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Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with unedited recordings of old media. I think I mentioned in a previous staff pick that I read a book about John Peel that had me listening to recordings of his old shows (thankfully there are dozens, if not hundreds, that are easy to find on YouTube), and somehow or another I’ve also gotten into watching old episodes of Headbanger’s Ball. There used to be a ton of these on YouTube, but it looks like at some point most of them were scrubbed from the site. Anyone know where I can watch more episodes?
Last night, rather than doing anything worthwhile, I watched this entire two-hour episode from 1988. This episode is unique because it doesn’t feature a host. Instead, the space normally devoted to Riki Rachtman’s patter is turned over entirely to excerpts from an interview with Axl and Slash from Guns N Roses (Axl is identified as “W. Axl Rose…” I didn’t remember that being a thing). I think the interview is pretty interesting. It’s very candid, and the band talks openly about doing drugs and other things that would have been racy for national TV in the late 80s. Besides the bad boy content you’d expect, they also go into detail about their songwriting process, which is cool to hear. But mostly the interview is kind of cringe, which is honestly refreshingin an age where most everything you see online is very self-aware and polished.
The videos they play on this episode are kind of what you’d expect from 1988… a lot of big hair and power ballads. Poison kicks things off with “Fallen Angel,” a song I hadn’t thought about in decades, but I still remembered every lyric. It’s honestly pretty good as far as Poison songs go, and when you compare it to the other videos in the episode, it’s clear how much Poison had going for them. The video has strong production values (even though it looks like they shot it on the same soundstage as their other videos from the period), and all the band’s members are animated and charismatic. Other artists clearly were not so well-suited to the video age. This episode features the King Diamond track “Welcome Home” (GRANDMAAAAAAA!), but it’s funny how whenever King Diamond himself shows up in the video, he’s out of focus or bathed in special effects. The poofily coiffed band members are rocking out in full view, but it’s almost like they’re trying to hide King Diamond from the camera. He really looks like a relic from a much earlier era of rock. Even a band like Damien, who is like 90% there, just really falls short of the mark. They have a cool set for their miming footage (it looks like the warehouse rehearsal space in Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” video) and the “plot” part of the video is well-shot (if kind of difficult to follow), but the band just doesn’t have the looks and charisma of a Poison or Guns N Roses.
Other fails are even more pronounced. The Scorpions’ “I Believe in Love” attempts to carve out some kind of niche for geopolitically aware mom rock, but the “Winds of Change” lightning didn’t strike twice. I can’t help but feel bad for all the Russians going to their concert… wouldn’t they rather be watching G’n’R? The Vinnie Vincent Invasion video (a horror movie tie-in a la Dokken’s “Dream Warriors”) isn’t as hilariously try-hard as the one for their song “Boyz Are Gonna Rock,” but there’s something smarmy and obnoxious about VV on camera that instantly tanks his videos. Plus, the director clearly wants to give the pretty-boy singer all the attention, but Vinnie’s name is the one on the checks, resulting in a weird power struggle running through the video. I was unfamiliar with the band Femme Fatale, but their soundstage-shot video is so painfully generic it’s not surprising I don’t remember them. Another band I’d never heard of, Masi, also leans heavily on cliche, but they mix it with incongruously gritty social realist footage and film school cleverness in a way that comes off as clunky and weird. Plus, the band has this mocking tone to their performances that reads as smug. You have to sell the audience the illusion that you care. That’s why Def Leppard’s video is all choppin’ broccoli faces.
A classic part of the Headbanger’s Ball / 120 Minutes experience is staying awake until the end of the episode in case they throw a bone to the real rockers. This episode features a video for “Ace of Spades,” and it’s so fucking cool. Even though Motorhead’s promo clip is from a totally different time and place than the prime hair-era clips, the band is so fucking sick and timelessly cool that they easily outclass everyone else. The very last clip on the episode is “Nursing Home Blues” from D.R.I., which is pretty sick in principle. The song is from Dealing with It, but the video’s footage is from the Crossover tour. It’s cool that it looks like a legit hardcore show, but in that kind of environment you can’t achieve the slickness you get from shooting Poison on a dedicated soundstage. There’s this one ridiculous part of the video during the guitar solo… they must not have gotten any good footage of the guitarist rocking out (it looks like maybe the camera person is stuck behind them), so the camera just hangs for this interminably long shot of the drummer… during the climactic, flashy guitar solo. Womp, Womp.
The commercials are also a trip. This broadcast was from Texas, but the local personalities populating the local commercials are very similar to the ones I would see on my local station in eastern Virginia. More often than not, these local spots are laugh-out-loud hilarious, as they should be. I was amazed how clunky some of the national spots were, though. The ads for VHS tapes of recently released movies were pretty rough, and while the Sports Illustrated ad that airs several times has strong production values, its premise is extremely hokey, and by the second time you’ve seen it, it’s worn well past thin. A speaking of seeing ads too much, the ads for Redken hair products were driving me nuts by the end of this two-hour video. And to think I used to sit in front of MTV for days on end, watching the same ads (and videos… fuck you forever, “Black Hole Sun”) over and over and over and over…
I bet you weren’t expecting a detailed critique of a Headbanger’s Ball episode from 1988 in this week’s newsletter, but that’s where my head is at. I’ll try to get back to some killer punk rock next week.