 by Tom Hallett
I was yakkin’ with a younger music fan the other day, shootin’ the shit about this an’ that, when the conversation turned to music videos. Where they came from, who made ‘em before the onset of Emptee-vee and VH-None, and what purpose they served.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "Rock & roll is not just music. You're selling an attitude too. Take away the attitude and you're just like anyone else, you're like American rock groups. Of course, maybe there's just too wide a market there for a good attitude...the kids need a sense of adventure, and rock & roll needs to find a way to give it to them." —Malcolm McLaren
SONG OF THE WEEK: “Fight War Not Wars”
—Crass
I told him about
Don Kirshner’s Rock Show, The Midnight Special, American Bandstand, The
Blue Jean Network; all those music-oriented network television programs of the
past. I told him that PR flacks and record companies used the earliest rock
vids to promote their bands, and that they were so rare in the beginning that
the few that made it to the public eye became legendary. And I told him how
we’d scour the airwaves, even reaching out to Canadian television, to
get our video fixes. If we weren’t out raising hell (and who could afford
to more than one night a week back then?) on a Friday or Saturday night, chances
were we’d be gathered ‘round the tube, waiting to see who—and
what—the world of rock ‘n’ roll would bring our way.
Sure, there were rock movies; behemoths like “Woodstock,” freak-outs
like “The Rock And Roll Circus,” “Tommy,” and “Quadrophenia,”
but somehow the act of gathering around the television set to watch rock and
roll made it seem more intimate, more personal. You could almost imagine how
people felt as they became a part of history when Elvis or The Beatles hit the
boards of the Ed Sullivan show. And back then, before the complete homogenization
of America, it was kind of exciting to know that you were watching a live or
video debut from some artist or band you dug the shit out of at almost the exact
same time the rest of rock fans in the country were.
The quality of those early rock videos, however, left something to be desired.
Grainy, cheap film stock, drugged-out producers and artists, and a lack of any
precedent in the genre led to some pretty cheesy vids being shot and sprung
upon the public. One of my favorites, I told the kid, was the now-legendary
wank-fest that was The Rolling Stones’ “It’s Only Rock N’
Roll.” For this impossibly stupid shoot, somebody got the bright idea
to fill up a room with soap suds as the band played. Maybe, in retrospect, it
was somebody’s not-so-subtle way of telling the notoriously doped-up English
cock-rockers to clean up? I dunno, but I do know that it must’ve been
a pretty hilarious sight as the soap refused to stop bubbling up, eventually
covering the entire band (and their electric instruments, which they insisted
on actually playing for the job) with veritable mountains of wet, shiny suds.
Legend has it that the band actually briefly lost Keef in the ensuing hullaballoo,
but once some gigantic fans were employed to blow out the room he was found
standing in place, his guitar slung low and a look of pure bliss on his craggy
face.
 Whether
it’s true or not, stories like that enhanced the lure of the rock video
for fans, and in the earliest days of MTV, we were once again treated to some
truly horrific/great rock video action. Who could forget the dark dread of Golden
Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” or the super-schlock plots of Michael
Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” vids? Or
the loopy insanity of Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance” and
Men At Work’s “Down Under”? Yes, kids, rock video brought
the world of rock ‘n’ roll home to us in living color, and though
most of it truly sucked, there were moments of creative brilliance and true
rock ‘n’ roll rebellion (anybody who was there will never forget
the moment that kid in Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take
It” video spits out the line, “I wanna ROCK!” and, with one
deft slice of his arm, twangs his guitar and blows his big-mouthed old man out
the window of his bedroom) that ultimately made it all worthwhile.
Nowadays, of course, music fans are, for the most part, forced to endure endless
streams of sleaze, greed, and violence in our videos—which is really no
surprise, considering those are the qualities a good number of people seem to
espouse in modern society. Gone are the free-form, adventurous days when some
idiot would pour 17 gallons of dish soap into a bubble machine and bury the
Rolling Stones. Now the shadowy characters of Rockwell’s “Somebody’s
Watching Me,” Men At Work’s “Who Can It Be Now,” and
Iron Maiden’s “Number Of The Beast” are no longer mere figments
of some coke-head music video producer’s imagination. Now they’re
real, and no longer amusing. So where does a discerning music fan get their
vid-fix, outside of Canadian television?
Well, as the mind-boggling proliferation of reality-televison programs in recent
times shows, people today don’t want to immerse themselves in fantasy
videos anymore. They’re so terrified and threatened by what’s going
on around them, that they want to see the REAL DEAL, the raw, unedited footage,
the low-down and the show-down. They want to watch college kids slurp down bull’s
testicles and cockroaches for a shot at a little cash. They want to see real
live car crashes and Saturday night arrests and cheaters caught in action and
stupid people pissing off dangerous animals and undercover narcs in live action
busts and race car drivers biting it live and, of course, rock and roll bands
playing on a stage, no props, no smoke and mirrors, no video concepts; just
the unexpurgated, no-bullshit, dyed-in-the-wool REAL DEAL.
Which is all my long-winded and clumsy way of saying that I’m fixin’
to start reviewing DVDs in this column, and that most of ‘em are going
to be live shows captured on tape. Once in awhile I’ll get my hands on
a collection of honest, from-the-heart rock videos (a pal taped me a kick-ass
collection of all of Neil Young’s videos—some of them seen only
a handful of times ever—awhile back, and that’d be worth a spin),
and we’ll check ‘em out here in the ‘Dial, but for the most
part, we’ll be checking out bands I like or am curious about that have
released specific live footage recently. In future columns, we’ll be looking
at such disparate artists as The Supersuckers, NRBQ, The Stooges, and Devo,
all courtesy of my pals at Music Video Distributors, and all available or soon
to be available to you in stores or by mail.
Tune in next week for the first in a series of DVD reviews, when we’ll
look at “Bukowski At Bellevue,” a one-hour video of the poet’s
poet, Charles Bukowski, as he entertained students at Washington state’s
Bellevue College in 1970. More on that later. In the meantime, I’m outta
room here, so until we meet again—make yer own damn news. ||
If you have local music news/gigs/CDs you’d like to see mentioned
in this column, or you’d just like to complain that I neglected what you
consider to be the genius of The Monkees’ music video career in the above
rant, send replies to: (temporary e-mail) jamescrouch_1@juno.com.
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