I’m sure many of you may have seen the various Shreds videos making the rounds where some awesome person with too much time on their hands and a bong full of the good stuff extracts the audio track from a video, then provides a new audio track to sync with the video. Shreds creators have taken down bands from Radiohead to The Who, with their calamitous interpretations of what a hit song might sound like if the entire band was having the worst gig of their life.
Of all of the Shreds out there (if you’ve got time to kill, see them all here , it’s Hall & Oates looking like The Replacements on a bad night that deserves the title, King of the Shreds.
I had so much fun reading the comments posted over the past few days in response to my piece on Billy Squier’s unbelievably bad video for “Rock Me Tonite” that I couldn’t resist sharing another video. This one I’ve actually posted on DM before. It features blue-eyed soulsters Hall and Oates singing “She’s Gone” while in what appears to be a shared drug-like stupor. Pre-dating MTV by almost a decade, this “promotional video” for the album Abandoned Luncheonette was made in 1973 and not released until years later. It’s a real jaw-dropper.
The clothes, the glazed expressions, the parade of women passing in the foreground, the red-sequined devil costume, the guitar solo with flippers…it’s all so ridiculously strange that it had to be a parody, right? A punk-style “fuck you” to the music industry?
When I originally shared this vid on DM a couple years ago, I didn’t know its history. As it turns out, the video was an elaborate joke with very little sub-text. A “fuck you” of sorts. In a 2009 interview with John Oates, the truth came out:
Well, I’ll give you a little background about what happened with that “She’s Gone” thing. First of all, it was 1973. There was no MTV, there was no outlet for anything like this. You know, it might be one of the first music videos ever made. I really couldn’t say, honestly, but it definitely would be a contender. What happened was, we were asked to lip sync “She’s Gone” for a teenage TV dance show broadcast out of Atlantic City, New Jersey. And we really didn’t want to do that; we didn’t want to pretend to sing the song. It was supposed to be shot in a television studio in Philadelphia. So we thought, with the mindset that we were in at the time – and I won’t say more on that, either -
We showed up at the television studio with a chair from our living room. The woman who’s walking through the picture – that’s Sarah…
Oh, wow.
And the devil who comes through was our road manager at the time. And we brought Monopoly money, and those weird instruments, and they thought we were nuts. They really thought that. My sister directed that video.
They thought we were completely insane. They actually didn’t air it; they wouldn’t air it. But we had it this whole time, and eventually I leaked it out to the internet, ’cause I just thought the world should see it.
Two soul classics: Pam Grier and She’s Gone by Hall and Oates.
The first video is the full length version of She’s Gone (not the radio edit) nicely synced up with scenes from Foxy Brown. The second is an example of a great song wedded to an abysmal video. What were they thinking?