I had a fairly grandiose idea for this edition of Friday Evening Videos. I was going to do a survey of music vids that used science-fiction imagery or themes, even when they had nothing to do with the song itself, as in the case of last week’s Queen clip. This practice was more common than you might think, especially in the early ’80s when the Star Wars-inspired sci-fi boom was still cresting.

But you know, I started thinking today that most of the vids I have in mind were less feelgood space opera than grim, post-apocalyptic dystopia. And given that it’s a gray, gloomy day in the SLC and that my mood has been teetering toward melancholy all week anyhow, I decided I really didn’t want to go to that place.
Besides, I’ve had this song stuck in my head for the past several days:

Scandal is better known for its hit “The Warrior” than this one, but I remember “Goodbye to You” getting a fair amount of airplay as well, and honestly I think it’s a much catchier tune. In fact, it’s a nearly perfect example of the guitar-driven power pop that seemed to be so plentiful right around the time I was getting interested in music. I loved this stuff then, and I still love it now.

Too bad the video for such a great song isn’t especially noteworthy. It reminds me of the lip-sync competition we had one week in my high-school drama class, just a bunch of kids practicing their dance moves and vamping at each other. But that simplicity is kind of appealing in its own way, and the video does present a nice time capsule of the state of fashion circa 1982. I really like these looks, actually. They’re distinct from the decade before, definitely “Eighties,” but not yet taken to the ridiculous extremes that would mark the latter half of the decade, i.e., the huge hair and the shoulder pads and such.
And of course Scandal’s lead singer, Patty Smyth, was easy on the eyes. What is it about these pouty brunettes, anyhow?
Scandal disintegrated in 1984, not long after they released “The Warrior.” Smyth went on to record a number of solo hits, most notably a duet with Don Henley called “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough.” I think I heard recently that Scandal has reformed and is supposed to have a new album out some time this year.

And with that, I’m off to see if I can shake these blues… have a better one, kids!

I’m a little late posting up this week’s music vid, but hey, it’s still before midnight, right? Just consider this my homage to the good old days of middle school, when we kids who lived out in the sticks had to stay up ’til the wee hours to see Friday Night Videos because we didn’t have cable service — and thus the holy font of all that was cool, circa 1983, MTV — like the lucky urbanites to the north.

Continue Reading…

It’s that time again, the end of a long and (for me, anyway) especially grinding week. I need to decompress, but since I’ve never gotten around to replacing the bottle that used to be in my bottom desk drawer, I think maybe I’ll head on over to the student union… find myself a spot in front of that projection TV the size of a bank-vault door… I’ve got a paper tray filled with those greasy English chips I like, a big splotch of ketchup in the corner for dipping… what’s on today? Oh, this is good! It’s that song I used to consider my personal anthem back in my, shall we say, less settled days:

I realize there’s a certain redundancy in the videos I keep choosing… Look, it’s another cavernous performance space filled with moody shadows, except for the shafts of light silhouetting the band. Look, more self-important posturing while wearing ridiculous outfits! Look, more hair!

Meh, whatever. I like the song. It resonated very strongly with me for a couple of years, all that stuff about “another heart in need of rescue” and “the lonely street of dreams.” It fit my notion of myself as a Byronic hero brooding in the dark about lost love. Or maybe it was frustrated lust. So hard to remember now.

Speaking of lust, incidentally, I really like the redhead who is, to paraphrase the immortal words of Bowling for Soup, shaking her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car. You might recognize her; she’s a model-turned-actress named Tawni Kitaen who had a few good years in the late ’80s and early ’90s with frequent guest spots on TV series such as Seinfeld, Married… with Children, and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. She also appeared in the movie Bachelor Party (the one Tom Hanks doesn’t put on his resume any more), co-hosted America’s Funniest Home Videos, and had a starring role in the short-lived syndicated sitcom The New WKRP in Cincinnati (which is actually where I first noticed her, as best I can recall).

And she provided eye-candy for a number of Whitesnake videos in addition to this one. That’s not surprising when you consider she was dating the lead singer, David Coverdale, during the band’s most successful years. (Did you notice that they share essentially the same hair style?) They would later marry for a brief, tumultuous period.

Sadly, time hasn’t been very kind to her since her heavy-metal heyday. After several years in obscurity, she roared back into the public eye in 2002, charged with beating up her then-husband, a pro baseball player, and appearing in an infamous (and not very flattering) mugshot. Since then, she’s had various substance-abuse and anger-management problems and is widely viewed as a bit of a nut case. (Perhaps we should’ve taken the end of the video, when she drags Coverdale into the back seat of a moving car, more seriously!)

She may be a wreck today, but back in her prime… wow. Remember what I wrote a while back about Kirsten Dunst sometimes getting a certain look in her eye that I find very, ahem, appealing? Tawni gets that look, too… it’s especially nice right around the 4:05 mark, when she’s mussing her hair. Yeah… that’s a nice image to end the week on, don’t you all think?

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…

I hadn’t really planned on turning this “Friday Evening Videos” thing into a regular feature, but I find I’m having fun with it — tapping into my adolescent fantasies of being the next Johnny Fever perhaps — so I think I’m going to run with it for a while.
This week, I’ve got something a little different to show you, and it requires more background than usual. It’s a music video, yes, but it’s also a promotional piece for the upcoming feature film The Runaways.

I was only vaguely aware of the real-life Runaways until about six months ago; I knew they were the band that Lita Ford and Joan Jett had belonged to in their younger days, and I had an impression that they were teenage girls performing in lingerie, but that was about it. Then I started hearing about this new biopic (SamuraiFrog is doing his part to spread the word), and, around that same time, I spotted a greatest-hits collection at my local library. I gave the disc a spin for curiosity’s sake, and I liked most of what I heard.

If you don’t know, The Runaways were a short-lived, all-female rock band formed in the mid-1970s. They were indeed teenagers at the time, and their lyrics and visual style all played off the dark fantasy of underage, oversexed young girls giving the finger to the world and proving that they were every bit as debauched as their male counterparts. (I have no idea if they were really like that, or if it was all a carefully manufactured marketing gimmick. If they were a more recent band, I’d say it was an act — I tend to be pretty cynical about media these days — but back in the free-for-all, sexual-revolution ’70s, who knows?) In those days, female musicians tended to be a lot more demure, a lot more mellow musically speaking, and a lot more into victimhood — think of Carly Simon, Roberta Flack, Karen Carpenter — so a group of trash-talking, hard-rocking chicks was a genuine revolution. The Runaways are often credited as an influence on later all-girl bands such as The Go-Gos, The Bangles, and The Donnas, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that Madonna took a lot of her trampy early look from them as well.

Musically, I found the stuff on their hits collection a little primitive, the sort of borderline-competent playing and simplistic lyrics you’d expect to hear coming from the neighbor’s garage on a hot summer afternoon. And yet… there is something compelling about their sound (which is somewhat reminiscent of early KISS), and several of their songs are insanely catchy. I especially like the ones that reveal a bit of vulnerability and even innocence lurking under the hard edge, songs like “Wait for Me” and the heartbreaking “Waitin’ for the Night.” But of course it’s the rowdy, bad-girl stuff that they’re best known for, and in this video — all footage from the movie — we’re going to hear their signature tune, “Cherry Bomb.” As unlikely as it sounds, Dakota Fanning is playing lead singer Cherie Currie, and I believe this is really her singing; Twilight‘s Kristen Stewart plays Joan Jett:

And now just for fun, here’s the original song as performed by the real Runaways:

Compare and contrast, kids!
The Runaways opens nationwide on April 9. Honestly, this and Iron Man 2 are about the only movies I’m looking forward to at the moment. My thanks to SamuraiFrog for finding the clip…

I was a commuter student when I was at college; that is, I lived at home on the south end of the Salt Lake Valley and drove back and forth to the University of Utah every day, a 50-mile round trip, for five years. I had my reasons for doing it that way at the time, but in retrospect, it wasn’t the greatest idea I’ve ever had. I certainly wouldn’t do it again, if I could live those years over. I spent way too much time on the road, and I missed out on too many of the social aspects of college life.
Even so, I do have some memories of those years that don’t involve driving or classrooms. My class schedules often had lengthy periods of free time built into any particular day, especially during my freshman year, and I managed to explore the campus pretty thoroughly during those gaps.
One of my favorite spots was a sort of lounge in the student union, a section of the main dining area that was elevated a bit above the rest of the room, and which boasted a big-screen TV, one of the old-fashioned rear-projection models that were about the size of a bank vault. Nine times out of 10, it was tuned to MTV… and this was back when MTV was still playing actual music videos instead of The Real World or whatever the hell they run nowadays. I spent a lot of time in that lounge… studying, watching girls, meeting friends, vegging out. That was the place where I developed a taste for coffee and bagels with cream cheese.
There are a handful of videos I very clearly remember watching on that massive old dinosaur of a television, songs that instantly remind me of what it felt like to be 18 and filled with vinegar and romantic notions. The soundtrack of my late teens, and the last few moments of my wide-eyed innocence. Here’s one of them…

Slaughter-Fly To The Angels
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Yeah, I know… hair metal. It’s supposedly the nadir of western civilization, mind-numbingly stupid and terminally uncool. Whatever. I’d still rather listen to this stuff than all those mopey guys from Seattle who drove a stake through the heart of real rock and roll. And this particular video includes a gorgeous old airplane and automobile, which is probably the reason why it’s stuck in my head all these years. I have no idea what kind of car that is, but I think the plane is a Lockheed similar to the one Amelia Earhart was flying on her final expedition.
Watching this again after all these years, I’m struck by how damn young the lead singer looks. I remember thinking back in the day that all those guys in the rock bands were so much older than I was… they were adults out there doing grown-up stuff, and I was just a stupid, punk kid. Or so it seemed then. I now realize that a lot of them weren’t much older than I was, and they all look like stupid punk kids to me now. Even the ones with enviable hair.
Incidentally, the leader singer of this particular band of punk kids, Mark Slaughter, has done some interesting things in the years since “Fly to the Angels.” He’s now a voice-over artist who worked on Animaniacs, among other things. That same series also employed Jess Harnell, who’s currently singing his heart out for the awesome (and very hair-metal-ish) Rock Sugar, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago. The entertainment industry is very small sometimes.
And I’m just babbling, killing time here at the office until Mr. Slate pulls the tailfeathers on that little dinosaur-bird. I think I’m going to get out of here… enjoy the music, folks. And if I don’t manage to blog again for a couple days, enjoy the weekend, too. Savor the few minutes of real life you can manage to snatch before The Man drags you back into whatever veal pens you’re locked in during the week…

I’ve got some things in the works, but for right now, enjoy a song that was one of my favorites back in the early ’90s and which I’ve just rediscovered:

The song is called “You Can Sleep While I Drive” (if you hadn’t surmised that already), a somewhat obscure track from the 1989 album Brave and Crazy by Melissa Etheridge. As I recall, this song was my introduction to her… I have vague memories of hearing it on a short-lived but wonderful radio station called The Mountain (105.7 FM) not long after I returned from my summer sojourn in England, way back in 1993. Melissa broke out (and came out of the closet) that same year with the monster-selling album Yes I Am, but I’m pretty sure I first heard “You Can Sleep” before that happened. I honestly can’t recall for sure at this point, but no matter…

I’ve always loved the mood of this one, the plaintive earnestness, the restlessness, the slight tinge of wee-hours-of-the-morning desperation that seasons but doesn’t overwhelm the song. It was the perfect articulation of everything I was feeling after coming home from a big adventure that I knew even then was going to end up being a singular experience for me. I was struggling with going back to my movie-theater job, knowing that it was time to move on but having no idea what to do next. I was struggling with a lot of things, actually. And hearing a woman’s voice sweetly suggest that we shake off the familiar dust of home and just… drive… well, anyone who reads this blog knows that’s still an alluring fantasy for me.

Despite my long affection for this song, however, I’d never seen this video before today, and it’s really kind of a trip. The pre-coming-out Melissa looks like a tougher version of a friend’s wife, and she also has a certain something that reminds me of a girl I used to know a long time ago and still think about sometimes. If I’d seen this back in ’93 (or earlier, since the video was apparently made in 1990), I probably would’ve developed a big crush…