Winwood had always loved Southern blues and soul, and Roll With It was his attempt to tap into those traditions. Winwood co-produced his 1988 album Roll With It with Tom Lord-Alge, the guy who’d engineered Back In The High Life and who’d remixed “Valerie.” Winwood had just married his second wife, an American woman, and he’d moved to Tennessee. But after the success of Back In The High Life, Winwood left Island and signed a $13 million deal with Virgin. The Spencer Davis Group had signed with Island Records in 1964, when Winwood was 16, and he’d been with the label ever since. (It’s a 5.) Suddenly, Steve Winwood was the most popular he’d ever been. Winwood stacked his 1986 album Back In The High Life with a dream team of star collaborators, and he finally reached #1 with the slickly bland “ Higher Love,” which had both Chaka Khan and Nile Rodgers in its supporting cast.Īfter “Higher Love,” Winwood got to #8 with the bloopy Back In The High Life ballad “ The Finer Things.” (It’s a 4.) Soon afterward, Winwood reached #9 with a remixed version of “ Valerie,” a 1982 single that had only made it as high as #70 in its first run. In the ’80s, Winwood made a conscious decision to play toward his mass-entertainer side, moving to New York and hiring a high-powered manager. With Traffic and Blind Faith, Winwood stayed in the rock-establishment mix for decades. With the Spencer Davis Group, Winwood had been a British blues-rock child star, a guy who wowed audiences and peers by moaning and hollering in ways that sounded so much like the blues records that British Invasion types fetishized so lovingly. In a late-’80s environment when beer-commercial aesthetics dominated, it was a towering smash.īy 1988, Steve Winwood had been doing pantomime for more than half his life. “Roll With It” is a copy of a copy, a piece of sheer pantomime. He constructed Steve Winwood the Southern fantasyland that Winwood so clearly wanted. It wouldn’t be the last.) For “Roll With It,” Fincher did the obvious thing. (“Roll With It” was the first song with a David Fincher video to hit #1. By that point, Fincher had been directing music videos for years - for Rick Springfield, for the Outfield, for the Hooters, for Johnny Hates Jazz. The same year that he shot the “Roll With It” video, Fincher also made a transfixingly coked-out Colt 45 ad with Billy Dee Williams.
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It all looks dazzling, in the same way that an exceptionally well-made beer commercial looks dazzling.įincher, still four years away from making his feature debut with Alien 3, knew how to make a beer commercial. Fincher shoots everything in sepia-toned black and white. The people in the crowd, most of whom are a whole lot younger and Blacker than Steve Winwood, hump each other in elaborately choreographed ways. He’s got suspenders over his white shirt and sweat sprayed on his face. Winwood, 40 years old and still plenty hot himself, bangs on a Hammond organ and makes passionate faces at the camera. The David Fincher-directed video for “Roll With It,” Steve Winwood’s second and final #1 hit, takes place in some sort of idealized Southern juke joint that only lets sexy people in the door. The song was the last #1 hit of Casey Kasem's 18-year run as the original host of American Top 40 (he would return to host the program 10 years later), as well as being the first #1 song of Shadoe Stevens' hosting tenure.In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.Įveryone is hot. The album Roll with It was also nominated as Album of the Year. "Roll with It" was nominated for two Grammy Awards in 1989, Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal performance. In the United Kingdom, the song reached No. 1 on the Billboard mainstream rock chart. It topped the Billboard adult contemporary chart for two weeks, and also spent four weeks at No.
1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in the summer of 1988. Publishing rights organization BMI later had Motown songwriters Holland-Dozier-Holland credited with co-writing the song due to its resemblance to the Junior Walker hit "(I'm a) Roadrunner". It was written by Winwood and songwriter Will Jennings. "Roll with It" is a song recorded by Steve Winwood for his album, Roll with It, released on Virgin Records.
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