{"id":1948,"date":"2010-05-07T22:28:57","date_gmt":"2010-05-07T22:28:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1948"},"modified":"2010-05-07T22:28:57","modified_gmt":"2010-05-07T22:28:57","slug":"friday_evening_videos_i_drove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2010\/05\/07\/friday_evening_videos_i_drove\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Evening Videos: “I Drove All Night”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll bet you all had a hunch when I started prattling on about Roy Orbison last night who was going to be be appearing in this week’s Friday Evening Videos, didn’t you? Smart little Loyal Readers.<\/p>\n

You’re quite correct: I was<\/i> planning to post what I thought was Roy’s final hit, “You Got It,” from the 1989 album Mystery Girl<\/i>, which was a favorite cassette of mine during my sophomore year of college and the following summer. But as I started poking around looking for the video clip and any interesting background information I could find, I discovered that this was not, in fact, Roy’s last charting single, and Mystery Girl<\/i> was not his last album. Remember that he’d been working a lot with producer Jeff Lynne in the year or two prior to his death in 1988; it turns out he recorded more material than what ended up on Mystery Girl<\/i>, enough to fill out one more album, which Lynne compiled and released four years later. Somehow, I completely missed King of Hearts<\/i> in 1992, and I also missed the two final, posthumous hits it generated, a duet of Roy’s classic “Crying,” sung with k.d. lang, and this song:<\/p>\n

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“I Drove All Night” reveals a fairly tangled history when you delve into it. The song was written specifically for Roy, and he recorded it in 1987, a full year before his death, but for some reason it wasn’t selected for Mystery Girl<\/i>, and of course it wouldn’t appear until King of Hearts<\/i> came out in ’92. In the meantime, Cyndi Lauper, of all people, scored a top-10 hit with it in 1989, and I’m willing to bet a lot of people probably think the song was hers, and Roy’s version was the cover. It has since been covered again by a band I’ve never heard of, Pinmonkey, and most recently by — shudder — Celine Dion in 2003.
\nSince I was unfamiliar with the song, I obviously had never seen the video either, until this afternoon. I think it’s absolutely magnificent. The imagery is a perfect match for the audio, it’s very clever how the director covers for the fact that Roy had been dead for four years, and the young stars are simply beautiful to gaze upon. (If you can’t place them, you’re looking at Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, seen here at the peak of her Rocketeer<\/i>-era detectability, and Jason Priestley, who was then riding high on the success of Beverly Hills, 90210<\/i>.) Everything about this evokes a particular time in my life, a time I often miss, to be honest. I was old enough in ’92 to know something, but still young enough to believe in a lot of things. I acted tougher than I really was, and I was in love with the idea of love itself. In other words, I was a lot like the character that Priestley is playing here. Or at least, that’s how I used to imagine myself, and how I like to remember myself.<\/p>\n

Hell, I could just reacting to the car, I guess. Priestley is driving a 1964 Galaxie, a little bit different than my older ’63, but close enough for this video to stir up a lot of sense memories.<\/p>\n

For our second feature this evening, I wanted to post “End of the Line” by The Traveling Wilburys, another fabulous song that combines a catchy hook with some truly authentic and wise lyrics; unfortunately, the foul Copyright Lords have forbidden anyone from embedding it, so if you’d like to see it, you’ll have to click through<\/a>. If nothing else, it’s worth a look to see how this one handled Roy’s absence.<\/p>\n

Finally, here’s a little something by request, a B-52s song for my friend Keith. To be honest, I really don’t care for The B-52s — I find the majority of their stuff obnoxious, what with the herky-jerky delivery and a sound that generally rubs me the wrong way — but their 1989 hit “Roam” isn’t too bad, and it’s kind of in the same thematic ballpark as “I Drove All Night,” at least in the sense that it’s about traveling and love. Enjoy, Keith!<\/p>\n

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I’ll bet you all had a hunch when I started prattling on about Roy Orbison last night who was going to be be appearing in this week’s Friday Evening Videos, didn’t you? Smart little Loyal Readers. You’re quite correct: I was planning to post what I thought was Roy’s final hit, “You Got It,” from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friday-evening-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}