CAPTAIN VIDEO!: Music Videos of the 1980s

this place was dead anyway.

2006-01-18T10:53:00.000-08:00

Greetings, Videots!

There will soon be more delicious 80th Dimension goodness from CAPTAIN VIDEO! -- but it won't be here. Visit the good Cap'n at his new digs:

jefitoblog: poking pop culture's soft, white underbelly with a sharp-witted stick

See you there!

9: The Right to Rock

2005-06-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

AMERICA 1989

Rock has been driven underground.

The authorities stalk pirate broadcasters and their followers.

Those who are apprehended suffer severe consequences.

Hey, kid! What are you doing? Haven't you heard? Rock has been driven underground! Knock it off already with your rocking out--in public, no less! You don't want to suffer severe consequences, do you?

Oh, shit! It's the Rock Police! You're really in for it now--don't say we didn't warn you...

Oh my God! They totally broke your boom box!

The Rock Police are gonna take you downtown...

(Meanwhile, across town, the rock freedom fighters in KEEL -- God bless 'em -- are reminding you that you've got the right to rock!)

Man, did you see that? That kid just blew up the Rock Police Paddywagon with a firecracker!

Run, kid! Run! Fight for your right to rock! Just like KEEL said!

They almost had him, and then -- out of fuckin' nowhere, dude -- here comes this motorcycle parade! Looks like a flagrant violation of the Rock Penal Code!

(I think KEEL had something to do with it!)

Hey, what's that guy on the left doing in here? He's clearly way too old to rock! I smell a setup, KEEL -- you guys had better clear out of there quick!

KEEL ain't gonna never stop rockin' for nobody!

Goddammit, KEEL -- here comes the fuzz! If you guys get taken in for rocking, who's gonna keep fighting the good fight?

Holy crap! The power of KEEL's rocking is electrocuting the Chief of the Rock Police! This is awesome!

YEAH!!! Rock never dies!!!*

*At least, not until a few years later, when Ron Keel, frontman for the shitty metal band KEEL, realized nobody was ever going to buy his crummy rock records and went to Nashville to become Ronnie Lee Keel. And then when that didn't work, on to reforming KEEL.**

**And then when that didn't work, he grew a mullet and started a band that would love to be Lynyrd Skynyrd.

8: Every Little Step

2005-05-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

Greetings, Videots!

CAPTAIN VIDEO! has had a long, grueling trip to the 1980th Dimension this month, and to be perfectly frank, he's a little tired. Rather than disappointing yon legions of loyal readers by totally punking out, however, I've reached into the archives for a video that is so totally, blindingly awful that it requires very little in the way of comment or explanation on my part. Witness:

Yes, it's Bobby Brown! And not just any Bobby Brown, either! This is "Every Little Step" Bobby Brown!

"Every Little Step" actually starts off well enough. The stark white set contrasts nicely with the black outfits, and the overall effect provides a nice visual complement to the stark efficiency of Teddy Riley's New Jack beats. Here we have some women in tight, skimpy outfits, which works in any video's favor.

And then begins the descent into Stupidville.

It's difficult to tell when one is looking at still photos from the video, but "Every Little Step" truly features some of the most horrible choreography of the era. As a singer, a songwriter, and human being, Bobby Brown has always made a pretty good dancer, so this routine has always been deeply puzzling.

The whole video is full of faces like this one. CAPTAIN VIDEO! forgot to mention that as a lip-syncher, Bobby Brown makes a pretty good dancer.

Nobody over the age of seven should ever wear anything with his name printed on any visible portion of it.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, the most flamboyantly gay segment in the entire history of R&B music video:

Yeah, he tries to come off tough later in the video, but after the red socks/biker shorts/suspenders incident, it isn't very convincing, is it?

This shot comes from the "rap" portion of the video, specially inserted into the "radio mix" of the song in order to disguise the fact that it consists of one verse and one chorus, repeated for several minutes. How anyone listened to this without laughing is beyond the scope of CAPTAIN VIDEO!s ability to comprehend. In the rap, Bobby promises to "rock stupid rhymes" -- likely one of the only promises he's bothered to keep in his adult life -- and finishes by reminding the listener that "My name is Bobby, not Uncle Sam."

CAPTAIN VIDEO! would be remiss if he did not mention the fact that yes, once upon a time, Bobby Brown showed promise. Many of us believed this was the beginning of a long and interesting career. Why we thought this, exactly, CAPTAIN VIDEO! is presently unable to recall. Regardless, Bobby Brown's fall from grace in the years since Don't Be Cruel has been spectacular. It has certainly been more interesting than his music.

How's that new album coming, Bob? Child support checks on time this month?

7: I'm Free (Heaven Help the Man)

2005-04-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

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.

6: Shake It Up

2005-03-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

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 Someone," 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!

5: I Can't Hold Back

2005-02-25T16:46:00.000-08:00

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:

4: The Glory of Love

2005-01-03T15:23:00.000-08:00

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.

3: Find Your Way Back

2004-12-17T16:03:00.000-08:00

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, and these days, those snarky chumps at VH1 won't stop making it part of whatever list show they're scheduling the everloving fuck out of. 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!

2: Owner of a Lonely Heart

2004-11-10T08:32:00.000-08:00

CAPTAIN VIDEO! remembered "Owner of a Lonely Heart" as being sort of disturbing and a little avant-garde--in other words, like a lot of videos from the period. I think I must not have been paying attention. Because honestly, this is one of the dumbest things I've ever watched start to finish. CAPTAIN VIDEO! feels confident in telling you that literal pounds of cocaine must have been involved in the making of "Owner of a Lonely Heart." Also probably more than one art-school freshman. But mostly just cocaine.

Things start off plainly enough, with your standard, garden-variety performance footage:

Jon Anderson closes his eyes and dreams about faeries

Requisite "serious rocking" look from whoever was the band's drummer at the time

Trevor Rabin, bored out of his mind

But then things get strange. The music stops and Jon Anderson looks into the camera, eyes a-buggin', and we hear him thinking: "Wait--maybe there's another universe..." Cut to a shot of Anderson standing in a field:

Out of nowhere, he turns into a bird!

The rest of the band gamely follows suit--one guy turns into a snake, one into an iguana or something, and one into a cat (which--I am not kidding--makes an adorable "meow" before scampering offscreen). It's like the opening credits of a really, really stupid show. I think it would be called Dork Manimal and the Zootards:

Out of nowhere, we are introduced to Sour-Faced Corporate Drone with Bad Haircut (SFCDBH for short). We don't know his name, where he's going, or why in the hell he's black and white. Artistic license? A statement about capitalism and industrial society? An accident? We don't know. Neither, I guarantee you, do the members of Yes.

Out of nowhere, two guys in trenchcoats swoop in and haul SFCDBH off to something that looks like a courtroom. Along the way, SFCDBH has a series of troubling visions:

A lot of howling and stumbling ensues, but the trenchcoats aren't buying it. SFCDBH has a date with the law.

Eventually, the trenchcoats manage to drag poor SFCDBH to a judge (CAPTAIN VIDEO! is guessing here--and, again, cursing everyone who voted for this), who sees the sad shape SFCDBH is in and dismisses him with a nod. But the fun's just begun. As the trenchcoats are dragging him back out of the building, the poor bastard has more nightmare flashes:

What the fuck? A spider and a scorpion? Where did they come from? Maybe they're former members of Yes. God knows enough people have been a part of this shitty band.

I think the worms represent Emerson, Lake & Palmer.

Anyway, through the magic of what passes for narrative in this sloppy turd, SFCDBH ends up in a factory. And in color. I know, I know--it doesn't make any goddamn sense. Well, maybe the band is trying to tell us that we aren't really living unless we join the proletariat and help overthrow our greedy capitalist overlo...no, fuck that. CAPTAIN VIDEO! refuses to accept that any of this has a shred of real meaning.

And besides, that wouldn't explain why SFCDBH is instantly attacked by one of his fellow workers, and forced to escape to the roof.

SFCDBH reaches the roof, and the viewer is at once hopeful--like what passes for its protagonist, this video has run out of places to go. But no! The band materializes out of nowhere and begins advancing on him! He does what any of us would do if trapped on a roof with Yes--he runs screaming to the edge and throws himself the fuck off:

We finally have something to cheer for. But, as with the music of Yes, as soon as you think it's finally over, they whip out another shitty solo--SFCDBH can't even die right. He turns into a bird and flies away:

So where does he go? Off to verdant hill and dale? Back around and over the roof, where he can poop on Yes? No. He goes right back where he was. Only now he's in color.

Maybe there is a meaning here: Yes sucks and so do their videos.

1: The Secret of My Success

2004-10-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

Say hello to CAPTAIN VIDEO!

Doesn't he look brave?

CAPTAIN VIDEO! will periodically drop by to act as our guide through the Music Videos of the 1980s. And today's entry is a real winner--a classic example of a particularly wonderful sub-genre of the 1980s Music Video! That's right, it's the Big Hollywood Soundtrack Single! Today we'll be watching..."The Secret of My Success," by NIGHT RANGER!

"The Secret of My Success" is just about a perfect example of the Big Hollywood Soundtrack Single of the 1980s, and its video does not disappoint. Consider the various elements in place:

Smokin' guitar on the hood of an old car!

A bolo tie!

Those aren't synthesizers you hear--that's a "horn section" "playing"!

"Spontaneous" duckwalk--with keyboard guitar!

And...Michael J. Fox!

Watch it! Live it! Love it! And remember--the secret of my success is...I'm living twenty-five hours a day!

Night Ranger - The Secret of My Success.mpeg