I wrote a little bit out Couch by Couchwest on Wednesday. I have not had the time to filter through all of the music on there. But one artist stood out when I heard her.
Kate Vargas sent in a new song this year called "Call Back the Dogs". It is not on her record Down To My Soul from 2014, which of course I had to check out after hearing "Call Back the Dogs". What a fantastic and unique voice.
Each song on Down To My Soul takes you on a musical journey with turns down unexpected paths. You definitely won't be bored.
This one should really be titled Decent Song, Career Killing Video.
The video will speak for itself, but I'll offer a little history here.
Billy Squier was well on his way to becoming a hard rock/pop metal superstar in the early 80's. After two iconic albums, Don't Say No and Emotions In Motion Squier had hits that have become classic rock staples like "The Stroke", "Lonely is the Night", "Everybody Wants You" and "My Kind of Lover". His next album Signs of Life came out in 1984 and Squier was ready to take the rock world by storm. And then the video happened.
In Squier's own words, "I was playing to half-houses. I went from 15,000 and 20,000 people a night to 10,000 people. Everything I’d worked for my whole life was crumbling, and I couldn’t stop it. How can a four-minute video do that?" How can a four-minute video do that? Oh it's bad. It's really, really bad. But career-killing bad? I'll let you be the judge.
This, recorded in 2009, shows that Squier still rocks. And this is also more along the lines of the video Capitol Records should have released in 1984.
Just to show those moves in the horrible video for for "Rock Me Tonite" are not out of character, watch this live recording from 1983 for "Everybody Wants You". Much cooler with a guitar in hand.
Journey was huge in the 80's. And it wasn't because of their videos. I think we all tolerated the videos just to hear the songs.
Set in a shipping yard (for no apparent reason), "Separate Ways" features really bad air guitar, air drumming and air keyboarding (is that even a thing?). There's the obligatory good looking female. Then at the end, it appears all to have been a dream.
If this video were ironic, it might make sense. But given the timeline and the advent of MTV, I think it's just bad. Judge for yourself.
For this edition of "Good Song, Bad Video", we take on the German metal machine known as Scorpions (and no, it's not the THE Scorpions, just Scorpions, for those scoring at home).
"Rock You Like A Hurricane" was one of their bigger hits and came out at just the right time to have a video full of cliche and cheese and nonsense.
It starts out cliche enough with cages and attractive women, only with a twist, this time the band is in the cage. And there are leopards (or some spotted jungle cats).
Then it just gets a bit weird. There are what appear to be sleep pods from which lead sing Klaus Meine is the only one who truly emerges. But there are five of them, so it's safe to assume that the other four house the rest of the band. Klaus is met by some masked woman and proceeds, uh, somewhere, where there are strange robed beings fiddling with something. They quickly exit as Klaus stumbles through.
You thought this was going somewhere? Not really. The next couple of minutes are Scorpions playing in the cage interspersed with live concert clips.
Then right after the guitar solo, we get another 80's hard rock video cliche: the dark narrow alley/cave/hallway/dungeon type scene. This one is tad more imaginative in that it has Aliens-like qualities.
The poorly constructed cage that encloses the band is falling apart at the seams by the end of the song, but the only one who breaks into the inner sanctum is one of the hot chicks who bends the bars even though any fat man could walk through at any time.
Then the band makes it back to the pods. And at least one of the hot chicks or maybe five. But there are still only five pods. It makes no sense and perfect sense all at the same time.
Time for another edition of Good Song, Bad Video. And this time I may have found the best/worst.
From Y&T's 1984 album In Rock We Trust comes the great song "Keep on Runnin'" accompanied by an atrocious video.
Y&T has never gotten the credit they deserve for all the fantastic music they have put out over the years. They, unfortunately, never caught on big during the 80's hard rock heyday. Maybe they weren't pretty enough. Maybe they were a little too stripped down. Maybe they were a little too hard. Or not hard enough. Maybe they weren't polished enough. I don't know, but they rocked.
The video for this song, however, should live in infamy forever. You can't blame the band. Their part in this whole production was faux playing the song on a stage. It's the whole storyline, horrid special effects and bad acting surrounding them that make this cringeworthy.
The story is familiar. The nerd asks the popular girl to go to show. She shoots him down and goes off with the popular stud jock. Nerd goes home and pops a Y&T cassette into his walkman (sorry kids, look those up, you know how to use the google machine). The guitars crank and something magical starts to happen.
This is where it starts to go off the rails. The kid starts to turn into the metallic figure on the In Rock We Trust album cover.
That in and of itself might not be too bad. But the result ends up looking like a cross between Iron Man and the Michelin Man.
As would be expected, the popular, hot chick and the stud run into trouble on wherever they are going. Stud boy ends up running off and leaving the hot chick at the mercy of this very unintimidating group of three....hooligans? gang members? I don't know. The MetalMichelin Man, while flying through the air, finds this scene and rescues the hot chick.
Then there's a bit of a twist, and I give someone credit for this because if you know Y&T, they never get the girl in their songs. The hot chick freaks out and leaves MetalMichelin Man confused and shedding a tear (oil drop?).
Whatever passes for special effects are disastrous throughout. But remember guys, this was before CGI, at least nothing beyond infancy. And this was the early days of MTV when bands/labels really didn't know what they were doing. But this is disastrously delicious. Judge for yourself.
I just can't leave it there. Y&T is one of my favorite bands of all time. Dave Meniketti is one of the best lead singer/lead guitar combo guys alive. And they are still doing it live. While original bassist/songwriting partner Phil Kennemore passed away in 2011 from lung cancer Dave and the band continue to melt faces. Here's a shoddy video but with good sound from a show in 2013.
Bon Jovi is one of my favorite bands. "Runaway", off the self-titled debut album, is the first song of theirs I ever heard. And still one of my favorites.
But, oh my, what a bad video.
From this video, we can glean that hair metal, along with lavender leather pants, emerged from some post-apocalyptic nuclear accident from the '50's. At least that's what I'm getting.
For all the female fans, Jon shakes his ass. And has great hair. Enjoy.
Def Leppard's Pyromania still stands as one of the best hard rock albums ever made. I don't know if there was really a bad song on the entire record. And Def Leppard came along at just the right time to take advantage of MTV becoming, for all intents and purposes, the world's biggest radio station.
Back in the days when Rick Allen was not the one-armed wonder and Phil Collen still owned shirts, Def Leppard graced us with one of the cheesiest videos ever with "Foolin'".
While this is mostly a performance video set on a cheap soundstage, this video gets high cheese marks for the inane, disjointed imagery interspersed throughout.
It starts off, for no apparent reason, with some strange harp player engulfed in flames. This harp player returns a couple of times throughout the video, again for no apparent reason.
When we move on to the pre-chorus, Joe Elliott is strapped to what appears to be some triangular shaped torture device. It's a recurring theme in the video. But the torture aspect is lost on me. Unless, of course, we count the torture of having to endure this.
The second verse introduces us to some sorceress witch-like character who apparently through her crystal ball is the one behind Elliot on the triangular torture device. Or maybe she is the one who sets Joe free. We never see her again.
Then there's just cheesy explosions following Joe Elliot through a poorly constructed narrow hallway of sorts.
Oh, then we have the band rising out of some pit with angel of death and skull imagery. That is just SO Def Leppard.
It's a great song from a great band and I probably spent way more time deconstructing this video than what was put into crafting it. Judge for yourself.
All in all, good fun. Back in the day it made for good video viewing. Now it makes for good fodder.
I'm old enough to remember the time when MTV was actually Music Television and played videos. And play videos, they did. Good videos. Bad videos. Any videos.
So let's revisit some of that. There is a plethora of content out there.
We'll start with a band that can take it. Despite this ill-conceived, misogynistic video, Motley Crue has withstood the test of time.
I don't fault the Crue, or anyone else in this series, for these atrocities. It was a part of the times.
From Shout at the Devil, here is "Looks That Kill".
I wrote a little bit out Couch by Couchwest on Wednesday. I have not had the time to filter through all of the music on there. But one artist stood out when I heard her.
