Getting back to our regularly scheduled, non-Star Wars programming, I’ve gathered up a selection of music vids that all mention my obsession du jour, summertime, and which, in one way or another, mirror my feelings on the season I’ve largely missed out on this year. Don’t worry, it’s not all heavy, depressing stuff… and yes, I know it’s no longer Friday evening…
It’s been a while since I posted a TV Title Sequence, and there’s one that’s been on my mind the last couple days. As it happens, this one is very MTV-esque, so it can double as a Friday Evening Video, for those who enjoy those and missed seeing one this week… two for the price of one! Just another little favor from your friends here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense!
If you don’t remember it — and really, why should you? — Booker was a short-lived spin-off from 21 Jump Street, that early hit for the fledgling Fox network that brought Johnny Depp to the public’s attention. As I understand it — and I could be totally offbase here, as I was never more than a casual fan and occasional viewer of Jump Street — Depp started talking about leaving the series early on in its five-season run and Richard Greico, who had a similar look, was brought on in the third season as a possible replacement for him. When Greico’s character, Dennis Booker, proved to popular and Depp was placated by some behind-the-scenes negotiations, Booker got his own show, which lasted a single season. (Depp ended up leaving Jump Street at the end of the fourth season, which coincided with the end of Booker‘s run as well.)
Although I generally enjoyed Jump Street, I never got into Booker much. Greico annoyed me on an almost cellular level, no doubt because of the way my girlfriend at the time used to react whenever his face popped up somewhere. (I was so easily threatened by virtual competition from media heartthrobs in those days, and I was so not a Richard Greico type, that I couldn’t help but loathe the guy on general principles. I had similar issues with Johnny Depp back then, and several members of Duran Duran as well.) It didn’t help that the only episode of Booker that made an impression on me was such a blatant rip-off of Die Hard that I’m amazed nobody got sued. But the opening credits… ah, I liked the opening. I used to tune in every week just to catch that one-minute sequence, and then I’d go find something else to do. It’s a near-perfect marriage of sound and imagery, in my opinion.
The sound is Billy Idol’s “Hot in the City,” of course, specifically the “Exterminator Remix” from the 1987 compilation album Vital Idol. Billy Idol was another one I didn’t much like at the time — I’ve since come to appreciate him quite a bit — but this song was awesome. Strangely enough, the official music video for the song bears a lot of resemblance to Booker‘s opening credits. Apparently Bruce Willis movies weren’t the only thing the producers were ripping off. I can’t find an embeddable clip, but you can see the Idol video here.
And just as a bonus, here’s the music video for the original version of “Hot in the City,” which was first released in 1982:
I like the original, but this is a rare, rare case in which I think I prefer the remix. I like that pounding bass line at the beginning…
I’ve been planning for a couple of weeks to post a clip of Harry Chapin performing “Taxi,” a lengthy ballad about disappointment and thwarted childhood ambitions, but you know what? Screw that. I’m not in the mood to dwell on my dissatisfaction right now. It’s a hot, muggy summer night in the SLC, the kind of night when young people go out on the prowl, and we middle-aged types reminisce about the crap we somehow managed to get away with, back in our own prowling days. So instead of that downer ’70s tune, I’m going back to the genre I turn to when I need a pick-me-up, the dumb and lustful pop-metal that I absorbed like oxygen in my late teens and early 20s. Here’s a song I can’t begin to justify liking, but I do, and I won’t apologize for it. It’s by Lita Ford, another former member of The Runaways who had a few solo hits in the late ’80s, including a pretty big duet she performed with Ozzy Osbourne. The song is “Kiss Me Deadly,” and no, it has nothing to do with Mickey Spillane:
I don’t have any specific memories associated with this song, other than liking it a lot when it was first out. I still have a 45 of it down in the Archives somewhere that features a rather fetching photo of Ms. Ford on the sleeve — she’s naked except for her guitar, which is naturally positioned just so to hide everything. I think it was that flavor of blunt sexuality that drew me to this song, actually… the line about getting laid and the one about knowing what she likes… I don’t think I’d ever heard a woman sing about sex in such frank, almost masculine terms before. Certainly it was a far cry from the fragile romanticism and opaque metaphors of Stevie Nicks. And I thought it was pretty hot.
Hot just like this miserable night. Going to be a long one, I think…
I heard tonight’s selection while driving home from The Girlfriend’s, the first time I’ve seen her all week. It was after dark and traffic was sparse, one of those times when the road seems to belong to you and you alone. The car responds like a horse that’s been penned up all winter, the windows are down and the draft whipping through them carries a sullen ghost of the 100-degree day that lived and died without your notice while you were at work. And then… a song that seems to perfectly encapsulate everything you’re currently feeling, and everything you’ve experienced over the past couple weeks:
To any of my Loyal Readers who’re still awake out there in the darkness, good night… and pleasant dreams…
Yeah, I know, another damn music video. I haven’t had the time for anything more substantive, I’m afraid. Lots of late nights at the office this week, and the way things are going, I’ll be lucky if I don’t have to work over the holiday weekend, too, and possibly the following weekend as well, and all thanks to some overzealous middle-management dumbass who made an impossible promise that I and my fellow bottom-of-the-ladder production people — the people who do the actual work around this place — now have to try and fulfill. My Loyal Readers can probably guess how I feel about that. Call me lazy if that’s how you see it, but I personally think the American-style protestant work ethic (i.e., the “thank you, sir, may I have another” mindset) is bullshit, and I resent the hell out of every additional second The Man shaves off the already too-small “life” portion of my work/life balance.
So, in that vein, here’s one for every middle-aged, white-collar cubicle monkey out there who spends his days wondering which of the reasonable, responsible choices he made in his youth led him to this bleak plateau where he feels like a coyote that’s thinking about gnawing off his own leg in order to escape the merciless steel jaws. It’s a little primal-scream therapy from Sting and The Police, and while the Road Warrior-inspired, post-apocalypse trappings of this video are as 1980s as it gets, the meaning of the lyrics and the bubbling rage at the grinding inhumanity of modern life remain as applicable — sadly — as ever.
And on that note, I hope that everyone reading this does, in fact, get to enjoy their holiday weekends. Think of me while you’re barbecuing and looking for a good spot to watch the parade…
I’ve really dropped the ball with these video entries, and for that I apologize. But just lately I seem to be dropping all kinds of balls, so why should this feature be any different?
Anyhow, what I’m posting this week isn’t a video exactly; it’s a TV spot for Michelob beer that aired in the late ’80s, but it looks like a music video, and it features the guitar god Eric Clapton and a (then) updated version of his classic “After Midnight.” Michelob had a number of similar ads around this same time featuring popular music and an MTV visual style. I have the impression (but no actual knowledge) that it was a successful campaign for them. Certainly, I liked these ads, all of them that as I can recall seeing, anyway, but this was my favorite… it sounded and looked cool, and I just knew that the atmospheric mood of the clip was a prediction of what weekend nights were going to be like when I came of age. Yet another adolescent fantasy that didn’t quite work out, considering I’m currently sitting at home by myself on a Friday night/Saturday morning writing about a 20-year-old beer ad instead of out listening to blues music in a smokey dive somewhere. Sigh… anyway, here’s the ad. Enjoy:
For the record, I know there was also a one-minute version of this ad, but it’s the 30-second spot that I remember seeing the most. There were also Michelob ads featuring Genesis, Phil Collins, and Steve Winwood (I wasn’t able to find a link to that one).
And now, considering that it’s well after midnight, I think I’m going to call it a week…
I’m posting our weekly music feature a little early this time; I’ll be on the road by this afternoon, heading west to Wendover, Nevada, a.k.a. Salt Lake’s moral exhaust port. I’m going out for a concert, and no, it’s not Rick Springfield for a change. It’s these guys, actually, another favorite band of mine from the Awesome ’80s:
Ah, the ’80s, when images of six guys standing around watching a woman sleep weren’t considered creepy at all. It really was a different time… a better, more innocent time in a lot of ways. Sorry about the dodgy picture; The Man has disabled embedding on all the decent-quality Huey Lewis videos, at least the ones I could find in two minutes of Googling.
“Do You Believe in Love,” from the album Picture This, was the first charting single from Huey Lewis and the News. I remember hearing it quite a lot back in the day and I always liked it, but the band wouldn’t really break through into “household name” status until the next album, Sports. Sports was a monster hit, with four of its nine tracks hitting the top 10 singles charts, and a fifth breaking into the top 20. The album itself was the second bestseller of the year, right behind Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The Arbiters of Cool never thought much of Huey and the boys, and I suppose I can understand why. Their image was more cuddly than cutting-edge; Huey himself was a bit older than the usual pop star, with rugged yet average features that appealed to the housewives; and a lot of their lyrics admittedly tended toward the cutesy and/or sappy. But then, so did the early rock ‘n’ roll and 1950s doo-wop that so obviously influenced their sound. And anyway, you can’t listen to Lou Reed and The Ramones all the time. Well, I suppose you can, but if you do, I don’t want to hang around with you.
We have time for one more, my personal favorite by Huey Lewis and the News, the one that drove the strait-laced, finger-wagging set into hissy fits because they didn’t understand what the song was really about:
Yeah, good stuff. Any band that can come up with that opening wail is rock-and-roll in my book. Incidentally, that dunking-your-face-in-a-sink-full-of-ice-cubes gag was done by Paul Newman in at least two movies that I know of: Harper, from 1966, and 1973’s The Sting. And one final thought: I always admired that red suit with the black t-shirt that Huey’s wearing. I still like the look, actually; if I ever find myself in the position of having to wear a suit, that might not be a bad way to do it…
I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the late heavy-metal singer Ronnie James Dio, who died last week at the age of 67. His music was a little too far to the headbanging side of the spectrum for my tastes (well, except for that one song on the Vision Quest soundtrack; I liked that one). But even so, he was a pretty formidable presence out there in the culture during my formative years, a familiar face and voice, and I seem to have reached a point in my life where I feel a pang at the loss of any iconic figure from my youth, whether I was a fan or not. So, to honor the recently departed Mr. Dio, I’m going to post one of his videos, “The Last in Line,” which is admittedly kind of ridiculous even by MTV standards, but is nevertheless… interesting.
To be honest, I’ve been thinking about posting this clip anyhow, as an example of what I like to call “narrative videos.” I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis or anything, but it seems to me that the vast majority of music videos are little more than performance clips. That is, they’re really just footage of the band playing the song. They may be wearing weird costumes or performing in bizarre settings or something, but there’s usually not much story happening. Some vids, though, have a definite plot: the three famous ZZ Top clips involving the Eliminator hot rod, for example, or more obviously, a-ha’s justly praised “Take on Me” video, in which a young woman is sucked into a comic-book world and proceeds to have adventures with the band’s hunky lead singer as they’re pursued by sinister guys in dark uniforms and helmets. And then of course, there’s Dio’s “The Last in Line,” which is perhaps single-handedly responsible for the entire “heavy-metal hell” sequence in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey:
As I said, pretty ridiculous, but it has the virtue of being far more ambitious than most videos, as well as a piquant commentary on the social concerns and fads of the early ’80s (i.e., the kids whose punishment is to play arcade games for all eternity — wonder which sin warranted that?). I think the similarity to Bogus Journey is pretty obvious, if you remember that movie at all, and you could also argue that the demon guy with the hoses sticking out of his neck was an inspiration for the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. (It would seem that American culture has been uneasy with the idea of cybernetics for a very long time.)
Lastly, a brief trivia note: You may have recognized the young man who’s taking the tour of hell. That’s Meeno Peluce, a child actor who was all over the boob tube during the late ’70s and early ’80s. He’s best known for the short-lived but well-loved time-travel series Voyagers!, and as fate would have it, he’s also the brother of Soleil Moon-Frye, a.k.a. Punky Brewster. I always thought Peluce was a cool kid, as well as a natural and appealing actor; he’s a little younger than me, but close enough that I easily identified with him in Voyagers! and other roles. This video, made in 1984, was the last time I remember seeing him in anything, although Wikipedia says he’s appeared in a number of made-for-TV movies since then. He apparently grew up to become a history teacher — interesting, considering his character on Voyagers! was a history buff and, as I recall, the son of a teacher — and he’s also an accomplished photographer who has shot Courtney Love and Lady Gaga. Not bad, kid… not bad at all…
I’ll bet you all had a hunch when I started prattling on about Roy Orbison last night who was going to be be appearing in this week’s Friday Evening Videos, didn’t you? Smart little Loyal Readers.
You’re quite correct: I was planning to post what I thought was Roy’s final hit, “You Got It,” from the 1989 album Mystery Girl, which was a favorite cassette of mine during my sophomore year of college and the following summer. But as I started poking around looking for the video clip and any interesting background information I could find, I discovered that this was not, in fact, Roy’s last charting single, and Mystery Girl was not his last album. Remember that he’d been working a lot with producer Jeff Lynne in the year or two prior to his death in 1988; it turns out he recorded more material than what ended up on Mystery Girl, enough to fill out one more album, which Lynne compiled and released four years later. Somehow, I completely missed King of Hearts in 1992, and I also missed the two final, posthumous hits it generated, a duet of Roy’s classic “Crying,” sung with k.d. lang, and this song:
“I Drove All Night” reveals a fairly tangled history when you delve into it. The song was written specifically for Roy, and he recorded it in 1987, a full year before his death, but for some reason it wasn’t selected for Mystery Girl, and of course it wouldn’t appear until King of Hearts came out in ’92. In the meantime, Cyndi Lauper, of all people, scored a top-10 hit with it in 1989, and I’m willing to bet a lot of people probably think the song was hers, and Roy’s version was the cover. It has since been covered again by a band I’ve never heard of, Pinmonkey, and most recently by — shudder — Celine Dion in 2003.
Since I was unfamiliar with the song, I obviously had never seen the video either, until this afternoon. I think it’s absolutely magnificent. The imagery is a perfect match for the audio, it’s very clever how the director covers for the fact that Roy had been dead for four years, and the young stars are simply beautiful to gaze upon. (If you can’t place them, you’re looking at Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, seen here at the peak of her Rocketeer-era detectability, and Jason Priestley, who was then riding high on the success of Beverly Hills, 90210.) Everything about this evokes a particular time in my life, a time I often miss, to be honest. I was old enough in ’92 to know something, but still young enough to believe in a lot of things. I acted tougher than I really was, and I was in love with the idea of love itself. In other words, I was a lot like the character that Priestley is playing here. Or at least, that’s how I used to imagine myself, and how I like to remember myself.
Hell, I could just reacting to the car, I guess. Priestley is driving a 1964 Galaxie, a little bit different than my older ’63, but close enough for this video to stir up a lot of sense memories.
For our second feature this evening, I wanted to post “End of the Line” by The Traveling Wilburys, another fabulous song that combines a catchy hook with some truly authentic and wise lyrics; unfortunately, the foul Copyright Lords have forbidden anyone from embedding it, so if you’d like to see it, you’ll have to click through. If nothing else, it’s worth a look to see how this one handled Roy’s absence.
Finally, here’s a little something by request, a B-52s song for my friend Keith. To be honest, I really don’t care for The B-52s — I find the majority of their stuff obnoxious, what with the herky-jerky delivery and a sound that generally rubs me the wrong way — but their 1989 hit “Roam” isn’t too bad, and it’s kind of in the same thematic ballpark as “I Drove All Night,” at least in the sense that it’s about traveling and love. Enjoy, Keith!
Friday evening, Saturday morning… it’s all the same for some of us, right?
Anyhow, I received some feedback earlier this week about our musical feature here: Loyal Reader Keith expressed some dissatisfaction with the songs I’ve been choosing for Friday Evening Videos. He lamented the fact that, despite our long years of friendship, he’s never been able to drag me over to the dark side — his words, not mine — of post-New Wave/alternative music.
This is an old, old rivalry between us. The battle lines between rockers and Wavers were drawn by forces larger than ourselves way back in high school — maybe even middle school — and I picked my tribe very early. I was a rocker. Not a metal head, mind you — that’s a whole other kettle of guitar picks — but I always identified far more with the earthy, long-haired fellows in the leather and acid-washed jeans than the twee weirdos who played that bloodless synthesizer crap. At least, that’s how I thought of things back in the day.
The irony, of course, is that most of my friends and girlfriends — including Keith and The Girlfriend — were Wavers. The universe can be truly perverse at times.
In any event, I’ve come in recent years to appreciate (or at least tolerate) a lot more alternative music than Keith probably realizes; hell, I took Anne to see Depeche Mode last year, the very epitome of everything I always disliked about New Wave synth bands, and I even had a reasonably good time. My mulleted 17-year-old self would be stunned to hear that, I’m sure. But the fact is, the label “alternative” covers a pretty broad spectrum, and I started realizing at some point that it wasn’t all bad, and that I’d actually liked a fair amount of it all along, even back in my militant teen years. Without realizing it, of course. I mean, they played The Cars on Rock 103, so that made them okay, right?
If I could trace this awakening to any one song or event, I think it would probably be learning a few years ago that Stuart Adamson, the lead singer of the band Big Country, had died in an apparent suicide. Not that I was ever a fan of Big Country back in the day; if I was aware of them at all in the ’80s — and I don’t think I was — I would’ve sneeringly dismissed them simply because the radio stations on which they were played were not my stations, i.e., the rock stations. But a funny thing happened as I was perusing the online tributes to Adamson: They all referenced Big Country’s hit single “In a Big Country,” and when, purely out of curiosity, I tracked down this song, it turned out that I liked it. I liked it a lot. It wasn’t sung in that weirdly passionless style that so many British imports of the ’80s had, and which I’ve always found so off-putting. The orchestration was sweeping and dramatic, the chorus was catchy. And what was that? Was there a guitar in there? I was, quite frankly, surprised by this song:
(Apologies for the crappy video quality; this was the best version I could find.)
“In a Big Country” caused me to re-evaluate a few things about music and what was cool. As I told Keith, I don’t think I’ll ever love alternative music the way I do the more traditional varieties of rock and roll — too much of it simply fails to resonate with me either emotionally or viscerally — but I’m hopefully a little smarter now about what I’m willing to sample, and what I’m willing to let myself enjoy.
Keith, I’m not dismissing your list of suggestions; I’ll see if I can work in some of the things you mentioned in the coming weeks.
