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.
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 By the 1950s, The Block’s burlesque houses had been replaced by sex shops and strip clubs.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.
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.
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.
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!
“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.”
“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.
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.
Seeing as how this is shark week on the SyFy network and I reviewed both Deep Blue Sea and Deep Blue Sea 2 on Sunday, it seems appropriate that today’s music video of the day should feature LL Cool J turning into a shark.
I mean, doesn’t it!?
Anyway, this is one of the songs that plays over the end credits of Deep Blue Sea. The video was directed by Renny Harlin and features several clips from the film. And, of course, LL Cool J turns into a shark.
Matthew and Gunnar Nelson are the twin sons of the late, 1950s teen idol, Ricky Nelson. In 1989, they signed a recording contract with Geffen Records. As Nelson, they released their first album, After the Rain, in 1990. Coming at the tail end of the hair metal era, Nelson specialized in the type of hard rock that was so radio friendly and inoffensive that even your mother could safely listen to them. Nelson achieved brief fame before Nirvana came along and permanently changed the musical landscape.
The first single released off of Nelson’s debut album was the title track, After the Rain. It was also their first music video.
I can’t remember where it was but I once saw the video for After The Rain at the top of a list of the worst music videos of all time. Actually, I’ve seen it at the top of several similar lists. After The Rain‘s bad reputation is almost entirely due to the first two minutes of the video.
A slob in a trailer park yells at his son. The sobbing teen lies down underneath a big Nelson poster than no one over the age of 12 would actually have hanging next to their bed. Suddenly, the poster comes to life and, in true Dr. Strange fashion, Matthew and Gunnar Nelson take the trailer park teen’s astral form on a journey to some sort of sweat lodge, when a Native American shaman holds up a feather. The magic feather transports the troubled teen to a Nelson concert and everything is instantly better.
What does it all mean, beyond suggesting that Nelson was the preferred band of both the trailer park and the sweat lodge? I don’t know. And was anyone’s life ever actually improved by going to a Nelson concert? Again, I just don’t know.
Like many bands of the era, Nelson’s popularity was washed away by a tidal wave of Seattle grunge. Nelson may now be forgotten but we’ll always have the feather.
Through the Shattered Lens 