You know, it’s really not my intention to turn this blog into all music videos, all the time… I’ve just been too busy and/or exhausted lately to write about anything more substantive. I apologize for that, and hope to get back to something more interesting soon. In the meantime, I hope my Loyal Readers are at least enjoying these goofy retro-licious awesome! things I keep dredging out of the InterTubes.

This week’s selection is yet another one I remember from the student-union TV lounge back in my early college days. This was apparently a highly impressionable time of life for me, or else there’s something bubbling away in my subconscious these days that keeps pulling me back to that place. I’m half afraid to speculate what that might be. Anyway, here we have a solo hit from the Red Rocker, Sammy Hagar, in which he tries to show a bit more introspection and sensitivity than he usually displayed in his work with Van Halen, or his best-known solo monster-smash “I Can’t Drive 55.” This is “Give to Live” from the album I Never Said Goodbye (for those who care, Sammy cut this one in between the VH albums 5150 and OU812):

I know, I know… the pretension, the “peace and love” messaging, the hair, that jacket. If it helps any, the only part of this clip that’s stayed with me over the years is the bridge, when he’s sitting on the mountaintop talking about fate. I’d utterly forgotten all the clips of Hitler and mushroom clouds. But I still like the mood of the song, and hearing it again is evocative for me in the same way that “Hysteria” is. And it is kind of an interesting artifact of the final days of the Cold War, when global thermonuclear war really seemed possible. I remember worrying about that on almost a daily basis. I don’t think the children of Gen X can possibly understand that. Neither terrorists nor even climate change represent the same kind of utter existential threat we felt like we were living under then. As recent as the ’80s often feel to me, this sort of thing really pounds home just what a different and distant time it was.

But rather than dwell on obsolete cultural dread, let’s do like we did then and turn our attention to more frivolous pursuits. This week’s bonus video is David Lee Roth’s solo hit, “Just Like Paradise,” released around the same time as “Give to Live,” as I recall. I find it interesting how closely these two videos parallel each other:

Well, they’re similar in the sense that they both alternate studio performance footage with rock-climbing scenery, anyhow. But where Sammy is trying to say Something Important, Dave’s song is just about flash and fun and gettin’ laid. Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good encapsulation of the difference between Roth’s work with Van Halen and Sammy’s “Van Hagar” stuff.

Incidentally, I remember having more than one argument over this song with Shelly, my then-girlfriend. She was a New Wave girl and didn’t have a lot of use for Roth (or Sammy or Van Halen, or pretty much any of the music I liked), and would always try to get me to change the station whenever “Just Like Paradise” came on the radio of the little VW Rabbit in which I commuted to the U of U. I, of course, would refuse and proceed to sing along at the top of my lungs, throwing in a leering waggle of my eyebrows at the more suggestive lyrics, no doubt hoping she’d eventually come around to seeing the debauched wisdom of ol’ Diamond Dave and let me investigate that whole paradise thing. Good times…

Only one video this week, kids, but it’s a bit longer than average, so maybe that will help cushion the blow:

This was the song that made me a Def Leppard fan. Up until this point of their career, I’d dismissed them without even bothering to listen to their stuff. The dippy spelling of their name and the generally ominous look of their album covers had given me the impression that they were another bunch of scary head-bangers along the same lines as Motley Crue or Iron Maiden; as much I liked rock, the really hard stuff was never my cup of tea. But then one afternoon, I was hanging out in that student-union television lounge I’ve written about before, and I happened to glance up from my book in time to catch one of those lovely shots of the classic cars driving through the late-afternoon autumn sunshine. I instantly identified with the imagery — that was how I spent most of my weekends in those days, driving my massive old Ford Galaxie up and down the nearby canyons, in search of inspiration or enlightenment or simply something to do, and this video captured the same quality of light that I loved (and still love) to bathe myself in during those drives — so I kept watching. And I listened, too, and the song itself clicked with my mood that afternoon.

This particular song transports me back to that time of my life more completely than any other memory trigger I can think of. Just reviewing the video for today’s entry has stirred up all kinds of things: the greasy-salty taste and texture of the English chips I liked to snack on during the long gap before my evening philosophy class; the smell of my first leather jacket (pigskin, slightly more pungent than the more common cowhide jackets); the cheap paperback bio of Janis Joplin I borrowed from my aunt Sharon and devoured in a couple hours while lying on the grass under a tree in back of President’s Circle. I remember my general emotional state in those days, too, a heady mixture of curiosity, enthusiasm, hope, lust, and an aimless yearning for something I couldn’t quite define. (The yearning is still there, but the other stuff tends to come and go more than it did then.)

And I especially remember this one particular girl… she was younger than me, some kind of prodigy who’d been moved up a grade or two, whip-smart but more than a little flaky. Being away from home at the big old university eventually proved to be too much of her, and she vanished toward the end of our freshman year. I have no idea what became of her; I imagine she went back home, wherever that was, and attended a community college for a couple years until she felt more confident. If I’d been smarter, or at least more assertive, I might’ve tracked her down. She had gray eyes, you see… they aren’t just an affectation in bad novels, they really do exist. Gray eyes, and long, straight, honey-colored hair. And most days she wore these knee-high moccasin boots. She dared me once to kiss those boots.

Hysteria, when you’re near…

I don’t know about you guys, but that seems like a good image to end the work week on.

Here’s one I’ve chosen specially for my friend Cranky Robert:

It’s kind of weird, considering how much of this crap I watched as a kid, but I don’t recall ever seeing this particular video until today. I knew the song, of course — I doubt if anyone in my general age bracket doesn’t — but the corresponding video somehow fell through the cracks. It amuses me that the early ’80s as depicted here looks much more like the ’70s than what we usually think of as “The Eighties” — no shoulder pads, florescent colors, or big hair in sight! It’s also notable just how bloody young Joan Jett appears to be; I’ve always imagined the face behind that chainsaw voice as so mature and experienced. Well, she may have been, ahem, experienced — that whole rock-n-roll lifestyle thing, you know — but a little googling and some math reveals she was all of 22 years old when the song was recorded in 1981. Like a lot of the girls I had a thing for in high school, she looks to me now like a kid who was trying to look much tougher than she probably felt. Genuinely tough or not, though, Joan is at least more masculine-looking than the guy who’s “standing by the record machine.”

And is it just me, or is Joan giving off a distinct Suzi Quatro vibe in this… anyone else remember her? I can’t recall if she actually had any charting hits in the U.S., but she made a bit of a splash with a recurring role on Happy Days; she played Leather Tuscadero, the little sister of Fonzie’s occasional girlfriend, Pinky Tuscadero. (You’re probably asking yourself how the hell I remember all this stuff… it’s a gift, my friends. Or perhaps a curse… there are days when I’m not quite sure.)
I always thought this song originated with Joan Jett, but it turns out she was covering an earlier band called The Arrows; their version of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” was released in 1975, and if you’re curious, you can listen to it here. Jett’s version seems to have attained evergreen status — it turned up in the movie Wayne’s World 2 back in the ’90s and is featured on the popular Guitar Hero game — but the song was recently covered again by Britney Spears. Needless to say, Britney’s version doesn’t have quite the same umph as Jett’s. I’ve got nothing against Spears, but that girl doesn’t know anything about rock ‘n’ roll. Talk about a kid trying to be tougher than she is.

Anyhow, in true block-party weekend fashion, here’s one more selection from Joan and the Blackhearts, in which she’s looking much more feminine and (in my humble opinion) tres sexy. This is “Crimson and Clover,” a cover version of the old 1968 hit from Tommy James and the Shondells, from the same album as “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll”:

And with that, happy weekend, kids…