Today’s music video of the day was filmed at Hollywood’s famed Whisky a Go Go, while Mötley Crüe was preparing to embark on their tour promoting Dr. Feelgood. In the 80s, you knew you had made it big if Sam Kinison was your chauffeur.
This video was directed by Wayne Isham, who directed videos for practically everyone. Everyone who was anyone in the music biz worked with Wayne Isham at least once.
Enjoy!
Today’s music video of the day was filmed at Hollywood’s famed Whisky a Go Go, while Mötley Crüe was preparing to embark on their tour promoting Dr. Feelgood. Did Sam Kinison really drive the band to their performance? It wouldn’t surprise me if I did. More than any other stand-up, Sam Kinison was the comedic voice of heavy metal.
This video was directed by Wayne Isham, who directed videos for practically everyone.
Enjoy!
This is a really dumb video but it’s Mötley Crüe so why should that come as a surprise?
Like almost every heavy metal video that came out in the early 80s, this one is set in an apocalyptic future. There’s a group of women who look like they just escaped from a dress rehearsal for Cats. Mötley Crüe shows up looking like KISS and carrying torches. There’s a battle. The band puts the women in a cage and then performs a concert for them, which I don’t know if you want your music video to say that you have to actually imprison people to force them to listen to your band. One of the women fights back. The video ends with a pentagram because Satan’s cool.
It’s Mötley Crüe. It really doesn’t demand much thought and at least Kip Winger’s not in the band. I may think it’s stupid but you know who probably loved this video? These two:
Enjoy!
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.
First released in 1989, the album Dr. Feelgood became and remains Mötley Crüe’s best-selling album to date. It was also their most critically acclaimed, in no doubt due to the band’s newly found sobriety. After years of drugs, sex, and debauchery, Dr. Feelgood was Mötley Crüe’s announcement that they could still rock even if they were sober.
Ironically, for an album that was recorded sober, the title track was about drugs. Dr. Feelgood was about a Los Angeles drug dealer. Nikki Sixx, who wrote the song, later told Rolling Stone that the song was based on several different drug dealers that he had done business with. Just two years before Dr. Feelgood became a hit, Sixx had been a notorious junkie who, after a heroin overdose, was actually legally dead for two minutes before a paramedic was able to revive him with two shots of adrenaline.
Along with being a slang term for heroin, Dr. Feelgood was also the nickname of several notorious doctors. Perhaps the most infamous Dr. Feelgood was Max Jacobson, who used to give “miracle tissue regenerator” shots to the rich and famous. His clients included everyone from JFK to Marilyn Monroe to Humphrey Bogart. Robert Freyman, the physician who is though to have inspired The Beatles’s Dr. Robert, was also sometimes called Dr. Feelgood.
Dr. Feelgood became Mötley Crüe’s first and, to date, only gold single in the United States. The video follows the song’s title character as he goes from working the streets to owning a mansion. In a repeat of what happened to Tony Montana, Dr. Feelgood’s own hubris eventually brings him down. As for why Mötley Crüe is performing in a revival tent, it probably just looked cool.
The song spent 109 weeks on the charts after its release and it remains Mötley Crüe’s most popular single.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FToyVkqPW7Y
I think I only saw this music video once before now. It is as crazy as I remember. I think the best part is when the lady they are singing about appears by knocking down that wall. If you are thinking they didn’t quite know what to do with Mötley Crüe at this point, then I highly recommend you check out the music video they did before this for the song Live Wire. They seemed to have been under the impression they were Van Halen in that one. In fact, it looks like it wasn’t till director Wayne Isham got ahold of them in 1985 that they found the way to really sell this Sunset Strip band.
But what else could we expect from director Marcelo Epstein who brought us the notoriously bad breakdancing movie with Lorenzo Lamas called Body Rock the following year. I could only find out that he did a handful of music videos, but it appears that Body Rock killed his career in film. I even found one review that was convinced that “Marcelo Epstein” must have been a pseudonym for Michael Haneke or Jonas Mekas.
While Epstein is a bit of a mystery, producer Alexis Omeltchenko sure isn’t. You can find all kinds of information about him online. I can tell you when he was born, who his parents were, his political party of choice, where he went to college, and more. I can only find 15 producing credits on mvdbase, but I highly doubt that’s it. He owns his own production company and has been a member of the Music Video Producers Association since 1984. I’m sure there’s more.
What else can I say? If by some chance you haven’t seen this thing, then watch it. You won’t be sorry. It’s really stupid.
“Long legs and burgundy lips.”
For some this is the height of hair metal at it’s raunchy. Some even call this song one of the best metal songs out there (though that’s stretching the term metal like it was Plastic-Man). I, for one, call this one of the guiltiest pleasures to come out of the hair metal scene of the 1980’s.
I’ll just let the lyrics speak to the cheesetastic and raunchirific pleasure this song was and remains (especially in strip clubs) to this very day.
Girls, Girls, Girls
Friday night and I need a fight
My motorcycle and a switchblade knife
Handful of grease in my hair feels right
But what I need to make me tight are those
Girls, girls, girls
Long legs and burgundy lips
Girls, girls, girls
Dancin’ down on Sunset Strip
Girls, girls, girls
Red lips, fingertips
Trick or treat, sweet to eat
On Halloween and New Year’s Eve
Yankee girls, you just can’t be beat
But you’re the best when you’re off your feet
Girls, girls, girls
At the Dollhouse in Fort Lauderdale
Girls, girls, girls
Rocking in Atlanta at Tattletails
Girls, girls, girls
Raising hell at the Seventh Veil
Have you read the news
In the Soho Tribune?
Ya know she did me
Well, then she broke my heart
I’m such a good good boy
I just need a new toy
I tell you what, girl
Dance for me
I’ll keep you overemployed
Just tell me a story
You know the one I mean
Crazy Horse, Paris, France
Forgot the names, remember romance
I got the photos, a ménage à trois
Musta broke those French’s laws with those
Girls, girls, girls
At the Body Shop and the Marble Arch
Girls, girls, girls
Tropicana’s where I lost my heart
Girls, girls, girls
Vince: Hey Tommy, check that out, man!
Tommy: What Vince? Where?
Vince: Right there, man! Hey baby, you wanna go somewhere?
Girls, girls, girls
Girls, girls, girls
Girls, girls, girls
Girls, girls, girls
UNCENSORED
Previous Guilty Pleasures:
I was a child of the 80’s. I can’t escape that particular information about my past, but unlike some of those of my generation I wholeheartedly embrace the 80’s both the good and the bad and the oh-so-awful. This is why after watching Hot Tub Time Machine (directed by Steve Pink…quite an 80’s name if there ever was one) I have a much deeper appreciation for the things I went through growing up as a teen during the mid-80’s. Rap was just starting to get real popular. Hairstyles, fashion and pop culture was dictated by the emerging juggernaut that was MTV (when they actually played music videos). This raunchy (and it is pretty raunchy) comedy starring John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke definitely spoke to my inner 80’s teen self.
The film’s premise could’ve been taken straight out of any 80’s direct-to-video knock-off of Back to the Future meets Porky’s. I mean the title itself pretty much explains the premise of the film. A literal hot tub acts as a time machine which whisks the four actors mentioned above to 1986 where they get to re-live a specific night they all spent together in 1986 (well, except Duke’s character who wasn’t born yet). Talk about space-time continuum and butterfly effect gets bandied about, but in the end the whole film was just trying to insert as much 80’s pop culture references as possible within 90 and plus minutes.
The film definitely got the 80’s vibe by liberally putting in boobs and naked chicks. 80’s icons Chevy Chase, Crispin Glover and William Zabka make appearances and John Hughes moments get replicated. I mean shot literally like it was Sixteen Candles all over again. The performances by everyone involved was great and it seemed like everyone were enjoying themselves. Craig Robinson as Nick had me laughing out loud every time he said something.
One thing good I can say about Hot Tub Time Machine that encompasses everything good about it is that it played like the anti-Judd Apatow comedy. While Apatow laughers I enjoy they’ve gotten to the point that everyone tries to make their comedies sound like his. Plus, any comedy that can have Sixteen Candles and Red Dawn references in the same 30-minute span has to be awesome….Oh yeah, it also used Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” power ballad over and over.
For the latest song of the day I go back to my teenage years growing up in the 80’s when hair metal ruled the world. While my heart still resided with thrash metal and heavy metal I still got caught up in the power ballad which defined the mid-to-late 80’s. It was this power ballad in all it’s cheesiness which to this day is still quite catchy to listen to. I mean Mötley Crüe in one’s playlist at the time meant getting tail instead of chasing them away.
“Home Sweet Home” is one of the few Crüe songs that seem to have survived the test of time. Chappelle may think Poison’s “Every Rose Has It’s Thorns” was the power ballad of the 80’s, but he is wrong. This song is and shall always be. Plus, it has that awesome slow-mo sequence near the end where the band dances to the beat. Yeah, cheesy like I said earlier.
Another reason I picked this as the latest song of the day is what will be posted afterwards.
Home Sweet Home
You know I’m a dreamer
But my heart’s of gold
I had to run away high
So I wouldn’t come home low
Just when things went right
It doesn’t mean they were always wrong
Just take this song and you’ll never feel
Left all alone
Take me to your heart
Feel me in your bones
Just one more night
And I’m comin’ off this
Long & winding road
I’m on my way
Well I’m on my way
Home sweet home
Tonight tonight
I’m on my way
I’m on my way
Home sweet home You know that I seem
To make romantic dreams
Up in lights, fallin’ off
The silver screen
My heart’s like an open book
For the whole world to read
Sometimes nothing-keeps me together
At the seams
I’m on my way
Well I’m on my way
Home sweet home
Tonight tonight
I’m on my way
Just set me free
Home sweet home
Through the Shattered Lens 