Today’s video is very much a product of the 80s. Kip Winger spent many hours perfecting his guitar spin pose and this video gave him a chance to show off the progress that he had made.
Remember when Lars Ulrich used to throw darts at a poster of this guy? I have to side with Lars as far as that’s concerned. Kip Winger will always be the artist who tried to keep Beavis and Butt-Head from critiquing his videos, which is why their friend Stewart become Winger’s biggest fan.
Regardless of what I think, Winger has their fans and the band is still going. Just last year, they released their seventh studio album. That’s seven more than I’m ever going to release.
Tomorrow is the first day of October and traditionally, the first day of the horror season. I am going to try to keep things centered on that theme as far as the site’s music videos of the day go.
For instance, what could be scarier than Kip Winger singing about banging groupies? How about banging underage groupies? Technically, as Kip always points out whenever anyone asks him about this song, seventeen is the age of consent in many states but the lyrics of Seventeen suggest that it might not have just been the law that was after Winger. “Daddy says she’s too young, but she’s old enough for me,” Winger sings while grinning at the camera.
Let’s take a moment to remember Lars Ulrich throwing darts at a picture of Kip Winger.
God knows Metallica has done some embarrassing things but at least they’ve never turned into Winger.
In a 2014 interview with Songfacts, Kip said, “”Look, seventeen was legal in Colorado, so I didn’t even get the joke, dude. I didn’t get it. And then it hit and every seventeen-year-old girl in the United States thought that song was about her.”
Sure they did, Kip.
The video is made up of close-ups of the band playing (while being illuminated with purple light for some reason) and shots of the girl who is only seventeen but looks like she’s closer to 40. Both the song and the video were a hit, procing that 1988 was a different time. Just imagine the reaction if a band released that song today.
If the song did come out today, we all know who would be on twitter, defending Seventeen and saying that we just weren’t getting the joke.
As for the subject of the song, she is 53 now and probably tells everyone that Nirvana was the first band she ever loved.
As Butt-Head once put it, while watching this very video, “His teeth are whiter than white.”
As far as commercial success goes, Winger had a brief but good run in the late 80s. Then grunge came along and the musical landscape changed for the better. Winger later found fame as the favorite band of Stewart Stevenson on Beavis and Butt-Head. It was rumored that Winger became Stewart’s favorite band after Kip Winger complained about his videos being criticized by Beavis and Butt-Head. It’s always better to laugh at yourself than to complain because being associated with Stewart is what really robbed Winger of whatever credibility they had. Of course, it didn’t help that Lars Ulrich was seen throwing darts at Kip Winger’s face in the video for Nothing Else Matters.
This video is typical Winger stuff. Kip sings that he’s headed for a heartbreak and you don’t believe him for a minute.
Winger’s the worst but this video for Can’t Get Enuff is interesting just because it was directed by Michael Bay, before he started his feature film career.
Everything about this video identifies it as being a Michael Bay production. It takes place on a hot day and it features a lot of sexy people finding ways to deal with the heat. The camera lingers on the sun, the bodies, and the city. It looks great even if it’s hard to imagine that any of the people in the video would actually be listening to Winger. The video was so popular that, even though Winger’s style of music was being overshadowed by newcomers like Nirvana, Can’t Get Enuff was still a hit for the band. Of course, just two years later, Beavis and Butthead premiered on MTV and viewers met Stewart, the loser wearing a Winger t-shirt. Whatever chance Winger had ever being considered cool in even a retro fashion pretty much ended as soon as Stewart said, “Hey, guys.”
“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.”
00:12 — Newlyweds speeding on a curvy mountain road? What could go wrong?
00:23 — There go the brakes!
00:31 — That sharp turn will look familiar to anyone who has ever seen the Duke boys outrun old Roscoe.
00:36 — It’s true what they say. Right before you die, you hear the opening of a bad 80s song.
00:50 — I’ve gotten worst cuts from bumping my head on a low doorway.
00:57 — Dude, did you just leave your wife behind in the car?
00:59– This is Winger. Kip Winger got his start as a backup musician and was a member of Alice Cooper for two years. Until Nirvana changed the face of music, Winger was responsible for some of the most generic hits of the 1980s.
01:21 — How long until we get a shot of the man sitting alone on that same swing?
01:32 — “Look, I’m spinning around with my guitar! Just like we did in practice!”
01:50 — “I remember how much we loved this wall.”
01:59 — It took 37 seconds to go from swinging together to swinging alone.
02:08 — Nobody came to the wedding but she’s going to go ahead and throw the bouquet anyway.
02:20 — It might be easier for the first responders to do their job if Winger would get out of the way.
02:46 — GUITAR!
03:07 — “My wife’s dead. Time to learn how to play an instrument!”
03:15 — Watch out, he’s driving again.
03:22 — Did he ever figure out why his brakes out went out in the first place? This might be a case for Jim Rockford.
03:36 — They still haven’t put out the fire? Is this what my tax dollars are paying for?
03:38 — I would be pissed off too. Put out the damn fire!
03:58 — That dude cannot drive.
04:12 — How does he keep doing this shit without getting a scratch on him?
04:27 — “How am I going to get home?”
To call Winger a “hair metal” band is probably an insult to hair metal bands but they did have a few hits. They also got on the nerves of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butthead.
Through the Shattered Lens 