This year’s nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came out a few weeks ago. Dionne Warwick wasn’t on the list, which is puzzling–she was on last year’s, when I was certain she’d finally be voted in. She wasn’t. Her qualifications did not get appreciably better or worse since then, so I’m not sure why she was dropped from the list.
Comparing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the corresponding baseball version in Cooperstown is difficult for a variety of reasons, many of which come down to the notion of subjectivity (art) vs. objective quantification (sports). There’s some overlap. You can quantify things like record sales and chart rankings and Grammy nominations (which themselves are arrived at subjectively), but concepts like influence and aesthetic worth are subjective; conversely, while personal opinion obviously has a bearing on who gets into the Baseball Hall of Fame (especially when dealing with the steroid era), ideally there is a far greater degree of impartial statistical measurement guiding the yearly voting. One area where they can be directly compared, though, is the nomination process. With the baseball HOF, once someone is nominated–based simply on how long the player’s career was, with achievement benchmarks that cast a wide net–you stay nominated for up to seven years (formerly ten), as long as you exceed 5% of the vote; you have some time for your advocates to publicly build a case for you. (Recent example: Larry Walker was inducted in his 10th and final year of eligibility, having gone from 20.3% of the vote in 2011 to clearing the bar with 76.6% in 2020.) With the Rock and Roll HOF…well, I have no idea how it works. People come onto the ballot, they drop off, then sometimes they pop back on.
The case for Dionne Warwick, in my mind, goes well beyond “Walk On By,” even though, I would guess, that remains her most recognizable song for most pop music fans 60 years later. (Hard to say, she’s had so many big hits. I played it on her birthday for some grade 6 students a couple of months ago, and, much to my surprise, a handful of them knew it.) One thing I’d make sure to include on her résumé–all thanks to YouTube; pretty sure I never would have known about it otherwise–is the pioneering video she made for “Walk on By,” her second Top 10 single and first #1 on Billboard’s R&B chart. Even more than Nico’s “I’m Not Sayin’,” this is a “real” video–visually sophisticated, conceptual even, not just a leisurely and photogenic walkabout. I’d even go so far as to say that what we have here is somehow hooked in with the French and Italian films that were then gaining in visibility, box office, and cultural cachet in North America–an attempt to capture their mood and their look, maybe a knowing parody, something.* If it was a video created to be shown on Shindig! or Ready Steady Go!, I think they overshot the mark by a considerable distance–if the term “floor-filler” has an antonym, this is it, a certified floor-emptier.
Once again, we’re up on the roof. But not a New York City tenement rooftop, nothing like the ones seen in the Liz Phair and Lauryn Hill videos–or the private retreat the Drifters celebrated–but rather an austere, modern-looking Paris rooftop, the Eiffel Tower very prominently in full view. Warwick is walking along pensively, a handbag over her shoulder and clutching a tiny stuffed animal. Initially, as befits the words she sings–“If you see me walking down the street, and I start to cry…”–she’s alone. Just after the half-minute mark, as “Walk on By”’s piano shifts into something more urgent on the line “I break down and cry,” a man passes Warwick on the left, and, within seconds, she’s surrounded by five or six more men, looking very much like they’re on loan from Pauline Kael’s “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties.” Warwick stops: the men are very mannequin-like (and here’s where I start thinking of analogous films, something by Jacques Demy perhaps), elegantly dressed in suits and ties, holding hats. As she resumes walking, the men follow her. She stops again, while they keep going, right out of frame–they’re walking on by, of course.
The men are all seated when they next appear–there are twice as many of them now (surprise: all white)–and it’s Dionne who’s doing the walking-on-by. She stops, they all get up and surround her. Warwick gives them a wry once-over, seems to conclude “Thanks, but no thanks,” and resumes walking. As the image fades to black, we watch Warwick recede into the background with the men following her. You get the feeling that this choreographed game of stopping, starting, following, and walking-on-by will go on forever. It’s all very cool and cosmopolitan, an oddly perfect distillation of both the song and Warwick–icy, distant, regal–herself. I wish there were long-forgotten clips for all my favourite ‘60s and ‘70s pop songs scattered across the deepest recesses of YouTube. If I wasn’t clear enough on the issue when writing about the “Like a Rolling Stone” clip, I’m far from a purist on this matter. I’d be more than happy if energetic and imaginative DIY-types start taking it upon themselves to fill in those two decades of largely missing music-video history–give me more, give me more.
“Walk on By”s aren’t all that plentiful, though. Let me add four more: two that were actual videos made, with whatever purpose in mind, at the same time as their songs, and two created long after the fact that capture the essence of their songs so well, I’d like to think that contemporaneous video clips might not have been all that different. The Beatles, it won’t come as any surprise, were playing around with what we now recognize as MTV-style music videos as early as 1966. Or, you could argue persuasively, even before that–there are musical set-pieces in A Hard Day’s Night (“Can’t Buy Me Love”) and Help! (“Ticket to Ride” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”) that are among the greatest videos-that-aren’t-actually-videos ever committed to film. But with the “Paperback Writer” clip (and also one they produced for “Rain” that doesn’t seem to be on YouTube anymore; the legal distinction between the two escapes me, although for the purposes of this blog they’re similar enough to be interchangeable), they’re making something that is 100% in service of the song, not anything larger, and they’re employing techniques and an approach–messing with their personas, visual puns and non-sequiturs, feigned boredom (“We’re doing this, but we want you to know we’re not happy about it”–the Replacements didn’t invent we-don’t-wanna-know)–that would become coin of the realm through the ‘80s and beyond.
Above and beyond all that, though, I’m including “Paperback Writer” for just about the boldest, most vivid colour photography you’ll ever encounter in a music video. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who would later direct the first film version of Let It Be, decades before Peter Jackson got hold of the footage), shot the band on the grounds of London’s Chiswick House, with a wash of lush green foliage, luxuriant blood-red roses, purple lilacs, and Ringo’s blue sunglasses that is every bit as trippy as you’d want a mid-‘60s Beatles video to be (just two years later, these are not the Beatles of A Hard Day’s Night). The other big attraction? “Paperback Writer.” As I’ve written before, the true genius of the Beatles’ catalogue isn’t found in whatever dozen songs you consider their greatest; my dozen favourite Dylan or Neil Young or Chuck Berry or CCR songs are more or less just as brilliant. The Beatles’ genius resides more in their 27th and 43rd greatest songs. “Paperback Writer” is the 43rd-greatest Beatles song ever–yes, I did check–and it’s better than the greatest song by many people who are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The “Paperback Writer” video was shot on May 20, 1966, and the single–one of those stray Beatles 45s with no album proper–was released 10 days later. The pop world, evolving at the speed of light in 1966, would take another radical turn in July when a new “supergroup,” Cream, played their first public show. The band consisted of breakaway personnel from three other existing bands–Eric Clapton from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce from the Graham Bond Organisation–a strategy that would be tried again and again for the next few decades with rapidly diminishing returns–I’ll make a nostalgic exemption for Crosby, Stills & Nash.** I’ve already rhapsodized about Cream in my book about pop music on screen, where “Sunshine of Your Love” (Goodfellas), “I Feel Free” (The Sopranos), and “White Room” (Freaks and Geeks) were resurrected from classic-rock purgatory and jolted back into life, so I’m as happy as could be to find a place for them here. As strange a match as the band might have made soundtracking New York gangsters in silk suits, they seem just as unlikely to be cast into the role of music-video innovators–they’re the band with the 20-minute drum solo, right? But for “I Feel Free,” the first song on their first album,*** they made a video, one that manages, seemingly without much more preparation than finding an open space and turning on a camera, to capture something fundamental about the song and the band and the moment.
The clip begins with successive close-ups of Baker, Bruce, and Clapton; Baker looks deranged, Bruce glances to his left, and Clapton takes a deep breath, like he’s about to embark on something from which he knows there’s no turning back. You’re a pop star now, Eric, so go do pop-star things. With the Richard Lester Beatles films still the prevailing template, the three emerge from a forest and begin to scamper and frolic. But there are compelling disconnects: the song sounds like some ancient druid chant, they’re fittingly dressed like monks, and the day is gloomy and grey–oppressively so, which I don’t think is just a case of fading B&W film stock. They climb hills, play around on a swing set, hang from tree branches, jump up, fall down, roll around.**** The image occasionally blurs, the dreaminess of it all abetted further by slow- and reverse-motion: bodies float backwards onto swings instead of jumping off. Some Keystone Kops midway, a return to the swing set, and at 2:00 a reprise of those close-ups at the start. Not a closed circle, though: the band re-emerges from the forest, but this time they tear off their monk costumes to reveal everyday trousers and white shirtsleeves. They run through a field, there’s no one there, the ceiling is the sky. They feel free.*****
There are, I know, other in-the-moment videos from the late-‘60s I could be writing about–including, I’m positive, one for the twee-as-they-wanna-be Small Faces’ “Itchycoo Park” I remember seeing that has seemingly disappeared from YouTube; there’s one for “Lazy Sunday” still up that I love just as much, although it’s maybe a little too similar in spirit and execution to the Cream video to warrant inclusion here–but sometimes the best glimpses into what could’ve been are provided by clips assembled long after the fact, with or without approval. Just like a film director completely turning a scene inside-out with a song you hadn’t heard in decades, a hip-hop group sampling some five-second snippet you may have to dive into the deepest recesses of your mind to identify, or a D.J. stumbling onto an improbably perfect segue,****** the DIY video, if done right, can make the familiar sound new again.
Creedence Clearwater Revival: if video had been an everyday fact of life as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s, I would love to have seen the videos that would have accompanied their phenomenal streak of Top 10 hits. “Fortunate Son” and “Bad Moon Rising” have become so synonymous over time with the Vietnam War and campus unrest–ironic, seeing as the band was viewed by many as apolitical hitmakers at the time–that we probably feel like we’ve seen these videos already, and to a certain extent we have: “Fortunate Son” plus newsreel footage of choppers, napalm, and the National Guard is almost a prerequisite for any documentary about the 1960s that touches on the war. I’d like to think that CCR’s swampier, more primordial hits–the ones where they get to “choogling”******* (“Green River,” “Born on the Bayou,” and most of all their monumental “Ramble Tamble,” the non-single that opened Cosmo’s Factory)–would have inspired flights of imagination less anchored to the decade. Something more akin to the single-shot******** clip John Fogerty landed on MTV for his mid-‘80s comeback hit, “The Old Man Down the Road.” But better–that one’s almost too literal in its attempt to make the perfect CCR video. There’s a third CCR–there are others, too; they contained multitudes–the CCR of “Up Around the Bend” and “Sweet Hitch-Hiker,” the CCR of the place up ahead, of good conversation, of flying at the speed of sound. And that’s what I’m going with, a video seemingly created with the band’s full approval in 2018 (the uploader on YouTube is identified as Creedence Clearwater Revival, linking to other videos and other social media accounts, all of it deemed “official”). Getting the members of Creedence to agree on anything after 1975, that’s a miracle in and of itself.
The “Sweet Hitch-hiker” clip would fit comfortably in amongst those three driving videos I wrote about earlier. Mixing cleaned-up (pristine) home movies of drummer Doug Clifford and (maybe–he’s behind a helmet) John Fogerty on bikes and zipping past roadside********* hitch-hikers with in-studio close-ups of the band playing, the video is a study in perpetual motion. The home-movie footage is speeded up tenfold, and the world that flashes by is vibrant and alive–no hangover from the ‘60s here. Just shy of the two-minute mark, a woman in a flowered print jumpsuit is now driving the bike, soon joined by another woman along for the ride. Women figured less prominently in the music of Creedence than in probably any other major rock band of the ‘60s, so an unexpected surprise. One thing they did write a lot about was stasis: a dead-end job pumping gas, a war (rain) that never ended, stuck here in Lodi again. This is anything but that.
We don’t have to imagine, or assemble reconstructions years later, to get a sense of what the Rolling Stones would have done with the medium of video; they were making them as early as 1967, with promotional clips for “We Love You” (an enthusiastic middle-finger to the British authorities) and “2000 Light Years from Home” (as silly as the song), and later for “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It)” in 1974–the one where they’re all in sailor suits–and no one has yet figured out a way to stop them. (Most recent: 2023’s “Angry.”) I don’t really feel like taking inventory, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never found an official Rolling Stones video from ’74 on more than passably diversionary–the one they made for “Waiting on a Friend” was about the best. So many of them seem to be offered up as evidence that the band is still standing and still, well, you know the rest.
There’s a video for “Rocks Off,” though, that is, again, anything but that. It was assembled/edited by Nuno Monteiro in advance of a deluxe edition of Exile on Main Street released in 2010, which in turn preceded Stones in Exile, a documentary on the making of Exile and the tour that accompanied the album. All of it–the video, the documentary, all the way back to another film, Cocksucker Blues, the more-often-cited-than-actually-seen filmed diary of that same tour (from which Exile’s cover art was collaged)–comes out of the work of one man, the American photographer Robert Frank. It’s a tall order to visually capture what Robert Christgau, in his oft-quoted “Consumer Guide” review of Exile, described as an album “weary and complicated, barely afloat in its own drudgery,” but Frank’s album-cover collage and scandalous documentary come from the same murky sludgepile (sometimes disturbingly so). And they’re translated masterfully to the “Rocks Off” video.
After a few seconds of local colour, there they are, the fabled Stones of the post-Altamont period–personal quirk, but the last moment where I can still bear to call them “the Stones”–ambling down a street in New York City. Newest member Mick Taylor, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts are in front; Mick Jagger follows behind, conversing with two guys I don’t recognize.********** (Outside of a couple of photographs, Keith Richards doesn’t turn up until three minutes into the video.) This first time we see Jagger he’s laughing, but elsewhere he wants you to know that the sunshine bores the daylights out of him, and not just the sunshine–his disdainful, withering stare suggests an all-consuming boredom with every last thing on God’s earth. But how can anybody who’s zipping through the days at lightning speed be bored? At a minute-and-a-half, images of the band (in their French villa, I think) flicker past in a herky-jerky blur; the cutting is near-subliminal for about a third of the video. Time is omnidirectional in “Rocks Off,” slowing down and speeding up and chasing shadows.
One of the video’s recurring storylines is the antics of a Bowery denizen in a fedora who subsists by wiping down the windshields of stopped (and sometimes not-stopped) cars. As he gracefully stutter-steps, glides, and pirouettes his way in and around traffic, you know he’s privy to the same phantom voices Jagger’s hearing in his head. Jagger tries, none too successfully, to shout them down; the man in the fedora just lets them in and goes about his day.
Thanks to a friend, I managed to get a ticket to a one-time-only screening of Cocksucker Blues at Toronto’s Lightbox theatre in 2014. The strange legal history of the film has been recounted many times–the screening I attended was free, which may be how they were able to circumvent the necessity of Frank himself being in attendance. (Frank would die in 2019, just shy of his 95th birthday.) Glad I saw it: highlights were Jagger joining Stevie Wonder onstage for “Superstition”–Wonder opened for the ‘72 tour–a bizarre panoply of backstage lurkers and dilettantes that included Truman Capote (I view the ‘72 tour as integral to pop music’s entrée into celebrity culture), and, of course, lots of Exile. But there were also dead patches throughout, and the uglier moments responsible for the film being withdrawn from circulation were more unpleasant than compelling. Between Cocksucker Blues and the “Rocks Off” video, I’ll take the latter every time. Would the Rolling Stones have come up with a better one themselves in 1972? We’ll never know. I’d also love to see what they would love to see what they would have done with “Sway”*********** and “Dead Flowers.”
*When looking up director credits months after writing that, I discovered that the “Walk on By” video was indeed directed by Claude Lelouch, the French director who had a huge international hit in 1966 with A Man and a Woman–very much the commercial side of art-house fare.
**Hate mail pending from GTR, Audioslave, and Slaughterhouse fans.
***Added to the U.S. version; “I Feel Free” was only available as a single in the U.K.
****None of which seems to interfere with the cigarette visibly dangling from between Clapton’s fingers.
*****Quick mention of another Cream clip available on YouTube, not really a video but with lots of inventive stuff going on visually: a performance of “Anyone for Tennis?” on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in May 1968. Painted studio backdrops, tennis rackets, longer hair, same dangling cigarette.
******Something I’ve experienced as both a listener and, for a few years hosting a show on college radio, as a deejay. Segueing Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Very Merry Christmas” into Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” (or Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year” into Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”) ensured that I would never hear those songs the same way again.
*******Not, I’m sorry to say, recognized as a word by the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. I’ve tried.
********Or so it would appear; according to Wikipedia, the effect of a single, long take–as with Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope–was achieved through sleight-of-hand.
*********The streets of El Cerrito? San Francisco? I don’t know.
**********I thought it might be Billy Preston, who played on Exile, to his left, but not unless that hat is hiding a very large Afro. A friend says that one of the two is a security guard named Stanley, something he remembers from reading Robert Greenfield’s Stones Touring Party.
***********They come and they go: for a while there was a user-made clip on YouTube of “Sway” overtop footage from a Kenneth Anger film (Invocation of My Demon Brother?) that was amazing. It got taken down a few years ago.
we don't want to know 