This is pure MTV gold, the kind of stuff that DVR-ing VH1 Classic
was made for. It's so sensationally bad that it's hard to tell whether
this is unintentional comedy or intended unintentional comedy, like
"Birdemic."
I could have spent all day picking through the amazing moments, faces and freaks sprinkled all over this clip.
But the prime slice of this pile of '80s cheese is the "UH" moment. It's the exclamation point on a whirlwind sequence in which Hagar - a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, mind you - throws his guitar in the air, runs up the wall, flips, catches the guitar, jumps off the judge's bench and lands his nuts on the back of the security guard's head.
Since you know the song, and you know that the "UH" part is coming, you know something awesome is gonna happen there. What makes it sublime is that you can never remember what it is, and when it happens, it's just flat-out rad - the timing, the landing and the dork's face when he gets reverse tea-bagged.
But there's so much more. Let's go to the highlights.
Sammy bitches out the alien cop: When Hagar leaves the racetrack and hits the road in his black Ferrari he's clearly pissed about something and in a rush. He's in Road Rage mode, weaving in and out of traffic because, well, he can't drive 55. So when this creepy-ass cop finally gets to him, it looks like Hagar actually pulls HIM over. Then he proceeds to get on his ass??!?!! No wonder he ended up in jail. Next time, pay the fine dude.
Curly Mullet Guy: Every one of the dudes in Hagar's band are pretty messed up looking. But, hey, it's the '80s, so they all get a pass. But Curly Mullet Guy has to be singled out, not only for his many psychotic faces, and not only for his sweet hairdo, but also for the fact that he looks like the one bad guy in "Roadhouse" who gets his throat ripped out by Dalton. Maybe it is the same guy, but I'm too lazy to look.
The Judge: He's smoking a cigar, hanging a doll, and chopping the head off his Stogie with a guillotine, which means what exactly? (besides that he's preparing the Stogie to be lit in a courtroom). I personally like how the guy lip syncs his lines and says the word "ass," even though it's bleeped out here. Apparently whoever posted this is kind of a prude.
Classic Mullet Guy: This guy has the best faces of all of Hagar's band members. The one here is just one of several, and I could have gone with any of them as well. This sickly freak has this clip teetering on scary, actually, so let's just move on.
Nerdy Lawyer Guy: Yet another crotch moment when Hagar jumps on the desk and the greasy geek is left to look up at Sammy's junk. All of this phallic stuff could have been a precursor to Hagar taking over-sexed David Lee Roth's place in Van Halen, although Sammy never quite measured up to Diamond Dave in the sleaze department.
Any of these could have landed "I Can't Drive 55" in CDNR's hall of unheralded video excellence. But congratulations to Nut Cop for getting the job done.
You wanna talk about paving the way for women in rock? You
wanna talk about making great tunes and scoring hits without sexing it up, even
though you’re a group of some pretty fine ladies who could have easily done
just that to make it big? You wanna talk about staying power? (songs still get
plucked for movies, songs still get played at sports arenas, band’s still touring)
But, to me, what really makes The Go-Go’s true legends are
the latter years of their wheelhouse era, particularly the track “Head Over
Heels,” off the 1984 album “Talk Show,” and especially the accompanying video.
The girls have obviously settled into being ladies. They’re wearing mom jeans
and sweats. They’re sporting mom ’dos. They got that sultry '80s makeup on.
The crowning moment comes when drummer Gina Schock enters
the pantheon of Great Drummer Video Moments (a la the big Kelly Keagy drum thump
in Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian”) with her big roll right after Charlotte Caffey
tears it up on the piano in the song’s midsection.
So, congratulations, Gina, for helping your band, The Go-Go’s,
become the inaugural entry into Cleveland Does Not Rock’s Most Underrated
Moments in Music Video History.
Yeah, he’s gone from looking like Don Johnson’s ugly brother
to an extra in “The Room.” And, yeah, he hasn’t had a hit in more than a few
decades.
The heyday.
But Eddie Money has some slamming hits, from the smooth “Baby
Hold On,” the pseudo-dance-rock “Two Tickets To Paradise” and the
comeback smashes “Take Me Home Tonight,” “Walk On Water” and, my personal favorite, “I
Wanna Go Back,” which I have on a 45 somewhere in the dark recesses of the
closet of my childhood bedroom … along with that awesome poster of the hot
chick in the catcher’s outfit …uh, I mean, nevermind.
Anyhoo, according to our scientific measurements and
calculations, Mr. Money has an outside shot of one day making it into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame. At least in one of those weird "other" categories, like Early Influence or non-performer, guys who no one
knows or cares about or remembers, in, say, 2033, when Lady Gaga and Mumford & Sons get in.
What the?
Wait a second, make that HAD an outside shot of one day
making it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Because if anyone has seen the
admittedly humorous but preposterously painful and embarrassing GEICO ad starring Eddie, you know what I’m talking about. His voice is
shot. He looks like some kind of rejected Jim Henson puppet. And what the f*ck
is up with his mouth?
If Eddie Money wasn’t a joke before this commercial made it
on the air, he is now.
Yo, Eddie: You oughta go back … and do it all over.
Of all the crimes ever committed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the 2004 induction of one Jackson Browne has to be way way up high on the list.
Not because Browne has never produced good music. He has some decent hits.
- "Running On Empty," despite being a one-trick, overrated Baby Boomer anthem that loses its appeal half-way through.
- "Lawyers In Love," cheeseball pop song with a awesomely horrid video
- "Tender Is The Night," not bad for corny AM radio slop
- "Somebody's Baby," accidental keeper from the "Fast Times" soundtrack. I'd never turn this off.
But overall this guy is just not Hall material. Or maybe he is based on who gets in year after year after year - lame, White Bread, nothing risky or edgy. He just kind of got the nod way after all the other deserving classic rock radio icons got in, floating in with other garbage like the Millennium Falcon hiding from one of those Imperial Cruisers in "Empire Strikes Back."
Five things really, really, piss me off about this guy:
1) His hair. It makes his head look like a penis. Get a freaking haircut man. It's not 1975 anymore. Even when it was 1975 his parted-down-the-middle mop made him look like a douche.
2) He's in, but yet Bryan Adams, who blows him out of the sky, will never even sniff a fart trapped in the Hall's front door. If you forget that Adams was overly pumped up by MTV as some kind of heart-throb, and pretend that he was really in a band like Big Star or something, then you have to admit Adams had some slammer pop gems. "Heaven" or "Tender Is The Night"? Come on.
3) Allegedly, supposedly he abused actress Daryl Hannah. This is an overblown rumor that is probably not true. But where there's smoke, there's fire, and at the very least Jackson was probably a major-league asshole to her.
4) Aping Bruce Springsteen. The Boss' down-home drawl is already kind of embellished, so ripping off a fake accent has to be one of the most ridiculous rips of all-time. Jackson is not an everyman, not a champion of the people, not a genius chronicler of our times and a voice of a generation. He's the guy who made the music that played when Damone porked Jennifer Jason Leigh in "Fast Times." Now that's Hall material.
5) The chorus in "Boulevard." I heard this kind of OK tune on the radio yesterday, and it is the singular reason why I'm writing this. It chugs along pretty fine in the verse and even pre-chorus - Joe Walsh-ish riffs, typical b.s. Browne lyrics and vocals, etc. Then it gets to that part when, inexplicably, a whole chorus of people come in with that "Nobody, nobody!" refrain. Why? How does that fit the song? This kind of lame shoehorning shows what a hack this guy really is, like you wonder if he hasn't had help all along on his good tunes. Screw you, Jackson Browne. Screw you.
911: A Joke; 2013 Rock Hall induction: Not a joke.
Two wrongs were made right by the clueless folks who vote to induct musical acts into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
1) Once the Beastie Boys went in last year, Public Enemy HAD to go in next. Because Public Enemy should have already been in before the Beastie Boys. I'm not saying the Beastie Boys couldn't one day get in, but there's just toomanyotherbands - shit, there's too many other rap acts period - who need to get in before them.
2) Rush should have been in years ago, back when they became eligible in 1998. Wait, did I just type that? Rush has been eligible for 15 FREAKING YEARS. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Before their induction this year, their fans would have killed you if you even suggested they shouldn't be in. Anyone who knows a turd about music history would have said they should be in. And anyone who ever picked up a guitar or bass or played the drums can speak to the wizardry that Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Neil Peart possess.
With these two egregious errors corrected - along with the overdue induction of Heart - we realize it's asking far too much for the Hall to put in the most obvious omission of all - The Replacements. Since they seem to like nice tidy packaging, how about an 80s Brit-pop class led by The Cure and The Smiths? And then, like this year's Donna Summer inclusion, throw in someone else undeserving and random, like, say, Boz Scaggs.
"You Keep Me Hangin' On" came blaring through the airwaves on some bad Saturday night '80s radio show with rain and the smell of 1,000 pig asses hovering all around some patch of nowhere in Lancaster County.
It sounded good. It sounded way too good. I thought it was Exposé, or maybe even Bananarama, which would have explained why it sounded so amazing, but I knew in my gut it wasn't either group. And I couldn't for the life of me remember who did the original.
The Supremes!
Yes, yes, it was The Supremes, and amazingly, unbelievably, outrageously, Kim Wilde, she of the equally awesome "Kids In America," had outdone the legendary Motown group that spawned Diana Freaking Ross, and she did it on their signature song. I'll admit I'm a kid of the '80s, and yeah, the slightly morbid minor-key overload of keyboards slathered all over the song really gets me, but I'm a student of the classics too, and almost always a believer that it was done best the first time.
But not this time. And not when Vanilla Fudge did it (my wife when I pulled the song up on YouTube: "Can you turn that shit off?"), or when Reba McEntire did it.
You might think it's preposterous to even consider comparing a two-hit wonder with an icon of Motown. But give a listen.
Why the Athens, Ga.-bred band’s seventh full-length album is
a dried-up pile of vom on the side of the road and not a breakthrough Grammy Award-winning
classic:
Because “Losing My
Religion” is the only good song on the album; it’s timeless, actually.
Because “Shiny Happy People” is the second-most well-crafted
pop song on the album.
Best album cover ever?
Because on three of the songs there are little or no lyrics,
so therefore little or no thought given to the songs by one Michael Stipe: “Endgame,”
“Low” and “Belong.”
Because the aforementioned songs give weight to the argument
that Stipe was the one who caused R.E.M. to be “Out of Time” with the record
label because he couldn’t come up with any lyrics or vocal melodies to match
the otherwise lush melodies that Berry, Buck and Mills came up with.
Because “Near Wild Heaven,” one of two tracks where the
unable-to-sing Mills was allowed to take or share lead vocal duties, is in the
crucial clean-up spot on the album; there’s a faster, cooler version of "Texarkana" out
there with Stipe on lead vocals that is actually kind of sublime.
What happened to you?
Because “Radio Song,” an experiment on par with Dennis Miller as color commentator on “Monday Night Football,” is the leadoff track,
undoubtedly one of the sources of the eventual departure of Berry (yeah, the
aneurysm, but …); can’t imagine the mega-cool Unibrow King going for this mess
of a marriage of limp chamber pop and watered-down rap; on behalf of white
people everywhere, I apologize to KRS-1.
