Greetings, Videots!

Apologies for the long delay between transmissions — we fell into a black hole in the 1980th Dimension and wound up in the VEVO galaxy, where our ship was captured by the nefarious Darth Doug Morris. We thought we were done for, but once he started shouting about illegal downloading and second quarter streaming royalty rates, we hit the hyperspace thrust rockets and got the hell out of there.

It was a scary ordeal, but it wasn’t all bad: as our ship pulled away from Darth Morris’ tractor beam and the stars did that neat spots-to-lines thing like with the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, we discovered a dusty VHS cassette in the hold. It was covered with a sticky layer of old Aqua Net, but we eventually got it to play — and we’re awfully glad we did, because it contained the ridiculous video for the 1985 Klymaxx single “Meeting the Ladies Room.”

The second hit (and title track) from the R&B sextet’s fourth album, “Meeting in the Ladies Room” is all kinds of ’80s; despite the fact that Klymaxx was an actual band whose members all played actual instruments, the entire song sounds battery-powered, right down to Bernadette Cooper’s robotic delivery on the verses (on the other hand, you’ve got to admire her for being able to keep a straight face for lines like “There’s a hunk of a man I done left behind” and “Somebody’s rockin’ my man”). It sounds like something that might have been left off the Footloose soundtrack, but dated production aside, it’s pretty catchy — largely thanks to the insistently catchy chorus, repeated what feels like thousands of times.

The video, though? CAPTAIN VIDEO! say damn. If you think the song is overloaded with ’80s kitsch, dear Videots, you need to see this clip. But first, a few highlights:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, spelling was not Klymaxx’s strong point. Unless CAPTAIN VIDEO! is misunderstanding the song, and it’s really about a meeting in a room owned by someone named Ladie, someone really should have caught this. The ’80s — the decade of the neon typo!

The first of the video’s many tragic fashion displays. Which is your favorite — the spotted half-sweater with fanny pack combo, or the mom-jean-tailored pants and tiny jacket with giant shoulder pads ensemble?

It’s possible that the ruins in the background are the director’s way of commenting on Cooper’s ruined hair, but probably not.

So, if you’ve ever listened to the lyrics to “Meeting in the Ladies Room” — and CAPTAIN VIDEO! doesn’t blame you if you haven’t — you know the song is about a no-nonsense lady who’s trying to enjoy herself at the club, but she keeps getting interference from all these other bitches who keep messing with her man! Well, this is the part of the video where we meet the guy in the equation, but nothing about it makes sense. Why is he popping and locking while seated at what looks like a Bowflex crossed with a Lite Brite? What happened to his hair? And why is he in the ladie’s room, anyway?

You don’t read much about it today, but cocaine blindness was a major problem in the ’80s. Observe.

Yeah, they’re fighting over this guy.

In case you were wondering what Gumby and Pokey were up to in 1985, here’s your answer.

Tragedy abounds. How did this happen, dear Videots? CAPTAIN VIDEO! is certain no one who was in this video remembers enough of the shoot to provide us with a satisfactory answer — we can only be thankful that it’s been preserved for posterity so we can gaze upon it, wipe the tears from our eyes, and promise: Never again.

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For most people, Bad Company was a meat-and-potatoes rock band from the ’70s that made Camaro music for Camaro people–most notably the hoary AOR chestnut “Feel Like Makin’ Love.” The song sums up everything there is to know about Bad Company’s music: As basic as vanilla ice cream, dumber than a Jeff Foxworthy joke, and repititious enough to worm its way into memory so deeply that most of the human race could probably hum a few bars.

What most people don’t realize is that after a brief breakup in the early ’80s, two of the guys from the original lineup went out, got themselves a new lead singer, and sold a big pile of records. They did this the same way nearly every other successful veteran act did at the time–by discarding artistic credibility (which admittedly was never much of a concern for Bad Company) and pandering to listeners of Top 40 radio for whom “rock & roll” meant the aural Velveeta of bands like Bon Jovi.

The high point for Bad Company 2.0 was 1990’s “If You Needed Somebody,” a song so monumentally stupid it makes “The Macarena” look like the Velvet Underground. But in comparison to the rest of the band’s catalogue, it’s a brilliant masterpiece–witness today’s entry, “Shake It Up,” from 1988’s Dangerous Age.

For a lot of bands trying to disguise their age during this period, the solution was to make a video featuring a lot of good-looking high school kids rocking out to the band’s shitty music. These videos tended to get around the age gap by either A) almost completely removing any visual evidence of the band, or B) conjuring up some situation in which said kids would have been caught dead hanging out with said band.

“Shake It Up” takes the latter course. The “story” begins with the nerd you see pictured above, holed up in what we can probably assume to be his parents’ basement, doing stuff with various potions. He also happens to have a functioning seismograph, which comes in handy later on.

Meanwhile, it’s the night of the Big School Dance, and the kids are rockin’ out!

There’s punch and everything!

Oh, and you’ll never guess who’s playing the dance. Yep, it’s Bad Company.

This is actually the type of gig Bad Company should have been getting in 1988, instead of fouling the airwaves and selling millions of records, but that’s neither here nor there. CAPTAIN VIDEO!s favorite part of this shot is the string of American flags hung over the stage. By this British band.

Oh, and speaking of the band. CAPTAIN VIDEO! freely admits that his knowledge of Bad Company is fairly limited, but it still came as quite a shock to see that the band’s lead singer in the ’80s was apparently none other than Nick Nolte:

Who knew he could sing? Color me impressed.

Anyway, back at the lab, Nerd makes a startling discovery: Not only is Bad Company’s music terrible, it causes earthquakes!

Like any civic-minded geek, he rushes to the gym, hoping to prevent the band from doing any further damage:

But he may already be too late! Just look at how freely the chaperone is rocking out!

And out in the parking lot, there’s all sorts of hanky-panky going on…

If this video had been filmed in the ’70s, it would have given us irrefutable visual evidence that rock & roll causes teen sex (and earthquakes). But this version of Bad Company’s music had nothing to do with rock.

Meanwhile, this is not what the girls at my high school looked like in 1988. And…oh God…are they hoping for a roll in the hay with crusty old Nick Nolte?

Nick seems to think so. And he’s apparently got room for two back at the Holiday Inn:

Unfortunately for Nick, the force of the band’s suckage has finally created a vortex powerful enough to bring the building tumbling down:

End of dance, end of concert, end of crummy video. And in just a few years, the remaining original members of Bad Company would realize that making terrible new music with Nick Nolte was actually even worse than patching things up with their original lead singer and playing the nostalgia circuit. The band made piles of cash, and the fans got what they’d been asking for all along–happy endings for everyone!

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There were a lot of things CAPTAIN VIDEO! loved about the ’80s, if you hadn’t guessed already. To put together a list of all of them would take forever. But one of CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s very favorite things about the 1980s was the overabundance of interchangeably faceless “rock” bands that clogged the charts. Most of them had one-word names, like “Loverboy” or “Styx”; they tended to hail from Midwestern towns nobody had ever heard of (except for the members of Loverboy, who came from Canada, which is essentially a Midwestern town blown up to continent size); and their looks were as anonymous as their music–most of their fans wouldn’t have been able to pick a single member out of a lineup.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Survivor.

Now, within this subgenre of faceless corporate “rock,” Survivor actually managed to carve out a few distinctions for itself. They were on Scotti Bros. Records, to begin with, meaning that for most of their career, the only other artist that mattered on their label was “Weird Al” Yankovic. They also had big hits with not one, but two themes from Rocky sequels, featuring two different lead singers.

Oh yeah, the singers. Survivor were the first of their ilk to replace a singer with another who sounded exactly like him. The most hardcore Survivor fans (that they must exist troubles CAPTAIN VIDEO! deeply, but exist they must nonetheless) will no doubt dispute this, but really, Dave Bickler and Jimi Jamison might as well be the same person. “Eye of the Tiger”? That’s Bickler. “I Can’t Hold Back”? Jamison. Scary, huh?

“I Can’t Hold Back” was released in 1984, an era in which it was really popular for videos to feature a lot of shots of the band “just hanging out” and being “regular guys.” So here we have Survivor killing an afternoon in the neighborhood music/book store:

Yes, folks, these were rock stars. It was a simpler, more innocent time, was it not?

Anyway, of course the lead singer is “just hanging out” and being a “regular guy” on his own. He’s sort of a troubled loner, I guess. I mean, it isn’t that he’s appreciably more attractive than the rest of these lumps. He does, however, know where to stand in a bookstore.

And…what’s this? She’s into rock & roll!

Jimi sucks in his cheeks and waits for the pheremones to do their job…

Not that she minds. What, you think she put on these heels, jeans, sweater-with-shoulder-pads, and two bottles of Aqua Net for herself? No sirree. She wants it.

She wants it bad!

Meanwhile, the other dorks in the band are doing their best to act supportive:

(CAPTAIN VIDEO! especially likes the guy with the Milhouse glasses and limp wave. You can almost hear him saying “Hey lady!” a la Jerry Lewis. And the fat one looks confused and a little angry.)

But Jimi’s girl isn’t distracted. In fact, she’s so captivated by his sulky-cheeked mojo that she finds herself overcome by a blinding flash of light…

A flash of light that turns her into a “rock” vixen!

It also transports her to–wouldn’t you know it–a terrible Survivor concert. Attendance must be high tonight: she has to walk through at least four rows of people before she can dance like a madwoman directly in front of the stage. Jimi and the guys “rock” accordingly:

(In the 1980s, the more zippers you had on your pants, the bigger a rock star you were. These pants clearly signify Survivor’s place in the 1984 rock pantheon, just below the guys who recorded “Pac-Man Fever.”)

Next thing you know, everyone’s on a train, and everyone’s checking out Jimi’s girl:

But Jimi don’t care–no, he’s calm, cool, and collected, complete with ridiculous outfit from the Mickey Thomas collection!

Silly as the tucked-in tie look is, however, it pales in comparison to the hobo chic being sported by Fatso the Drummer:

Not to mention the poor, dumb bass player, who was somehow convinced that dressing up like a nun didn’t stop being funny after Benny Hill:

And hey–what’s a young Lars Ulrich doing here?

While all this “rock” “wackiness” is going on, Jimi’s stalking his girl toward the back of the train. Ladies, be honest: Riding public transit at night, you know you wouldn’t be able to resist a man with this look on his face:

Of course, it isn’t long before they’re totally making out.

It’s too good to last, though–just as suddenly as we found ourselves at the concert and on the train, we’re back in the bookstore. Perhaps sensing that a restraining order or expensive alimony payments loom in Jimi’s future, the band grabs him and drags him away:

What immediately follows is a scene that anyone who lived in the 1980s watched 10,000 times before, in 10,000 different videos–the guys pull their friend down the street, he continually looks over his shoulder at the girl, he eventually breaks away, etc. He takes off running after her, but she’s gone to the train station (wouldn’t you know it?) and, even though she only had a lead of maybe a few seconds, his tubby ass shows up too late to make the train.

The final shot sums up not only this stupid, disjointed video, but the rest of Survivor’s career:

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There are things each generation must explain to those that follow. Things they must atone for. The Founding Fathers had slavery, for instance. The freewheeling credit spenders of the 1910s and ’20s had the Great Depression. The “Greatest Generation” had the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My generation has Kenny Loggins.

To be fair, it was actually our parents who brought him his first measure of success, as the “Loggins” in “Loggins & Messina.” But they knew what they were doing–L&M’s recorded output, while slight, managed to stay on the sunny side of the line between breezy and banal more often than not. “Danny’s Song”? “House At Pooh Corner”? “Watching the River Run”? Classics.

But then Loggins & Messina broke up, and Loggins proved all too eager to expose himself as the dippy New Age doofus he’d always been at heart. His first few albums were a terrible blend of ponderous mysticism, mush-brained folk, and soft jazz, from the interminably mawkish music to the artwork that seemed to always feature a soft-focus shot of Kenny–all done up in a velour tunic or something similarly lame–striking a ridiculous pose against a backdrop of, say, the universe.

That was bad enough. But then the ’80s dawned, and he discovered two things:

1. He wanted to rock.

2. Synthesizers.

This led to a series of albums, each progressively dumber than its predecessors, on which Loggins managed to pan sacks full of chart gold out of a stream of inane, overproduced drivel masquerading as rock & roll. My generation ate it up–we’re the kids who sent “Footloose” to Number One–and we’ve never had to pay for it. One day, however, we will have to explain the terrifying success of Kenny Loggins to our children. CAPTAIN VIDEO! does not look forward to that day.

CAPTAIN VIDEO! certainly will not show today’s video to his curious tykes. “I’m Free (Heaven Help the Man)” represents three terrible musical artifacts from the 1980s–one, it’s a hit Kenny Loggins song from a motion picture soundtrack; two, the portion of the title within parentheses is longer than the portion without; three, in the video, the singer pretends to be an action hero.

This last annoyance was always ridiculous enough when the singer in question was just a simpering soft-rock balladeer (like Peter Cetera in Chicago’s “Along Comes A Woman” video). But Kenny Loggins has never, in looks or musical essence, given the appearance of someone who would be able to put up a convincing fight against a stiff breeze or a six-year-old girl, let alone a non-quadraplegic adult human being.

And that brings us to the crux of this video’s shittiness: It asks us to accept Kenny Loggins as an escaped convict.

He’s on the run! What did he do to wind up in prison?

Isn’t it obvious? He’s a rebel!

No fence can hold him–especially not when these handy fence-snippers are standard issue for all the inmates!

Will he be able to snip fast enough to get out before George and Stanley find out he’s missing?

In the nick of time, he uses his ninja hippie powers to escape detection!

And…here’s where things get really lame.

Knowing that Kenny Loggins made the least convincing street tough since that time Richie Cunningham wore Fonzie’s jacket on Happy Days, the director had two choices: Ignore it, and try to make everything else as believable as possible, or just bring all the other gangsters in the video down to Kenny’s level.

Guess which option was chosen:

Yes, believe it or not, Poindexter here is the leader of the pack. What kind of town is this? Do the cops even bother carrying weapons? Could the crew keep straight faces while watching the filming of this scene, in which Kenny and Poindexter engage in “macho” posturing that leaves them both seemingly on the verge of tears?

Of course, Kenny’s come back for his girl. She lives with her parents and doesn’t look to be more than sixteen years old. Kenny, on the other hand, probably left home when Lyndon Johnson was President. Here is where the video turns creepy and crappy.

Ma: What did she say, George? What did she say?
Pa: She’s run off with that damn goodfornothin’!

Pa: (thinks to self) He won’t get far. Can’t run too far on that freak vegan diet of his. I’ll just wait at the county line with a bag of granola and flush him out.

Yep. That’s what I’ll do.

Of course, Pa doesn’t need to go to the county line–the cops have the lovebirds cornered on top of a building in a matter of minutes. Kenny stands around and makes a series of stupid faces while the girl screams and sobs. Looks like it’s back to the hoosegow for Kenny, until who should have a change of heart but…

Yes! It’s Poindexter to the rescue!

On his signal, the town’s troubled, misunderstood youth descend upon the cops, who have no idea what to do. Kenny and his child bride escape. The old ladies in the background clasp their hands to their bosoms and swoon.

This video wasn’t the dumbest thing Kenny Loggins did in the ’80s–that honor belongs to either “Meet Me Halfway” or his naked wedding to his enema therapist–but it comes close. Painfully close.

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Today we’ll be looking at one of CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s favorite bands, Jefferson Starship–or Starship, or Jefferson Airplane, or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves these days. The Starship belongs to an elite group in the music world, one consisting of musicians who began their careers with bright promise and seemingly unimpeachable credibility–only to frantically piss it all away as career twilight approached. In Starship’s case, this was accomplished by joining forces with Mickey Thomas, the vocally talented but musically inane Elvin Bishop Band singer. It may seem unfair to pin all of the Starship’s many sins on one person, but in this case, it’s warranted. Within a decade, Thomas’ enervating influence changed the band from a respected (if commercially foundering) relic of the Summer of Love into a vapid, soulless crap factory whose albums were reviled by thinking people everywhere.

The low point, of course, is 1986’s towering masterpiece of pop stupidity, “We Built This City.” CAPTAIN VIDEO! has no interest in dissecting that particular video; we all saw it a million times when it was popular. Today, we’ll be taking a look at a lesser-known entry in the Starship ouevre: “Find Your Way Back,” from 1981’s Modern Times. (Side note: while Modern Times is indeed one of the least creative album titles of the 1980s, the Starship shattered the stupidity barrier with 1984’s Nuclear Furniture. Sometimes it’s best not to get too fancy.) You know the song–all forced drama and phony emotion, dragged along by the feeble pulse of Aynsley Dunbar’s airless drums; lots of awful squawking from Mickey Thomas; keyboards and guitars that sound like neither should. Oh, wait, that describes pretty much every Starship song since 1978, doesn’t it? Maybe some stills from the video will jog your memory:

Glowing instruments!

Hurry up and suck!

The video’s storyline seems to center around some kind of leather-clad alien woman who has had her heart broken by the band (even Grace Slick? Hmm) and carries a glowing white orb with her wherever she goes. These parts of “Find Your Way Back” are no better or worse, really, than any of the other videos from the period that had their budgets converted into convenient white powder form and snorted before a single frame was filmed. It’s low-budget pretending to be high-concept! Hello, alien woman!

Alien woman doesn’t do much and says even less. The only reason we know she’s got a beef with Jefferson Starship is that she tears up a picture of the band and throws it in the air:

And, I mean, most of the Jefferson Airplane’s old fans were probably doing that in 1981. Or at least tearing Mickey Thomas out of the band photo. And speaking of Mickey Thomas, Jesus Christ, would you look at this:

CAPTAIN VIDEO! can’t believe his eyes! What was the director thinking? (There’s no point in asking what Mickey Thomas was thinking.) It seems altogether fair to say that at no point in the history of music video–and this includes the various cameo appearances of Ron Jeremy–has any man ever looked more like he has just wandered off the set of a porno flick. It’s difficult to select the worst part of Thomas’ ensemble, but CAPTAIN VIDEO! is going to go with the striped tie, still tucked into his shirt from that last-minute trip to the bathroom to score a little blow. Mickey Thomas looks like such a tool, he even out-tools the other members of the band. Craig Chaquico, you look like Derek Smalls:

The only thing that would be funnier is if Chaquico were playing a–oh, never mind, he is:

And the only thing funnier than that is Mickey Thomas.

But wait! There’s more! Thomas turns during Paul Kantner’s mercifully brief guitar solo, pumps his fist as if to signify that he is about to rock, and grabs a tambourine. Grace Slick, who has thus far avoided being in the same shot with Mickey, must have been too coked out to notice what was happening. Otherwise, CAPTAIN VIDEO! is certain she would have swung her mike stand around and clubbed Mickey Thomas in his stupid head with it. Then she would have made him eat that tambourine. And then, mercifully, she would have broken up the band once and for all. But no:

At the end of the video, the alien woman–instead of attacking the band with enormous laser cannons–uses her alien magic to put their picture back together. This is a classic example of power gone to waste. If she can reassemble a piece of paper that has been torn to bits, it would seem reasonable for the viewer to surmise that she could have done something that might have made an actual difference in the world, like, say, atomizing Mickey Thomas. But no. The picture is restored and the band is safe to go on testing the boundaries of lame for another ten years. Curse you, alien woman!

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Greetings, Videots!

Today’s entry takes us back to the magical land of the 1980s Soundtrack Video, where the girls are always pretty, the underdog always wins in the end, and life is nothing but a series of Very Dramatic Moments played out in time with Heart-Pounding Music! This is a type of video that went out of fashion circa 1991–CAPTAIN VIDEO! thinks the official last entry in the genre may have been “Perfect World,” by Alias, from the Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead soundtrack–and that is a terrible shame. Today’s soundtrack videos are for songs by artists like Avril Lavigne, and they are decidedly light on Heartwarming Montages, Sweeping Melodies, and the blinding sheen of synthetic gloss.

Know who understood how to make a great soundtrack video? Peter Cetera.

Cetera was the bass player for Chicago from the late ’60s until 1985, when he used the enormous success of Chicago 17 as an excuse to quit the band and pursue a solo career. Longtime Chicago fans had been complaining for years about Cetera’s overwhelming(ly sappy) presence on Chicago albums–but in his defense, most of the other band members were too coked out to bother showing up for albums 13-17. If it hadn’t been for Cetera’s work ethic, business sense, and unique ability to churn out a hundred variations of the same damn love song, Chicago probably would have broken up 25 years ago.

(CAPTAIN VIDEO! understands that this is not something for which many people would exactly like to thank Peter Cetera, and does not completely disagree with this sentiment.)

Anyway, in the fall of 1986, Cetera released his first post-Chicago solo album, the stupidly titled Solitude/Solitaire, and he did not hedge his bets: in spite of his constant whining about being pigeonholed as a simpering balladeer, he delivered a record chock full of moon-eyed love songs. These included a Top 40 one-two knockout combination–his duet with Amy Grant, “The Next Time I Fall,” and “The Glory of Love,” a.k.a. “The Love Theme from Karate Kid Part II.” Imagine the drug-fueled orgies that must have taken place in Warner Bros. Records’ accounting department when they heard the news! Between the millions of scrawny, hopeful nerds anticipating the sequel to Karate Kid, and the annoying ubiquity of Cetera’s voice, he likely could have recorded literally anything and still gone to Number One. Like Kenny Loggins and Caddyshack, or Kenny Loggins and Footloose, or Kenny Loggins and Top Gun*, it was a marriage made in marketing heaven.

Was he a matinee idol, or what? Who could resist this face? He was, after all, the man who would fight for your honor. He’d be the hero you’re dreaming of.

No? Not convinced? Well, what about some hot karate action?

Hiyaaaaa! That’ll get asses in the seats! Who says Karate Kid is for chicks? We’ll ma–

Pan out! Pan out! And fire the director! What the fuck is happening to his face? His jaw is shifting off to the side! Did he make up a sixth vowel or something? Action shot! For God’s sake, action shot!

Yeah! Nothing says “date night” like a teenage girl with her knife to her throat. This guy is, like, three feet taller than Ralph Macchio–it’ll make the movie’s Big Ending three times as dramatic! Wait ’til you see the Secret Trick Karate Move the boys in Script cooked up!

Cut back to Cetera–what’s he up to?

Holy shit! Are those jazz hands? Who choreographed this thing? What is he doing? Does he know the camera’s on?

And while we’re at it, why is he wearing a cable-knit turtleneck? Cut away! Cut away!

Goddamn it, I said cut away, not zoom in! New company policy: never fucking zoom in on Peter Cetera–do you understand me? He looks like someone surprised him while he was in the middle of a stroke! On the toilet!

Shit!

*Or Kenny Loggins and Over The Top.

Peter Cetera – Glory of love

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Greetings, Videots!

Apologies from all of us here on the deck of the VIDEO! Cruiser — we realize it’s been far too long since we sent a transmission back from the 1980th Dimension. Not that it’s any excuse, really, but we stumbled across the leftover Cuervo and cocaine from Toto’s “Rosanna” video shoot, and things got a little hairy around here for awhile. We’re okay now, though, and to prove it, we’ve dug up a bona fide ‘classic’ to watch with all of you.

Picture it: the year is 1986. You are Lionel Richie, and you have conquered the pop charts, both as an occasionally too-sensitive member of a tremendous funk group and a solo artist/purveyor of syrupy, impossible to forget adult contemporary ballads. You’ve followed up your successful tenure in the Commodores with a pair of best-selling solo albums. What should you do — what can you do, really — for your third act?

If you answered “find out just how stupid a Top Five single can get,” then you have our condolences, because you clearly remember today’s dried-up mound, “Dancing on the Ceiling.” Here, one of the most prolific songwriters of the early ’80s managed to pee all over the memory of a classic Fred Astaire dance routine while simultaneously rivaling “Who’s Johnny?” as the most substance-free hit of the year. With that title and these lyrics, the only way the video could have been worse is if Richie had filled it with people dressed like Meshach Taylor in Mannequin and made them jump around like idiots.

Oh. Wait.

Call the paramedics! This man has been eaten by a couch!

In Richie’s defense, he’s an extremely talented songwriter, one whose gift for easy hooks and MOR tempos made him a perfect fit for the early-to-mid ’80s — and by the time Dancing on the Ceiling was recorded, he’d been keeping up a difficult pace for a number of years, so it isn’t surprising that exhaustion crept into the album. On the other hand, “Dancing on the Ceiling” is awful.

Once again, CAPTAIN VIDEO! is flabbergasted by the number of people it took to write a song — in this case, the not-so-magic number is three. Three people! To produce a finished product that includes the words “Oh, what a feeling / When we’re dancing on the ceiling,” repeated approximately 40,000 times! Clearly, there was some mighty fine Colombian swirling around the studio when this “song” was “written” — and speaking of nose candy, why, let’s take a look at the video!

The clip opens with an exterior shot of a swanky highrise apartment building, then cuts to Lionel, his guitarist, and his white-gloved drummer walking down a hallway. Lionel is walking backwards and jabbering about what a great party they’re going to have — and what do you know? He’s right!

And this isn’t just any party, either — it’s a KEYTAR party!

And what would a keytar party be without a lot of terrible, terrible dancing? Observe two classic moves:

The “I’m holding up a building while doing a one-armed windmill”!

The “Where did my dignity go?”

Here’s the video’s first money shot, which was greeted with a chorus of oohs and ahhs from people who couldn’t figure out how in the world Lionel managed to actually dance on a ceiling. (CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s favorite comment on this clip’s YouTube page reads as follows: “FAKE! They aren’t really dancing on the ceiling! Really they’re just walking across it.”)

Speaking of fake, here’s a shot of Lionel with two of his band members. That blond-haired ponytailed fellow to Lionel’s left is the drummer, and he spends the entire clip either smacking his sticks together or hitting them against the air. While wearing white gloves.

And speaking of gloves, here’s a rare sighting of a creature not seen since 1986, or the last outdoor funk festival in Minsk: the gloved bassist!

It was here, for the first but by no means the last time, that Cheech regretted breaking up with Chong.

How did a black man break the color barrier at MTV in the early ’80s? By tricking the bitches into thinking he might be gay. Nicely done, Lionel! You so smooth.

Just in case you forgot, this is a KEYTAR party!

…And finally, what would an expensive ’80s video be without a perfectly unnecessary cameo from Rodney Dangerfield? (Bonus fun fact: this is what Rodney was talking about when, after filming Ladybugs, he told people he’d “done worse.”)

So there you have it, faithful Videots — the sights and sounds of Lionel Richie scraping the bottom of his creative barrel so thoroughly that he wouldn’t release another album of new material for a decade. He’s released a string of records since 1996, but none of them have come anywhere near the sales levels of his first three solo albums — which is why his most recent release, 2007′s Live in Paris, sticks a six-and-a-half-minute version of “Dancing on the Ceiling” third on the setlist. He may have co-written and recorded one of the dumbest songs of the ’80s, but we’re the dopes who turned it into a hit. As always, Lionel is laughing all the way to the bank.

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Greetings, Videots!

Time gets a little funny out here in the 1980th Dimension, but it feels like it’s been awhile since we turned on the projector and marveled at what once passed for entertainment, so why don’t we do that now? Let’s just turn this thing on and set it to random…

Crap! It’s Loverboy!

Yes, Videots, today’s exhibition comes courtesy of Canada’s headband-rockin’ answer to REO Speedwagon. At the time of this video’s release, Loverboy was one of the biggest bands in rock & roll, riding high on a string of four consecutive platinum (or multi-platinum) albums, all of which sucked something awful. (Say what you will — CAPTAIN VIDEO! refuses to believe that even Loverboy’s best songs have ever had anything but camp value. If you can listen to “Workin’ for the Weekend” without snickering at least once, please turn yourself in to the nearest member of Nickelback.)

By the mid-’80s, however, signs of wear and tear were beginning to show. Audiences were tiring of the band’s formula, and most of its biggest hits after ’83 were soundtrack ballads — specifically “Heaven in Your Eyes,” from Top Gun, and the stunningly mawkish “Almost Paradise” from Footloose, which is technically a Mike Reno duet with Ann Wilson, but seeing as how no one could have picked the rest of the band out of a lineup even at the height of its fame, we’ll count it here. The point is: Loverboy was running out of gas.

To be fair, the band had been touring basically nonstop for years, and despite what Steven Tyler and will tell you, there are really only so many songs a person can write about hot chicks. In retrospect, if Loverboy had called it quits after 1985′s Lovin’ Every Minute Of It, they probably would have gone down as something more than a goofy relic. Alas and alack, the band rolled the dice for Album Number Five, and came up with a 40-pound turkey called Wildside.

Today’s video is the leadoff single from that horrible album, an oh-so-’80s number titled “Notorious.” Normally, CAPTAIN VIDEO! breaks these clips down for you, highlighting the most ridiculous moments for maximum mockery, but that’s impossible with the “Notorious” video, mainly because it represents one of the early peaks of the epilepsy-inducing fascination with micro-jump cuts that gripped the industry toward the end of the decade. Taken out of context, all of this video’s ingredients are non-toxic, even if they were totally played out long before the clip was released; it’s only when you mix them together that the nauseating fumes threaten to overpower you.

If the “Notorious” video has a saving grace, it’s the fact that it was directed by none other than a pre-Se7en David Fincher, who, even this early in his career, had the good sense to limit shots of the band to 10% of the video (and light them from behind half the time). Although Mike Reno had yet to begin his campaign to eat the contents of every bakery in North America, Fincher knew that nobody in the band was pretty enough to compete with closeup shots of scantily clad models doing phone booth stripteases. If you are old enough to have requested this when it was in heavy rotation on MTV, it is now time to fess up: You didn’t call in because you were a fan of the band.

And it certainly couldn’t have been that you liked the song. CAPTAIN VIDEO! understands that taste is subjective, and remembers well the synth-glutted lunacy that was the mid-to-late ’80s — but come on. “Notorious”? It kicks off with a blast of noise that sounds like a cabinet full of synthesizers in an earthquake, and goes downhill from there, offering the listener such AOR bon mots as “Little girl, don’t you hesitate / ‘Cause you’re usin’…live bait! / Senorita, solitaire / You got a certain kind of savoir faire.”

Awful. Just awful. The worst part — or best part, depending on how dark your sense of humor is — is that it took five people to write “Notorious,” including the deans emeritus of retard rock, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. (Given how skillfully they’d take the whole synths-and-gang-vocals shtick to the top of the charts with “Bad Medicine” a year later, it seems obvious that “Notorious” was a warm-up exercise of sorts.) CAPTAIN VIDEO! repeats: Five people. Gentle Videots, “Notorious” is hardly even a song — were you to try and perform it on acoustic guitar or piano, it would collapse, like a souffle made of poop, flop sweat, and cocaine.

Collapsing, incidentally, is exactly what the band’s career proceeded to do. Wildside went gold somehow, but the band had had enough, and called it quits prior to the late ’89 release of the contract-fulfilling best-of compilation, Big Ones. They’ve since reunited, of course — their most recent release, the optimistically titled Just Getting Started, came out just last year (and God as CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s witness, it really isn’t half bad). They’ll never again scale the commercial heights they reached in the ’80s, but — as this video attests — that isn’t necessarily a bad thing:

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Greetings, Videots! Due to unforeseen circumstances, Scraps had to bail out on this week’s Name That Tune, so we’ll be taking a special trip to the 1980th dimension instead. Buckle up!

As you all know, New Orleans has been in the news quite a bit over the last few years, what with disasters natural (the hurricane) and man-made (heckuva job, Brownie!). But it’s important to remember that the city has a long, proud tradition of weathering terrible storms. Musical ones, even. Particularly during the ’80s.

We are talking, of course, about Louisiana’s LeRoux.

They’re something of a blues-club circuit standby now, but if you aren’t a student of Cajun blues or ’80s AOR, you may not have ever heard of Louisiana’s LeRoux — so we should probably spend a little time retracing the band’s fascinating, often unintentionally hilarious career.

The group was formed in the late ’70s by guitarist and singer Jeff Pollard — in fact, it was originally called the Jeff Pollard Band — and spent a few years bumming around the Capitol Records roster as a bayou-flavored rock band, spinning off minor hits like “New Orleans Ladies” and “Nobody Said It Was Easy,” before being dropped in 1980.

Shortening their name to LeRoux, the group soldiered on to RCA, where they eked out another record before Pollard quit, taking percussionist/flautist/trumpet player Bobby Campo with him. Now, it’s important to pause here and underscore what we’re talking about: The departure of the guy who not only started the band, but initially named it after himself. LeRoux should have been LeDone, right?

But no. This was the ’80s, people! No one cared about Louisiana gumbo, but there was money to be made in bland, immaculately polished rock & roll! Onward and downward, Rouxsters!

All they needed was a singer and songwriter who could take them far, far away from their musical past — hopefully stripping them of all their credibility in the process — and they got him in the form of Dennis “Fergie” Frederiksen.

(The lone Toto fan in the audience just screamed, “Oh, shit! It’s Fergie!”)

Frederiksen, like LeRoux, has a fascinating (and often unintentionally hilarious) story. Before attaching himself like an anchor to LeRoux, he was a solo artist named David London. Take it away, Wikipedia:

“As David London, Frederiksen released a music video, ‘Samantha,’ that appeared as a video interlude on HBO and on USA network’s Video Concert Hall. This song was also on the soundtrack of the Village People movie Can’t Stop the Music.”

This isn’t entirely accurate — Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner deserve just as much of the blame for Can’t Stop the Music as the Village People — but it gets the important part of the message across, which is that the Ferg was deeply committed to becoming a star.

In LeRoux, der Fergster probably saw the chance to be the band’s own version of Michael McDonald, overhauling their musical direction while earning them buckets and buckets of money before embarking on the inevitable solo career. As you’ve no doubt already realized, he only accomplished the first part of that goal, and the video evidence of said “accomplishment” is what we’re here to discuss today.

Gentle Videots, CAPTAIN VIDEO! brings you LeRoux’s 1983 “hit” “Carrie’s Gone.” Like many terrible ’80s videos, this one begins with a shot of a car that no one in the band could possibly afford:

And a house none of them would have been allowed inside:

Of course, this guy totally belongs in here. Just look at his suit. (No, seriously, look at it. CAPTAIN VIDEO! is convinced it’s the only reason we’re supposed to dislike the person wearing it.)

What’s he looking for? Come on, Videots. Don’t play dumb. You know he’s looking for Carrie…and you know Carrie’s gone!

Now, if you’ve ever heard “Carrie’s Gone,” you know there are plenty of musical reasons to dislike the song — the rhythm guitar that even Mel Bay would laugh at, the crappy synth, the Energizer drums — but this marks the spot where we meet the real villain of the story. The whole point of the song, and the video, is to give Frederiksen the chance to thumb his nose at his girlfriend’s vanquished paramour. He even shows up in her note:

Seriously, what a dick:

And as if taunting the guy he’s just cuckolded on paper isn’t enough, the little twerp shows up in his house. His house!

And what does the Fergburglar have to offer Carrie? Well, just take a look at his idea of a romantic evening:

At this point, our jiltee shows up at LeHovel, presumably to snap the annoying little mulleted pipsqueak in half.

Unfortunately, the Dutchess brought backup:

Even after being confronted with all that muscle, Suit Guy makes a move, and true to form, our little Farrah Fawcett wannabe vanishes into thin air, reappearing on a fire escape. He can disappear, he can teleport, he’s fucking annoying — Fergie Frederiksen is like a corporate rock version of Mr. Mytzlplyk.

By now, any sane man would just give up and let Carrie have the little dingleberry, but our guy persists. It’s anyone’s guess as to why. Maybe in her note, Carrie told Mr. Suit that she was leaving him for another woman, and he’s trying to tell her she’s made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, the world will never know — we go from a shot of Suit climbing up the fire escape to a LeRoux concert. Dig the keytar!

It doesn’t really end here — there are a few more shots of Carrie’s ex haplessly pursuing her — but since Fergie never receives the beating he so richly deserves, there’s no reason to bother going over the video’s last two minutes. It certainly isn’t as if the song goes anywhere.

Fergie, though? He was going places. Not long after this album was released, Frederiksen replaced Bobby Kimball in Toto — CAPTAIN VIDEO! assumes he called Kimball repeatedly, singing “Toto’s gone” into the phone and hanging up — taking over the vocals for 1984′s Isolation, an album so bland it makes vanilla taste like habanero.

After Isolation tanked, Fergie was finally exiled to the rock & roll margins, where he remains to this day, performing with something called the World Classic Rockers (don’t fucking ask) between doing benefit shows for the American Liver Foundation in order to bring awareness to hepatitis C, which he contracted at some point, probably from Carrie. (What? Too soon?)

LeRoux, for its part, reunited in the late ’90s, and has done an impressive job of re-reinventing itself as a Cajun boogie band — they tour like madmen, and have recently worked as backing musicians for Tab Benoit. CAPTAIN VIDEO! hasn’t seen a recent setlist, but it seems altogether unlikely that the group is performing, or thinking about, “Carrie’s Gone” these days. Fortunately, we still have the video, which you can “enjoy” below.

That’s all for now, Videots — see you in a month!

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Greetings, Videots!

Apologies for the long delay between transmissions, but apparently, some strange things were afoot at Mission Control — the S.S. M.T.V. wasn’t able to raise anyone at the home base for months. It seems as though everything’s back up and running now, so if you’ve got the stomach for it, let’s see what dreaded beast we’ve been able to drag out of the 1980th Dimension this month, shall we?

Fuck! It’s Air Supply!

CAPTAIN VIDEO! will understand if you want to run now, Videots — this could get ugly in a hurry. First of all, Air Supply sucks; second, Air Supply videos suck; and third, where Air Supply songs and videos go, dozens of impassioned housewives inevitably follow. In other words, we might very well soon be pelted with granny panties and harsh words from Airheads all over the Web.

Are you still with us? Are you sure? Okay, let’s get this party started. Well, not a party, really; we are talking about “Making Love Out of Nothing At All,” after all. More like a sunset walk on the beach. (A beach littered with Members Only jackets and high-pitched wailing, but still.)

“Making Love Out of Nothing At All” was part of Air Supply’s seemingly interminable early ’80s hot streak, arriving between “Two Less Lonely Eunuchs People in the World” and “Just As I Am.” Interestingly enough, the song wasn’t originally intended for the Australian Russells — Jim Steinman wrote it for Meat Loaf’s Midnight at the Lost and Found album, but legal squabbles left Meat “Making Love”-less, and the rest is mellow, mellow history.

And really, the drop from Mr. Loaf to Air Supply really isn’t very steep. Steinman’s songs are uniformly ridiculous, over the top, and unavoidably catchy; all they need is a singer with a big range and the ability to oversell line after line of shockingly stupid lyrics. Russell Hitchcock, come on down!

CAPTAIN VIDEO!’s favorite lines might be these — but it’s so hard to choose:

I can make the runner stumble
I can make the final block
And I can make every tackle at the sound of the whistle
I can make all the stadiums rock

Rock? Really? Because we…well, never mind. Let’s move on to this terrible, terrible video.

Even nestled among the other jewels in the Air Supply crown, the “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” video is really something special, because it adds bad acting to the mix. Blessed with a string of hits, the Russells did what everyone else with a decent video budget was doing in the early ’80s — namely, trying to make a mini-movie to go along with their song. This one starts off with a string of unintentionally hilarious scenes between Graham Russell (looking for all the world like a miniature Larry Bird) and some chippie who’s clearly too young for him. With all the passion and urgency of a cashier counting out pennies, Russell “pleads” with his girl to join him on the road (he starts off with “So, won’t you reconsider?”), telling her he can give her anything.

Her response, natch, is “All I want is you.” CAPTAIN VIDEO! would ordinarily assume this poor woman has some sort of severe mental handicap, but since she’s the one driving to the airport, that’s out of the question. Maybe she was just after his money. Anyway, Graham leans in for a kiss on the tarmac, she pushes him away, and then the fun begins:

Which one’s the microphone?

Pull the camera back! BACK!

Early on, the video’s director proves he’s just as subtle as Steinman, timing the shot below — in which Graham stares longingly at a picture of his baby back home while a bored-looking groupie rolls over next to him — with the lines “I know just how to fake it / And I know just how to scheme”:

Followed by this shot, of our rakishly unbuttoned hero looking sad on the plane, thus underscoring that he didn’t really want to bone that groupie. If only his selfish bitch of a girlfriend had been willing to join him on the road:

All the while, Russell Hitchcock is screeching like a castrato with his ass on fire. And on and on it goes — dull performance footage, painfully squidgy “acting” by Graham, pictures moving in frames — for over five fucking minutes. (Steinman never met a three-minute song he couldn’t stuff with an extra couple hundred seconds’ worth of lard.)

The song goes on for so long, in fact, that Graham’s girl has time to pack her bag, hit the road, change her mind, and high-tail it to the gig, where she sashays past security and plants this groin-melting look on him:

Bored groupies behind him once more, Graham meets his lady beneath a strategically placed laser lightshow:

Making love truly out of nothing at all. The song went all the way to Number Two, which makes perfect sense in a world where According to Jim is entering its seventh season. It’s lonely in space, but at least this video was never a hit out here:

That’s all for now, Videots! Meet you back in the 1980th Dimension next month!

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