy and this inspires Lando (ever the opportunist) to switch sides again and aid Luke in his rescue attempt. That attempt, though mostly successful, fails to do much for Han who had been frozen in carbonite and turned over to Boba Fet before Luke arrived.

After Leia and company escape Luke stays behind to confront Vader and in their climactic battle over the gaping yaw of Cloud City's core Vader makes one of the most famous proclamations in movie history.

But it's not the plot details of The Empire Strikes Back that make it so compelling a film. It's the little things. The fact that Lucas and Kirshner don't allow the story to be overwhelmed by special effects. The believeability of the interactions between all the main characters, the willingness to allow the narrative to explore the dark side of the hero myth and Kirshner's patient character development. The quiet scenes carry every bit as much punch as any of the action scenes. For example the reaction of R2D2 and Yoda to Luke's decision to confront what awaits him in the forest on Dagobah. The scene early on where C3P0, R2, Leia and Chewbacca have to deal with the possibility that Han has just sealed his own fate by going out alone to look for Luke at nightfall on Hoth. Vader's stunned silence as Luke falls away from him.

These are all the telltale signs of a master film maker at work and one can only rue the fact that Kirshner was not in the director's chair for the third film. But by then Lucas had made his decision to use Star Wars as nothing more than a marketing platform for toys and video games and storytelling was no longer required.

Still, we have The Empire Strikes Back to enjoy. A great film that in its conceptual completeness, subtlety and emotional depth stands shoulder to shoulder with the best sci-fi movies ever made.

There was a time when jeans were just jeans. You bought them to wear to work on the construction site or to just lay around the house in on the weekend. That all ended in the 80s with the introduction of "designer" jeans. No brand was more successful out of the gate than Calvin Klein and undoubtedly no one was more singularly responsible for the success of CK jeans than the product's public face, Brooke Shields.

In the most infamous of a series of racy (for their time) tv commercials the then 15 year old Ms. Shields stared into the camera and breathlessly declared "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." Oh my.

Here is that scandalous ad from 1980 which wound up getting banned in many parts of the country but would go on to nonetheless create the basic template for nearly every other designer jeans ad that followed. (Somebody needs to tell that young lady that good girls don't sit like that!)

J.R. slumps to the floor after being shot.

"Dallas" was a pioneering prime time big budget TV series that ruled the airwaves in the late 70s and 80s. At the end of the '79-'80 season J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) was shot by an unseen assailant and CBS spent the summer playing up the mystery of who could have shot down the head of the powerful Ewing clan. The suspense was only heightened by the fact that the start of the '80-'81 season was delayed by two months due to an actors strike in Hollywood. Bookies all over the world were taking bets on who did it. "Who shot JR?" became the catch phrase of the year. Jimmy Carter joked that if he knew who shot JR he'd have had no problem raising money for his presidential re-election campaign.

The suspense finally ended on November 21, 1980 when it was revealed J.R.'s black-hearted mistress Kristin Shepard (Mary Crosby) was the one who pulled the trigger, driven to her crime of passion during a fit of rage. The show became the highest rated TV episode in history to that time drawing an estimated 83,000,000 viewers in the US alone.

The first time I heard this beautiful song I knew it was Barbra Streisand with that distinctive voice but I also thought "It sounds an awful lot like somebody else". Well that someone else is of course the Bee Gees who were at the height of their creative power when they wrote and produced this incredible ballad for Barbra. The brother's breathy chorus played off against Streisand's dramatic soprano climaxes is almost too much of a good thing. Almost. The song spent 3 weeks at number one in the U.S. and became Streisand's most popular single ever.

"Get Happy!" was Elvis Costello's attempt to break free from the "New Wave" label he hated and whether or not it removed that label/shackle from him, as a record, its an unqualified success. 20 songs are stuffed onto what was at the time a single LP and they run the musical and thematic gamut from the ominous 'son of sam' overtones of  "Clowntime is Over" to the mid-period Beatles homage "New Amsterdam", which is the song I'm featuring here.

Costello recorded "New Amsterdam" on his own away from the band which probably goes a long way in explaining the song's particularly lyrical feel. He was restless, looking for ways to express himself outside of the strictures of the band while moving toward a more timeless sound. The song is Costello's internal dialogue regarding his feelings about New York City (formerly New Amsterdam). He feels like he should fit in but, while he has the right look, the city just doesn't seem to open up to him the way London does where "they'll take you to heart after a little while". New York, like an abusive lover, nearly kills him and then shows him its sweet side "you give me the lip after punching me silly". Still it's those love/hate relationships that make for the best creative fodder, as "New Amsterdam" proves yet again.

Who knew we needed them?

Among the numerous Post its stuck to the edge of my computer monitor is one that says "post on Post it notes". I'm not sure when I stuck it there as it was partially hidden by a bunch of others with such exciting content as "Bread, laundry soap" and "jellyfish swarms"(?) and my personal favorite "COFFEE!!!!".

I think that, in some way, my eclectic collection of 3" yellow squares is pretty representative of Post it clusters the world over: random thoughts of varying importance jotted down hurriedly before they're forgotten and stuck to whatever is within arms reach. If you're like me most get posted and then forgotten anyway but hey, at least I look like I got it goin' on! So where did this mechanism for appearing like an active go-getter originate anyway? Well, as you may have guessed it's a product of the 80s. 

While the adhesive used on Post it Notes was originally developed in 1968 by 3M chemist Spencer Silver it languished for years without a real world application until one of Silver's colleagues came up with the idea of using it to attach bookmarks to his hymnal. A couple of years later 3M test marketed a product it called "Press 'n Peel" notes based on the concept but nobody gave them a second look. Finally after some more test marketing demonstrated the product might indeed find receptive customers the renamed Post it Notes hit the market for real on April 6, 1980. Work environments the world over were changed forever and more than three decades after their introduction I get to enjoy the pleasure of wondering what on earth might have caused me to post a note about jellyfish swarms.

While technically an English band the Pretenders revolved around frontwoman, songwriter, guitarist, badass-for-the-ages and Cleveland native Chrissie Hynde, who had left the States in the late 70's for London in pursuit of greener musical pastures. She found them. While searching about for the proper musical fit for her amazing talents she cut some demos which found their way to one Dave Hill of Anchor Records. He arranged some studio time for her and she was encouraged to form a group. When the audition dust settled the original Pretenders lineup was in place with James Honeyman-Scott on guitar, Peter Farndon on bass and Martin Chambers on drums.

Their debut album "Pretenders" exploded onto the charts in January 1980, kicking the decade off with style. It reached #1 in the UK and #9 on the Billboard album charts. Pretenders were a breed apart right from the beginning. Chrissie Hynde wasn't some record company creation like the countless tough girl-wannabe posers seen in videos today, she was the real thing. She didn't suffer fools lightly, didn't enjoy having to answer stupid questions, didn't make apologies for what she did or how she did it and was incredibly talented and driven all at the same time. She wasn't a disco queen pretending to be a cultural force, she was a musician with magnetic gifts who seized the spotlight and blew everyone else off the stage.

The album's first cut "Precious" is a song that helped send the message that the 70s were over in no uncertain terms. As raw and cathartic as anything that ever emerged from punk, as tight and compelling as anything power pop groups like XTC would ever produce and as lyrically uncompromising and sarcastic as Hynde herself the song is a three and a half minute manifesto that set the stage for the band's entire career.

Here they are performing "Precious" at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

Released on May 22, 1980, at time when Asteroids and Space Invaders ruled the video arcade, Pac-Man took the world by storm gobbling up the competition on its way to becoming the most popular arcade game of all time. No one could resist and the proof was in the ka-ching. Pac-Man has devoured some 10 billion quarters since its introduction and spawned countless spinoffs and copies. Only 6 people are known to have received a perfect score of 3,333,360 before being shut out by the kill screen. The most recent to do so acheived his perfect score in 3 hours, 41 minutes and 22 seconds: a new world record.

The most popular arcade game of all-time: Pac-Man

Raging Bull is brutal poetry: harsh, uncompromising, caustic, daring and cringe-worthy in places. Martin Scorsese peers in the window of Jake LaMotta's life and records a tragedy in motion, the classic bull in a china shop. LaMotta was a muscle car with no brakes. He bludgeoned his opponents in the ring. He bludgeoned his brother and wife and anyone else that got under his very thin skin outside the ring. He made it to the top, fell off, made it back and fell again. That he would wind up a bloated pile of scar tissue telling one-liners in sleazy clubs only seems fitting. Since tragedy is the essence of all comedy what else could he have become?

DeNiro tried to get Scorsese to make this movie for years but Scorsese resisted. He couldn't find an interesting, unique way into the story and didn't want to do just another boxer-with-a-tough life movie. He was also going through the late stages of cocaine addiction and felt that he had nothing left to offer the world of movie-making. DeNiro was persistent though and eventually Scorsese caved in, cleaned himself up and agreed to take it on.

Scorsese wanted a different look for this film, one of the reasons he decided to shoot in black and white. He reportedly was also bothered (from a strictly professional point of view) by the way that color film faded over time and didn't want this film to suffer that fate. He was also particular about how the fight sequences were shot; changing the size of the ring being used in order to elicit different emotional responses, putting a cameraman in the ring with the actors in order to capture the emotions of the fighters and delicately choreographing the fight sequences for maximum dramatic effect.

Production actually shut down for a time during the shoot so that DeNiro could go on an eating binge to prepare for the later scenes depicting the post retirement LaMotta. DeNiro returned from his binge some 50% heavier than he was during the first part of the shoot and suffered from back and breathing problems.

The finished product is one of stark beauty and gruesome confession. Both the filmmaker and his star push the envelope to the breaking point without apology. They had to. Any other treatment of such a blood-stained life would have been disingenuous. For their troubles the film was nominated for 8 academy awards and won 2, including best actor for Robert DeNiro. Though some critics of the day took issue with the hyper-realistic depiction of violence the film has since been recognized almost universally as one of the greatest American films of all time (and is number 3 on my list of top 10 films of the 80s).

Raging Bull -1980 - Trailer

Erno Rubik was a professor at the Academy of Applied Arts in Budapest Hungary in the 1970s. Some people say that he developed his cube as a way to help his students visualize 3D objects, others say his interest had more to do with the structural problems associated with trying to hold a 3x3x3 cube of mobile parts together. Whatever his motivations he discovered that his cube of colored squares made a neat little puzzle and applied for an Hungarian patent in 1975. After gaining a foothold in the Hungarian toy market his puzzle caught the attention of toy giant Ideal who stepped in and released it for sale in the West in 1980.

It was an immediate hit. Like the Swatch watch it seemed like suddenly everybody had 3 lying around their house. They became part of the cultural landscape and gave the people that could solve them something to gloat about. Contests were organized everywhere and somewhere along the way something called the World Cube Association also came into being to put a formal stamp on records related to solving the cube. The first World Champion in 1982 solved his cube in about 23 seconds. Over the years that number has come down significantly and the current record for solving the cube is a ridiculous 5.6 seconds.

In the years since its introduction some 350 million Rubik's Cubes have been sold and it is generally recognized today as the most successful toy in history.

He was the odd-son-out in the carnival that was John Lennon's personal life. Raised largely by his mother Cynthia he lived his childhood out of the spotlight in England. That all changed in 1980. Following the murder of his father Julian Lennon (John Charles Julian Lennon) was thrust into the limelight as the media went searching for John Lennon-related stories. Inevitably he took up his father's musical mantel and for a while in the mid-80s became a mainstay on MTV. Over time interest in him as the 'second coming' began to fade and he assumed the life of a journeyman rocker; playing clubs, releasing albums that got little or no attention and doing the occasional interview.

That doesn't mean he went away though.

Today Julian Lennon is still an active musician (his new album Everything Changes is due out this year) a film producer (the documentary Whaledreamers about an aboriginal tribe) and head of the environmental and humanitarian White Feather Foundation. At 48 he's outlived his legendary father by 8 years and by all accounts is a happy and centered man.

Julian Lennon then and now

the humble but commercially formidable Sony Walkman

In June 1980 Sony Corporation of Japan introduced the "Walkman" into the American market and people's experience of music would never be the same. The cassette tape had been around for years but had found only niche audiences. Sony's co-founder came up with the basic idea for the Walkman in the late 70s when he was frustrated at having to carry around a bulky cassette tape player on business trips just to listen to music. He had a prototype developed and pitched the idea to the company's chairman as "...a good idea...".

It was that alright and a lot more.

The Walkman took off, eventually selling more than 200,000 units. If you didn't have a walkman in the mid 80s you just weren't happening. It would be like someone today who didn't have a mobile phone.

While the Walkman as it came to be known in the 80s and early 90s would eventually be shoved aside by the digital revolution it's indelible mark on popular culture cannot be over-emphasized. It made wearing  earphones in public acceptable, it cemented the idea that music was not something you had to listen to in a static indoor setting and it helped marked the beginning of the end for vinyl records.

I should note that while the Walkman product did lose it's pre-eminence in the market that doesn't mean it went away. Sony now makes high tech mp3 players sold under the Walkman name, as well as old-fashioned cassette player versions.

On the evening of December 8, 1980 former Beatle John Lennon was returning from a recording session at the Record Plant in New York City to his home in the Dakota building next to Central Park. After exiting his limo at the street he stopped to sign autographs for a few people waiting on the sidewalk. As he made his way into the building after signing the autographs one of the the people who he'd just given an autograph to opened fire on him with a handgun and hit him with several shots. Lennon, barely alive stumbled into the security guard station of the building and collapsed. He was rushed in the back of a police car to a nearby hospital and was pronouned dead a short time later.

Lennon's death sparked a global outpouring of grief not seen since the Kennedy assasination. Six days after the murder some 250,000 people gathered in Central Park near the Dakota to observe 10 minutes of silent rememberence.

I will not give the murderer the satisfaction of mentioning his name here. He remains to this day an inmate at Attica State Prison in New York and, personally, I hope he rots in hell.

You can't get too far into any homage to the 80s before getting around to Michael Jackson. The decade belonged to him the way the 60s belonged to the Beatles. Though "Off the Wall" was technically released in August of 1979 it's full impact wasn't felt until well into 1980. Maybe the most important career move he ever made was to bring Quincy Jones in to produce. Jones was a studio master who'd worked with everyone from Sinatra to Dinah Washington to Dizzy Gillespie and he and Jackson formed a working partnership that created music history. With this album, Jackson became the first solo artist to have four singles from the same album reach the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. And he was just getting started.

Enough talking.

Michael Jackson - Rock with You




Michael Jackson - Official website