(New to the countdown? Catch up here.)

We open with a hand pressed against a television set: somebody’s jacking into the matrix, or maybe getting in touch with poltergeists. Unfortunately, the world we’re entering is a Kenny Loggins video shoot, and we’re immediately assaulted by an elite squadron of pulsing synthesizers.

Kenny Loggins was one of the most generic stars of the video era. He was good-looking enough to get screen time on MTV (although he had that unfortunate combination of dark beard and bleached mullet), and he just kept churning out hit singles (most of the biggest ones on movie soundtracks), but if his personality was a liquid that he kept in a container and measured in ounces, he wouldn’t have to worry about it being confiscated by TSA screeners. Somewhere, former partner Jim Messina was gnashing his teeth and saying “Why not me?”

“Nobody’s Fool” was Loggins’ seventeenth (and final) visit to the top 40 charts. The movies he was working for had abruptly declined: whereas Loggins had hit #1 with the title track of Footloose four years earlier, and #2 with “Danger Zone” for Top Gun just two years previously, his 1987 single (“Meet Me Half Way”) was for Sylvester Stallone’s arm-wrestling bomb Over the Top, and “Nobody’s Fool” was for the godawful Caddyshack II.

Caddyshack II was such a flop that this clip got reedited. When it was first released in the summer of 1988, the “Nobody’s Fool” video was stuffed full of allegedly wacky clips from the movie (Dan Aykroyd, gopher puppets, etc.) and a deceptive amount of Chevy Chase (he had a cameo in the movie). But for this year-end appearance, the movie footage has been stripped out and the song is now attributed to the Loggins album Back to Avalon. The result is a video with very little going on: all this footage was originally meant to be interstitial, to give Loggins some face time between shots of Jackie Mason falling into a swimming pool.

Loggins and his band perform on what is probably a golf course, but just looks like a grassy patch, at night, with lots and lots of swiveling lights. We swing in for a closeup of Loggins at the microphone, and then cut to an over-the-shoulder shot of somebody (the director?) watching on a monitor, with other technicians huddled around him.

Short clips of Loggins are intercut with cameramen moving a big rig for a tracking shot and a crane swinging around. It’s hard to pinpoint, but I think 1988 is the year that videos started including this sort of self-referential “how the video was made” footage. There had been backstage camera crews before, and parodies of other MTV clips, but I don’t remember seeing gaffers and teamsters on-screen before 1988, when suddenly including them was deemed “post-modern” and hence cool. (The more notable video of 1988 to be filmed in that style was Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” which we’ll be seeing towards the very top of this countdown.)

Quick cuts: Loggins in the flashing lights, a guitar tech polishing an instrument, Loggins in the parking lot getting out of his car, wearing sunglasses and a plain white t-shirt. At the microphone, Loggins has removed the glasses but added a leather jacket and a white acoustic guitar. He is spectacularly backlit to give his hair extra volume, and looks pretty damn good at forty years old.

The various members of Loggins’ backing band get a few seconds of screen time each, and we see lots of grips scurrying about as the spotlights move in synchronized patterns. There’s a quick scene of Loggins at the craft-services table: we learn that his snack of choice is whole wheat bread, covered with a layer of peanut butter, and then sprinkled with M&Ms.

We hit the chorus: “I’m going all the way / Sooner or later, you gotta love somebody.” The song’s lyrics are chockablock with clichés, notable only for their inclusion of the phrase “back to the shack,” showing how far Loggins would go to please the film’s producers. Even the title of the song had been used recently: Cinderella had a #13 hit the previous year with their own “Nobody’s Fool.” But you know what? The chorus is catchy as hell.

A Steadicam operator wearing shorts circles around Loggins; we then see the resulting shot. A sepia-toned day-for-night clip shows Loggins driving a golf ball, with reasonable form. We continue in this vein: generic rock-band footage spliced together with scenes of the crew and a few glimpses of Loggins off the set. In one of them, he sits in a director’s chair, reading a magazine, while two young women pose for a photo with him. I’m assuming they’re affiliated with that magazine, because otherwise, he’s being a real dick.

Just when I thought we were almost done, we get a guitar solo. The guitarist is the best-dressed man in this video, sporting a long leather duster. Loggins strikes heroic poses, while the two women from the magazine play darts. We head for the fade-out with Loggins and his band in backlit silhouette, and the director cranking up the rented smoke machine.

“Nobody’s Fool” hit #8 on the Billboard singles charts. I couldn’t find the countdown version of the video online, but if you want to see the Caddyshack II version, it’s here.

posted 5 February 2009 in 1988 and tagged Kenny Loggins, postmodernism. 5 comments