How many other members of my generation spend the occasional evening sitting at the PC, looking for long forgotten music videos?

Remember the days before MTV ... or at least before MTV was widely available? (Heck, maybe MTV was just our alt-realty version of VNM anyway.)

Remember Friday Night Videos and Night Tracks? Man. Remember when the whole music video concept was novel, exciting and irresistible?

I have been surprised to realize that a great many of the songs and videos I remember so fondly all date back to the same year: 1983.

David Bowie was always hit or miss with me. For every song he released that I loved there would be another I disliked. I remember the first time I saw the video for Bowie's '83 hit called Modern Love and totally flipping out over it. What a great pop song. I couldn't get it out of my head. Of course, a big part of the reason the song was so good was that awesome little guitar hook at the beginning, played by the then unknown Stevie Ray Vaughn.

In 1983 I was convinced that the heaviest song anyone would ever record was Rock Of Ages by Def Leppard. This was before I got "retro" and discovered Black Sabbath. In '83, Def Leppard was like an atom bomb. Even the image of skinny-ass Joe Elliott waving a seven-foot cardboard sword wasn't enough to ruin this video:

'83 also saw the unthinkable happen: Kiss released Lick It Up and did a video with no makeup. That was a real shock. One reason it was shocking was that without their makeup Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley looked like a couple of old farts. And that was twenty-six years ago, dude. Simmons and Stanley were easy to pick out in the Lick It Up clip, and so was drummer Eric Carr. But I remember being confused the first time I saw the video, wondering who the ugly chick in the band was. Turned out that "ugly chick" was Vinnie Vincent, the guitarist who'd replaced Ace Frehley. Vinnie was one of seventy-four or seventy-six guitarists that Kiss went through in the '80's and '90's.

The video had a post-apocalyptic Mad Max kind of vibe and took place in a bleak future where a bomb or something had wiped out everything except hot chicks and elderly rock stars. Here the band parties into the night, unaware that Keith Richards is waiting in the darkness, ready to strike when they least expect it and take away their women and MRE's:

'83 was also a big year for Boy George, and his band Culture Club had a huge hit with Karma Chameleon. Of course, I was a 15 year old boy in '83 and I was into heavy metal and The A Team. Boy George represented everything I was steadfast against. He looked like Brooke Shields on steroids, and his proudly androgynous image was naturally an affront to any teenage boy's self image. We were doing all we could do to follow the natural path, dude, and become MEN. MEN who would some day have a chance at engaging in actual conversations with WOMEN. And maybe we'd have these conversations in a car, cars we would be driving as we were accompanied on actual DATES by a WOMEN. And, if all went well, the end result of the mysterious DATE process was that somehow the MAN was going to manage to touch the BREAST of the WOMAN. The goal was to touch the BREAST in a way that was mutually agreeable to the MAN and the WOMAN ...but any awkward, fumbling contact that involved the hand of the MAN and the BREAST of the WOMAN was technically acceptable. Once that was done, the MAN could make up any fool thing he wanted to say about the rest of the night, nobody was going to believe him anyway. So with this level of planning and this degree of uncertainty already having profound effects on our desperate young lives, the last thing we needed was happy Mr. Androgyny and his little band dancing their way through the havoc of our daily existence:

Honestly, accusing another guy of being a Culture Club fan in '83 was a pretty serious charge. Those Culture Club albums were sold with gay-germs right on the disc itself. If you took it out and played it, you'd have Boy George's very own gay-germs all over you before you got the record on the turntable! By the time side A was finished, you'd not only be a Culture Club fan, you'd also be Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds:

Of course, it's been 26 years and I'm ashamed to say that the 15 year old version of myself would be horrified to see how I now respond when Karma Chameleon comes on the radio. Like every other putz my age, I bop along a bit, sing along with the words I remember, and remark about how cool it is when they play the old songs I remember from my school days. Boy George just doesn't freak me out anymore. I don't even know if he's actually gay or not. I realized that my grasp on "gay culture" was tenuous at best when the gays addopted Tammy Faye Bakker as an icon d'jour.

Then there was Styx and Mr. Roboto, a conceptual piece that didn't make sense on it's own, in the abbreviated four-minute version they showed on TV.

No, the video to Mr. Roboto told only part of the story. But if you bought the album, you'd get to hear the whole story, right?

Well, at least you'd get the lyrics sheet, and you'd get to find out that Denis DeYoung wasn't actually singing "My Heart Is Human / My Blood Is Boiling / My Brain Like A Yam!" ... No, the last part of that famous line was actually "My Brain IBM!, which didn't make much sense either. But if you put the whole story together you'd realize that it involved some shocking, nefarious elements, such as:

• government censorship of our music!


• Rock stars held prisoner of the state!


• A bad guy named Dr. Righteous!


• Japanese Robots that facilitate the escape of our hero, a rockstar named Kilroy!


• No, really, his name was supposed to be Kilroy. Stop laughing.

And a whole bunch of other shit that wasn't enough to make you listen to this whole lame album all the way through more than a time or two.

So like the rest of us you probably recorded the two or three good tracks to a cassette and put Mr. Roboto back under house arrest at the bottom of the LP pile.

Here's a total change of gears; for whatever reason while I was looking for those videos I remembered another song from '93 rather than '83. I always loved Out There by Dinosaur, Jr. What a kick-ass song. It was disappointing to find out that the original music video apparently doesn't reside on YouTube. But I did find a live performance from last summer, and apparently the band can still sounds pretty good. I bet they're worth checking out live. This is really good, sloppy, grungy rock in the Neil Young And Crazy Horse tradition. Turn this one up loud enough to piss off the neighbors:

Labels: Music, You Tube