“I’m Your Captain (Closer To Home)” GFR – The Story Behind The Song
“I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home)” is one deep, spiritual, uplifting piece of rock and roll grandeur. The song is long and flowing and it lifts you up. Judging by Mark Farner’s words on how the song came about, that is exactly what he had prayed for.
Mark Farner
In a Songfacts.com interview Mark Farner, the lead singer and author said, “Initially the song came to me after I said my prayers one night and I put a P.S. on the end of my prayers. I asked God to give me a song that would touch the hearts of people that the Creator wanted to get to. I got up at 3 o’clock in the morning… I’m always getting up at different times of the night and writing things down. A lot of them are not songs but this happened to be one.”
“As I’m writing it, I’m between the state of subconscious and conscious. I’ve got one foot in dreamland and my pen is writing these words down. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It was kind of weird, I thought, as I was writing it. I didn’t sit there on the edge of the bed and read it over and over, I just wrote it down, and when I got to the end of it, I just folded it over and put it on the nightstand. There it was.”
The following day he started working on the music. “I made a mistake. I was going for the G and it was a little short and I hit the C. And I looked down because that chord spoke to me in such a way. I’ve never heard that come out, that inversion of the C. I thought, Wow, that’s a cool chord. Then I thought maybe with those words in the other room, maybe that’s a song, so I grabbed the legal pad and laid it down on the table next to my coffee and just started strumming, ‘Everybody…’ And it just started coming out.”
Don Brewer
Drummer Don Brewer explained this part of the songwriting process for “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home), “We used to rehearse at a place called The Musicians Union Hall in Flint, Michigan. We used to work all of our stuff out there. Mark came in one day with basically the beginning of the song, the ‘I’m your captain part.’ We always worked out everything with a jam… he would have an idea, somebody would have an idea for a bass part of whatever, and we’d just kind of work on these things and jam out.”
Brewer also explained how the orchestra came about. “At the time, rock bands had experimented with orchestras, and we said, ‘Let’s put an orchestra on this thing, we’ll just play endlessly. We’ll get Tommy Baker, our friend down in Cleveland, to write the score for it. It was a new thing for us, kind of new for the day – there hadn’t been too many bands using orchestras.”
“When we recorded the song in Cleveland, we didn’t have the orchestra there. We didn’t know what the final outcome was going to be and we hadn’t even recorded the string arrangements. We just recorded the end of the song on and on and on over and over, knowing they were going to come in and put an orchestra on it later. When we finally heard the song about two weeks later, it just blew us all away. It was a religious experience.”
“I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home)”
The 8 Most Played Videos on MTV
Before we talk about the most played videos on MTV, do you remember the first video you saw on MTV? I do. It was “Rock the Casbah” by The Clash. My mind was blown. I have to give MTV credit for exposing me to music that I didn’t know existed. Because of this, I attribute my lasting love of 80’s-90’s Alternative Rock to my days of watching MTV.
As much as I loved my MTV, it was back in the early days when MTV really was MUSIC TELEVISION.. that’s when you had me, fools. One of our recent Throwback Thursday tracks, “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel, made me think about MTV and wonder… “What were the most played videos on MTV?”
My Money Is On Sledgehammer
“Sledgehammer” HAS to be on the list. In my opinion, this video was groundbreaking. It was one of the first to use stop-motion claymation. “Sledgehammer” had Stephen Johnson directing the video… he had given a similar treatment to The Talking Heads’ “Road To Nowhere” the year before.
These types of videos are not plentiful. I have to believe that the budget dollars and time required to put them together were all insanely high.
The “Sledgehammer” video cost a ton of money and had some crazy issues. Peter Gabriel kept getting electrocuted by his light-up suit. They had to Scotchlite tape HIM and THE ENTIRE SET to fix the problem.
I read that they also used model chickens for the chicken dances in the video. The chickens are postmortem. As a result, the shelf life was an issue. I’m going out on a limb and saying they went through a LOT of chicken models. I know. It is gross. Suddenly, the chicken dances seem less funny to me, but let’s move along.
At the end of the day, “Sledgehammer” was a ground-breaking video and well received. In 1987, “Sledgehammer” swept the MTV Video Music Awards.
What Were the FIRST videos played on MTV?
MTV debuted on August 1st, 1981. Chances are good you and I both know the first song: “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles. I have recently rewatched Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run” video. It’s so great to see her at a time when she’s about to take off. Third: Rod Stewart’s “She Won’t Dance With Me.”
Oh, and a sidenote of trivia that I love, did you know that the first “rap” song played on MTV was Blondie’s “Rapture?” To check out more of the first day of MTV’s videos CLICK HERE. Now let’s find out which songs were the most played videos on MTV. My list is reflective of actual play on MTV.
The 8 Most Played Videos on MTV
