7 replies to this topic

[HandBanana]

Growing up in the 80s, you had Night Flight.
Night Flight was a brilliant piece of eclectic, free-form programming born of the (at the time fledgling) USA network's need to fill the wee hours of the weekend mornings with something.
This was of course the time before infomercials and cheap corporate consolidated movie re-runs.
What was great about Night Flight is that it was like having a cooler older brother in college that would come back and rock your little mind with cool/cult/underground stuff that you never would have seen otherwise.
It was the first time I saw Melvin & Howard, how I heard about Zappa, how I discovered tons of music outside the bounds of top 40 radio.
Think its the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead too.

Night Flight was a grab bag. They'd play a movie and with the time left show some live Zappa clips. Then show a 50s hygeiene short. Then maybe a Fleischer toon.

(NOTE TO ROB: WE NEED A NIGHT FLIGHT THREAD BY SOMEONE THAT KNOWS HOW TO WRITE)


So it's summertime. Like 1986 or 87. Im 12 or 13 and up watching Night Flight.
At the time, the furthest tentpoles of my musical tastes were maybe like INXS.
The night they played Infected was my "holy shit" moment.
Michael Stipe tells a story about how one night when he was 14 he sat up with Patti Smith's Horses and a bowl of cherries and just gets blown away. He liked music before that but had never heard anything so shocking before that.
This was my version of that moment.

In 86, Epic ponied up the cash to do a short film with Tim Pope for The The's album Infected. While overall it loosely plays like a short art film, the videos are still self-contained enough to stand and play individually.
To my preteen brain, raised on classic rock and top 40 hits, Matt Johnson's lyrics about pointless sex, despair-soaked, emaciated, sweaty, nicotine-stained life in Thatcher's England in the 80s changed everything.
Fuck. "Out of the Blue(Into the Fire)" would have knocked me on my ass by itself if I had only seen it.
Like....everything. I would never have venture over to "that part" of the record store if I hadnt had a really good reason to and now I had a very good one.

OK this is getting long-winded and boring as fuck.

Anyhoo, thanks to Youtube, I can post the entire thing right here.
I cant guarantee that your experience will be remotely like mine was.
I cant guarantee that this all wont play as a little dated as it most certainly is.
I still think this works as a powerful statement from what was, for all intents and purposes, a one-man band and its even very frequently danceable.

So. We shall get underway in the next post. Thanks for indulging me.

[HandBanana]

01. INFECTED



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[HandBanana]

02. OUT OF THE BLUE (INTO THE FIRE)


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[HandBanana]

03. HEARTLAND



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[HandBanana]

04. ANGELS OF DECEPTION


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[HandBanana]

05. SWEET BIRD OF TRUTH


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[HandBanana]

06. SLOW TRAIN TO DAWN (feat Neneh Cherry)


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07. TWILIGHT OF A CHAMPION


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[HandBanana]

08. THE MERCY BEAT


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