Lost Hits of the New Wave #37

"Stand or Fall" by The Fixx

One of my first memories of MTV was this video. I never saw the music video channel until about a year or so after it had first hit the air, and was in college at a friend's house, who not only had a Nintendo Entertainment System with the amazing for the time Donkey Kong home video game, but also cable with a projection TV in the basement.

"Stand or Fall" by The Fixx was the video that was on when I first came down into that basement, and as I recall, I saw it again later that afternoon as well. It wasn't a matter of it being popular at the moment, it was that the channel didn't have all that many videos yet. This was also around the time that Michael Jackson was making a stink about no videos by black artists on the channel, and something called "Billie Jean" was also starting to get airplay. I saw that one that afternoon as well.



Around this time however, The Fixx was very hot, follow up singles "Red Skies" from Shuttered Room, and from the next album Reach the Beach, there was "Saved by Zero" and "One Thing Leads to Another." Their videos were played on MTV in heavy rotation and for the non-cable users, "Video Rock," ad nauseum.



Led by Cy Curnin, lead singer and primary songwriter who has a solo career as well as participation in other musical projects, The Fixx continues to perform and record today.

Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley

Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley ~ I know I must have seen her or heard her at some point, growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s, but the truth is I didn't really become aware of Moms Mabley until I was in college.

At the Community Center where the radio station was at Camden County College there was a very large but friendly security guard named Don. He was a good guy, but understand me, he did not need his uniform to intimidate someone. Don could have made an excellent living as a bodyguard or a professional wrestler. As far as the Center went, and the radio station, being a security guard, he came and went as he pleased.

I came in for a radio shift one night and found Don in the production studio laughing heartily at a record he was playing in there. He'd found it in the record library and had to hear it, rushing right in there to put it on the turntable. It was Moms Mabley, specifically Moms Mabley Live at Sing Sing, and Don told me as we listened for a bit that she was the funniest woman in the world.

I believed him. She was damned funny, and more than that, she was real - she was telling it like it is. As for Don, I had never heard a man laugh so hard and happily before, and rarely since. That was my introduction to Moms Mabley.

Now, some thirty years later I find this documentary on HBO Go called Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley. Whoopi, who for a time impersonated Moms in her act, puts together a nice biography of the lady. Meshing her life story with actual footage and interviews with contemporaries and those influenced by her, we're given a fair depiction of Jackie 'Moms' Mabley.

Despite (or some might say because of) her race, her age, and her sexuality, Moms Mabley made her way in a world against her, breaking down barriers that barred many in her time. She did it with humor and truth, a role model and inspiration for us all.

If I had any complaint about this doc, it's that it needed more footage and/or recordings of Moms. I'm going to go find some now, you should to, whether you see this terrific documentary or not. Recommended.

Lost Hits of the New Wave #11

"Don't Say No to Me" by Lulu Temple



We've talked about Quincy before, and how I discovered college radio, it's all here. One of the most important things in college radio is support. Now I was involved with my college radio station, and it needed a lot of support.

I didn't go to the University of Pennsylvania with WXPN, Drexel with WKDU, Trenton State College with WTSR, or Princeton with WPRB. I went to Camden County College, yeah, thirteenth grade, and their radio station, FM mono WDBK, was, if anything, a weak second cousin to those big four of area college radio.

We needed a lot of support. So we featured a lot of local artists, among them, the former Quincy, who had formed very locally at Haddon Heights High School. Quincy had to change their name to Lulu Temple because of pressure from Quincy Jones, so their second release, Don't Say No, came out under that name. The album had a difference in sound as well with added horns. I dug the title song a lot and gave it much airplay.

Woodstock

Woodstock ~ I had seen this once years ago, in an edited form, unfortunately, on a late night UHF channel. Hmmm, I guess that kinda indicates just how many years ago that was. But this is the first time I’ve seen the whole thing. Although, seeing how VH1 Classic is showing it in full frame, I guess you could say I’m really only seeing half of the whole film. The director’s use of split screen techniques makes this even more painful.

My first memory of the Woodstock film is a review in my big sister’s college newspaper called the Common Sense. It had the very cool and dated tagline of “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” and over a decade later I would write for it, but that’s another story. The reviewer said that the guy who made the movie sure liked sunrises and sunsets, man, and that’s pretty much all he said. That stuck with me because I was confused, and because I thought Woodstock was about music.

And it is about the music. Early on, The Who’s music from “Tommy” and especially their version of “Summertime Blues” is electrifying and yet the later bit by Sha-Na-Na is just puzzling. Sly and the Family Stone, Ten Years After and Santana give good music, although I wonder if Sly was upset Roger Daltry was wearing the same outfit as he was. And of course the most inspiring moment was Jimi Hendrix playing the crowd awake with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Regarding Joe Cocker’s amazing performance of “With a Little Help from My Friends,” sometimes when someone does a parody of something, you tend to forget the original and only think of the parody. Trust me, after you see the real thing, you will forget John Belushi’s brilliant Joe Cocker imitation forever.

A positive perspective is kept throughout the film, even when things fall apart, which is probably for the best. Much effort is also put forth to illustrate what the experience of being there was about, something not often done with concert films. Woodstock was a logistic nightmare that worked out simply by serendipity – or peace and love, if you prefer. As has been proven more than once, this kind of thing could never happen again. This is a great time capsule to a happier simpler time, and an excellent concert film – and yeah, there are a lot of sunrises and sunsets, man.