It sure is Groundhog Day. I won’t make the joke that I am sure you’ll hear all day.
As for this video, I had a different one planned originally. I was going to go with another duet that Cher did for a love song. Then I thought it would be worth checking to see if she had ever done a music video for this song before I started writing. Yep! This exists. Why does this exist? Apparently Cher did this for the album The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience. I think I may be traumatized for life now that I’ve heard Cher ask Butt-Head if he feels lucky. Why did she do this? I don’t know. Maybe it was for a comeback after the 1980s were over.
This was co-directed by Tamra Davis and Yvette Kaplan. Davis directed around 40 music videos. She’s also directed numerous films and episodes of TV Shows. Kaplan has mainly worked in animation. She’s done work on other things, but the majority was as a supervising director for the run of Beavis and Butt-Head. She also worked on the movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).
Enjoy this bizarre trip down memory lane. I swear I didn’t pick this out in advance. It fell into my lap at the last minute.
According to Google Translate, the title of this song is “There Will Be A Spring”. I guess that explains the water and flowers. I have no idea how that explains the super low-angle though. Maybe they were trying to show the sky? Your guess is as good as mine.
Unless I am forgetting one, there are two more pre-ABBA videos before I can finally get back on track.
This time we have Agnetha joining the Swedish Air Force I guess. To my knowledge, Agentha today is afraid of such travel, which has been one of the big stumbling blocks to an ABBA reunion. That makes it a little weird to watch this video.
There’s still a couple of pre-ABBA videos to knock off. This time Frida appears to have traveled to Hawaii to rehearse for the sailboat version of Knowing Me, Knowing You.
I love how one of the comments on this video says, “that was wierd”. No, it doesn’t truly get weird till you see Frida boxing with herself. That, and when you find out that One Night In Bangkok was written by Benny and Björn, along with Tim Rice.
I did Friday Night by The Darkness yesterday, so here’s the music video that I have no doubt they had in mind when making Friday Night.
If you recognize the director, then it is probably from Cyndi Lauper videos like Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
If you recognize the woman who gets stranded with Huey, then you probably know her because she is married to Pierce Brosnan. That’s Keely Shaye Brosnan or Keely Shaye Smith depending on how she gets credited on something. She was also a correspondent on Unsolved Mysteries back in the 1990s.
If you recognize the name Susan R. Feldott, the production manager, then you must have been in the business.
If you recognize the shark, then these posts are useless. Yes, Edd Griles also directed the video for If This Is It by Huey Lewis & The News. That’s the music video where a Sand Shark goes after a family at the end. They were obviously making fun of that here.
I was sick most of yesterday. I needed a video at the last minute. Nothing fails to cheer me up like The Darkness. This one picks up after the video for I Believe In A Thing Called Love when their ZZ Top spaceship crash lands on every island of woman from every exploitation movie ever made–complete with a giant skull to reference Iron Maiden. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the shark is a reference to the one that stranded Huey Lewis on an island in the video for Stuck With You.
To my knowledge, this was not only the debut single for the band, but also their first music video. You might have noticed that is not Bon Scott. AC/DC’s first lead-singer was a guy named Dave Evans. He’s a good singer and clearly a good performer, but I can see why the band let him go. Despite attempts over the years to classify the band as “hard rock”, they have maintained that they are just rock ‘n roll. I see that when I watch Bon Scott and Brian Johnson. When I watch Dave Evans, I see Marc Bolan of T-Rex or a frontman for one of the Sunset Strip bands of the 1980s. He doesn’t quite fit. Of course this is all in retrospect. Still, that is the feeling I take away from this music video.
The music video was filmed for the show The Last Picture Show because clearly that big sign above them didn’t make that clear.
Going into doing these “music video of the day” posts, I never would have imagined that Alice Cooper, ABBA, AC/DC, and Hall & Oates would be trailblazers for the modern music video.
There’s still some pre-ABBA music videos to do. I need a break again. So why not take this time to do one of the weirdest videos from the 1970s that I am aware of? There’s a fair amount of information out there on this video, so I’ll just cover some of the basics and let you enjoy the video.
It was shot in 1973. According to at least one site, it was originally thought to have been shot in 1976.
John’s sister Diane made it for them.
The devil is played by the band’s tour manager, Randy Hoffman.
The girl is Sara Allen who had a longtime relationship with the duo that includes the song Sara Smile being about her.
Note when Daryl actually does lip-sync in the video. He really only does it when both he and John are singing together. That’s funny because while being one of the most successful duos of all-time, Hall really did the singing, and Oates the backup vocals. Sometimes they would do songs where they would sing together, but that is what you normally would hear in their songs. This became so much the formula for Hall & Oates that when they were inducted into the Rock ‘N Roll Hall Of Fame, John said that he is probably the most well-paid backup singer in music. However, jump back to 1973, and you have a video where Hall seems to have gone out of his way to make sure you see them as a duo.
That said, the best part is easily Daryl Hall’s give-no-fucks performance. That’s not to say that Oates does a bad job, but there is just something about Daryl’s dead-face staring at you that is amazing.
Here is some additional information from an interview Oates gave concerning the video:
[Oates:] Well, I’ll give you a little background about what happened with that “She’s Gone” thing. First of all, it was 1973. There was no MTV, there was no outlet for anything like this. You know, it might be one of the first music videos ever made. I really couldn’t say, honestly, but it definitely would be a contender. What happened was, we were asked to lip sync “She’s Gone” for a teenage TV dance show broadcast out of Atlantic City, New Jersey. And we really didn’t want to do that; we didn’t want to pretend to sing the song. It was supposed to be shot in a television studio in Philadelphia. So we thought, with the mindset that we were in at the time — and I won’t say more on that, either —
([Interviewer] Ryan is laughing again.)
[Oates:] We showed up at the television studio with a chair from our living room. The woman who’s walking through the picture — that’s Sarah…
[Ryan:] Oh, wow.
[Oates:] And the devil who comes through was our road manager at the time. And we brought Monopoly money, and those weird instruments, and they thought we were nuts. They really thought that. My sister directed that video.
[Ryan:] You’re kidding me.
[Oates:] They thought we were completely insane. They actually didn’t air it; they wouldn’t air it. But we had it this whole time, and eventually I leaked it out to the internet, ’cause I just thought the world should see it.
Through the Shattered Lens 