Today is Pioneer Day, a Utah state holiday commemorating the arrival of the first Mormon settlers here in the Salt Lake Valley. If you’re from around here, you know what it’s all about, but for my out-of-state readers I should explain that this day is basically an end-of-the-month do-over of the Fourth of July: we have a big parade in the morning, then picnics in the park, carnivals, day-long activities for the kids, and finally, fireworks at night. (There are some who grumble, in fact, that Utahns make a bigger deal of our local founder’s day than our nation’s Independence Day and that this indicates there’s some lingering whiff of treason in Mormon culture. Personally, I think folks just like fireworks and parades.) Anyway, most of the state’s population seems to have the day off… but not me. Nope, I work for The Man. Which means I’m sitting at my workstation, same as always, trying not to listen to the drums of the marching band a mere half-block away…
You know, on these hot summer days when responsibilities keep me inside drudging away at my desk instead of out playing as I’d like to be, my mind tends to wander back to my carefree adolescent years, when all I really had to think about was the anticipation of getting my driver’s license and the beguiling, inscrutable mystery of girls. Oh, and of nonsense like this:
That’s actually a trailer for the late-90s home-video release of Heavy Metal, not the original theatrical version from 1981, but as I recall the vintage advertising wasn’t too different. You have no idea how exciting this movie looked to me when I was twelve. An R-rated cartoon? With aliens and starships and rock music and the possibility of… boobies?! It was utterly mind-blowing… and of course, there was no way my mom was going to let me see it, not with that R rating and those danged cartoon boobies. The innuendo in Moonraker had been bad enough. And so it was a long, long time before I would see Heavy Metal in its entirety (I think I was in my twenties before I finally caught it at a midnight screening), and naturally, after all those years of build-up, it turned out to be something of a disappointing mess. Ah, but the images and the music… man, that stuff lives on in my memory as a touchstone of all that was simultaneously cool and tacky about the early ’80s.
Yeah… summer days in 1981…
From somewhere outside my office, I can hear that the parade carries on…
I see this and I think back to the many failed attempts to get WKRP in Cinncinnati onto home video. Look at the list of bands that have music on this video! Can you imagine the licensing nightmare you’d have to endure today to release something like this?
Simpler times, my friends, simpler times…
If it makes you feel any better, I had to come to work late today because the 3 CITY BLOCKS around my office were filled with screaming teenage girls (and their parents) who were camped out since 5AM to watch Miley Cyrus sing for 30 minutes on The Today Show.
A spectacle that, I dare say, would make those who celebrate Pioneer Day cringe…
Actually, Heavy Metal is available on DVD and, as far as I know, all the original music is intact. I can only assume that (a) the songs on the Metal soundtrack don’t command the same level (high) royalty fees as those featured in WKRP (possible, since the HM soundtrack is mostly obscure recordings, even if the artists are familiar, or stuff done exclusively for the movie; by contrast, ‘KRP used the same hit songs we were hearing on the radio), or (b) it has something to do with the overall quantity of music needing to be licensed. In other words, Metal is a two-hour movie with 12-15 songs. A season of WKRP is over 20 episodes with 3-4 songs per episode. I imagine the costs are significantly higher to license an entire series’ worth of music, versus a single feature film.
As for Miley Cyrus, she’s as huge here as anywhere else. She headlined a big Fourth of July celebration concert/fireworks show in Provo, which is possibly the most goody-two-shoes city in this entire state. The air down there is so rarefied that even many Mormons think the place is a little on the weird side. To my knowledge, no cringing occurred, unless it was just on the part of grown-ups who like real music…
(FYI, if you care, the actual city of Salt Lake — as opposed to the general populated area, which I often tend to rather imprecisely mean when I talk about “Salt Lake”– is a good deal more diverse and liberal than most people think. The homogeneous white-bread Mormon scene that everyone imagines Utah to be is really located out in the burbs, in places like Sandy, Draper, and a new “instant town” called Daybreak. Temple Square may be at the very heart of downtown SLC, but it’s kind of like the Vatican, an island in the middle of a different country.)