Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Oh, what the hell... since I brought it up earlier, here's the video for Wilson Phillips' number-one smash hit, "Hold On":

Pretty silly stuff, I know... so sweet and earnest and self-helpy. So "just between us, girlfriend." So very 1990. (This will probably sound weird, but the music of the '90s sounds far more dated to my ear than the music of the Awesome '80s, which has achieved a sort of timeless quality, at least in my opinion). But like I said in the previous entry, it's harmless stuff, and this song in particular has a catchy melody. I always liked it back in the day.

A couple observations:

• My god, these three girls all look so young. I don't remember them seeming all that young back in 1990. If you scrubbed off the make-up and put them in purple plastic aprons, they could've been working behind the candy counter at the theater...

• I wonder if all the mountaintop helicopter footage was inspired at all by Sammy Hagar's "Give to Live" video, which has a similar sequence. Or maybe in the late '80s/early '90s, it just seemed like a mountaintop was the best place to discuss this heavy "change your attitude, change your life" stuff.

• I remember how Carnie Wilson, the heavier of the two redheads, the one with the short, straight hair, took a lot of crap when Wilson Phillips was still extant for being "the fat one." She doesn't look all that big to me here; in fact, I think she's quite attractive. Weird how your perspective on such things changes over time. (Of course, it probably helps that she really did become fat in later years, and she did it all in the public eye, so I'm most likely comparing her 1990 self against what she later became.)

• Chynna Phillips, the blond who's doing the lead in this video, looks so much like her mother that it's kinda spooky.

• And finally, for the record, my favorite of the group was always Wendy Wilson, the one with the curly red hair. She's the prettiest in my eye, and that combination of a sundress with boots is still tres sexy...

And on that note, let's get this holiday weekend started, shall we?

Posted by at 5:26 PM | Permalink

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...

Continue reading "Friday Evening Videos: Special "Summer" Edition" »

Posted by at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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...

Posted by at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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...

Posted by at 1:17 AM | Permalink

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...

Posted by at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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...

Posted by at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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...

Posted by at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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...

Posted by at 9:09 AM | Permalink

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...

Posted by at 9:41 AM | Permalink

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!

Posted by at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

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.

Posted by at 8:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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!

Posted by at 6:06 PM | Permalink

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 "Friday Evening Videos: "Radio Ga Ga" »

Posted by at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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?

Posted by at 4:40 PM | Permalink

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...

Posted by at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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.

Posted by at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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...

Posted by at 5:15 PM | Permalink

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...

Posted by at 5:33 PM | Permalink

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
Uploaded by SirDroopy. - See the latest featured music videos.

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...

Posted by at 4:55 PM | Permalink

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...

Posted by at 5:28 PM | Permalink