In the early ’80s, right around the time MTV was reaching its full ascendancy, the band KISS decided to abandon their trademark make-up and fantastic costumes. I suppose you can’t blame them. After a decade of performing in that stuff and never letting anyone see their true faces, the gimmick was probably feeling pretty stale. Also, it seems reasonable to imagine they might have had concerns about wanting to be taken seriously, and that the make-up might have seemed like a barrier to that. Or perhaps the “unmasking” was a gimmick in itself, just a stunt to draw attention back to themselves and boost sagging record sales. Whatever the reasoning behind it, it must’ve been a huge risk for them. Essentially, they chose to become less visually distinctive just as the visual was becoming enormously important to the music industry.

Whether or not they hurt themselves either commercially or artistically with this “unmasking” is a question for genuine connoisseurs, rather than a greatest-hits dilettante like myself. But I do know that KISS continued recording hit singles for many years after they revealed their faces, including one I was hoping to hear at the concert the other night, the title track from their 1983 album Lick It Up. Alas, it wasn’t part of the setlist. So I’m going to play it for you here instead:

This is admittedly a stupid video. Skanky women squatting in what is presumably supposed to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland but looks more like the back alley behind Safeway… the interminable shots of the band’s crotches as they, um, walk… a couple of little plastic skulls laying in the road, trying hard to look ominous… everyone eating cake and frosting or something squirted out of mustard bottles (yeah, I know, phallic imagery was never subtle or especially clever in heavy-metal videos, but this was just dumb)… seriously, what the hell, man? Things improve somewhat when we cut to just the band playing in the burning ruins, but all the scenes that take place in daylight… oy. Even Gene Simmons looks embarrassed, and that takes something. It’s hard to imagine how a band that had always been so conscious of the power of visual imagery could have been so out of their depth on this one.

So yeah, not a fan of this video… but I do like the song. It’s catchy, and there’s that cool little guitar thing just before the second verse. And I’ve got to be honest, I enjoy a good innuendo. Although this song is blunt enough that I’m not sure it even qualifies as innuendo. It’s just plain suggestive. But that, of course, was irresistible to a naughty boy growing up in the buckled-down atmosphere of small-town Utah in 1983…

Photo: Courtesy of Mercury News

Turning now to cheerier topics, my main man Rick Springfield is having quite a week. On Sunday, May the Fourth (a.k.a. “Star Wars Day”), he appeared in a College Humor video as “Rick Forcefield” (little-known trivia fact: Rick is a sci-fi fanboy who owns an extensive collection of Star Wars action figures… “One of us! One of us!”). His first novel, Magnificent Vibration, was released Tuesday and has been garnering some good reviews (my copy is already waiting on the “to read” stack). And just this morning, he was honored with his very own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His fellow ’80s pop artist Richard Marx probably said it best during the ceremony today: “He’s arguably writing the best songs he’s even written in his life right now, plus now he’s an accomplished author, he’s still acting up a storm all over TV, and he’s still that good-looking… which, if I didn’t like him, would be really freakin’ annoying.”

In light of all that, I think it’s all entirely fitting to end the work week with a selection from the man of the hour. His signature song “Jessie’s Girl” is of course the obvious choice for a Friday Evening Video… which is exactly why I’ve chosen to go with something else. Because I’m contrary that way.

“Love Somebody” was a top-five hit from the soundtrack of Rick’s 1984 feature-film debut Hard to Hold, a mediocre flick that’s mostly remembered these days by middle-aged women who were teeny-bopper fans at the time, and who fondly recall those unfamiliar tingling sensations they experienced following a brief glimpse of Rick’s bare butt midway through the movie. (Rick mentions this moment in every single concert performance just before launching into this song.) The video is typical peak-period MTV: a quasi-narrative that mixes footage from the movie with live concert clips and an out-of-left-field fantasy sequence that includes a hot chick with big hair, a wind machine, fog, and breaking glass. It doesn’t make a lick of sense… but I love it. And I love this song, which I’d probably rank second only to “Jessie’s Girl” in my personal all-time Rick canon, thanks to its catchy melody and chorus, and that really mean-sounding guitar-thing at the bridge…

And with that, I bid you all a good Friday…

Earlier this week, I attended a work-related recreational function where I made the mistake of enjoying a couple pints of Wasatch Evolution Ale on an empty stomach. Don’t worry, I didn’t make a fool of myself or anything. All my clothing stayed firmly fastened and in the proper locations, and no inappropriate advances were made. I didn’t even attempt to dance. But my tongue was considerably loosened by the beer — hey, I never claimed to be a world-class drinker! — and when a favorite old song popped up in the playlist, I couldn’t resist sharing the memory I tend to associate with it. Fortunately, my coworkers seemed more amused than horrified… so this week for Friday Evening Videos, I figured what the hell, I’ll share it with all of you too…

My junior year of high school, I was lucky enough to land a cushy job as a media aide during the class period just before lunch. What that means is, I got to hang out for an hour — unsupervised, no less! — in an isolated room just off the school library where we kept the VCRs, projectors, and assorted stage equipment. Once in a blue moon, I would have to check out some of this gear to a faculty member, or do a bit of cleaning and light maintenance when something was checked back in, but mostly I did homework from my other classes, read trashy paperbacks, and generally killed time before lunch while listening to the totally kick-ass stereo system that was set up in the back corner. (It had a graphic equalizer, the absolute pinnacle of audio technology at that time! At least I thought so… I just liked monkeying with all the sliders.)

The word soon got out that I was down there, and friends began dropping by for visits on one pretense or another. There was one friend in particular who was about to become… very memorable. She was an older woman, a senior to my junior, but — I have to be honest — I’d never given her much thought. Oh, I liked her well enough. We were definitely friends, and I enjoyed talking with her on the bus and such. But as far as romantic interest? Nada. I had my eyes too firmly fixed on the girls who were emulating Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”-era look, and this girl was the diametric opposite to that. She was a good church-going Mormon who carried her scriptures in her backpack and dressed very modestly and gave no indication that there were any ulterior motives whatsoever behind her visits to that equipment room. Until one afternoon when this song was playing on that way-cool, fully equalized stereo with the quadrophonic sound:

The Bangles’ “Manic Monday” debuted the week of January 25, 1986, and it stayed on the charts for months, eventually peaking at the number-two position in April. It was ubiquitous and inescapable, and it made The Bangles’ career. I loved it because it was cute and catchy and Susannah Hoffs’ breathy, little-girlish voice made me weak in the knees, and because it had that naughty line in the bridge about “making some noise.” And I loved it even more after it became the soundtrack for my very first lessons in French kissing.

Following that first afternoon, I had a brief and intense affair with this friend of mine, this good Mormon older woman who taught me such a valuable life skill, consisting mostly of her coming to the equipment room during my aide period and making out like crazy with me (often to the tune of “Manic Monday,” as it seemed to play sometime during that hour every day), then the two of us pretending nothing had changed during our bus ride at the end of the day. It lasted maybe a month, if that long. As I recall, we just sort of… stopped… as quickly and unexpectedly as we’d begun. And at the end of the year, she wrote in my yearbook, “Sorry you didn’t get everything you wanted.” (That was a fun one to explain to my mom, who of course loved reading everything her baby’s friends wrote in his yearbook.)

That makes it sound like this girl was a tease, or like I’d pressured her to go farther than first base. I don’t recall either of those scenarios being the case. In my mind, I was pretty satisfied with our arrangement. But who knows… I am seeing it through a hazy filter of 30-year-old nostalgia, after all. Maybe I was more of a boor than I remember. I hope not. I like to think I was just a little adventure for this conservative girl as her graduation and grown-up life loomed before her.

I have no idea whatever happened to her. I’ve looked for her on Facebook, and to the best of my Google abilities, and I haven’t found so much as an outdated phone number. Wherever she is, I hope her life turned out well… and that she gets as much of a warm glow from the opening riff of “Manic Monday” as I do…

Happy weekend, everyone…

Don Henley has long struck me as rather a horrible person, dour and self-important and (it would seem) a real pain in the butt to work with. A few years ago, I read a book about The Eagles, the band that delivered him to stardom, and he did not come off well at all in that volume. (Although, to be fair, his bandmate Glenn Frey didn’t either; he and Henley are polar opposites in many ways, but they apparently both orbit a common center of asshole-ishness.)

And yet in spite of his perceived shortcomings as a human being, I enjoy quite a lot of his work, both with The Eagles and his solo efforts. He’s got a knack for creating memorable phrases as well as an insightful eye for the ways that life beats you down. Yes, his music is often pretty melancholy, if not downright sad… but it also frequently feels just plain true.

This week’s Friday Evening Video is a song from his third solo album, The End of the Innocence, which came out in 1989… yes, the same landmark year when I got rained out of a Steve Miller concert and discovered Bonnie Raitt. What can I say? It was a memorable twelve months… for a lot of reasons.

“The Heart of the Matter” was the third single from The End of the Innocence. It came out in early 1990 and made it to number 21 on the Billboard chart, which means I heard it a lot during that winter and spring. And it broke my heart a little bit more every time I did, too. It’s possibly the best track on the album… and it’s the one I always used to skip, because I just couldn’t take hearing it. It cut a little too close to the bone, you see, and after several middle-of-the-night spins of that album when I ended up sitting in the dark with a metaphorical knife sticking out of my chest, I decided it was better for me to simply avoid that one. Quite honestly, I didn’t think about this tune for years.

Just lately, though, it’s been on my mind again. I’ve realized it’s finally time to let go of some things I’ve been carrying around for far too long. I finally can let go of them, and I think it’s possible I already have without even realizing it. Now when I hear “The Heart of the Matter,” it still resonates for me… but the frequency has changed. The verses that I used to not want to hear are now the ones that make the most sense to me.  Make of that what you will; it’s probably doesn’t mean anything to anyone but myself.

So let’s play the damn song, shall we? As far as I can determine, there isn’t a music video for it per se, but I did find this lovely performance of it from Farm Aid IV, a benefit concert held on April 7, 1990… probably just about the time I was deciding I never wanted to hear this song again. Well, tonight I not only want to hear it, I think maybe I kind of need to…

Hope you all enjoy it, and have a good weekend.

in the summer of 1989, which seems a lot nearer in my mind than it really ought to, I took my then-girlfriend to see the Steve Miller Band at a place called ParkWest. She didn’t care much for the classic-rock stuff I’ve always loved, but Steve Miller was a particular favorite of mine at the time — like a lot of dorky young guys with delusions of coolness, I’d adopted “The Joker” as my personal theme song — and she indulged me.

ParkWest was located in the mountains above Salt Lake, only a couple miles outside Park City. Its main function was as a ski resort, but for years it hosted outdoor concerts during the summer months. It was a beautiful setting for live music, if a little on the rustic side. As I recall, there was no permanent seating, only grass that rose up a steep hillside with the stage positioned at the bottom. All shows were general admission, and if you wanted to be at all close to the stage, you had to show up early in the day and wait until the gates opened. Most people brought picnic lunches and a party attitude to pass the time. The worst aspect of the place was the parking — there really wasn’t much, at least nothing formal, just empty fields accessible by a two-lane road that led back to the main highway. If you did arrive early for the show, you’d find yourself waiting around again after the show for the traffic jam down below to clear out, a process that sometimes took hours. And of course, being outdoors, the venue was susceptible to the weather… something my girl and I learned in a pretty spectacular fashion the night of the Steve Miller show.

Miller had only been on a stage a short time — it seems like he’d only played three or four songs — when heavy, slate-colored clouds started boiling up over the mountainside behind us. When the wind started gusting high enough to set the hanging light rigs swaying, Steve announced that he and the band were going to go backstage for a few minutes and wait for things to blow over. Except they didn’t blow over. A few minutes later, a roadie rushed up to the microphone and said something along the lines of, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re very sorry but the Weather Service has just announced a major lightning storm is about to hit. The show is cancelled. Be safe going home.” And just to emphasize the point, a tremendous crack of thunder split the air as he finished speaking.

My girl and I hadn’t even made it out of the fenced-in seating area when the first drops of rain started to pelt down. And then it was like someone opened a sluice gate. We were soaked to the skin by the time we reached my car, a VW Rabbit with a sunroof that served as my commuter special. Between the blinding rain and the parking lots rapidly transforming into muddy bogs, the traffic jam was worse than usual, and it soon became obvious we weren’t going anywhere for some time. So we passed the time as passionate teenagers have from time immemorial, steaming up the windows to the crackling music of a distant radio station and the drumming of rain on the car’s roof, shivering from both the cold and our own raging hormones, the outside world occasionally glaring white as lightning stitched across the sky…

The Steve Miller portion of the evening may have been something of a bust, but I certainly got a fond memory out of the evening. And I also discovered a new musical artist that I would soon become obsessed with. The opening act that night was a woman named Bonnie Raitt.

I was dimly aware of Bonnie before that night — I’d heard the name at least — but I really didn’t know much about her, and neither, I’d dare say, did many other people. She’d been around a long time at that point, chasing after the brass ring but never quite catching it, never quite breaking through to mainstream popularity. What I saw in her hour-long set prior to Miller’s, though, told me I wanted to know more. Her music seemed curiously timeless to me, as if it had just always been there waiting for me, and I liked how it resisted categorization. Rock, certainly, but heavily infused with blues and country… it was a sort of music I found myself gravitating more and more toward in my college years, music that was stripped down, authentic and human. It was music that suggested smoky juke-joints and long-neck beers, a mileau that was at once familiar and comfortable even though I’d never really experienced anything like that, like the sprung and duct-taped seat-back of a booth in a roadside diner. I found Bonnie Raitt’s music and the atmosphere it conjured deeply seductive… and Bonnie herself was incredibly sexy, a mature woman who knew her way around the world, leaning way back and smiling a playful smile as the bottle on her fingers slid across the strings of her guitar… all of which is nicely captured in tonight’s video selection. Which, for the record, I had not seen yet when Bonnie’s music filled my head with all those images:

“Thing Called Love” was first written and recorded by John Hiatt two years earlier, in 1987. Bonnie’s version appeared on her tenth album, Nick of Time — the album that would finally bring her the attention and acclaim she’d worked so long to find, as well as three Grammy Awards. A couple days ago, I saw on the Ultimate Classic Rock blog that Nick of Time was released this month 25 years ago. Twenty-five years. Incredible. As I said, ’89 doesn’t seem so far away to me.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that is the actor Dennis Quaid giving Bonnie the eye in the video. If I remember my trivia, they were an item for a while.

As for that girl I took to the concert, our relationship was over by the time Bonnie accepted her Grammys in April of 1990. ParkWest underwent a number of ownership and name changes — it was called Wolf Mountain for a time, and is currently known (rather unimaginatively, in my opinion) as The Canyons. I can’t remember when they stopped hosting concerts up there, but it’s been a very long time… decades, I believe. I can’t recall the last show I saw up there… but man, I still remember the Bonnie Raitt/Steve Miller show, the night of that huge rainstorm.

Okay, this one is going to take a bit of explaining, so bear with me, please…

The first time I traveled anywhere as an adult, I spent a week in Reno, Nevada, with my dad. Long story, which really isn’t germane to this entry, but I will just say that that trip seemed like a great adventure to me, coming at a time when I really needed one. I was 21 and hurting from a breakup with a girl, eager to figure out exactly who and what I was, bored with my day-to-day life, and chafing against the moralizing, uptight atmosphere of my home state. (The girl who dumped me was a Mormon, you see, and it had been an issue in our split.) Getting away from all that stuff and into a fresh environment that glorified, shall we say, adult pursuits was an invigorating experience. Whether or not it really helped me figure anything out is questionable. But if nothing else, I discovered one of my favorite songs that week.

It seemed to be playing everywhere I went in Reno: in the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel, where we stayed; in the coffee shop at the Club Cal Neva Casino, where I ate a lot of $1.99 ham-and-eggs; in the ice cream shop where I met the colorful old man who claimed to have been with Claire Chennault and the Flying Tigers in China; and even in the bar of the infamous Mustang Ranch, where I went one night and drank a Tom Collins, just so I could say I’d been there. (I chickened out when it came to doing anything more.) I loved this song, a slightly melancholy but ultimately affirmational, piano-based tune that somehow perfectly suited my general mood and frame of mind at the period of my life. But I had no idea what it was called, or who performed it. (This was long before the World Wide Web came along and made it so simple to learn these things.) I’d never heard it before my Reno trip, and I didn’t hear it again for about six months after. But finally, one glorious day, it popped up on a radio station back home in Salt Lake City, and a helpful DJ finally gave me a title and artist: “Walking in Memphis,” by Marc Cohn. In short order, I tracked down and purchased the album it came from, and to my delight found that there wasn’t a bad song on the entire disc. It’s still one of my favorite listens two decades later. (Two decades?! Oy. I think I need to go lie down for a moment.)

Fast forward to just a couple years ago. I’ve just seen Marc Cohn live at a smallish outdoor venue here in Utah, but unlike most musicians who disappear backstage after the last encore and are already halfway to their next gig before the ringing has left the audience’s ears, Marc is setting up at a card table outside the amphitheater, making himself available to fans for autographs, pictures, or just to say hello in person. I knew there was a chance he might do this — friends who’d seen him before had told me to be ready for it — but I was still surprised. I’ve never seen anybody else do this, not even performers who are known for having good relations with their fans. As I said, I’d known about this possibility in advance and had come prepared. I asked him to sign my old, well-played CD of his self-titled debut album, and I quickly related a condensed version of the way I’d discovered “Walking in Memphis,” his best-known song and biggest hit. And he was very nice and very gracious, even though he’s surely heard variants of that story a thousand times before. I came home that night with the impression that Marc Cohn, in addition to being a great live performer, is also an all-round cool human being.

Now jump to this morning. My day started badly for reasons that don’t bear repeating. I was in a just-plain bitchy mood as I arrived at work and signed into my computer. As usual, I wasted a couple of minutes catching up on Facebook while I sipped my first cup of coffee and waited to find out what was on my agenda for the day. And there I saw a post by Marc Cohn, who I’ve been following for a while, and I was inspired to dash off a quick comment. No big deal. I do that all the time with several celebrities I follow on Facebook and/or Twitter. I never expect any sort of response, nor have I ever gotten one. So imagine my shock when I’m notified a few minutes later that someone has answered my comment… and it’s Marc Cohn himself!

Here’s a screen grab:

Now isn’t that something? It’s not like I think Marc Cohn and I are best pals now or anything like that, but I am… pleased… that I apparently struck some kind of chord in him with one of my fondest memories.

You know, Facebook takes a lot of heat for various reasons — because it’s superficial and it’s a huge timesink, and because of privacy concerns — and these criticisms all have some genuine merit. But the great thing about Facebook is that enables a truly remarkable level of connection and interaction between people who otherwise might not have any contact at all. I admit, that’s sometimes a bad thing. But sometimes it’s a really magical and satisfying thing, too. Having the man who wrote and recorded a song that means so much to me say something like that… well, it didn’t exactly fix my crappy day. But it certainly helped.

I intend to do some more blogging over the long holiday weekend, but in the meantime, I’m going leave with you all with this, my favorite song from the summer of 1991, a tune about Memphis that will forever remind me of Reno, and the best-known work by a genuinely cool human being:

If I don’t make it back here, Happy Memorial Day, everyone! Enjoy some, ahem, adult pursuits, won’t you?

So, this song popped into my head a couple days ago, as these things do from time to time, and it hasn’t left yet. After having a fairly amusing conversation about it with my friend Anastasia, I thought maybe I’d share it with all you fine people, too. You can thank me later.

The song is called “Willin’,” and I was frankly amazed that Anastasia — or anyone else in my circle of friends — actually knew it, as I’ve always thought of it as somewhat obscure. It was originally recorded by the band Little Feat, and I like their version fine, but it is Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 cover that’s been on a continuous loop in my brain this week. Probably because her version was my first exposure to it. I’ll talk about that in a moment, but first… the song:

I first encountered “Willin'” in a fairly unlikely context: you can hear about 10 seconds of it in one scene of James Cameron’s film The Abyss. If you don’t know that one, much of the story takes place inside an experimental underwater oil-drilling platform on the bottom of the ocean. In the scene in question, the rig is being towed to a new location, and as the camera zooms in on the cockpit of the “tug sub,” the overalls-wearing pilot is singing along to this tune — coming from a boombox duct-taped above her seat — at the top of her lungs. Specifically, the line about driving every kind of rig that’s ever been made. It’s a cute gag — what’s a sub, after all, but another kind of rig? — that serves to illustrate the earthy, blue-collar, average-jane-and-joe aspect of the movie’s characters. They’re roughnecks and truck drivers, despite their science-fictiony surroundings.

Well, that brief snippet of incidental music was enough to pique my curiosity. It took me a long time to identify the song and track it down, and when I heard it all the way through for the first time, I loved it. But I also thought it was kind of weird. After all, here was a woman signing longingly about another woman, that beautiful girl back in Dallas… The song made a lot more sense when I learned it had been written for a man. Of course, this was in the early ’90s, before I developed a taste for Melissa Etheridge and Joan Jett, and got used to the idea of women singing love songs about women.

MTV-style music videos were still several years in the future when Linda Ronstadt recorded “Willin’,” so all the clips I found of it were concert recordings. But that’s fine, considering her skill with live performance. This particular one was made at the New Victoria Theatre in London, in November 1976, when Ronstadt was in her heyday as a rock-and-roll artist. She was also (I think) incredibly sexy at the time. The look on her face when she first says “willin'” about 20 seconds in… well, it does happy things for me.

I remember I used to have a poster of her that I won at a county fair midway game. This would’ve been in the mid ’80s, by which time Linda was moving past her rocker persona and starting to explore traditional songbook pop, so I’ve long suspected the carnie was trying to move some very old stock. Regardless, I had no idea then of who she was… but I hung the poster anyway because I liked her looks. I recall she was wearing a lot of bangles and a button-down shirt in the picture, and generally looked very soft and feminine in the way that 1970s “rocker chicks” had, and which went away in the more harshly-styled ’80s. (I’ll be honest, even though I tend to rhapsodize a great deal about the ’80s — the decade in which I was a teenager — I generally think women’s looks were sexier in the the ’70s.)

I’m just rambling at this point, so I’ll leave you with the song and bid you all a good weekend. I’m going to head home now. And when I get there, I think maybe I’ll fire up my old turntable and listen to some vintage Linda Ronstadt LPs…