There are Luther Vandross songs I'm familiar with (not necessarily their titles). Notably, "Never Too Much" and "Till My Baby Comes Home." (These are the only ones I can bring forth without . . . [cough, cough] . . . jumping ahead.) I unfortunately remember his cover of "Superstar" - unfortunate, because it is the Carpenters' which for me is the definitive, and is burned to this day in my head. This particular song, I don't have much memory of at all. The label, meanwhile . . . . . . might well be the last R&B #1 on any CBS label with this label type from Pitman, NJ. Around the time this reached the top here, CBS ceased pressing vinyl at the Pitman plant in order to retool it for CD manufacture (which it would handle until its final closure in 2011), and shift all its vinyl manufacture to their newer Carrollton, GA plant which opened in 1981 - and which, upon the Pitman plant's cessation of vinyl pressing, adopted new label fonts which are not a favorite of mine at all.
Luther's first three albums for Epic are stellar! And I absolutely love his epic rendition of "Until You Come Back To Me/Superstar". I was in L.A. at the time and the R&B station I listened to had the full album version in rotation in late 1983. Maybe the N.Y. stations weren't that big on Luther Vandross, but he was sure big out here. But, look at it this way: with "Stop To Love", there's some life in the R&B chart other than the maudlin ballads we have been dealing with.
I don't know about that, I definitely heard those three I cited on New York radio. And "Till My Baby Comes Home" and "Never Too Much" also had life.
No memory of this one at all. Very generic mid-'80s sound. A couple of the synth hooks sound photocopied from other songs. Luther sounds great, though. And as @Grant points out, at least it's not another dull ballad...
And Mr. Vandross has had his share of dull ballads over his career. Something which, as all agree, this could never be accused of being.
New #1: Candy - Cameo Week ending January 31, 1987 2 weeks The video gives me a clue as to why their popularity started to go away with the R&B audiences.
I have a very personal story on this - not directly, but from someone I know going back to high school. At the time this came out, he worked at a video post-production and editing firm that was one of the few to actually produce and edit things in an analogue version of HDTV (what would come to be called '1080i') when that was first being developed. The video for "Candy" was shot in HD, and I was one of the very few outside of the team that made it and worked on the edit to have seen it up-close in such a clear resolution (and full-flowing 30 frames and 60 fields - contrasted with regular NTSC 29.97/59.94). I can attest that basically, the video seen on regular "SD" analogue NTSC television (that is, on those shows which would actually run it) was essentially a color kinescope, with loss of picture quality and "nuance" and all that, the white levels becoming more bluish (at the time; seems to have been color corrected on that video clip), and the movement consistent with 24 fps motion picture film. (They also taped and edited in HD another video for another R&B single that would be a hit later in the year but not make #1; as I respect The Process I'll hold off on what until we get to the time period in question.) Incidentally, this video editing place was across the street and a few doors east from the former HQ of London Records, which by this time was already in PolyGram's hands. As for Larry Blackmon's vocals on this, it seems most reminiscent to my ears of the vocal stylings of the Ohio Players' Leroy "Sugarfoot" Bonner, for sure. 'Specially on songs like "Love Rollercoaster."
And a side note: The zipper at One Times Square was at the time operated by the short-lived New York Newsday, with controls from an early Daktronics Venus system; for the news and sports headlines and adverts they used what is today called Sans Serif 7, and for time and temperature checks they used Fixed Width 7. The zipper (the second in the history of that particular edifice) had 12,408 light bulbs (most likely A21 bulbs, from what I've gauged) - 11 rows by 1,128 columns. (Around this time, sixteen columns, or 176 bulbs, were deactivated, around the corner of Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street.)
And finally, the way the title was enunciated in the song, made it almost sound like a foreign car about to make its splash here in the U.S. - Hyundai.
As a broadcasting major, this video was absolutely stunning at the time. I remember watching it with my roommate and we were floored by the seamless overlaying of so many separate video elements. There were other videos at the time - like the "Don't Dream It's Over" video by Crowded House or the "Boy In The Bubble" video for Paul Simon - that tried to do similar layering of images using standard-definition video and gadgets like the Quantel Paintbox or similar, but the results always looked very cut-and-paste. "Candy" in contrast looked pretty much seamless, even if the downconvert from HDTV (I'm assuming the Japanese MUSE system or its predecessor) to NTSC was problematic. The lower resolution of NTSC I'm sure hid any remaining artifacts of the HD video overlay process. Surprisingly I don't think HD got a lot of use after this for making music videos, at least not until maybe the '90s. Bizarrely, I don't think many TV series that utilized video to do effects composites (like the various Star Treks) switched to HD either, which was probably a mistake since the results would have been far more-convincing (and also much easier to release on Blu-ray...). Curious to know what the next '80s music video was that made use of HD for its production. I've always wondered if the original HD master to "Candy" survived somewhere - I bet it would be breathtaking to see this in full HD on YouTube today. We've taken this sort of photo-realistic video trickery for granted for a couple of decades now, but at the time I'd never seen anything like it. Definitely a landmark video, and also I think a fantastic song. It's mellow, sexy and has killer electric guitar bits to spice things up.
And there's the thing. All those effects, made in HD, were more seamless. And it was taped where this person I know worked at the time.
Like ‘Word Up’ before it, ‘Candy’ has aged remarkably well and has been sampled countless times. Never knew the vid was shot in HD or that it was even possible at the time. The stuff I learn here!
There was quite a lot of analog HD video shot, especially in Japan, prior to the widespread adoption of digital HD in the mid-2000s and beyond. I'd first seen HD the year before this, at CES, on giant rear-projection NEC sets showing video shot at Chartres cathedral. Well, giant for the time, anyhow. Probably 32" or 36" or maybe 40" sets with a widescreen aspect ratio. It was truly stunning. The resolution wasn't quite as high as film, obviously, but there was something about the color that was far richer, more saturated, than what you typically got from film. More lifelike. I think it was 1080i video, so the 30fps motion was more natural than film's comparative pokey 24fps. It's sad to realize we could have had HD video here in the US - at least over cable and satellite - during the 1990s.
Again, I emphasize, the downconversion was to 24 fps film (23.976 as shown on NTSC). So the motion on the video as was seen since its debut was, as @sunspot42 noted, "pokey." It is for that reason why I characterized what's been shown since 1987 by the general public as a "color kinescope." Because basically in its transfer from HD, that's what it was. Incidentally, this person I've known since high school, was on the set overseeing things while it was taped and was therefore witness to each of the "effects" being made before they were so layered. As I said before, I was witness to the finished product in its original HD state. (He was by no means the director. More an assistant. The director was Zbigniew Rybczyński for whom such layerings would become a trademark, but what he had been doing before this video.)
It was one of those sizes on which I saw the video in its original analogue HD state. Again, it was indeed "rich" in every which way you mention. And again, plain 30 instead of the 29.97 that had been the NTSC standard since the adoption of RCA's "compatible color" system in late 1953.
Yeah, there was all sorts of equipment fairly early on to convert HD video to film, so I'm not surprised if they dumped the results to film and then converted that to NTSC video. Although I don't see any film grain in the finished product. Maybe they ran it thru the process electronically without actually using any film? Anyhow, 30fps is more-realistic than 24, so seeing straight up HD video live for the first time in Las Vegas back in '86 was really eye opening. The only other video I saw that looked that good, prior to the arrival of high-definition D-VHS around 2000 or so, was on a teeny Sony Trinitron monitor on an enormous freestanding Sony 1" videotape player at the TV station I worked at as a student. Even NTSC looked pretty impressive at the studio coming directly off the tape, at least on like an 8" studio-grade Trinitron. By the time it got to your home, though... I think the intent was to actually produce films using HD video, although blown up to the size of a cinema screen, the final results weren't very good. Would have been much cheaper than shooting on film though, especially post-production, just using film to distribute to theaters (this is long before digital projectors or even really bright analog video projectors). I vaguely recall a film getting released in the late '80s or early '90s that was shot on analog HD video, but I don't remember which one it was. I thought it might have been House Of Games, but I don't see any references to that out on the web.
It was "Candy" that convinced us to get the whole album. It's a great '80s recording I think. Lots of bass and lots of space.
They certainly would have used 35mm and not 16mm to do the transfer, that's for sure. The grain on 16mm would have been most obvious.
Though this is outside the scope of this thread, I can't let this go without bringing up one of "Zbig's" most famous video works, done in the same layering he applied to "Candy": Spoiler: May be a certain color type of flag. "Stairway To Lenin"
Doing that entry for the thread was the first time I ever saw the video. I guess i'll have to see it in HD because as it's presented in standard resolution, it does nothing for me.
