Music Videos, YouTube performances, etc.

I found a rabbit hole of laserdisc archives that includes some music videos, such as:



Absolutely spectacular. God bless Dan Clear.

I saw this tour twice in 1983. The first show was in the spring in Chapel Hill and it was Neil solo. Trans-centric but spanned the whole glorious catalog. The second show was in the winter in Durham. Same format but with The Shocking Pinks set added.

A show with acoustic music, pre-programmed electronica and 50's influenced rockabilly blues - name another artist who could pull that off with any semblance of credibility.
 
This is the most recent pre-release single from the forthcoming Bayonne (Roger Sellers) album due in May. The video features home video footage from Roger's childhood to him as an adult, and it serves as a loving tribute to Roger’s dad who passed away last year. Have to admit, I got a little choked up while watching this one. And I think the song is great too.

 
It would be neat to see more home video of myself as a child, but my dad didn't really buy into the technology of the time (1965-1983).
There are some old silent home movies when I was a baby that I got digitized from 8mm film. I don't know who shot those.
 
This is cool!



In the late 70's Bob Dylan began his struggles with evangelical Christianity and he released a string of poorly received albums after his conversion. 1983's Infidels is regarded as his return to secular music, though a close listen to the lyrics still reveals some fairly misguided politics here and there. Best to gloss over those, taken as a whole, Infidels is reasonably decent mid-career Dylan, though it really loses steam on the second side.

In workshopping this album, Dylan called on a wide range of musicians to play with him in his Malibu home. While he eventually entrusted much of this project to Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, he also jammed out with several members of 1st wave Chicano punk band the Plugz. Promoting this album in 1984, he appeared on David Letterman bringing on drummer Charlie Quintana and bassist Tony Marsico (without frontman Tito Larriva) as his backing band. They played 3 songs including alternate versions of Jokerman and License to Kill from the Infidels album. It's a rousing performance that I much prefer to the somewhat staid approach he laid down on wax. Legend has it he came very close to using the Plugz as his backing band for Infidels, though I was not able to find much specific information online about this.

Daniel Romano is a musician and performance artist from Canada. During peak pandemic in 2020, he took the sound from that 1984 Letterman performance and expanded it to the entire Infidels album. Successfully channeling both Dylan and the Plugz, he does an incredibly admirable job envisioning what Infidels COULD HAVE been if Dylan had decided to go with the Plugz as his backing band in the studio. The result really cooks, this would have been a pretty radical move for Dylan at that point in his career and in my biased view, the absolutely correct one.

The Daniel Romano album, which reuses the cover of the Plugz debut Electrify Me with the faces blanked out, seems to originally have been available on Bandcamp and on streaming platforms. He must have gotten cease and desisted super hard or something as I don't see it anywhere now, though I did manage to dig up the files. YouTube says it's copyrighted but the owner allows it to be used, which is a fairly common copyright result in my uploads. To the best of my knowledge this was never released in physical form and is not available to listen to anywhere else. ENJOY!

 
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