Milli Vanilli – Girl I’m Gonna Miss You
Okay. Thank god for YouTube. In in the early 90s I was asked to “sail” a boat in a music video for some band I had never heard of.The producer had chartered a sailboat so the singer could sail away at the end of the love song with a broken heart. That boat, being chartered, was insured and needed to be captained by a responsible individual who was insured to sail boats (that was me due to a brief career in yacht delivery). So, for $500, I sailed the sailboat to a dock in Cotuit, where these dudes in bicycle shorts and dreadlocks were lipsynching to a song and camera people and makeup people were climbing all over the dunes. Why they picked Cotuit for the shoot is beyond me, but the video is unique for two reasons.
1. It shows a Cotuit Skiff — the kind of sailboat I own three of, and which my grandfather built in the 1940s.
2. I am on the big boat during the shoot and barely if impossibly visible at the end when the love stricken star sails into the sunset.You see his back. I am sitting to his left, ducked down, with a hand on the wheel because he was utterly unable to understand the notion of steering.Nor, apparently, singing, for less than a year later, Milli
Vanilli was ostracized for lip synching their act and having utterly no music talent.
[I hosed the video trying to put a normal title on this post. Will try to revive. YouTube embedding is not for the stupid]
Wow – the secret life of Churbuck – did you actually provide the voice for the song? What’s next, we find you were on the grassy knoll in Dallas?
Amazing stuff – a video otherwise destined for obscurity.
The question nagging at my mind: Did Churbuck have the stunning 80s hair and fashion sense?
And bicycle shorts.
These guys were wild.
German. Not a lick of English. Had fake dreadlocks. Wore bike shorts to display their packages. And lipsynched a lot on the dock and on the deck of the boat. Of course they lipsynched. That;s what they did.
Didn;t they get nailed because the CD skipped in a concert.
There was a Pop Up Video version of this that had me standing in the cockpit and which identified me as his true lover as we sailed into the sunset. This version doesn;t show me.
Sure did and got their Grammy taken away because of it.
Time to move, to a place where Milly-freakin-Vanilly fans can’t come & relive the heartbreak. You should see the sycophantic, gothed up, trolls who mope around Kurt Kobain’s old house. It would be psuedo-sporting to hunt-em w/ a flame-thrower! Cheers JRN
Mitch: I had a ponytail and a mustache at the time as I was at the peak of my Dead Headedness.
Wow, I haven’t heard this song in a long long time. Thanks for bringing back a flood of memories.
I really miss the 90’s, everything was so new, exotic, fresh.
wow, hanging with Tom Waits and now this…a charmed life you’ve lived David.
David – any chance you’ll get a cameo appearance in the Milli Vanilli movie?
http://movies.monstersandcritics.com/news/article_1264360.php/Milli_Vanilli_movie_revealed
David–
Was brother Mel a lot of fun at the wedding in your backyard. he should have used you for Apocolypto in the role of “12 Jaguar”
My inbox has like four emails pointing me at the Milli Vanelli movie. I never should have hung that one around my neck.