Category Archives: Music

Music Video of the Day: Tainted by Neal Coty (1997, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Like yesterday’s selection, today’s music video of the day was filmed on the Block, Baltimore’s notorious red light district.

Neal Coty, who hails from Thurmont, Maryland, makes good use of The Block in this video for his song, Tainted.  Among the clubs highlighted are two mainstays of the Block,  the Circus Bar and the 2 O’Clock Club.

Back in the day, both establishments were considered to be upscale gentlemen’s clubs.  Blaze Starr got her starts dancing at the 2 O’Clock Club.  Meanwhile, in 1961, the Circus Bar was featured in an episode of Route 66.  Though both clubs have gone through several changes in management over the past few years, both the Circus and 2 O’Clock remain open to this day.

As for Neal Coty, he’s also still active.  Along with performing his own music, Coty has also co-written songs for  Mark Chesnutt , James Wesley, Craig Morgan, Blake Shelton, Flynnville Train, and Heartland.

Music Video of the Day: Hold On To The Night by Bootcamp (1981, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

They may be largely forgotten today but Baltimore’s own Bootcamp was one of the first bands to appear on MTV.  Their video for Hold On To The Night was the 42nd video to ever be shown on MTV and appropriately it was filmed in Baltimore’s version of 42nd Street, The Block.

As you can see in this video, The Block was Baltimore’s red light district.  In the 1940s, it was famous for its burlesque houses and, during World War II, many a soldier spent his last night before shipping out visiting the Block.  It was here that Blaze Starr got her start.  By the 1950s, The Block’s burlesque houses had been replaced by sex shops and strip clubs.  The fact that Baltimore’s Police Headquarters sat at the east end of The Block didn’t keep it from becoming notorious as a center of prostitution, drug dealing, and general seediness.  The story  was that the police, realizing they could never stop either the drug or the sex trade, instead just tried to contain them to one section of the city.  While that may or may not have been true, I always wondered if the Hamsterdam storyline in the 3rd season of The Wire was inspired by The Block.

Over the years, the Block has shrunk.  Now, it’s only two blocks long and it’s best known for being home to a few strip clubs.  The Gayety Theater, which is heavily featured in this video, burned down in 2010.  Arson is suspected.

As for Bootcamp, they were briefly popular in the early 80s, playing with bands like The Tubes, Squeeze, The B-52’s and Split Enz, before breaking up in 1984.

Music Video of the Day: Your Love by The Outfield (1986, directed by John Jopson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This is a song that I will always associate with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.  Your Love is on the Flash FM playlist.  It’s not a great song to listen to when you’re in the middle of a police chase but it is nice when you’re just stealing cars on a rainy night.

The video was shot, over the course of a day, on a soundstage in Astoria.  While the band is playing, an artist played by JoAnne Willette finger paints the cover of The Outfield’s first album, Play Deep.  Willette would later co-star on the Growing Pains spin-off, Just The Ten Of Us.  She also appeared in episodes of The Facts of Life, T. J. Hooker, Santa Barbara, Growing Pains, Melrose Place, Chicago Hope, Becker, ER, The Young and the Restless, My Sister Sam, Private Practice, and The New Adventures of Old Christine.  Among her film credits are small roles in both Welcome to 18 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.

Even though The Outfield was a British band, they never found much success in the UK.  Their popularity was almost solely centered in the U.S., where Your Love reached #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #7 on the Mainstream Rock chart in 1986.

Music Video of the Day: Any Way You Want It by Journey (1980, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

I’ve recently been reading Noel Monk’s memoir about managing Van Halen during the early years of their career, Runnin’ with the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen.  

Among the many revealing stories in the book is one about an incident that happened when Van Halen was touring with Journey.  Monk went backstage and discovered that David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen had gotten into a food fight.  Eddie threw a bowl of peanuts at Dave.  Dave threw guacamole at Eddie but he missed his target and, instead, ended up hitting the lead singer of Journey, Steve Perry.  Monk says that he found Perry in his dressing room, softly crying and trying to get the guacamole off of his leather jacket.  Monk compared Dave and Eddie to “heartless mean children,” picking on the smart kid in the middle school cafeteria.

Steve Perry deserved better.

(He deserved better than the Separate Ways video, too.)

Today’s music video, Journey’s party anthem Any Way You Want It, was selected in honor of Steve Perry.

Ever since I first saw Caddyshack (not to mention the episode of The Simpsons were Rodney Dangerfield played Mr. Burns’ son), Any Way You Want It has always been my favorite Journey song.  The video is also Journey at its best, simple, without pretension, and rocking!

 

 

“How It Ends” A Netflix Film Reviewed By Case Wright – Some Spoilers

Posted on by casewright

How-it-ends

How It Ends is a horror/thriller from Netflix and if you don’t watch, Netflix will probably make you.  The story begins with Will, an up and coming lawyer who is seeing the ultrasound of his soon to be son with beloved Samantha. Will is sweet, but the least manly man to ever unmanly.  He’s wound tight, nervous, and hyper-insecure.  Will needs to get Sam’s father Tom (Forest Whitaker) to give his blessing so Will and Sam can wed.  Will flies from the greatest city on Earth- Seattle to a totally ok City of Chicago to see Tom.

We meet Tom and his wife.  Tom is everything Sam is not.  Tom was a career Marine, manly, confident, and determined.  During the dinner, Tom does everything, but say to Will- You are a wimpy worthless un-man. Tom’s response is both whiny and defensive.  It’s just all kinds of awful.  Then, the power goes out nationwide with F-22s buzzing around Chicago AND all communications are down as well nationwide.  Tom asks if Will rise to the occasion and road trip to Seattle to find/rescue Sam.

I know, I know… this sounds like Taken et al, but it’s not.  It becomes a Father (in-Law) and Son survival story and we watch Will become a Man.  They leave in Tom’s Cadillac and hit the road to Seattle.  Immediately, they find that they cannot stay on the main roads to get there because rednecks try to steal their car at the first rest stop and then an escaped convict tries to murder them.  This is within the first half hour of this very action packed show and we still don’t know what caused the catastrophe.  We get hints, but it’s not Aliens …. I don’t think.  Frankly, I’m still not totally sure of all of the details of the disaster even now.

They decide to stay off the main roads and team up with a teen who has mechanical skills.  Along the way, people are trying to murder them for gas and supplies.  The teen that goes with them becomes part of Will and Tom tribe for a short time and has to kill to protect her new tribe.  Unfortunately, this is too much for the teenager to accept and she abandons Will and Tom to find her way forward alone.  It’s a very accurate depiction of societal breakdown.  During Katrina, towns setup armed checkpoints to prevent looting and mayhem.  I had friends in Mississippi during Katrina and they did exactly that.  They needed to shut ingress and egress from their communities to survive and they did so.  The communities acted like a tribe would.

Will has to learn how to shoot, drive and shoot, do a chest-tube, read people, give up trust, and murder.  We watch him change from a spineless nerd to a confident leader who will readily kill to protect his tribe.  During Will’s transformation, the tribal bond between Will and Tom becomes as strong as steel.   It’s a story that gets to the very foundation of what family does and what it means to be part of a tribe.  The moment the lights go out, we will go from Facebook likes to being real tribal humans again.

When Will gets to Seattle, it’s heartbreaking.  Seattle is totally destroyed….sniff.  It just gets you. Even the Clink…The Home of my Beloved Seahawks is gone.  THE PAIN, THE PAIN!  It’s like 2015 all over again! Will’s beloved is gone, but she left a note for her coordinates.  Therefore, Will has to go back on the road to find her and save her from whomever.

Will finds Sam with a neighbor Randy who is at his mountain lodge getaway.  Randy is the epitome of our current society. He is a wealthy-techie-know-it-all-socially-awkward-creep who thinks that all of his thoughts are facts.  He believes that in this new society he will continue to be on top and he tries to take Sam as his own.  Not so fast, the world has changed- sorry the power was down forever so no more facebook updates for you.  Life has reverted back to a tribe-based system and Randy is left behind literally into dust.

I would recommend this film because it has tremendous suspense and dares to show us what we’ve lost trading our friendships for likes and retweets.  You never really know what caused the disaster because that is not the story.  The story is about the immediate reemergence of tribal life and how it enables people to determine rapidly who is a friend and who is a foe.  In essence, the film challenges us to see a possible positive to this new reality.  People are closer and snakes like Randy are easily identified and remedied for the good of the tribe.  We still survive, but we have to do it as human beings.

 

Music Video Of The Day: Nothing Else Matters by Metallica (1992, directed by Adam Dubin)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“At first I didn’t even want to play it for the guys. I thought that Metallica could only be the four of us. These are songs about destroying things, head banging, bleeding for the crowd, whatever it is, as long as it wasn’t about chicks and fast cars, even though that’s what we liked. The song was about a girlfriend at the time. It turned out to be a pretty big song.”

— James Hetfield, on Nothing Else Matters

Eventually, Hetfield did play it for the guys and Nothing Else Matters went on to become one of Metallica’s signature songs.  The song may have been inspired by Hetfield’s feelings about being away from his girlfriend while he was on the road but, as Hetfield explained it to Mojo Magazine, “It’s about being on the road, missing someone at home, but it was written in such a way, it connected with so many people, that it wasn’t just about two people, it was about a connection with your higher power, lots of different things.”

The video was directed by Adam Dubin and edited by Sean Fullan and is made up of clips from the 1992 Metallica documentary, A Year And A Half.  Along with the song, the video is best remembered for a scene where Lars Ulrich throws darts at a poster of Kip Winger.  Do you blame him?

For his part, Kip Winger has said about Metallica’s hatred of him, “That is why it’s the great irony that we ended up on that geeky guy’s shirt on Beavis & Butt-head, because Metallica couldn’t play what we play, they couldn’t do it, they literally — technically — couldn’t do it. And I’ll challenge those chumps to that any day of the week, but we could play their music with our hands tied behind our back. And so, I was a little teed off about that, but in the end, none of that shit matters…”

If you say so, Kipster.

26 years after the release of Nothing Else Matters, Metallica is still selling out stadiums worldwide.  And Winger?  Look for them at the closest county fair.

Let’s give the final words to James Hetfield:

“I remember going to the Hells Angels Clubhouse in New York, and they showed me a film that they’d put together of one of the fallen brothers, and they were playing ‘Nothing Else Matters.’ Wow. This means a lot more than me missing my chick, right? This is brotherhood. The army could use this song. It’s pretty powerful.”

Music Video of the Day: Freeway of Love by Aretha Franklin (1985, directed by ????)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

From an episode of Good Times:

“I didn’t know Benjamin Franklin was on the hundred-dollar bill!”

“Who did you think was on it?”

“Aretha Franklin!”

 Of course, Aretha Franklin was never on the hundred-dollar bill but maybe she should have been.  The singer, who earned the title Queen of Soul, was one of the most influential artists of her time.  When she died yesterday at the age of 76, tributes flowed in from other musicians who were proud to say that she was one of the people who had first inspired them to sing.  Aretha Franklin paved the road that so many other artists have followed.

One of her biggest hits was Freeway of Love, which is also today’s music video of the day.  Appropriately, the video was filmed almost entirely in Detroit, the home of Motown.  Portions of the video were also filmed at Doug’s Body Shop in Ferndale, Michigan.

Keep an eye out for Clarence Clemons and his saxophone.

RIP, Aretha Franklin.

Music Video of the Day: I Said Hi by Amy Shark (2018, dir by Nick Waterman and Amy Billings)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

To quote Amy Shark, this song is “an anthem for anyone who is waking up everyday fighting for what they believe in and challenging the universe!”

(For the record, Amy Billings and Amy Shark are one in the same.)

Enjoy!

Music Video Of The Day: My Own Summer by Deftones (1997, dir by Dean Karr)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since it’s shark week on the SyFy Network, I figured this would be as good a time as any to share this shark-related video.

In this video, the Deftones perform while standing on shark cages.  Which … I don’t know.  That, honestly, is something that I would never do.  It just seems like you’re inviting trouble and, to prove my point, Chino Moreno does fall into the water while performing.  Apparently, Chino survived being attacked by the shark because he’s still around.  Maybe he’s like Felix Leiter in the James Bond novels and he’s bionic now.

To quote Mr. Big in Live and Let Die: “He disagreed with something that ate him.”

Anyway, this video was directed by Dean Karr, who has directed music videos for everyone from Korn to Lisa Marie Presley.

Enjoy!