“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.

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."

http://gty.im/451753894

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."

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?"

"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.

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.

Dear Lord... the boobs.  Models who did not know how to play instruments were deliberately chosen and it shows.  The biggest thing I remember about this video from back in the day was the one model that didn't seem to have as much "support" as the others.  This was discussed in our high school lunches.  How come NO ONE told her? Nobelmania.com tracked all the ladies in the video down and interviewed them roughly 30 years after the video was made.

"Sabotage" started out as a joke. Songfacts talks about Beastie Boys' producer, Mario Caldato, was beyond frustrated at the lack of work getting done on the album (the studio had a basketball hoop and skate ramp that might have been distracting). Ad-Rock responded by spitting out a verse about how Caldato was ruining their fun.  It became the theme of the song, the biggest single on the album, and one of the most played video on MTV.

Side note:  I have not heard this song the same way since I discovered the story behind the lyrics "Where do we go now?"  You can read the whole story here: Classic Rock Songs that Started as Jokes. Axl was asking the question, "Where do we go now?" to the producer.

Many would agree that this collaboration revived Aerosmith's career. Rick Rubin said in the book I Want My MTV: "The record and the video had a huge effect on both groups. It opened the door to Run-D.M.C.'s full suburban crossover, and it reminded people how great Aerosmith was."

I KNEW it had to be one of the top videos!  "Sledgehammer" earned a record-setting 10 nominations at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards. The video won nine VMAs, which was also a record.

Not only is this song one of the most played by MTV, but it also has more than 1.5 BILLION hits on YouTube. I love a lot of the music that gets put in the box of "grunge." When "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came out, it was a game changer, It was different than anything I'd heard before it. I remember where I was when I first heard this song.  That is impact.

The director of this video, David Fincher, also directed Alien 3.  He went on to direct several more videos for Madonna and several more blockbuster movies including Fight Club, Seven, and Panic Room.

"Thriller" is 100% iconic. This video stands the test of time and is still bad a$$ in my book. "Thriller" has been changing Halloween costumes and wedding party entrances since its inception.