 Hey, Hey, We’re Duran Duran
Simon LeBon and his ’80s pop-icon bandmates are no longer the young generation. But they’ve still got something to say. By Bryan Reesman
THIS COULD BE Duran Duran’s Davy Jones moment. It has, after all, been 26 years since the British bandmates released their first album, backed by racy videos and those handsome visages. Two and a half decades, plus a year and some months on top of that is a long time, long enough for young fans — especially all those young female fans who obsessed over Simon LeBon, Nick Rhodes, and the three unrelated Taylor boys, John, Andy, and Roger — to have grown up and given birth to even younger fans. Fans of Justin Timberlake, maybe.
So it’d be easy to imagine Duran Duran perpetually living out the scene from The Brady Bunch Movie, in which Davy Jones sings “Girl” to a bunch of breathless 40-something women who had idolized him when they were teenagers. (Except that Duran Duran would be singing “Girls on Film.”) Instead, the original bandmates, minus guitarist Andy Taylor, have decided to keep up with the musical times. Their new album, Red Carpet Massacre, a whimsical take on today’s celebrity culture, offers a new, more modern sound.  And that sound, it turns out, was heavily influenced by none other than Justin Timberlake and producer Timbaland , who has helped craft hits for Timberlake, Ludacris, and the Pussycat Dolls, among others.
American Way caught up with LeBon and Rhodes in England to talk about Timberlake’s role as well as wolf whistles and salty popcorn.
More than a few critics in the 1980s thought Duran Duran wouldn’t survive the decade, much less be releasing a new album in 2007. What do you think about such naysayers?
RHODES: It’s very tempting to just make a loud raspberry sound, isn’t it? I think it’s very hard for anyone to tell what’s going to happen. Artists themselves never have any idea. That’s why we’re always nervous wrecks.
LEBON : We’re lucky, because we’re still doing what we want to do. We’ve managed to maintain our career without a break, so it would be very easy to look at the people who were in the same class, so to speak, and feel superior. But I don’t.
Ready Again for the ’80s
Duran Duran isn’t the only high profile ’80s act still making noise.
THE GOOD:
Bon Jovi
Lost Highway
Ask Jon Bon Jovi why his band has been recording regularly since their 1984 debut, and he’ll tell you it’s not about the early hits but about the ongoing attitude. “A career isn’t one or two years,” says the still-wellcoiffed singer/songwriter. “A career is 20 or 25 years of making music that is not nostalgic, but is contemporary.” And you know what’s contemporary today? Country. Pop country. So enter Lost Highway, an album that blends country pop with light rock. To be sure, this is no Slippery When Wet. But that’s actually a good thing.
THE BAD:
Rock of Love with Bret Michaels
The 1980s hair band Poison has regrouped a handful of times for studio albums and tours during this decade — which is just fi ne, if you like that kind of thing. But the recently concluded VH1 reality dating series featuring bandannaed front man Bret Michaels on a solo mission to fi nd love — or something — did not rock our world.
THE UNFINISHED:
Guns N’ Roses
Chinese Democracy
Guns N’ Roses still tours, but it’s just not the same band — and not only because lead singer Axl Rose is, well, weightier. Rose is, in fact, the only original member still with GNR. But that may change if Chinese Democracy, the band’s fi rst studio album since 1991, is ever released. Duff McKagan and Slash are among the original GNR members said to have laid down tracks with Rose for the album. Until it comes out, the ’80s won’t truly be back. |
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Speaking of staying current, how did it come about that you ended up working with Justin Timberlake on this album?
LEBON: We’d met Justin and Timbaland on the night of the [MTV Video Music Awards] in 2003, when we received our Lifetime Achievement Award. I think Timbaland was having a chat with Justin over a pint of ale and mentioned that he was doing the Duran Duran project. Justin said, “You’re not doing it without me!”
RHODES: Clearly, he’s a successful international artist right now. And he’s from a completely different generation, so his musical references are completely different than ours. Justin grew up listening to different things. One of the fortunate coincidences was that he grew up listening to Duran Duran. He loved “Come Undone” and “Ordinary World” [from 1993’s The Wedding Album], and that is what attracted him to the band in the first place. I suppose it would be like us wanting to work with a lot of the people we grew up listening to. It’s perfectly natural.
Some might also think it’s natural to draw connections between Justin Timberlake’s early work and your band’s early work. You know, the whole boy-band thing.
LEBON: We were cited as one of the founders of boy bands, but that’s not quite how we feel about it.
Well, were there any ego issues in working with a producer who is so much younger than you?
RHODES: Often, older artists are wary of working with younger artists, thinking, What are they going to teach me that I don’t already know? But with us and Justin, that simply wasn’t the case. We thought it was a really interesting match. We loved his first solo album. It had killer grooves, and his sensibility was quite close to all the things we’ve always liked — a crossover of dance music, rock music, and electronics.
So why does Justin do only guest harmonies? Why not have him sing out front?
LEBON: I think that’s part of his approach to the whole project. He didn’t want it to necessarily be “featuring Justin Timberlake”; he wanted to do it on the terms of a producer. He hasn’t done any great big solos or been featured in that way, and it wouldn’t be right for us to try and say he had. He was very clear about that.
Where does the title come from?
LEBON: It’s just a bit of a fantasy. I think we all fantasize about chicks in cocktail dresses handbagging each other on the red carpet. We have a pretty normal view of these kinds of events. On the one hand, we’re fascinated by them, and on the other hand, they’re so contrived and ridiculous, you can’t help but laugh about it.
Duran Duran is back. The ’80s are back. So when will Arcadia — that short-lived, Duran Duran splinter group — come back?
RHODES: EMI is going to do a special version of that album [So Red the Rose]. I want to restore some of the tracks that were edited because there was [not enough] space on the vinyl. There is another instrumental that was untitled; I would like to restore it so that the full body of the Arcadia project is on one album. We are talking about potentially playing a song or two from Arcadia and Power Station on the next tour.
Duran Duran recently played at the Concert for Diana. Simon, I heard the late Princess of Wales checked you out at a gym years ago?
LEBON: She wolf whistled. I was bending down to tie my shoes, and she said, “I’d recognize those legs anywhere.” It made me laugh. She was a funny girl.
What would your fans be surprised to learn about you?
LEBON: I like salty popcorn when I go to the movies.
RHODES: When my [high school] chemistry teacher, who used to go and put bets on horses for us, left the classroom, it was not a good room to be in, because people lit up paper darts on Bunsen burners and threw them around the room. I’m amazed that the school never burned down. And I used to get left in charge.
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 London Calling
Six Things You Might Like to Know about Stacy London, the Host of What Not to Wear and Fashionably Late. By Rhonda Reinhart
1. She has no problem with drinking or talking.
Stacy London, the 38-year-old sharptongued cohost of TV’s style-setting What Not to Wear, is heading into late-night talk shows with Fashionably Late. London considers it an “action show,” because it’s filled with beauty tips, trendwatching, and celebrity style. And also with booze. The show features a staff mixologist. “It’s a cocktail party that I’m throwing on Friday nights,” London says, “so I’ve got to have a mixologist. What’s a party without a cocktail? What Not to Wear — that’s my job. That’s work. I feel very much like with Fashionably Late, I get to kick my heels up too.”
2. She once could have fit in with Barney the dinosaur.
“As a kid, I definitely was very flamboyant,” London says. “Anything sparkly I had to wear. I drove my mother insane because I only wore purple as a child. It was my favorite color. So instead of wearing purple in moderation, I looked like, basically, a grape from the Fruit of the Loom ad. It was that kind of obsession. At nine, I got glasses and braces, and it really went downhill until about 30.”
3. She was not in The Devil Wears Prada, but she could have been.
London began her fashion career as an assistant at Vogue magazine, which she describes as being “sort of like fashion boot camp. While it was tough, it was the most worthwhile experience, jobwise, I’ve ever had. Like any industry, fashion is cutthroat. But to me, it’s no worse than banking or film or television.”
4. She’s not mean. She’s constructive.
Despite What Not to Wear’s tough-love approach with its poorly attired participants, London insists the show means well. “A lot of people say, ‘God, you can be so mean,’ ” she says. “But I never really feel that way. All of the humor and all of the sarcasm comes from a place of constructive criticism.”
5. She can help job seekers.
“In the best of all possible worlds, sure, it would be great if image didn’t matter,” London says. “But I think it’s very naive to think that that’s the case. If you’re going for a job interview and you don’t look very good, why would anybody think that you’d respect the place of business that you’re trying to work for? To me, it just doesn’t make any sense to say that it doesn’t matter. It’s not about playing some sort of superficial game. It’s about relaying messages before people know you.”
6. All in all, she loves sweatpants.
“I can’t always look the way I’d love to look,” London says. “But I try. I think it’s about the effort. It definitely makes a difference, and I think it makes an impact on the way people perceive you. But, sure, I love sweats, but I only wear them in my house.”
Talk, Talk, Talk
In the talk-show realm, where Stacy London now ventures, Jay Leno has long been king. But his reign is to end soon. By Ken Parish Perkins
JAY LENO has long suffered from the Céline Dion complex — great voice but kind of boring. If you’ve heard one song, you’ve heard ’em all. The same goes for Leno’s arsenal of jokes. In his 15 years at the helm of The Tonight Show, Leno has become a distributor of one-liners that are funny when they hit you, yet often leave as quickly as they arrive, like light rain on a sunny day. Leno’s political barbs are now so calculatedly nonpartisan that they can be simultaneously funny and irritating. It’s as if he counts them out, making sure Democrats get the same number of zingers as Republicans.
But that’s actually what made Leno a hit with NBC executives in the first place. He was a perfect choice for Tonight back in May 1992, when audiences of network television were beginning to wither and executives wanted someone who could relate to crowds in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Branson, Missouri, with some of the same material — someone safe. The result: I’m afraid that, unless he acts to change it, Leno’s legacy in late-night television will be simply that he helped put the “broad” back into broadcasting.
But therein lies an opportunity. As Leno prepares to depart Tonight in 2009, making way for the younger, goofier Conan O’Brien, perhaps having an end date will free the edgy comic who might yet lurk within. It seems almost certain, after all, that Leno will go out on top of the ratings. While David Letterman is merely hanging on to his 4.3 million viewers per night, Leno solidly draws about 5.8 million. He’s the undisputed king of those numbers and has been for years. So as the lame duck of late night, why not take some risks now?
Sure, the stars won’t make it easy. They’re more calculating today, securing guest spots with Leno and Letterman and O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel to hawk their products and safeguard their images. Unfortunately, that’s the way the interviews now come across to viewers, who are really hoping for glimpses of real people. But there is little incentive for Leno to play along with that salesmanship. He has the opportunity to return to the sort of raw, memorable material that defined him when he roamed the countryside like a comedic maniac. Here’s hoping he does just that.
Madden and More
Impressionist Frank Caliendo brings his schizophrenic shtick to TBS. By Joseph Guinto
John Madden is Frank Caliendo’s “Free Bird.” Unquestionably, Caliendo owes his current career success to the spot-on impression he does of Madden, the rumpled, heavyset, NFL Hall of Fame coach and NBC sportscaster. It was Caliendo’s Madden that helped him land a weekly stint on Fox NFL Sunday and score steady appearances on CBS’s Late Show with David Letterman, breaking away from the pack of no-name comedians on MadTV. The Madden impression is also what first got Caliendo noticed by TBS, which just debuted Frank TV, Caliendo’s own sketch show. Audiences, too, clearly love the impression — it relies on weird, guttural noises, telestrations sans Telestrator, Brett Favre exaltations, and the word boom. But maybe they love it too much.
In the unaired pilot for Frank TV, one of the first impressions Caliendo does is of Madden. Pretending to circle himself on a Telestrator, Caliendo, as Madden, says, “Here’s a guy who’s a little bit tired of doing that voice every week.”
That was just a joke, he later insists during an interview. Summoning the same Madden voice, Caliendo says, “Here’s a guy who doesn’t mind doing the Madden impression — boom!” Still, just as Lynyrd Skynyrd had other songs (“Sweet Home Alabama” wasn’t bad), Caliendo does other impressions. A lot of them. And, yeah, he wouldn’t mind if people asked for, say, an Al Pacino every now and again. “But that’s really how TV goes,” Caliendo says. “What you do in this business is you try to pigeonhole yourself so you can get known. And when you finally get known for something, you spend the rest of your career trying to convince people you can do other things. Hopefully, I can do that with this show.”
Caliendo can certainly do other things. He’s a sportscaster, for one. The 33-year-old comedian grew up in suburban Milwaukee and studied broadcast journalism at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He had hoped to someday become an anchor on ESPN’s SportsCenter. “It didn’t go that way, though,” he says. “When I was in college, I showed up at a comedy club one night and got into stand-up right away. I was working within months. Usually it takes years for people to get regular bookings.”
It’s easy to understand why his career took off so quickly. Though he’s on the short side — about five feet seven inches tall — and has a very Maddenesque frame, Caliendo can be shockingly convincing playing thinner, taller characters. In the Frank TV pilot, he does a killer, albeit heavier, Cosmo Kramer. “You have to suspend a little disbelief with some of the things for me,” Caliendo says. “But at the same time, I am trying to lose some weight right now because I watched the Seinfeld skit and I thought, Oh that’s just hideous. It was almost like the South Park version of Seinfeld.”
Then again, his weight likely helped his Madden impression gain early acceptance, and today, strangely, it might be helping him earn the favor of TV executives who want to cater to a general audience. Caliendo says his stage act has become like “a baseball game of comedy,” because so many fathers bring their sons to see him. “And everybody in Hollywood tells me that I’m a regular guy,” he says. “They say I’m a real everyman type of person. I think what that really means is that I’m not skinny.”
You know who is skinny? Dave Chappelle. And Caliendo acknowledges that the format and casual vibe of his TBS show derive from what Chappelle did on Comedy Central. “We wanted to call Frank TV Chappelle’s Show, but the network wouldn’t let us do it. Yeah, Dave’s back. And now he’s chubby and white.” Still, that leads to an idea. What about John Madden as Rick James? “That would be a funny thing to do,” Caliendo says. Suddenly, almost magically, he manages to morph Chappelle’s high-pitched squeal with Madden’s guttural voice: “I’m John Madden …” He stops himself before finishing the catchphrase that became Chappelle’s “Free Bird.” Best to save that for Frank TV.
| Who's Talking Now?
Is it Frank Caliendo doing an impression or the actual people and/orcharacters he impersonates?
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| A. “Only
one team leaves the Super Bowl as the winner, and everybody else loses
their last game. So if you win your last game every year, you’re
probably the Super Bowl winner.” — John Madden or Caliendo as Madden?
B. “There’s a lot of letters in LaDainian Tomlinson.” — John Madden or Caliendo as Madden?
C. “Why do my fingers look like little people? Who are these people?” — Jerry Seinfeld or Caliendo as Seinfeld?
D. “To me, the hardest part
of being a professional football player is: On the one hand, you’re a
millionaire; on the other, they blow a whistle and you have to run
around after a football.” — Jerry Seinfeld or Caliendo as Seinfeld?
E. “I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid.” — Caliendo or Terry Bradshaw?
F. “Goobidee goo, we’ve got some great games for you.” — Caliendo or Terry Bradshaw?
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| | ANSWERS: A. Caliendo, B. Madden, C. Caliendo, D. Seinfeld, E. Bradshaw, F. Caliendo |
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Leader of the Pack
Mystery writer Robert J. Randisi is bringing Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the rest of the Rat Pack back to life — repeatedly. By Kristin Baird Rattini
Frank Sinatra was a prolific musician who recorded hundreds of songs on dozens of albums over the course of several decades. But Ol’ Blue Eyes had nothing on author Robert J. Randisi. Randisi, who is also the founder of the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA), has practically been his own book-of- the-month club — he’s published at least one book a month, every month, since 1982.
That makes this month’s release, Luck Be a Lady,Don’t Die: A Rat Pack Mystery (St. Martin’s Minotaur, $24), his 445th published work. It’s also the second installment of his already critically acclaimed Rat Pack Mysteries. Set in 1960s Las Vegas, the book follows Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and crew as trouble follows them. We followed Randisi to his Clarksville, Missouri, home to fi nd out about the PWA and the original Eee-O Eleven album.
| | Reading List
Here’s what Robert J. Randisi says about his four favorite mystery books (besides his own, of course).
The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, Ross Thomas, 1970: “A fascinating study of the political machine in a small, southern town, it takes a much deeper look at the background of its main character, Lucifer Dye — one of my favorite character names of all time.”
Enquiry, Dick Francis, 1969: “This is early Francis, but he’s at his best. It’s the story of a steeplechase jockey — Francis was a steeplechase jockey — who is disqualifi ed from a race and then becomes the subject of an enquiry . He has to prove that he was framed in order to save his career.”
Forty Words for Sorrow, Giles Blunt, 2001: “This is the fi rst in a series to feature detective John Cardinal. It’s one of the most powerful introductions to a series I’ve ever read.”
The Barbed-Wire Kiss, Wallace Stroby, 2003: “This introduces private eye Harry Rane and has one of the freshest PI voices I’ve heard — read — in years.”
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You’re sort of the chairman in your own right, having created the Private Eye Writers of America in 1981. Why did you start the group?
At the time, a lot of good writing was going unnoticed and unrewarded when it came to awards like the Edgar. It was that simple. We needed our own identity.
The charter members were people like Sue Grafton, Bill Pronzini, Sara Paretsky, Stuart Kaminsky. The organization is small … but it has been invaluable to the genre — which was not a genre when I first founded PWA. There are more PI writers than ever and more excellent writers writing PI fiction.
Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime is one of your most successful books. Why do you think the Rat Pack still holds such tremendous popular appeal?
I think after the Beatles, the Rat Pack is a group that men want to be like and women want to be with. Also, I believe that their level of “cool” is timeless.
The first Rat Pack Mystery was set during the fi lming of Ocean’s Eleven. Where does Luck Be a Lady, Don’t Die pick up?
Six months later, at the opening of Ocean’s Eleven, which is taking place in Vegas at the Fremont Theatre. This time, Dean gets ahold of Eddie G. [the series’s main character] to help out Frank. The last time, it was the other way around. Frank is worried about some girl in Vegas who is missing. They end up getting involved with the mob and Sam Giancana.
Your previous mystery series are based in New York and St. Louis. Did you enjoy packing your bags for a new literary destination?
I was looking for something different to do — other than a private-eye or police procedural. I love the Rat Pack and Vegas. It just all came together one night while I was watching the HBO movie The Rat Pack. I came up with the idea of the main character as a pit boss working at the Sands whom the Rat Pack turns to for help. The voice was a 1960s pulp-writery voice. I had just received a review in Booklist that said I may be the last of the pulp writers. I liked that. I wanted to write a book for which we could use that quote on the cover. So it took off from there.
Worth Your Money
New DVDs and movies you should check out. By John Ross
GOLDEN TOUCH: This one time, in a parallel universe … Chris Weitz directed American Pie. So don’t go holding that against him when you hear that Weitz also directed The Golden Compass, a new special-effects-filled fantasy flick based on the fi rst tome of author Phillip Pullman’s Harry Potter-ish book trilogy called His Dark Materials . Sure, Compass stars the chiseled Daniel Craig and the chilling Nicole Kidman, whereas American Pie starred Seann William Scott and Tara Reid, but wouldn’t you say that Craig’s character is sort of the Steve Stifler of James Bond movies ? No? That’s just us, then.
FORD MOTORS ON: Given that John Ford is so copied today, it’s easy to forget what a singular fi lmmaker he was. He managed to capture the Wild West, showing solitary and sweeping images of the open plains in long shots that often overwhelmed the cowboys and pioneers who populated his epics. He did the lush hills of Ireland justice, too, in more than a few movies. But even if his Westerns and other films had been terrible and not inventively dramatic, they’d still be worth watching, if only for the titles. To name just a few included on this massive 24-film DVD set that comprises 32 years’ worth of Ford’s movies for Fox: 3 Bad Men, Hangman’s House, Born Reckless, Doctor Bull, and Judge Priest. Oh, and also Wee Willie Winkie. Just wait until you see the saloon shoot-out with Shirley Temple in that one.
WILLIAM: If Will Smith, Vincent Price, and Charlton Heston were the last men on earth and everyone else on the planet was a zombie, vampire, or mutant, who would survive? We’re about to find out. In this month’s biggest big-screen blockbuster, I Am Legend, Smith breathes new life into a role played by Price in 1964’s The Last Man on Earth and by Heston in 1971’s The Omega Man. Don’t expect Smith to put his mark on the part by busting out a lot of cutesy, Men in Black–style one-liners, though. For most of the movie, Smith has no dialogue.
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