Category Archives: Music

Music Video Of The Day: What Do You Do For Money Honey by AC/DC (1980, directed by Eric Dionysius and Eric Mistler)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

One reason why AC/DC has remained popular for such a long time is because there’s nothing phony about them.  They play hard rock, they play it loud, and they make no apologies.  That attitude can be found in all of their songs and also all of their videos.  The video for What Do You Do For Money Honey, like most of their videos, is a simple performance clip because AC/DC doesn’t need to do anything extra to rock you.

This song is from Back In Black, their first album after the death of lead singer Bon Scott.  After Scott’s death, the band came close to disbanding but were encouraged to stay together by Scott’s parents, who insisted that Scott would not have wanted his death to be the end of AC/DC.  Brian Johnson was subsequently brought in to replace Scott and the rest is history.  In What Do You Do For Money Honey, Johnson is singing to an unseen woman who avoids having to work by sleeping with older, wealthy men.

The song may not be as well-known as Highway to Hell but it’s still AC/DC rocking out as only they can.

Enjoy!

 

Music Video of the Day: Satellite by the Hooters (1987, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When watching today’s music video of the day, it helps to know something about the time when it was made.

During the late 80s, several popular televangelists were exposed as doing some less than holy things.  Jimmy Swaggart kept getting caught with hookers.  Jim Bakker (husband of the heavily made-up Tammy Faye Bakker) was accused of embezzling money from his ministry in order to pay off Jessica Hahn, a church secretary who said he had raped her.  (Bakker claimed that he was set up by enemies who wanted to take over his ministry.)  Oral Roberts announced that if he didn’t raise a certain amount of money, God was going to kill him (“take me home”).  Meanwhile, Pat Robertson (yes, that Pat Robertson) was running for President and Jerry Falwell was just being himself.

Obviously, someone needed to step up and take on these religious charlatans and the Hooters answered the call with this song and video.  Both were considered highly controversial at the time, which helped Satellite become the band’s first successful single in Europe.

The video features the couple from American Gothic trying to watch the Three Stooges with their daughter, despite constant interruptions from obvious stand-ins for Jerry Falwell and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.  I would never think of the American Gothic couple as being fans of Larry, Moe, and Curly but it goes to show that you never can tell.

Enjoy!

One Hit Wonders #27: “Wipeout” by The Surfaris (Dot Records 1963)

Posted on by gary loggins

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Kids all across America pounded their school desk tops in the 60’s and 70’s  (and probably still do!) imitating the hard-drivin’ primal drum solo of The Surfari’s “Wipeout”, which shot to #2 in the summer of 1963:

Ron Wilson based his riff on a simple paradiddle, a practice piece most anyone could do. Hell, even I can do a paradiddle, and I have NO musical talent whatsoever (as my good-ole-southern-boy dad used to say, “Son, you couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket!”). Only Wilson sped things up a few notches, aided by the twin guitar attack of Bob Berryhill and Jim Fuller, and Pat Connolly’s bubbling-under bass line holding the whole thing down.

At age 19, Wilson was the old man of The Surfaris – everyone else was sixteen years old when the song was recorded! “Wipeout” was first released locally in sunny Southern California as the ‘B’ side…

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Music Video of the Day: Kids in America by Kim Wilde (1981, directed by Brian Grant)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Happy Independence Day, America!

For today’s music video of the day, we have Kim Wilde performing Kids in America.  This was her first single and one of two of Wilde’s singles to chart in the United States, the other one being her cover of The Supremes’s You Keep Me Hangin’ On.   (Wilde found more success in her home country, with 25 singles charting on the UK charts.) The song was written by Wilde’s father and her older brother, both of whom were fascinated by American youth culture.

The video, which finds Kim Wilde literally looking out a “dirty old window,” was directed by Brian Grant, who was one of the busiest music video directors of the 1980s.  He also did videos for The Human League, Squeeze, Queen, and Tina Turner.

Myself, I will always associate this song with stealing cars in Vice City.

The only thing better than stealing a golf cart is stealing a golf cart while listening to Kim Wilde sing Kids in America!

Enjoy!

Confessions of a TV Addict #15: Rambling On About The Cowsills, LOVE AMERICAN STYLE, HAPPY DAYS, and The Archies!

Posted on by gary loggins

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Last week, I attended one of those 60’s nostalgia concerts, this one called “The Happy Together Tour”. Headlining the bill was The Turtles (well actually A Turtle, but we’ll get to that later), Chuck Negron of Three Dog Night, Gary Puckett (minus The Union Gap), the founding fathers of The Buckinghams, The Classics IV (well, two of them anyways… The Classics II?), and the surviving members of The Cowsills.

For those of you unaware, The Cowsills were a family band from Newport, RI consisting of brothers Bill, Bob, Barry, John, and Paul; sister Susan, and Mom Barbara, who had a string of bubblegum pop hits in the late 60’s beginning with “The Rain, The Park, & Other Things”:

Bill, Paul, and Susan entertained the crowd with that, plus “We Can Fly”, “Indian Lake”, “Hair”and another number they introduced to the world, “The Theme from LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE”, which brings me…

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Music Video of the Day: Down by the Water by PJ Harvey (1995, directed by Maria Mochnacz)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“It’s a song I didn’t want to put a label on too much, like this isn’t a song about some woman drowning her baby. To be quite honest, I don’t really know what it is for me, myself, yet – which I don’t mind because I’d much rather leave it for other people to do what they want with anyway.”

— PJ Harvey on Down By The Water

Despite the above quote, it is generally accepted that PJ Harvey’s Down By The Water is about a woman who drowned her baby and is now returning to the scene of the crime and asking for her baby to be returned.  According to Harvey, she has met both fans and critics who have assumed that the song must be autobiographical and that she’s singing about drowning her own child.

Speaking of drowning, that’s what came close to happening to PJ Harvey herself while she was shooting this video.  Made up to look like, as she herself put it, “Joan Crawford on acid,” Harvey was wearing a wig that proved to be so heavy that, when she went underwater, it was a struggle to resurface.

It proved to be worth the trouble, though.  The video was not only highly popular on MTV but it also helped to make a hit out of the song.  In fact, Down By The Water would prove to Harvey’s breakthrough hit in the United States.  Years after it’s initial release, the song continues to live on as a part of the soundtrack of countless investigative procedural crime dramas.

Enjoy!

Rockin’ in the Film World #20: EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS (Embassy 1983)

Posted on by gary loggins

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You couldn’t go anywhere in 1984 without hearing “On the Dark Side” blaring from a car radio or your neighborhood bar’s jukebox. That’s thanks in large part to audiences rediscovering 1983’s EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS via repeated showings on HBO, turning the film into an instant cult classic and veteran Providence-based rockers John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band into FM-radio favorites. The film hadn’t done well when first released to theaters, but exposure on the fairly-new medium of Cable TV garnered new fans of both it and Cafferty’s soundtrack album.

Investigative reporter Ellen Barkin looks into the mysterious death of Eddie Wilson (played by Michael Pare’), lead singer of The Cruisers, whose death in a car accident is shrouded in secret, as the body was never found. Was it suicide? murder? or is Eddie still alive? She digs deep to uncover the facts about what happened that fateful night…

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