[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published July 30, 2011.] It’s the last weekend of July and summer is in full swing (it won’t last forever, though, so if you haven’t busted out your bathing suit by now, you’d better do it soon). We already know that many of the literary greats we admire liked to flit around the beach in their bathing suits, but what about their sonic storytelling counterparts? Turns out they fancied a swim now and again too. Not surprising, since their days were most likely filled with sticky tour bus rides and sweat-inducing live performances. Also not surprising: they tend to look just a little better in their next-to-nothing duds than our dear group of authors, since for many of them, part of their job was inspiring teenage lovesickness. Click through to see our gallery of rock stars from the 60s, 70s and 80s as they frolic, pose and pout in their swimsuits.

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We all fall down the YouTube rabbit hole every once in a while. Most of the time, it’s an inane abyss, but every once in a while, you stumble upon something that makes your day. That’s exactly how we came upon the treasure trove of music history you’ll find below — a set of notable TV commercials for some of pop and rock’s most popular and influential albums. What makes these clips so interesting is that they were made before the records in question had been sanctified by critics and/or certified platinum, giving us a glimpse at how legendary albums were introduced to the public. See Kurt Cobain give birth, Michael Jackson in neon, and Blondie go disco after the jump.

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Chances are you’ve seen at least one of Norman Seeff’s photographs of the 1970′s and ’80s most iconic personalities. The former doctor from South Africa left a career in medicine to pursue his art and landed in New York City in the early ’70s. He was introduced to the Big Apple’s biggest creative collaborators and shot portraits for the likes of Patti Smith and Andy Warhol to name a few. As his photography expanded he began to attract the names of musicians, artists, and visionaries worldwide, and his now famous images remain some of the most memorable celebrity snapshots ever taken. Click through for a candid look at an enthusiastic John Travolta right before he became a star in Saturday Night Fever, a married Cher and Gregg Allman, a young Steve Jobs, and more. Read More »

1. Hollywood big shot Brian Grazier has stepped in to replace Brett Ratner as the producer of this year’s Oscars. Despite some initial speculation, Grazier now says that there’s no way that he’s going ask Eddie Murphy to reconsider his exit as host. [via Deadline]

2. Ricky Gervais says that NBC wants him to host this year’s Golden Globes, but with only two months to go before the event, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is still unsure. One potential reason for the holdup: Deadline reports that there’s at least “one A-lister who is threatening not to attend if Gervais emcees.” Any guesses who it is?

3. The Criterion Collection — or at least 46 of its titles — is now available on iTunes! But wait, there’s a catch: even if you purchase a film, you won’t have access to the extensive special features, which is kind of the whole point, right? [via Slashfilm]

4. A list of the musicians who will be making cameo appearances on Season 2 of Portlandia includes Eddie Vedder, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, Johnny Marr, and Joanna Newsom. [via THR]

5. The Rolling Stones (apparently sans frontman Mick Jagger) are meeting up in a London studio later this month, sparking rumors of a 50th anniversary show. Keith Richards denies the reports: “We’re just going to play a little together, because we haven’t played for three or four years. You don’t necessarily want to rehearse or write anything – you just want to touch bases.” [via NME]

Bonus Buzz: Presidential Super Heroes

We’ve seen Mick Jagger’s name in the news a lot lately — and the funny thing is, the items we’ve been reading have nothing to do with his mediocre, new supergroup, SuperHeavy, who released their first album last month. First, there was Maroon 5′s inescapable (and dreadful hit, “Moves Like Jagger.” Then there’s Marc Spitz’s biography, Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue, which came out last month. And now, Gothamist reports that a group is trying to hijack New York City’s annual Halloween parade with a gaggle of marchers dressed as Jagger. But they’re not just going to slip into Mick’s leggings; they’re also planning to perform such hits as “Emotional Rescue,” “Dancing in the Street,” “Satisfaction,” “Time Is on My Side,” “Paint It Black,” Miss You,” “She’s So Cold,” “Start Me Up, and “Beast of Burden.” We would love to see this happen but have one additional suggestion: Please also enlist a gang of ’80s-era David Bowies to truly make “Dancing in the Street” worth everyone’s while.

Martin Scorsese’s excellent new documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World premieres tonight at the New York Film Festival; it will then run on HBO, in two parts, on Wednesday and Thursday night. Here are a few not-so-brief thoughts on how and why Scorsese has used rock music throughout his career.

Music moved me. It literally makes us move a certain way. It makes certain things happen. It’s equivalent to dancing, I guess. You know, you behaved a certain way. Some of the boys were able to swagger. Others pulled back. But the music scored our lives. I was taking it all in, pulling it together.

- Martin Scorsese, Conversations with Scorsese (2011)

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If you’re in any way interested in the Olympics, you might remember reading a while back that there’d been a mild controversy on the other side of the Atlantic about the use of The Clash’s classic song “London Calling” in some of the promotional videos for the games in London next year. (Since then, it’s turned out that The Clash are the least of London’s PR problems, but still.) Anyway, the whole thing has been playing on our mind for the last couple of weeks, until we realized what bugged us so much about it — the fact that “London Calling” is being used to promote anything. This isn’t unprecedented, of course — the song has been used in commercials before — but even so, it hasn’t joined the ranks of songs forever ruined by advertisements. As advertisers know only too well, once an image associates itself to music and lodges in your head, it’s damn near impossible to get rid of. And unfortunately, it’s too late for the songs we’ve collected after the jump — are there any that spring to mind for you?

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To commemorate the space shuttle Atlantis’s return from its final mission, Boing Boing posted the music video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” It’s a great and weird clip, featuring Bowie as a retro-futurist, silver-clad astronaut gyrating through space. And he’s also ground control, which you can tell because he’s wearing a red baseball cap that says “GC.” Then there are some girls with big hair, who don’t appear to be astronauts. Anyway, it got us thinking about how much we love stumbling upon music videos from the days before MTV, when the medium was new and unpolished. Ten of our favorites, including everyone from the Beatles and the Stones to ’60s French pop and Devo, are after the jump.

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Buried way down on the list of this week’s DVD releases — below Limitless and Take Me Home Tonight and Peep World — is a little movie called Skidoo, which you may have never heard of unless you are a bad movie aficionado (as your author is). This 1968 “comedy” was an attempt by Paramount and esteemed director Otto Preminger to make a hip film about the counter-culture geared towards the young people — starring such youth heroes as, um, Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, and Groucho Marx. It concerns a gangster (Gleason) who is sent into prison to ice an informant and ends up dropping acid and escaping via a flying garbage can. It is as spectacularly ill-conceived as it sounds, and it sank without a trace following its release — though it occasionally popped up on cable, it was never released on home video (not even on VHS) until now.

Of course, Skidoo could be seen via the back channels of bootleg video, but it’s nice to see an oddity like this finally getting an official, authorized, legitimate home video release. And while the movie is an utter mess, it is an undeniably entertaining one, featuring inventive songs by Harry Nilsson and Groucho’s final film performance; let’s face it, even bad movies deserve to at least make it to the marketplace. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a wish list of some other titles that have never made it to DVD — some never even to VHS. Take a look after the jump, and add your own in the comments.

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Linda McCartney was the first woman to land the coveted Rolling Stone cover with her portrait of Eric Clapton. Her photographs captured the Beatles kicking it at Brian Epstein’s house, Mick Jagger hanging back with Brian Wilson and everyone from Hendrix to Twiggy, completely unguarded. Over 200,000 photos by accomplished music photographer and Paul McCartney’s late wife were sorted to compile the 288-page Taschen tome Linda McCartney: Life in Photographs. Those photographs are now on view at New York City’s Bonni Benrubi Gallery through the end of July. See a selection of the images here, including personal, revealing shots of the McCartney family.

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