One of the things I did in my Hollywood (FL) Beach hotel - since I couldn't watch TV and work on the computer - which had to be at the desk to get Internet access - while I worked on work work or blogging was watch music video clips on YouTube. In my sophomore year I taped selections from the records of my 12th grade friend Reece - especially cuts from most of the then record albums he owned by two of the great singer-songwriters of the 1970s: Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen (and his E Street Band). My friend Andrew later borrowed one or both of those cassette tapes. Ten years later I lived with my friend Melanie's family in their NYC apartment and sometimes stayed up late to do school work, watch music videos, and listen - in heavy rotation - to my new album "The Joshua Tree," by U2, a band that was one of the greatest of the 80s and whose picture I had framed and put in my room in the apartment. Two months after my Hollywood Beach stay I would be in the land of the Joshua tree, driving by the site of a famous U2 concert and walking down the block where a famous U2 video ended. Also in heavy YouTube rotation in Hollywood was the MTV music video for a U2 album I used to listen during summer 1984 when my college friends and I were house-sitting for various Swarthmore professors in their beautiful but hot, un-air-conditioned houses.
Among the videos I watched and liked the most late those nights was Bruce Springsteen's "Lost in the Flood": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlpakRAH5JQ
Also, Jackson Browne's "The Pretender": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhp96VWLEqA&NR=1
And - then, the tour de forces - U2, Running to Stand Still -
And U2, "The Unforgettable Fire": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yiNqwEAtpkh
Not enough sleep, but some great music and video up in that Westin Diplomat room.
-- Perry
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