Remembering the 80's Volume Four: The Tubes "She's a Beauty"

Tonight in Remembering the 80’s I review a video that managed to simultaneously ruin my views on strip clubs, circuses and amusement park ride security measures. Yes, it is time to do a recap of the video for The Tubes “She’s a Beauty”. For convenience sake I will timestamp my comments so you can follow along with the video.

Pre-Video: Seriously, who names their band “The Tubes”? That is either a horrible attempt at a double entendre or just grabbing some random object for use as your band name. For reference, this song is from 1983.

0:00: We start with a carnival background banner that I am pretty sure would get the video banned if aired today. Seriously, we can all agree that we can totally see her boob there, right? We have barely started the song and already ten year old me is wondering what the hell is going on.

0:20: Given the horrible acting and / or lip synching that you see in early music videos I will admit that the lead singer’s carnival barker routine is actually pretty good. Points for the tip of the straw cap.

0:45: Apparently twelve year olds can get entrance into the sideshow / strip club. Reminds me of one of my trips down Bourbon Street when, while following two parents with their ten year old son, I heard the strip show sidewalk barker yell “Come on in, it’s Family Night.” I stopped in my tracks right in front of the door because, I mean, it is Family Night.

1:00: For some reason I have spent a lot of time recently learning about the history and the operation of the Disney theme parks. Being a Florida resident I now have an annual pass and instead of enjoying the shows and meeting Mickey Mouse I want to learn everything about how the parks and rides are designed. So this looks like your standard fixed track dark ride. However, for a restraining device the “Masked dominatrix with a night stick” is certainly not standard operating procedure. Though it would make “It’s a Small World” a lot more palatable.

1:03: The entrance is a pair of female legs adorned with razor blades that you pass between and then close behind you, nearly decapitating you. The Freudian implications of this don’t even need to be elaborated upon. Incredibly, on the list of disturbing things we will see in this video this doesn’t even make the top ten.

1:15: We move on to the giant female lips that rise to feature dancing girls. In my past I may have, ahem, attended establishments that featured dancing girls but never had to look at what might have been an advertisement for the Rolling Stones to start things off.

1:30: The fabled “Let’s meet the band” portion of every early 80’s music video. Think about it, every video had one scene in which you get to see the band perform and, as this video clearly shows, do the “Let’s act like we have to run away from the camera.” There are at least a half dozen dramatic spins by the guitarists and keyboardists as they try to flee the camera operator. And I have no clue what the drummer is doing back there. I believe that he is missing both arms. Take that Def Leppard.

1:35: “She will give you every penny’s worth. But it will cost you a dollar first.” Sadly inflation has really caused this video to become dated. Now it will cost you at least a twenty and to be honest your rate of return is nowhere near as good as it used to be. Or so I’ve been told….

1:50: Seriously, why the hell does this band have two keyboardists? That is at least one too many.

1:53: Superfluous nipples on the drum kit. Oh, before I forget my band “Superfluous Nipples” is playing at the Fric and Frac on Tuesday. Everyone stop on by.

2:00: We now run the ride car through the boob. Again, not only was this video broadcast I saw it a hundred times when I was ten years old. Given my warped view of life I wonder if I could file a class action lawsuit against The Tubes.

2:05: In what makes the top five of “What the hell is going on here” we go straight from blasting through the paper boob to what looks to be a seven year old ballet dancer. Seriously, who the hell let the seven year old on this set? It’s bad enough that we have a twelve year old boy being subjected to this but in a video that is essentially one long, exploitive view of women we suddenly have to watch an innocent seven year old. I am just going to assume that one of the guy’s in the band had a daughter who really wanted to be in the video.

2:10: Hey, a trapeze artist! Why not? This is clearly like every circus that I have ever been to in my life.

2:15: We now run the car, which again let’s remember holds a twelve year old boy being restrained by a dominatrix, through a stack of amplifiers. There is no reason for this other than roughly every third video in 1983 featured the destruction of amplifiers. I guess Guitar Center had a sale on them or something. Still, it’s a nice way to try to kill the cast members in slow motion.

2:20: Dancing cave women in cages! Eleven year old boy being choked out with a baton! Somehow this is meant to be sexy I think but I can’t be sure. Right now it just reminds me that Opposite Worlds will be on SyFy tomorrow night and I really need to write about that train wreck of a show.

2:40: And now the part of the video that I always remembered but only until rewatching it this week that I figured out what my ten year old mind could not comprehend. There is a mermaid, which is fair enough. A mermaid that looks rather plastic in certain parts but even as a kid I figured that was just part of the mermaid costume. But watching the video a few times I began to realize a few things. Like the fact that the mermaid has a rather large Adam’s Apple and really harsh facial features and makeup. Google says it is actress Katy Johnson but decide for yourself. That mermaid still freaks me out.

3:09: Back to the trapeze artist with what must be the most gratuitous acrobatic routine ever performed. For a song that is essentially a warning about falling in love with a stripper this video sure has a hell of a lot to do with the circus. I keep on expecting for an elephant to show up at some point.

3:20: Yep, the dominatrix now has a chokehold on the boy. Nothing wrong there…

3:25: And in the fabled ending shot, our twelve year old boy has been turned into an old man as a result of going through this entire experience.

Fascinating post-video fact that I learned this week that I cannot believe is actually true: Ever wonder who the poor twelve year old boy is in this video? It is Robert Arquette, the younger brother of Roxanna, Patricia and David in his first acting role. Wait, you don’t know who Robert Arquette is? Oh, that is probably because he had a sex change and is now happily known as Alexis Arquette. Now, far be it for me to link these two events but that is the most mind blowing piece of trivia that I have learned in years. 

Remembering the 80's: Volume Three: The Rubik's Cube

In my entire life I have never successfully solved a Rubik’s Cube. Even when I had instructions in front of me on how to precisely solve it the algorithm was absolutely worthless to me. Given that the Rubik’s Cube made it to the states in 1980 and became a huge phenomenon the fact that the precocious, mop headed, math genius version of eight year old me was unable to figure this out was kind of inexplicable. All of my siblings figured it out quickly, including my younger brother Kevin who was five at the time. I never did as I just am unable to do three dimensional geometry in this form. Anyone who has seen me try to pack a car will know that this is still the case.

We talk about how things were simpler back in the 80’s. I grew up in a world without cable television and where our Atari was top of the line entertainment. So while this is simpler than what we deal with today but at the time we had no idea. I grew up with the assumption that there would be a nuclear war with the Russians by the time I turned eighteen. We were still dealing with the after effects of disco. Life was stressful and dangerous, which makes the fact that the entire world was mesmerized by a cube.

And we are talking mesmerized here. There have been 350 million Rubik’s Cubes sold worldwide. There was a Saturday morning cartoon series. I am not making that up. Rubik was voiced by Ron Palilo, better known as Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter. The story just gets stranger and strange. The Hungarians built a giant, rotating Cube as the centerpiece of their exhibit at the World’s Fair in Knoxville. Yes, in the 80’s when people thought of where to hold a World’s Fair they thought Knoxville. Did I mention that cocaine was also prevalent in the 80’s? Given that the Rubik’s Cube was simply that, a cube with multi-colored stickers, you had all of the knockoffs. There was a pyramid, or a cylinder or some vague snake like thing. But every kid had one and every kid tried to solve it.

What is interesting, especially when you think of problem solving, is that there are three different methods of solving the Rubik’s Cube. The first is what people consider to be the proper solution. You move the various rows over and over again until all of the colors match up. This is the mathematical solution where people have written algorithms and determined that any cube could be solved in no more than twenty moves. Then there is the “lazy kid in your grade school class who wants to look smart” solution where you simply take off all the stickers and reapply them so that you have a solved cube. You can rightly look at them with disdain.

But the most interesting solution, and the one as a kid I wish I had tried, is the one where you completely break the rules by grabbing a screwdriver, prying the cubes apart and reconstruct the cube in a solved state. You end up with exactly the same answer as the people who use the “approved method” but you do it by working in a completely out of the box manner. It’s incredibly clever in a way I didn’t realize as a kid but now I look for ways where you can win a game by changing the rules.

Anyway, this is the 80’s in a nutshell. A Hungarian builds a cube and three decades later people will still talk about the thing. Between this and Tetris you could say that the main export from the Iron Curtain were extremely addictive puzzle games. 

In the future we shall all have dancing robots

I’ve said all of the following over the past few weeks. I don’t know when I got so old but I doubt that five years ago I ever anticipated myself saying any of the following…

·         You know, purchasing a tuxedo turned out to be a wise financial decision.

·         You have to go with the vest instead of the cummerbund. A cummerbund just screams high school prom.

·         Ok, just let me finish my yoga workout and I will get back to you.

·         Hey, remember back when VH-1 used to show videos?

·         It would be a lot nicer here if they turned the music down.

·         Instead of the vegan option I would prefer to have a steak in which the cow was continually insulted throughout its lifespan. Just so that it always knew who is the boss around here.

(Ok, the last one was more of a failure of the Sincerity Project than a sign of my growing old but it was my best example as to what the polar opposite of what a militant vegan would be. Sometimes having those analogies ready comes in very handy.)

Yes I do want to mention that I own a tuxedo and I really do where it with regularity. Kim often goes to black tie events for work and I get to accompany her as arm candy and I do my best to look dashing. The fact that this is my life stuns me to no end. No kidding, I am wearing a Star Wars t-shirt as I write this but will occasionally dress up like James Bond. Life is a neverending series of adventures, much like The Neverending Story but sadly with fewer Luck Dragons.

Remembering the 80’s Volume Two: Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”

Wow, so much I could say about this one. Let me run through the highlights…

·         Maybe I was the only one who heard this rumor but I was under the impression as a kid that the reason this song didn’t have any lyrics was because they were so dirty that they couldn’t be aired. Apparently no one ever informed the nine year old version of me about jazz.

·         Seriously, there was a point in time in which a jazz / hip hop fusion piece could become a hit song primarily due to the fact that it had a video featuring relatively simplistic robots. The 80’s were either quaint or avant garde in that respect, take your pick.

·         Also, I really do recall there being a good bit of moral outrage surrounding this video driven by the fact that it features mannequins in lingerie. We’ve advanced in that regard thanks mainly to the groundbreaking films Mannequin and Mannequin 2: On the Move.

·         I will to my dying day remember the robot who gets his head slammed into the cereal bowl over and over again. That is a metaphor for life if I ever saw one.

·         The fact that I have gone my entire life without designing a set of those dancing legs for my personal bemusement is one of my greatest regrets. I think that they would make for a great statement piece for any home.

·         Probably the toughest concert decision of my life was whether to see Herbie Hancock or Fats Domino at Jazz Fest one year. I chose Fats (who put on an amazing set) but part of me wishes I would have seen Herbie even if he was sans robots.

Remembering the 80's: Volume One

We are starting a new, probably weekly feature on the blog this week with Remembering the 80’s: A look back at what we once thought was amazing. We will start with the mind blowing video for Simple Minds “All the Things She Said.” If Wikipedia is to be trusted this video is from 1986. Let’s catalog the awesomeness, shall we?

·         We start with a star background that appears to have come as the default package with the video editing software. Somehow the computer graphics are of lower resolution than if they had just taken the video camera to the roof and shot the actual night sky.

·         The entire video consists of band members filmed multiple times floating past the camera. This makes the video so high concept that I can almost guarantee it won Video Music Awards.

·         I really think the black and white, vaguely Native American, poncho with hat and sunglasses look is ready for a comeback.

·         I bet the guitarist was thrilled to be able to show off just how many guitars he owned and that he could pull off the same rock star move multiple times in a row.

·         Simple Minds must be the only band in which the lead singer is also a trained hawk wrangler. I would also like to know how the record label justified the budget item “hawk glove” on the expense report.

·         There may never have been another video in history with so many dramatic spins.

·         Ok, I will admit that I think the black suit and hat combination is really cool and I totally want that hat. The gold lame jacket with owl accoutrement a little less so. I love the fact that you can actually make out the guitarist walking through the background as if he has a better gig to go to.

·         Also note that both the bass player and drummer basically looked at the concept and went “Screw this, we’re going to the bar.”

·         On the mullet scale I am going to have to give him four Billy Ray Cyrus’ out of ten. I am certain that the guitarist spent two hours getting his hair just perfect, though.

·         Did anyone ever see the lead singer of Simple Minds and Dana Carvey in the same place at the same time? I mean, we could hire him and Mike Myers to remake this video. It’s not like they have anything else to do at the moment.

·         At three minutes in we get this weird breakdown where we have faux Dana Carvey a) wearing striped pants, b) chewing a hayseed and c) letting what appears to be a cockatoo sit on his legs. What the hell is it with this song and birds? Was his girlfriend an ornithologist? Were all the things she said a whole flurry of bird trivia?

·         You can tell when the camera crew grew sick of the whole thing when they just decided to film everyone from the knees down even if that meant focusing on pants silk screened with dollar bills.

·         I yearn for the days when if you could just vaguely wave your limbs around in time to music could be considered dancing.

·         For all of this you have to admit that this is one damn good song. I mean, compare this to 90% of what you hear on the radio today and you will think this is a much better song and it didn’t even break the top 20 in the US.