Eighteen years ago I watched Red, Hot + Blue. Taped it, and bought the CD. It’s been ‘in the rotation’ on CD, and now in my iPod since then. I haven’t watched the VHS tape since shortly after I recorded it, but I’ve recently bought the DVD release. It’s playing on my computer right now.
You know? I still like it. I’ve watched Did You Evah by Deborah Harry and Iggy Pop, Miss Otis Regrets/Just One Of Those Things by Kirsty MacColl and The Pogues, and now Don’t Fence Me In by David Byrne.
k. d. lang’s rendition of So In Love had me in tears. Turning a tormented love song into a tormented lament of lost love caught me right between the sternum and the gut. It’s still my favorite version of the song.
I’ve always liked Miss Otis Regrets. But then, I was a huge Pogues fan at the time. It’s strange, looking at the video, knowing that Kirsty MacColl is dead (though by accident and not by AIDS).
And Did You Evah has always been a fave. I liked the prehistoric flying creature on the wire (‘Oh, look who’s coming in now.’) and the interaction between Deborah Harry and Iggy Pop.
Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye performed by Annie Lennox seems the saddest song to me, especially when paired with the video. It’s the old 8mm films. It seems that kids growing up today have video with its included audio. When I got a camera it was a sound-capable super-8. When I was a kid my dad would show silent 8mm films. It was weird seeing people I only dimly knew mugging for the camera years before I was born, and seeing the cars and the way people dressed in the '50s. Seeing 8mm films reminds me of when I was a kid, and they’re a bit poignant because most of the people in them are dead. So here’s Annie Lennox’s video with its footage of those Halcyon Days Of Youth And Innocence paired with a song about parting.
I like Les Negresses Vertes’s version of I Love Paris with their French accents. But then at the same time I think of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s version. It’s interesting to have two versions in my head at the same time. And just for fun, I picked up the guitar and figured out some chords that will work with the song. (D, A, and a change to G, D, A ad the end.)
It’s All Right With Me with Tom Waits is an interesting video. I don’t know what they used, but I can imagine Jim Jarmusch swinging around a Bolex H-16. (I’m a bit of a fan of Jarmusch’s films.)
From Wiki:
Is that true? In the early days of the epidemic did people boil clothes to avoid catching the disease?
I don’t know if it was specifically true of AIDS, and by the time I saw the video I knew how AIDS was transmitted and that boiling clothes had nothing to do with preventing or avoiding the disease, but I know it was done in earlier 20th Century epidemics of influenza or typhus. The image is of having to destroy or clean out the remainders of a lover, when what you really wanted to do was hold it close for even just the scent of the person… I interpret it as symbolic of having to abstain from making love to an infected and dying lover.
I worked in a record store when this came out. I played it probably more, that couple of years, than any other records. It’s a masterpiece of its kind.
I think standards are pretty immune to the ravages of time and are always ready for reinterpretation. And this project had some very good interpretations.
Incidentally, I didn’t know it at the time but the DVD also came with a CD. So now I have the original CD I bought so long ago, and an extra copy. 
I found – and still find – the U2 “Night and Day” disappointing in the extreme. It’s perhaps my most favoritest song of all time, and that cover is just … meh.
(FTR: best ever version: Stan Getz and Kenny Barron. Sheer perfection.)
Huh. There was a bluesy restaurant in DC of that name awhile back, and S. Frederick Starr, a Sovietologist, former president of Oberlin College and talented jazz musician, wrote a book about the jazz subculture in the USSR named that.
So it’s no surprise that its use as a name would be somewhat common.
Annie Lennox singing “Ev’rytime we say goodbye” is like a kick in the gut every time I hear it. Lisa Stansfield’s “Down in the depths” is also great, as is Jimmy Somerville’s “From this moment on” and Aztec Camera’s “Do I love you”. Almost every track is solid.
But the Jungle Brothers can still kiss my ass with their heterosexist “Babydoll lemme get close to you 'cause that’s what a man is supposed to do” bullshit in “I Get a Kick.” How dare they sing a lyric like that on a CD for research into a disease that was decimating gay men? Pissed me off then and still pisses me off. I skip that track every time.
Only they (the makers of the project) were making the point that AIDS isn’t a ‘gay disease’. Everyone is at risk.
I don’t believe for a second that the Jungle Brothers were making this point.
ETA: And if that is the point they were trying to make, they made it in about the most ham-fisted way I can think of.
I meant the makers of Red Hot + Blue, not The Jungle Brothers.
I love that album. The highlight is probably Shane MacGowan laying gleeful waste to Just One Of Those Things: “Ah trup ta tha moooon/Oan gossamer wungs. HUAARGHH!”
Same answer applies. If that was the point, it was a completely ridiculous way to try to make it.