Is it unfair that my brother, Christopher, gets a 15-minute video tribute for his 50th birthday, when my sisters only got videos that were three and five minutes long?
I mean . . . nobody gives a shit. Probably. Some people might prefer the shorter run times. Short attention spans and all that.
But, I still feel compelled to say this: I have now made one of these videos as a 50th birthday present for all three of my siblings, and while I am very proud of all of them, I am especially proud of this one—not as any comparative reflection on the video subjects, but simply because with experience I was able to build upon the ideas of each project in turn.
All three videos prominently feature just one pop song. Angel's and Gina's videos were basically the run time of the song chosen: Angel's video, which I made when she turned fifty in 2019, featured the song "Landslide," a reflection of both our mutual love of Fleetwood Mac and the song's themes about getting older. I came up with the idea for that one somewhat last minute, finishing it up literally the day of her birthday party and creating a simple slideshow of photos from her life, "50 photos of Angel for her 50th birthday." The birthday party Dad and Sherri held for her that year in Olympia was on October 6; I did not share it to social media until her actual birthday on the 9th.
With Gina's video, for when she turned 50 two years later—last year, in 2021—I expanded on the concept a little. I found myself amused by how wildly different her hairstyles have been over the years, something she has occasionally commented on when I've posted a really old photo or video clip. Thus, the track I used for her video had no personal meaning to the two of us, but only to the concept at hand: I used the song "Hair" by Lady Gaga. The video's run time in this case is in excess of five minutes only because Lady Gaga's "Hair" is a lot longer song than Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide." But, in her case, I also threw in some old video clips along with the photo slideshow. I'd say it was pretty well received.
Well, in Christopher's case, the one full song I used makes up only about a third of the video's runtime: it's Ned's Atomic Dustbin's 1993 cover of "Saturday Night" from the soundtrack to So I Married an Axe Murderer.
Why that song in particular, you ask? Let's get into it!
First of all, it was included in a mixtape I recorded for us to play in Christopher's car the couple of times we went "cruising" on late weekend nights in Spokane in the early nineties. Now, as a gay man, "cruising" now has far different meaning (and if you don't know what it is . . . uh. look it up), but back then, all it meant was basically driving around in circles through downtown streets, blaring music from the car stereo. For the mixtape I recorded, I chose half the tracks and had Christopher choose half, and I sequenced them so that each of our choices alternated. I only know that "Saturday Night" was one of Christopher's choices because I still have the tape, thirty years later, and I was able to check the track list.
Now, Christopher was very much into grunge thirty years ago as well. And if grunge had any single track that were in any way appropriate for the tone of celebrating someone you love, I'd have chosen one. But when it comes to grunge songs, for a project like this, it was slim pickings. A lyrical story of a freezing homeless guy sleeping on concrete? Maybe let's skip that one. A song about lonely people who keep passing away? Next! A chorus with the refrain "I hate everything about you"? That doesn't work. For a hot minute I nearly used the 4 Non Blondes classic "What's Up" but decided that was too much of a downer. Among the tracks on this mixtape, "Saturday Night" was the closest thing to a perfect choice. Especially since the couple of times we went cruising, and listened to that song, were probably on Saturday nights. Plus, I wanted something that was the opposite sad, not even wistful: I wanted something upbeat and fun.
Now, the video I made for Christopher's 50th, which I entitled Fiftopher, features this track rounding out the last third or so of its fifteen-minute runtime. The reason it's this long otherwise is that I made two strict rules for myself: it had to include at least one video clip from each calendar year in which I have video footage of him (that covers fifteen years, spread out between 1992 and 2022), and it had to include at least one audio clip from each calendar year in which I have audio recordings (that covers nine years, between 1990 and 1998. Okay, okay, there are two recordings from 1990 (January and December), two from 1992 (January and June) and none from 1991 or 1993 but they still average out to one a year, no need to split hairs here!
So, let's talk "talk tapes" for a moment. In the nineties, and actually starting with Danielle in 1989, I recorded a lot of myself, basically just goofing around, with friends or family. In most cases, it was just me and one other person: Matthew and Danielle; Matthew and Christopher; just a few times in the mid-nineties, Matthew and Gabriel. One exception was the grouping of Matthew and two cousins, sisters Jennifer and Heidi. I came up with "group names" for each combo, and created handmade inlay cards for the cassettes and put them together like they were albums. Matthew and Danielle were called "Crazy Kids." Matthew, Jennifer and Heidi were called "First Attempt." Matthew and Gabriel were "The Loony Bin." Matthew and Christopher, playing on both our last name (McQuilkin) and the common use of "M.C." in rap artist stage names, were The "M.C." Brothers.
Wherever I could, I would record at least one tape each year with any given "group." As you might imagine, as we all grew up through the nineties, people's interest in doing these things with me waned—and once I got a camcorder as a college graduation gift in 1998, recording audio suddenly seemed pointless, so that was when "talk tapes" ended. They had a good run, of a full decade, 1989-1998. And in that time, recordings with Christopher were by far the most prolific, as he was part of other ideas as well: "Pretty Human" was what I called ourselves when we recorded (very, very bad) songs of our own composition; we made four of those. And then I busted out my external microphones for holiday gatherings, which typically included Mom, Christopher's then-wife Katina, and in some cases Christopher and Katina's firstborn, Nikki, or Katina's mom, Dawn. I "group" name I had for this ensemble was "Mikes," and I made seven of those tapes, between 1991 and 1997. All told, Christopher appeared on twenty of my "talk tapes." I literally did not figure out that combined total until just now.
For the tribute video, however, I stuck to the main ones: The "M.C." Brothers. So this video has one clip from every "M.C." Brothers tape ever recorded: two in 1990; two in 1992; one in 1994; and one each in 1996, 1997 and 1998. I did throw in a bonus clip from a "Mikes" tape I recorded at Grandma and Grandma McQuilkin's 50th wedding anniversary party in 1997 as well, that being the only one of those I recorded with Dad's side of the family instead of Mom's.
And there is just one "song" featured from the first ever "Pretty Human" tape, a song called "Pretty Human Words," which I recorded in 1990 as a song about using nice language and not swearing (ha!). Christopher had gotten an electric guitar not long before, I believe for Christmas in 1989, and he "played" it as my musical accompaniment: that is the soundtrack to the opening credits, his opening "licks" to that song. Later, the video abruptly stops and the picture goes black, in service to the moment in that same song when Christopher says "Stop stop, it's my guitar solo!" and then you hear the most hilariously awful guitar solo imaginable.
When the soundtrack is not Christopher's 1990 guitar licks, or a cover of "Saturday Night," the way I avoided feeling compelled to use yet another actual music track was to superimpose "talk tape" audio over still photos. There's a few instances in which it goes back and forth between the same photo of each of us as we talk back and forth, and in those cases the photos were part of the "photo shoot" done for the talk tape inlay card. In other cases, I used some of the oldest audio clips with even older photos, so that the visual references go all the way back to infancy, even if the oldest audio clip only goes as far back as Christopher at age 17, and me at age 13.
I should note, just briefly, that there was a couple of brief periods in which finding anything at all was a challenge. I have no video clips or audio of Christopher from 2002, 2005, 2012 or 2015. I have literally one photo of Christopher from each year in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2013. A couple of those are not the greatest photos (in one he is almost entirely obscured looking out a hotel window through the branches of a tree), but they were the best representation I could get from as many of his fifty years as I could get.
There were three years, between 2013 and 2016, when Christopher and I didn't talk at all. I won't get into why, but suffice it to say, by 2016, we had basically reconciled, and I have seen him at least once a year on average since. Our sisters, Angel and Gina, became a part of our lives early, when Christopher was nine and I was five, but they were still raised separately, having been part of the package when Dad married Sherri in 1984. Mom moved Christopher and me to Spokane in 1985, and she raised us herself over there: in my formative years, although I had multiple visits per year to Olympia to see Dad, Sherri, Angel and Gina, on a day to day basis, it was just Mom, Christopher and me.
There was something that moved me about putting this video together, because it really brought back some good times I had with Christopher, and reminded me of the years we were close. And, okay, I'm honestly not sure how he'll feel today about how often we were crassly suggestive in our goofing around on both cassette and video tape, but they're still a record of Christopher's developing personality and sense of humor, which I frankly still find hilarious. I find him to be a lot more reserved now, as naturally most of us are in middle age, but given the massive number of hours I spent working on this project—I started it weeks earlier than the "birthday deadline" than I did for Angel's or Gina's birthday videos—it really never got old to me. It's a fun trip, every time.
