Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

Music Video of the Day: It’s Gettin’ Late by The Beach Boys (1985, directed by Dominic Orlando)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Does this video have a good message or not?

It starts with a sexy beach babe making out with a skinny guy who is wearing glasses so that’s good.

But then the girl leaves with a bunch of stereotypical jocks and her boyfriend isn’t allowed to come because he has bad eyesight.  That’s bad.

Then the spirit of Big Kahuna shows up and the video takes a Cinderella turn when the Big Kahuna uses his kahuna powers to turn the nerd into a jock.  Is that good or not?  It depends on whether or not our hero learns a lesson about being himself at the end of the video.

Our hero then drops in on the beach party. where he discovers his girl sitting next to the main jock.  So, he reacts by flirting with all the other girls at the party.  That’s doubly bad.

Then the Big Kahuna shows up and turns the our hero back into his nerdy self.  All of the other girls run away but not his girlfriend because, it turns out, she loves him just the way he is.  That’s so good that it makes up for all the bad stuff that happened before.

But then the Big Kahuna punishes the shallow jocks by turning them into nerds, which would seem to indicate that, in this video’s moral universe, being nerdy is some sort of karmic retribution.  That’s bad.  But then everyone’s much happier after they’ve all turned nerdy so maybe that’s actually a good thing.

Having sent several mixes messages, the Big Kahuna throws away his magic shell and heads back to the ocean.  At least true love wins in the end.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: One Night In Bangkok by Murray Head (1985, directed by David G. Hilier)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

One Night in Bangkok was written, by Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, and Tim Rice for a musical called Chess.  Chess, which was meant to be a satire of the Cold War, tells the story of two chess champions, one an American and one a Russian.  One Night in Bangkok opens the second act as the American, who has now retired from playing professionally, is hired to provide commentary for a chess championship that is being held in Bangkok.  As is evident from the lyrics, he is not impressed by the city.  In fact, the American was so unimpressed by the city that the song was banned in Thailand and officially condemned by the Thai government.

The song was performed by actor Murray Head, who played the American in the Broadway production.  The single proved to be an unexpected hit, reaching number three in Canada and the U.S. and number twelve in the UK.  It’s gone on to have a long life outside of Broadway, being successfully covered by several different groups.

As of this writing, it’s still officially banned in Thailand.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: I Quit by Blotto (1983, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Just in time for Friday, today’s music video is all abut quitting your job.  This is the video that asks, “If Nixon could do it, why not you?”

I previously wrote about Blotto last year, when I shared their music video for I Wanna Be A Lifeguard.  Sadly, despite the success of Lifeguard, Blotto never really broke into the mainstream.  They did, however, have a strong cult following in the Northeast, especially among college students who appreciated their humorous lyrics and DIY style.  While this video never made it into the regular MTV rotation, it did show up on Canadian television.

One final note: at the time this video was released, Blotto was being managed by none other than actor Burt Ward, who was best known for playing Robin on the 60s Batman television show.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Mother 93 by Danzig (1993, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“Al Gore wanted to tell people what they could listen to and what they couldn’t…it was basically coming down to the idea that he wouldn’t let anybody record any music that he didn’t think you should be doing. There was going to be an organization that would tell you what you could and couldn’t record. And certainly if you couldn’t record it, you couldn’t put it out. It was really fascist.”

— Glenn Danzig, on the inspiration for Mother

There’s been a lot of debate about what Glenn Danzig is singing about in Mother.  Some people think that the song is supposed to be pro-Satanist, even though Danzig himself has said that he’s not a Satanist and is merely interested in the occult.  Others think that the song is sung from the point of view of a teenager who is warning his parents that he has decided to reject their values and embrace his evil side.

More likely, the song is exactly what Danzig has often said it is.  It was a song written to protest the 80s push by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center to have the government step in and regulate music.  The “mother” that Danzig is singing to was probably Tipper herself.

The above video was the second one for Mother, hence why it’s called Mother ’93.  It features live footage of the band performing at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in California.  At around the same time this video was in rotation on MTV, Glenn Danzig was invited to audition for the role of Wolverine in one of the early attempts to make an X-Men film.  Danzig, who had the right look for the role, had to turn down the opportunity due to scheduling conflicts.

This video also inspired a classic line from Beavis and Butt-Head: “That little dance isn’t very cool.”

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: Ride Like The Wind by Christopher Cross (1980, directed by Bruce Gowers)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Ride Like The Wind tells the story of an outlaw who has been convicted of multiple murders and condemned to hang.  He is now trying to outrun the posse and reach Mexico where, apparently, the posse would have no jurisdiction.  The plot sounds like something from the Doobie Brothers so it’s appropriate that Michael McDonald provides the backing vocals.

Christopher Cross wrote this song while on acid and traveling between Houston and Austin and it went on to become the lead single off of his debut album and one of his biggest hits.  Cross would later go on to win an Oscar for writing the theme song for Arthur but, by his own admission, neither Cross nor his music were a good fit for the network that came to dominate pop culture in the 80s, MTV.

Speaking of MTV, the video for Ride Like The Wind clearly comes from a time when music videos were viewed as being a novelty.  If the video had been made a few years later, it probably would have dramatized the song’s story.  Instead, like many early music videos, it’s just a performance clip.

As for Cross, he’s still recording and performing and Ride Like The Wind continues to be a soft rock staple.  It was most recently covered by Belgian DJ Laurent Wery.

Enjoy!

Film Review: An Innocent Man (1989, directed by Peter Yates)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Jimmie Rainwood (Tom Selleck) is an aeronautics engineer who, with the exception of once getting arrested for marijuana possession in college, has lived a clean and productive life.  Mike Parnell (David Rasche) is a corrupt narcotics detective with a raging coke habit.  When Parnell and his partner, Scalise (Richard Young), get a tip about a house where drugs are hidden, Parnell is so coked up that he gets the address wrong.  They end up breaking into Jimmie’s house and, when Jimmie steps out of the bathroom holding a hair dryer, Saclise shoots him.

Jimmie survives getting shot but that’s the least of his problems.  In order to cover up their mistake, Parnell and Scalise frame Jimmie.  They replace the hair dryer with a gun.  They plant drugs in Jimmie’s house.  Because of his previous marijuana conviction, no one believes Jimmie when he says he was set up.  Convicted of a crime that he didn’t commit, Jimmie is sentenced to six years in prison.  While his wife (Laila Robins) does everything that she can to get him released, Jimmie is preyed upon by the other prisoners.  His only friend is Virgil (F. Murray Abraham), a veteran prisoner who shows Jimmie that he’s going to have to do some terrible things to survive being in prison.

As he showed when he directed Bullitt, the late Peter Yates was a director who could make even the most conventional genre material feel fresh and that is what he did with An Innocent Man.  Made at a time when American leaders bragged about their devotion to the war on drugs, An Innocent Man is critical of both the police and a legal system that cares more about punishment than rehabilitation.  Even if the plot is predictable, the film is gritty enough to make an impression.  Jimmie is so victimized and Parnell and Scalise are so smug that, by the time Jimmie finally has a chance to orchestrate his revenge, you can’t wait to see the cops get what’s coming to them.

Part of the appeal of An Innocent Man is that it features actors who you normally would not expect to appear in a film like this.  Tom Selleck, best-known for playing upright authority figures, plays a frightened man who is forced to sacrifice his humanity to survive.  When the movie started, I was skeptical that Selleck could pull off the role but, by the end of the film, he had the thousand-yard stare of a man who had been to Hell and back.  Meanwhile, David Rasche, best known for his work in sitcoms, is more than convincing as the most corrupt narc around.  Best of all is F. Murray Abraham, playing the seasoned convict who knows how to get things done in prison.  When he tells Jimmie that he has to “take of care of this,” even if it means committing a real crime, you believe him.  By the end of An Innocent Man, nobody’s innocent anymore.

Music Video of the Day: Robert De Niro’s Waiting… by Bananarama (1984, directed by Duncan Gibbins)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Robert De Niro might not seem as if he would be the most likely of subjects for a teenage love song but this song is hardly a traditional love song.  The song was originally conceived as being sung from the point of view of a girl who deals with the trauma of being raped by escaping into a pretend world where Robert De Niro is her boyfriend.  By the time the song was actually recorded, the rape angle had been dropped but this it’s still darker than your normal teen crush song.

Originally, the subject of the song was going to be Al Pacino, which might have made more sense.  (Remember that while Robert De Niro was shooting pimps in Taxi Driver, posters of Al Pacino as Serpico were decorating dorm rooms.)  However, it was decided that, musically, Robert De Niro sounded better than Al Pacino.

This video features the members of Bananarama being followed by two “gangsters” who could have stepped out of a De Niro film.  It was directed by Duncan Gibbins, a talented director who tragically died in 1993.  I wrote more about Gibbins and his career when I reviewed his video for Smuggler’s Blues.

Enjoy!

Music Video of The Day: I Want A New Drug by Huey Lewis and the News (1984, directed by David Rathod)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Despite what Patrick Bateman might try to tell you, Huey Lewis and the News has never been a band that most people would associate with drugs.  Instead, Huey Lewis and the News wrote and performed the type of songs that you might expect to hear in a sports bar (albeit a sports bar with an 80s theme).  If you need proof, just take a look at the cover of their third album, 1983’s Sports:

That cover sums up who Huey Lewis And The News were as a band.  While only the members of the band can say for sure what they did behind closed doors, most people would look at this cover and say that these weren’t the guys you’d find smoking weed and debating philosophy or doing coke and going crazy on Wall Street.  These were the guys who were waiting for you to come down to the local bar and shoot some pool, with the winner buying the next round.

Ironically, one of their biggest hits was so widely misinterpreted as being a pro-drug song that they actually made a music video with the expressed intent to show everyone that it wasn’t.  I Want A New Drug wasn’t about wanting a new drug.  It was about being so in love with a woman that the feeling was better than anything that any drug could provide.

The video features Huey waking up late and remembering that he has a show that night.  He races across San Francisco and, noticeably, he doesn’t do a single drug during the journey.  He does spot a woman played by Signy Coleman, whose mom was friends with Huey’s mom.

This video was directed by David Rathod, who also directed the videos for two other songs from Huey Lewis and the News, Heart and Soul and He Don’t Know.

Enjoy!

Music Video of the Day: All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose by KISS (1983, directed by Martin Kaban)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

As you can tell from watching this video, this from the period of time where KISS was performing without their trademark makeup.  All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose was their second single from the album Lick It Up and, while the video itself got some airplay on MTV, the song failed to chart in the U.S.  Compared to their success in the 70s, KISS struggled through the 80s and the early 90s.  Taking off the makeup and essentially looking like every other hard rock band that was around at that time did not help.

Today, All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose is best-remembered as the song in which Paul Stanley raps.  The majority of the song was written by KISS’s then drummer, the late Eric Carr and Carr was initially not happy with the decision to have Stanley rap one of the verses.  However, later, Carr said that Stanley rapping was actually what the song needed to distinguish itself from the rest of the album and that the rap was probably the reason why All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose was eventually released as a single.

The video is a hard rock fantasy, with the members of KISS walking around a burned-out city and running into criminals, circus performers, and, of course, barely dressed women.  This was probably a video that KISS could only have made during the period when they weren’t wearing their makeup.  The Demon and the Starchild would have looked out-of-place wandering around the city but Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Eric Carr, and Vinny Vincent fit right in.

In retrospect, it’s hard not to be amused that, back in the 70s and 80s, so many parents groups viewed KISS as being a threat to young minds.  (There are people who still believe that KISS stands for Knights In Satan’s Service.)  I would guess that few of those concerned parents actually listened to any of the music that they were so concerned about.  Instead, they just saw songs with titles like All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose and jumped to their conclusions.

Enjoy!

Better Drugs and Bigger Parties: The Dirt (2019, directed by Jeff Tremaine)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

If you want to experience the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle, you could start a band, play some clubs, get signed to a record deal, go on tour, and eventually burn yourself out.  Of course, if that’s too much trouble or if you’re already older than 30, I guess you can just watch The Dirt on Netflix.

The Dirt is the latest band biopic.  This time the band is Mötley Crüe  and the film has all the usual VH1 Behind the Music style anecdotes.  Watch Nikki Sixx (Douglas Booth) nearly die of a heroin overdose!  Ponder how Tommy Lee (Chase “Machine Gun” Kelly) could have been stupid enough to cheat on Heather Locklear (Rebekah Graf)!  Listen as Mick Mars (Iwan Rhoen) refuses to tell how old he is!  Gasp as Vince Neil (Daniel Webber, giving the movie’s best performance) deals with tragedy after tragedy!  When you’re not watching Tommy Lee go down on a groupie or Nikki learning how to shoot dope, you can watch as Ozzy Osbourne (Tony Cavalero) snorts a line of ants and slurps up his own urine.  The movie is based on Mötley Crüe’s autobiography and the actors playing the members of the band take turns breaking the fourth wall and telling their story.  Nikki Sixx says, “We were a gang of fucking idiots!” and the movie seems to agree.  Nikki has always had a reputation for being the smartest member of Mötley Crüe.  Of course, when your main competition is Tommy Lee, that’s not too high of a bar to clear.

Especially when compared to other band biopics like Straight Outta Compton and Bohemian Rhapsody, The Dirt is shallow and overly episodic.  Nikki says that Mötley Crüe’s main concern was finding “better drugs and bigger parties,” and The Dirt is the same way.  It never digs too deep into the band’s music or the reasons why, for a period of time in the 80s, they were so popular.  The story is told by the members of the band so it often switches between being honest about the band’s history and making excuses for some of the members’s worst behavior, like when Tommy punches his first fiancee.  Fans of Mötley Crüe might enjoy seeing all of the stories about the band brought to life.  Meanwhile, those who didn’t care about Mötley Crüe before watching The Dirt will probably care even less after spending nearly two hours watching them act like self-destructive fools.  One thing that the movie gets undeniably correct: After all these years, Dr. Feelgood still rocks.