Hello. I’m Gavin Edwards, the public speaker and the New York Times-bestselling author of The Tao of Bill Murray, the ’Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy series, and Kindness and Wonder: Why Mister Rogers Matters Now More Than Ever. If you’re interested in hiring me, click here for more information.
As promised a couple of months ago, I’ve added my 1997 Q&A with Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler to the archives; you can read it here.
This interview was the first installment in the “Rites of Passage” column found on the back page of Details; we both had a lot of fun with it. Tyler called a few minutes before our scheduled time, when I was away from my phone; he sang “Happy Birthday” into my answering machine, cackled, and hung up. (He called back five minutes later.)
The Nationale-Nederlanden building, designed by Frank Gehry and built in 1996, is also known as the Dancing House, the Drunk House, or Fred and Ginger.
Sure, I know what you’re thinking: Europe had another hit? In fact, they had three others, including 1987’s “Carrie,” which apparently went all the way to #3. This relatively anemic followup marked their last appearance in the American top 40, although they were still getting a promotional push from somebody. Including the video on this year-end roundup was MTV’s way of saying they expected success from Europe in the years to come, and this wouldn’t be, you know, their final countdown.
We open on the black-and-white image of a castle, with the wind howling and clouds blowing by. Then we cut to a line of five men, all with impressive manes of curly golden hair. They’re singing “keep on walking on that road and I’ll follow,” and it sure looks like Robert Plant’s illegitimate children that he sired during the 1968 Zeppelin tour of Scandinavia got together to form a harmony group.
More harmonizing on lyrics like “if a mirror should break / it’s easy to take,” plus the lead singer getting some close-ups. Then in unison, the band pumps their fists while leaning to their right, as if they’ve been doing a lot of aerobics classes together. As they lurch back left, here’s a big pyrotechnic explosion in the background, and we switch to color.
The music pumps up to big synth-dominated pop-metal while the camera wheels around to show them playing outside the castle. Leather jackets, amplifiers, smoke machines: it’s a smorgasbord of “rock” signifiers!
Cut to inside the castle: maybe the night got too cold for the band. That’s odd; I thought they came from the land of the ice and snow. The lead singer has jammed his hands into his pockets, which is an unusual posture for a vocalist. The inside of the castle looks a lot like the setting for the “Total Eclipse of the Heart” video, only without the spooky glowing schoolboys. There are lots of cobwebs, though.
Quick flash of a skinny person of ambiguous gender, who appears to have been painted bronze. (Freeze-framing reveals that it’s a woman with short-cropped hair in a tank-top and that the color is probably because of the light projected on her.) We’ll be seeing more of her later, I’m sure.
Back outside, with the smoke machine turned up to “puree,” the lead singer–hang on, let me look up his name. Joey Tempest! How excellent is that? Isn’t that totally a 1961 Broadway version of a rock-star name? Okay, “Joey Tempest” is clenching his fists overdramatically and I understand why the director had him put his hands in his pockets.
Back to the chorus: the director takes color footage of a long tracking shot down a long hallway in the castle, with the camera careening from side to side, and superimposes the band members over it in black and white, one at a time. Not a bad visual gimmick, but the dude who’s bare-chested except for the leather jacket really needs to put a shirt on. Joey Tempest clenches his fists, points his fingers at the camera like guns, and does a Bob Fosse move that suggests he’s about to bust out some jazz hands. He’s not as over-the-top as Billy Squier or Cy Curnin (of the Fixx), but he’s definitely bucking for a place in the Over-Handsy Lead Singer Hall of Fame.
More pyro, more hero shots of the band, backlit by white shafts of light from the windows behind them. A quick glimpse of Gender-Ambiguous Girl, peering over a ledge, wondering if it’s safe to come out when the synthesizer hook is so mighty. (This song, by the way, is utterly generic Euro-metal cheese, but it is reasonably catchy, and the band’s insane exuberance helps sell it.) Then a short guitar solo, and then somebody turns on the wind machine! More specifically, somebody turns on the wind machine in front of a huge pile of scrap paper, because suddenly debris is flying everywhere! And yet, Joey Tempest heroically sings on.
We hit the chorus one more time, and this time Tempest sings from the castle’s turret. Clearly somebody said, “hey, you’ve rented a castle with a turret, might as well use it.” Meanwhile, Gender-Ambiguous Girl’s hand snakes across a wall of flaking paint. Maybe she’s suffering from lead poisoning and has spent her entire life in the dark recesses of this castle, only emerging when Sweden’s fourth-most-popular-ever recording act comes to shoot a video?
There’s a longish, proficient, but not very good guitar solo: deedle-deedle-dee. The director rotates through his settings, the band lurches around, the guitarist plays as he leans forward and walks down a hallway. When it finishes, Joey Tempest regains control of the situation by rolling his fingers to invite you to come towards him. Is there a technical term for this? Finger cascade? He holds up his hands with all fingers up, and then brings down his pinkies, his ring fingers, his middle fingers, etc., only quickly. He is now officially a member of the OHLSHOF.
Inside the castle, the band gets in a tight formation and walks around together, like they’re the Jets or the Scooby Gang. Gender-Ambiguous Girl is walking down the hall, and is being filmed in a way to emphasize her breasts, making her gender substantially less ambiguous. I can’t figure out if they’ve painted her or smeared mud on her or if she just dropped by on her way to filming a fetish video for extra-jaded Swedes.
We close with Tempest giving his all: thrusting his hips and flailing his arms around. And of course, another explosion. Actually, it looks like the same explosion we started the video with–it’s a sad turn of events when the record label restricts a metal band’s pyro budget. We are left to consider whether the band coming down against superstition is a reflection of their rational Swedish upbringing.
“Superstitious” hit #31 on the Billboard charts. You can watch it here.
I have another “Icon” interview in the new issue of Maxim (the October issue, with Audrina Patridge of The Hills on the cover): this time it’s with Woody Harrelson, currently starring in Zombieland.
We met at a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles, so naturally, I had a cheeseburger before I showed up. Harrelson ordered a blended vegetable juice and a plate of mixed vegetable hash; halfway through his meal, he realized he had ordered the same thing twice, just in liquid and solid form. He gestured at his food and said “Doesn’t it seem a little bit redundant?”
Many musicians have a career arc that takes them through various radio formats: country to top-40 and back to country, for example. One of the most common paths, taken by artists such as Rod Stewart, is classic rock to top-40 to adult-contemporary. Richard Marx following that route isn’t unusual–what makes his career remarkable is that he did it in the space of a single album.
Marx started his career writing songs for the likes of Kenny Rogers and Chicago, and singing backup for Lionel Richie. But when his debut album (the creatively titled Richard Marx) came out in 1987, its success was fueled by AOR playing “Don’t Mean Nothing”–the format snarfed up Marx as a palatable new performer in the mode of Jackson Browne or the Eagles. A year later, AC programmers were putting Marx in heavy rotation, while their rock-radio counterparts were trying to forget they had ever championed him.
On to the video, I suppose: Richard Marx sits at a bar, surrounded by various older working-class men: guys who work on an assembly line, or at the docks. Some are wearing old-fashioned hats with brims. Marx is not, of course: he wouldn’t want to inhibit his poodle hair, which has achieved an impressive volume, just shy of heavy-metal singer proportions.
Cut to Marx walking down a cold city street; it looks like the lower East Side of New York City. Trash is falling from the sky and a garbage can is on fire behind him. It looks like an alternate-universe version of Sid and Nancy. Or maybe one of Rudy Giuliani’s campaign ads (his first mayoral run was 1989). I lived in NYC for twenty years, and I never saw a garbage can on fire (although I did sometimes see the aftermath: a metal can that had an odd bulge at the bottom).
Back to the bar, where Marx is nursing a drink and rubbing his brow. In the background, a pool game is in progress and we can see a neon sign reading ILLIAN’ RED. Yes, that’s “Killian’s Red,” but with the K and the S taped out, to comply with MTV’s practices and standards. It’s very distracting. This is, incidentally, the third video on this countdown with significant time spent in a bar, after Glenn Frey’s “True Love” and Terence Trent D’Arby’s “Sign Your Name.” The camera moves in on Marx as he stares at the pool game. As the guy playing pool hits the ball, we switch from color to sepia-toned black-and-white. Flashback!
In the flashback, Marx is wearing a black tanktop and playing pool by himself. His love interest walks in the door: a brunette wearing a man’s shirt. We can tell she’s the love interest because of the way Marx stares at her. She’s accompanied by a douchebag; we can tell he’s a douchebag because the way he rubs the bartender on the head and his habit of pulling on his girl’s shirt. Oh, and his hat.
In color, Marx leans against a chain-link fence at night, wearing a leather jacket, singing the chorus: “Time was all we had until the day we said goodbye”? Yeesh. This seems like a good time to mention that this is a terrible song: it’s a ballad so all-encompassing in its mediocrity that it’s passed the Bland Event Horizon beyond which no listener can escape. I actually find it hard to focus on it. I never thought any song could make me miss Steve Winwood, but at least when he sang dreck like this, he had some vocal presence and sold whatever piece of hackwork was on the menu. Marx’s voice is so thin, he just sounds overwhelmed by the synths.
Unfortunately, Marx keeps singing (“rising in the afternoon / making love to you under the moon, oh-whoa-oh”), bobbing his head and rubbing his ass against that chain-link fence, like he’s a cat in heat. In the flashback, the love interest grows bored with the douchebag and brings a beer over to Marx. She sits down at a booth, and twirls her hair in her fingers, the international symbol for “take me now” (except in some parts of Europe, where it means “what brand of conditioner do you prefer?”).
Back to the present day. While a bad sax solo plays, Marx watches two Alka-Seltzer drop into a glass of water. In the video’s one moment of artistry, we fade to a flashback scene where Marx and the love interest are driving in tight circles in a dirt lot near some oil derricks: their dusty tracks match the rim of the Alka-Seltzer glass. I’m glad whatever film-school graduate toiled on this clip had something he could put on his highlight reel. The love interest puts her hands over Marx’s eyes while he drives: customarily a bad idea, but I’d like to stop watching this video too, so it seems sensible enough.
“Endless Summer Nights” hit #2 on the Billboard pop charts. You can watch the video here.
Nobody ever accused Sammy Hagar of being a genius. But I would have guessed that he passed driver’s ed.
Unfortunately, the opening line of “I Can’t Drive 55” is as follows:
One foot on the brake and and one on the gas
Not only can you not drive 55 with that technique, you can’t drive 5. If Hagar actually puts both feet on the pedals like that, he’ll just sit in his driveway, revving the engine, making a lot of noise, and burning out his transmission. (Oooh, a metaphor for his career!)
MTV replays their promo for “Michael Jackson Sunday”; as you might expect, it plays very differently now than it did a few months ago. “He’s been bad,” says the MTV Voiceover Guy. (A clip from “Bad” plays.) “He’s been smooth.” (A “Smooth Criminal” clip.) “Now he takes his own image head-on!” They show excerpts from the “animated fantasy” “Leave Me Alone.” In 1988, the video seemed supremely goofy, and not just because Jackson was flying a toy airplane–the song’s title was contradicted by the way Jackson had spent the previous couple of years sparing no expense to put himself in the public eye, in his crusade to sell a hundred million copies of Bad (he fell short, of course). Now it’s just sad–turns out the song was an unheeded cry for help.
Seeing the leather-and-studs outfit of “Bad” and the Cotton Club look of “Smooth Criminal,” I’m reminded that whenever Michael Jackson wore civilian clothes, it looked unnatural. He appeared in public so often in spangles; when I saw him in a striped T-shirt on the recent cover of GQ, it seemed like a costume. I wonder what he wore when he was just hanging around watching TV at Neverland. I have a hard time imagining him in sweatpants.
“A serial killer has New York City by the throat.” Oh, joy–once again, it’s the ad for The January Man. The seventh time around, I’m noticing how the big names of KEVIN KLINE and SUSAN SARANDON and so forth are treated: white capital letters on a black background, but steadily shrinking into the background. It gives some movement to what would otherwise be a pretty static montage.
Next, a repeat of the promo for the WWF’s Royal Rumble. I love how the ref is wearing a bow tie, as if that’ll give pro wrestling a little more class.
Local spot: another “Season’s Greetings” from UA-Columbia. Lots of employees waving at the camera from their cubicles, presumably full of holiday cheer.
We end with an animated bumper. It’s another gorgeous piece of work from the MTV promo department–the animation is designed to look like paper dolls, possibly inspired by Indonesian shadow puppetry. A man on stilts walks through the ocean, while birds fly overhead and a sea serpent undulates. A shark grabs one of his stilts, and then a giant hand lifts him up from above: the hand belongs to a woman in her bathtub, looking quizzically at what she’s just fished out of the water. She splashes water at us, which turns into the MTV logo.
Kevin Seal returns and does a couple of cartwheels, to a smattering of applause from the crew. He proceeds to hype the “Big Bang” celebration: “We’ll be counting down the minutes, you know, grooving with the multitudes.” He lists the bands that will be playing (Robert Plant, Bobby Brown, Poison, Cameo, etc.) and concludes, “It’s our Big Bang ’89 party and you can see it on your TV in case you don’t have a party to go to yourself.”
Another picture from my trip to Australia last month (taken while I was wandering around Melbourne, trying to shake off my jet lag so that I would be able to put together complete sentences when it was time to interview Pink):
