METAL VIDEO

METAL VIDEO

Richard Riegel

It’s just a few days before Xmas as I type this, so I’m busy making my list of wanted videos and checking it twice. As it happens, Sandy Claws has already slithered down the chimney of my TV to deliver the new Debbie Harry video, “French Kissin,” which I requested a few columns back. Ms. Harry’s heartbreakingly beautiful face (best in showbiz, sez me) looks none the worse for the wear of her round-theclock care for her spouse, Chris Stein, during his serious illness. Stein himself does a brief comeback cameo on guitar in this video, but the star role belongs to the lovely Debbie. Clad in her hot-pink dress of yore, Ms. Harry lounges on her black, white and mint-green bedspread and shakes her wireless remote at the eternal teevee, which brings up alternate images of bathing beauties, chichi pool plunges, the Eiffel Tower, several varieties of kissy-kissy, etc., etc. Which just goes to prove that even a big star like Debbie Harry has just as itchy a channel-selector finger as the rest of us proles when it comes to Fade Away & Radiatesville.

If Christmas is upon me, that means the New Year’s not far behind, and you probably won’t be reading this until Valentine’s Day is history anyway. From this vantage point,

I can already spot some major changes on our video horizon for 1987. In a move at least as earth-shattering as Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency in 1974, MTV has chosen not to renew Martha Quinn’s contract for ’87. That’s right, our own perky, twerpy, fatally cheerful & girlish Martha Quinn, whose cute nightly TV face has launched a thousand diatribes from this column alone. Twenty-twenty hindsight and all that, but now that my fair share of critical abuse has (presumably) helped kill off Quinn’s MTV career, I realize that I’m going to miss her bubbly perkiness, especially as I watch the contrast between the lame-duck Quinn and her more-or-less successor as anchor veejay, Carolyn Heilman.

As ever, the MTV marketresearch computer undoubtedly has its microchip digit right on the public’s pulse, and probably “designed” Ms. Hellman specifically to keep the network in synch with the everchanging video arena. First impressions may be deadly, but Carolyn Heilman strikes me as the haunted offspring of an unholy mating between Ronald Reagan and Brooke Shields. Get it: Heilman’s overgrownValley Girl chassis suggests youth and kickiness, but she also exudes a Teflon-coated sense of infinite self-assurance exactly like the one our chief exec’s famous for.

I don’t know anything about Heilman’s background, but her voice conveys that same I’m so-cool-and-you’re-not glib tone employed by so many of today’s female AOR deejays (every city has one), so maybe she acquired her limitless self-possession while spinning Phil Collins discs for the lumpenyupps. Time will tell whether I can establish the same kind of love-hate relationship with Carolyn Heilman as I always enjoyed with Martha Quinn. I wish Ms. Quinn well in her subsequent career in the biz, and I might remind her that previous MTV dumpee Nina Blackwood has already resurfaced on the small screen, both as a reporter on Entertainment Tonight and as a chipconsumer in a Pringles ’n’ Herbs commercial. Maybe Martha can team up with fellow MTV exile J.J. Jackson to do a more contemporary version of that “You old poo!” Puffstissue commercial.

Speaking of transitions, did anybody else out there notice that Lisa Robinson’s Radio 1990 quietly slipped out of the USA Network’s listings a few months ago? I didn’t even miss Radio 1990 at first, as the show had become so unfocused (the producers kept trying to pack rock ’n’ roll, fashion displays, and bizarre game-show silliness into the same ever-shrinking half hour), I had quit watching it. But then one evening when I wanted to zap away from some inanity on MTV, Radio 1990 wasn’t there anymore. At least Mrs. Robinson can fall back on her publishing empire.

In the meantime, MTV has shifted its Metal Music V2 Hour all over its schedule, with it finally sticking at 3:30 p.m. (EST), which is fine for you afterschool animals, but tuff for a working stiff like myself. And whenever I do manage to catch the Metal Music V2 Hour through some chink in my work schedule, they inevitably show Kiss’s “Tears Are Falling” and a bunch of other ancient vids I was watching when Mark Goodman was yet a pup.

Still and all, a few brand-new metal (and/or metal-flavored) vids are sneaking thru the fluff onto my family-room viewscreen, so let’s get on with ’em: The best metallic video I’ve seen this month is Megadeth's “Peace Sells.” The punch line to that title is “But who's buying?,” of course, and the video is a surrealistic, strobe-flash collage of alternating dollar signs, peace signs, and the inevitable conflict & war of our dollar-dominated times. In an ironic twist that’ll make this video even timelier than it already looks, a stuffy dad enters the TV room and switches off the Megadeth speed-collage his daughter’s glued to, in favor of glimpses of Reagan’s deafened-by-thehelicopter schtick. (“THIS is the news!” Dad snorts.) Darling daughter zaps right back to Megadeth as soon as she gets her chance, but she might as well’ve left the nightly news on, as the real-life reports of the Iran-Contras mess issuing from Washington these days make even Megadeth’s speedparanoias seem idealistic. Congrats to Megadeth for the bright colors of their metal imagery; if the MC5 had had video amplification like this, they woulda conquered Amerika in nothing flat.

Burning Down The Party Zone

The music’s hardly speedmetal, but the video of the KBC Band's “America” shares a lot of the concerns expressed in Megadeth’s video. K, B, and C are Kantner, Balin, and Casady from the classic Jefferson Airplane lineup, of course, so they bring an old-hippie tone to their “protest,” but their sentiments are still right-on timely. This video is both cliched and fresh at once, as it’s made up on dozens of speeded-up, timelapse shots of American cities (a la the videos of Jean-Luc Ponty and the new-music crowd) in alternation with scenes of daily American life (a la the John Cougar Mellencamp video approach). The pace is as speedy and brightlycolored as our current crisis of national conscience demands. Memo to Grace Slick: How 'bout you dropping out of the Starship’s terminal wallow in the AOR hog trough with Journey and Night Ranger and all those other slick S.F. goobers, and returning to your true mates in KBC? Paul’s politics sound less half-baked than they have in years (he’s actually approaching dialectical microwaveability by now), and yer re-commitment to the cause could help avoid big trouble for your own little China in our shared future.

Speaking of anger and confrontations and polemics, the Beastie Boys are punk rockers who’ve gone rap, but their “Fight For The Right (To Party)” song and video could’ve been scripted by just about any current American metal band. The plot of the video is vintage Twisted Sister, as a matter of fact, as it’s built around that always-tasteful frag-the-nerds theme. The Beastie Boys trash the nerd houseparty with their biker friends, etc., and everybody from their producer (Rick Rubin) to the nerd parents ends up piefaced. This tune’s a slam bam winner in anybody’s league, but parents are strongly cautioned that their I’il dearies may destroy the whole rumpus room after watching this video.

Shortcuts: The Vlnnie Vincent Invasion’s “Boyz Are Gonna Rock” video includes all the enshrined metal props, all their hair and guitars, all the fretboards and old lace you party hyenas are always howling for. So bang those heads out there while Vinnie and the boyz smash their amps just like some English band (I forget who it was) used to do. Black ’n’ Blue’s “I’ll Be There For You” video (produced by Gene Simmons) is a similar fuzzy-pumper hair & armwaver concert extravaganza, although the song itself is a foggy ballad Motley Crue wouldn’t refuse in a pinch.

Also, did you catch Lemmy’s cameo as a bad hombre in Boys Don’t Cry’s “I Wanna Be A Cowboy” video? In a perfect world, Boys Don’t Cry would do cameos as men’s room attendants in Motorhead’s videos (which would be shown every hour on the hour), but it’s far from a perfect sphere of a global village—which is why you’ll have to tune into your kindly ol’ Uncle Richard The Vidcrit again next month. Can’t wait!