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Out There!- “Shake For The Sheik”, “Walking Through Walls”, & “I’ll Be There” (The Escape Club’s Lesser-Known Hits)
We all remember the Escape Club, right? Back in 1988, none of us could escape The Escape Club and their smash hit, Wild Wild West. Wild Wild West hit the top of the charts, and was supposed to lift the band to further acclaim. Sorry, but it didn’t happen! Yet, the Escape Club would be known for another song, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. Wild Wild West was on pop radio every fifteen minutes, and the video was in heavy rotation on MTV. One of MTV’s legendary and best-known videos, it featured these strange combo arms and legs (without a crotch) getting down to the beat.  Twenty years later, and I still haven’t gotten those flopping arms out of my head!  The Escape Club consisted of a singer who could pass as Bono’s younger brother (Trevor Steel), “Booger Presley” on the lead guitar (John Holliday- doesn’t he look like Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds? If not, how about Eric Bogosian?), the rasta-haired bassist (Johnni Christo) and the quiet Steven Seagal inspired pony-tailed drummer with no personality (Milan Zekavica). You know what? Even twenty years later, the song still hasn’t aged one bit.
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Kanye’s “Love Lockdown” Video: Mr. West Goes Tribal
With attention building for his upcoming fourth album “808s and Heartbreak” (out November 25th), Kanye West has just premiered the video for his Top 5 single “Love Lockdown”. Typical of the artier-than-thou West’s previous works, this is a pretty arresting video visually. I can see this cleaning up at next year’s VMAs…and it’s so damn refreshing to see a hip-hop video where the ass-shaking is not coming from a sea of bikini-wearing chicks. I’m just […]
FORTY-FIVE REVOLUTIONS PER MINUTE #6: Reaching Out To Capture A Marmoset
OTHER BRIGHT COLORSÂ “Stands To Reason” b/w “Circle Square” (1985)
Sporting no visible label name or serial number of any sort, Other Bright Colors’ first and only 7-inch appeared magically in stores around the fall of 1985. This was, as you can guess, a fertile time period for young indie bands in the southeastern US. Early ’80’s LA punk stalwarts Black Flag had forged a giant path, like a modern-day Lewis & Clark, through the Deep South and the Great Northwest and back again, paving the way for what would become the American Indie Revolution.Â
Soon, kids nationwide were turning burned-out churches and abandoned VFW halls into punk co-ops, creating fanzines and record labels from Xerox paper and glue, and galvanizing bored drop-outs everywhere to stand up and say, “Fuck, we can do this, too!” Suddenly, it was as if there was a flood of little black plastic discs raining down from the sky. The “45-as-art” concept that started when Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel” hit the stands in ’74 had now come full-circle. This was our CNN. Or maybe not, but whatever it was, it was glorious. Anyway…
Hailing from Chapel Hill, NC, Other Bright Colors quickly gained a foothold in the greater East Coast rock clubs with this sweet little teaser of a single. I remember the thing that caught my eye about it was the way the artwork, a simple handwritten scrawl over orange-and-flesh backdrop with sepia-tone “band frolicking through nature” photo on back, seemed both very D.I.Y. and very professional at the same time. And the rich music contained on the plastic held even more mystery.
OTHER BRIGHT COLORS \”Stands To Reason\” on YouTube
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