SCREEN BEAT

SCREEN BEAT

Billy Altman

CARBONATED GUSTO

Well, friends, here we are, with a change of scenery (sayonara, Video Video; aloha, Creemedia) and a spanking new title to boot. To tell you the truth, Screen Beat is really the title we always envisioned for this column devoted to music-on-TV, but somehow we never got around to telling anyone who could do anything about it before now. What with the magazine’s recent coastal shift, however, and this column’s matching slide west (unless, of course, they’ve moved the media section more towards the back of the mag, in which case we’ve slid geographically east; pretty soon, you might need an atlas to find things around here), it seemed the right time for a change. If nothing else, at least we can all enjoy looking at what I’m certain is a fabulous new logo.

So much for old new business. Now for new old business—namely, how long is this TV-stars-having-hit-records thing going to last this time around? Check back in your video history books and you’ll see that this sort of thing has been going on ever since pre-Beach Blanket Bingo Annette used her two, er, Mouseketeer ears to launch a shortlived singing career that featured such hits as ‘‘Pineapple Princess” and “Tall Paul” (my favorite verse: “He’s my mountain/He’s my tree/We go steady/Paul and me”). Since then we’ve seen everything from The Rifleman’s Johnny Crawford hitting the charts with “Cindy’s Birthday” to John Travolta, in his Welcome Back Kotter days, scoring big with “Gonna Let Her In.” The people I’m speaking about here are not those folks who were already singers or musicians and found that their recording careers enjoyed a significant commercial boost by dint of their presence on the tube—say, Glen Campbell, or even (ugh) Donnie and Marie—or people who started singing while acting and veered off more towards singing, like Ricky Nelson or, most recently, Dukes Of Hazzard star John Schneider. I am speaking about people like 77 Sunset Strip’s Ed “Kookie” Byrnes and The Donna Reed Show’s Paul Petersen (“My Dad”) and Shelley Fabares (“Johnny Angel”)—people whose “recording star” status is really nothing more than a momentary reflection of their TV popularity.

Now usually this stuff just runs its course and you forget about it. No real harm done, a couple of extra bucks in the TV star’s pocket, and if they either eventually fade from sight and/or sound (David Soul, where are you now?) or just back to what they did before (Bill “Little Old Man” Cosby—now there’s a good example), so be it. And I’m hoping that that’s what happens to the “singing careers” of both Miami Vice’s Don Johnson and Moonlighting’s Bruce Willis. I don’t know what’s more bizarre: Johnson being so embarrassingly dead serious about “his music” that he doesn’t realize how comical he comes off in his “commitment” to what is, at its bets, mere industrial product; or Willis being so embarrassingly “casual” in his “hey, it’s rock ’n’ roll!" “approach” that he doesn’t realize that some folks out there might actually know that it was the Coasters, not Leon Russell, who first performed “Young Blood,” and who find this thinly disguised rip-off of the Blues Brothers pretty lame in both concept and execution. In any event, let’s hope these things blow over soon; what little decent music there is out there needs as much exposure as possible in the ever-tightening playlist belt of both music radio and music television. And thanks for letting us into your Creemedia living room. Glad to be here.

SNAP SHOTS

Lights! Camera! Oxygen! The Mighty Lemon Drops, “My Greatest Thrill”—Our colleague Jon Pareles of the New York Times recently came up with the nifty term “mope rock” to describe the post-new wave depression music played by the likes of Joy Division and the Smiths. Judging from the way he comes-across in this clip, maybe the Lemon Drops’ lead singer should be drafted as the genre’s official poster child; not since Tom Verlaine abandoned the media awhile back have I seen anyone look so anemic and so self-consciously uninvolved in their own video. Apparently, it takes all the energy this kid can muster up just to keep his head from dropping down on his chest, so forget about any of the considerable charge generated by the song itself (it is a good one) getting augmented by the visual “delivery” in this performance clip. And while he’s almost too apathetic to even lip-synch, they keep cutting to this Jean Seberg type (representing, I take it, the girl in the song who's wrecked the poor boy’s life), and she’s happily go-go dancing away at a non-stop pace. What probably happened was they kept going out to clubs and he’d never get up and dance with her—too much of a strain on his iron-poor blood. So she dumped him. From the evidence here, who could blame her?

Reach Out, Reach Out and Synth Someone: Krafftwerk, “The Telephone Call”— Now here’s a question for all you etiquette aficionados out there: If four people are on a conference call, and nobody says anything for 20 minutes, is it OK to hang up without saying Auf Wiedersehen? Really, though, those Kraftwerk boys sure are a bunch of madcap cut-ups, aren’t they? They show a shadow of Rolf’s (or is it Florian’s?) face on the wall, and you can see that he’s singing; then they pan over to the herr himself, and he isn’t moving a muscle—not even a blink! Funnnnnn-nnnny! Weird Al, look out!

Time To Play With Me, Pee-wee! A-ha, “Manhattan Skyline”—Having conquered the comic book, those daring young foreigners from A-ha now move on to bigger game—newsprint! Here they are inside a crossword puzzle! Here they are connecting the dots (la la la)! Here they are as front page photos! What I want to know is, when do they turn up in the obits?