If you’ve been frequenting this site for some time, you’d likely recall that I’ve mentioned (on several occasions) that many of my most enduring and earliest memories revolve around music. And to spend even a portion of my days, focusing on childhood passions and obsessions makes me one of the luckier people in the entire world; sadly, after all, most people can’t say that. Now, as a child of the 80s, I remember my parents renting a wild array of movies and videos from Video Joe’s on 67th Drive and Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills — but the ones that captured my attention the most, that I still remember to the day was David Bowie‘s Serious Moonlight, Talking Heads‘ Stop Making Sense (arguably, one of the best live concert movies ever made) and The Police’s Synchronicity.
More than 30 years later, I can still remember an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder while watching each one of those videos and arguably from that point onwards, I was madly obsessed. I watched each of those concert videos with rapt attention, observing everything and I knew from that point on that I wanted to be part of that somehow; that I wanted to be around and make sounds that made me feel things that I couldn’t describe. So when I heard that David Bowie died after an 18 month struggle with cancer last year, I was profoundly heartbroken. Bowie wound up being a major influence on a significant portion of my life — and as a tribute to him on what would have been his 70th birthday, I figured it would be appropriate to choose a random array of some of my favorite work, as well as any live footage I could find. Check it out y’all.