Category Archives: music video

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!

One Hit Wonders #26: “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” by Gale Garnett (RCA Victor 1964)

Posted on by gary loggins

gary loggins's avatarcracked rear viewer

New Zealand born, Canadian bred Gale Garnett sang her way to #4 on the Billboard charts during the summer of 1964 with a song that’s since become a summertime folk-rock classic, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine”:

Gale herself penned the tune and performed it with her band The Gentle Reign. Folk music was still big in those early days of Beatlemania, and Gale’s song, with it’s liltingly lovely harmonica and whistling refrains, had young lovers swooning in the summer breeze. Gale and her group copped a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Recording, and made the rounds of all the TV shows, but “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” was their one and only hit record.

But that didn’t stop Gale Garnett! She was already a starlet of note, appearing on TV shows like HAWAIIAN EYE, 77 SUNSET STRIP, and BONANZA, and would soon be featured in animated form as the beautiful…

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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!

Music Video of the Day: Somebody Save Me by Cinderella (1986, directed by Mark Rezyka)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today’s music video of the day comes from 1985, the year when anyone with big hair could be a rock star.

It starts with two women running down a hallway in Philadelphia.  Are they excited to see Cinderella, the generic glam rock band that had a few hits in the 80s just to be washed away, as so many similar bands were, by the arrival of grunge?

No, of course not!

The girls are excited because they’ve heard that Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora are in the building!  Bon Jovi and Sambora’s cameos are significant because Jon Bon Jovi was the person who initially discovered Cinderella and convinced PolyGram Records to sign them.  So, basically, this is all Bon Jovi’s fault.

To be honest, this video would probably be totally forgotten if not for it’s appearance on an episode of Beavis and Butthead:

Enjoy!