Friday Night Videos

Wow. It was 10 years ago this week that I launched my very first nostalgia-tinged installment of Friday Night Videos. Only I didn't even call it Friday Night Videos back then. I stumbled across a video to Falco's "Vienna Calling" and gave in to the impulse to share. The thing is, though, that this particular video for my favorite Falco song wasn't the same video I recalled watching as a teenager on Night Tracks, Friday Night Videos and all those other weekend programs us kids without MTV had to make do with. Of course, a lot changes in 10 years, and that original video now lives on YouTube to be shared far and wide. Yay!

Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Pretenders.

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Friday Night Videos

Wow, it's been a while since I put together an installement of Friday Night Videos. Did you miss me? Ha, loaded question. But you know someone I'm missing? Howard Jones. Surprisingly, out of the decade-plus I've been doing Friday Night Videos, ol' HoJo himself does not show up even once. Let's rectify that now with "No One Is To Blame," which was a striking departure from his earlier work when it first came out in 1986. The arrangement really captivated me and prompted me to buy the album based on the strength of this song alone. Spoiler alert: The album did not quite live up to the promise of this one song.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Bob Seger.

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Friday Night Videos

The Wife and I have discussed Prince on several occasions. "Genius" is a term grossly over-used, but I don't think anything other than "musical genius" does justice to Prince's immeasurable talent. Had he lived in the 1700s or 1800s, he'd be known today as a composer comparable to the likes of Mozart. The 20th century figure I'd compare him to most would be Duke Ellington. Prince was always pushing musical boundaries, fusing different styles and flexing his creative muscles in weird and original ways. Funk, jazz, pop, rock, R&B, soul, classical... just about the only genre he didn't regularly utilize was country, and I'm not 100 percent sure on that one. Was he a flake? Erratic? Eccentric? An egomaniac? Sure. It's hard to tell where the performance ended and the real man began. He produced brilliant work, and he produced a lot of crap. That's the thing--he failed musically many, many times, but he never stopped. He constantly tried new things, and many efforts fell flat but those that worked were hailed as visionary. He was so prolific that he got into a huge blow-up with his record label, Warners, because they only wanted to release one album a year and Prince wanted to do something like three a year. Nuts. It's rumored that Prince has more than a thousand unreleased songs in his Paisley Park vault--not outtakes or demos or rejects or alternative mixes, but actual finished, polished, fully-produced songs just waiting to be released whenever the Purple One deemed it time to do so. The only other artist who left a comparable legacy is (as far as I know) Frank Zappa, who left behind enough material for a dozen or more albums at the time of his death, the last of which was finally released just a couple years ago. I expect we'll be getting new Prince material for decades to come.

In 1988, I managed to get ahold of a bootleg copy of Prince's legendary Black Album, which was pulled from distribution right at the point of release because of a weird dream he had. That tape was a prized possession for years, until a friend's tape player chewed it up in early 1994. To say I was upset was an understatement. It was a damn cool album. I mean, any album that starts off with "Le Grind" can't go wrong. Fortunately, an official version of that album actually made it to market later that year, so I was able to replace the lost take with a more durable CD. That doesn't mean much, other than the fact that for a few years I was the cool guy who had a mythical album nobody else could get--at least as far as Prince fans were concerned.

Alas, Prince has fiercely fought to keep his music and videos offline, almost as hard as he's fought to keep Weird Al from parodying any of his songs. Therefore there are no official Prince videos to feature on Friday Night Videos. The only one I can find is "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" from the George Harrison tribute at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2004, featuring Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, Tom Petty and a bunch of other folks. Prince upstages them all with a blistering solo that reminded everyone that no matter how great a performer, singer and songwriter he may be, he was still a much better guitarist than almost anyone gave him credit for.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.

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Friday Night Videos

I've been on a Go-Go's kick lately, so it's Go-Go's time on Friday Night Videos! Unfortunately, most of their videos seem to be missing from YouTube, even on the band's official channel. The good news is that one of the videos available is "Head Over Heels," a masterfully-crafted pop earworm. I had the Talk Show album from which this single sprang forth, and it was pretty darn solid overall, showing their growth and maturity as both songwriters and musicians. Alas, which the album did okay on the charts and produced a couple of hits, it wasn't enough to keep internal tensions from breaking up the band for a couple of decades.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Jimmy Buffett

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Friday Night Videos

There are a great number of talented and even legendary musicians who just don't do music videos. Or, if they do, some of their songs become iconic well after they were originally release and never became a hit. Heck, they might've been considered filler on an album somewhere along the line. Which makes it difficult to feature said songs on Friday Night Videos. This week, for example, has been damp, dreary and chilly for the most part, making me look wistfully at our pool and long for those lazy July floats, sipping on a passion fruit-infused hurricane. That, in turn, led me to think about songs evocative of tropical paradise, which inevitably led to John Prine's politically incorrect (but very funny) "Let's Talk Dirty In Hawaiian." All I can say to that is, thank goodness for Austin City Limits!

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Cinderella.

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Friday Night Videos

Well friends, I don't know how long I'll be able to keep the Friday Night Videos feature going here. Four consecutive songs I hunted up on YouTube had either been deleted or "Embedding disabled by request." Sigh. At least Queen gets it. YouTube serves the same purpose as MTV and Friday Night Videos did back in the day--that is, it's a promotional platform for music to encourage more sales. Videos are a 4 minute commercial for a song in particular, and albums in general (and considering the music selection I feature here, Greatest Hits collections). Fortunately, Queen understands that exposure is a good thing, which is why the brilliantly skewed "Fat Bottomed Girls" is the featured song today. Freddie Mercury could preen like some unholy fusion of Mick Jagger and Tim Curry, and rocked like no other. Enjoy!



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Elton John.

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Friday Night Videos

Apologies for no "Friday Night Videos" last week, but YouTube was on the blink. But that may be fortuitous as far as timing goes. In light of this week's coup in Thailand, the video I'd planned to feature, One Night in Bangkok, seems eerily prescient.



I had the Chess album on tape in high school, and although none of the other songs were as striking as "Bangkok," I still played the heck out of it and found it somewhat addictive. There's one particular oddity regarding this song, though. Some months prior to Murray Head's "Bangkok" video and single coming out, I saw a video on Friday Night Videos (or perhaps the WTBS equivalent program) for the song "One Night in Bangkok." Only it wasn't by Murray Head. It was sung by a chorus of women (Bananarama comes to mind for some reason, but this was most definitely not them) who danced around quite a bit, and I recall red was the predominant color in the video. The arrangement and instrumentation of the song was utterly different from the Head version, and I distinctly remember being baffled by the video when I saw it, as opposed to the Head video, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I never saw that proto-Bangkok again, and have never met anyone else who's ever seen it. Was it a release that flopped, prompting Tim Rice and the others behind Chess to pull the song and rework it? I dunno--this is one instance where Google and Wikipedia are failing me. Does anyone out there know?

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Gino Vanelli

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Friday Night Videos

In the mid-80s 'Til Tuesday was inescapable on the radio or televised video shows (I didn't get MTV in tiny Columbus, Texas, so I was left with Friday Night Videos and Night Tracks). Specifically, it was 'Til Tuesday's monster hit, "Voices Carry," that was ubiquitous. Because of that over-saturation I soured on them, but in the years since I've come to appreciate this song and the talent of Aimee Mann. It got to the point where I'd change the radio or TV station if this one came on, but now I just bask in the nostalgia. Go figure.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Pink Floyd.

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Friday Night Videos

The late Billy Ocean was big in the 80s. Really big. You wouldn't know that from the lack of airplay he gets these days, even on stuff like Sirius XM's 80s station. But he was. He had a smooth, soulful voice and stylish good looks. He seemed like a decent guy. I never quite liked his work enough to rush out and buy his albums, but I never changed the channel when they came on the radio. My earliest memory of him came from the video for "Loverboy". This was on heavy rotation on few video programs my MTV-free house received: Night Tracks, Friday Night Videos, etc. And you know what? It's even weirder today than I remember it. I have to wonder if the Henson Creature Shop was involved in this production in any way, because the horse-lizard main character has pretty sophisticated (though limited) facial movements that remind me of some Farscape creatures, and the woman he abducts looks like a Gelfling, or any of Brian Froud's other fairy-like creatures. Others online have noted the aesthetic similarities, but I haven't seen anything definitely connecting the two. The whole thing is a bizarre Star Wars cantina scene knock-off complete with fake Jawas, but the thing that stands out the most to me is the "Barbot." I want one of those.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Tom Tom Club.

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Friday Night Videos

Talking Heads was the very first band I featured on my Friday Night Videos segment way back in 2006 (technically, I'd posted Sheena Easton the previous week, but I hadn't decided to make it a recurring feature at that time). I do so love the work of that band, even though David Byrne took over to the point where he refused to let them continue on after he departed (I like some of Byrne's solo stuff, but like so many others, being in a group seemed to bring out the best in his writing). That said, one of their signature pieces is actually a cover of Al Green's "Take Me To the River." I don't think I've ever seen an official video for that early hit, but when a brilliant performance from the Stop Making Sense tour exists, that's kind of a moot point.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Charlie Byrd & Stan Getz.

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Friday Night Videos

So we've got a massive Arctic front barreling down on Texas expected to push temperatures down into the teens by Sunday, so I'll be spending this evening and Saturday covering banana and citrus plants and hauling other frost-sensitive tropicals into the garage and other places of warmth so they're not killed by the unnatural cold. Needless to say, I'm not terribly thrilled by all this because I intensely dislike the cold. So this week's installment of Friday Night Videos has me dreaming of warmer climes and sunny weather with Sugar Land's "All I Want To Do." Man, summer cannot get here fast enough!

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Styx.

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Friday Night Videos

I just realized I've been doing Friday Night Videos here for almost 15 years, and in all that time I've never featured the Who. Let me rectify that now with "Won't Get Fooled Again."

Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Kinks.

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Friday Night Videos

I've seen complaints that modern music is too vulgar, that it's offensive and too many artists confuse crudeness for creativity. Shamefacedly, I realize I've contributed to the problem plenty of times in the past with my Friday Night Videos feature. I am sorry. So very, deeply sorry for any offense I may have caused. To make it up to everyone, today I'm sharing the sophisticated classical musical stylings of perhaps the greatest composer ever to live, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Here is his heartfelt vocal composition, "Leck mir den Arsch," as performed by the amazingly talented Johanna von der Deken, Yu Horiuchi and Hyung-ki Joo.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... R.E.M..

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Friday Night Videos

You know, I have thought about featuring this song many times over the years I've done this whole Friday Night Videos thing, but for some reason or other, I never did. Kinda surprising, because I've always liked it and it's a good rocker. Here's Meredith Brooks' "Bitch".

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Sophie B. Hawkins.

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Friday Night Videos

Peter Wolf hit it big with "Come As You Are" in 1987. I remember an article in Rolling Stone or somesuch that covered how Wolf compiled his album out of songs originally rejected by the J.Geils Band, which I found fascinating. Not so fascinating was his video, which featured Wolf bizarrely hopping around a 1950s town. It wasn't necessarily a bad video, but the era of MTV (or Friday Night Videos, because I didn't get MTV in my small Texas town) it was just baffling. It wasn't until decades later that I realized this video is almost a jump-for-jump homage to Bobby Van's 1953 performance of "Take Me To Broadway" From the film "Small Town Girl." After comparing the two, I'm much more impressed by Wolf's video.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Men At Work.

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Friday Night Videos

Sixpence None The Richer's not a band I keep up with much. Sure, I recognize their biggest songs but they've never intrigued me enough to dive deeper into their catalog. So why am I featuring them on Friday Night Videos? Because their new single, "Rosemary Hill," has an accompanying video that was filmed in and around New Braunfels. Seriously, the whole thing. I recognize every intersection, every hill, every Gruene Hall... well, that last one's a given, as there's only one Gruene Hall and it's five minutes from my house. So if you'd like a glimpse of where I live (generally speaking) this video will scratch that itch.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Sergio Mendes.

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Friday Night Videos

I don't know why I thought of Mac Davis, but he was ubiquitous on the radio back when I was growing up. So I thought I'd feature his biggest hit, a tongue-in-cheek ode to self-affirmation, on today's Friday Night Videos. I was shocked to discover there were not any quality clips of him performing it! I considered using his appearance on the Muppet Show, which is good fun, but it's badly pixellated and I couldn't stand watching more than a minute of it. Fortunately, Willie Nelson comes to the rescue, because his cover of "It's Hard to Be Humble" is the musical elixir we didn't know we needed.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Desi Arnaz.

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Friday Night Videos

I know it's pretty obvious, but with the Chicago Cubs playing the Cleveland Indians in the World Series, I would be remiss if I didn't feature the late Steve Goodman's classic "A Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request" on Friday Night Videos. Enjoy.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... "Weird Al" Yankovic.

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Friday Night Videos

Introducing a new weekly feature here at the blog: Friday Night Videos! Being from a small, rural town in Texas, I never experienced the joys of MTV until I got to college--and then I bored of it fairly quickly as it started moving away from an all-video music format. But in high school, my sole connection with hip music pop culture was the network-broadcast Friday Night Videos. So join me on a nostalgia trip back through time as I revisit some of those fondly-remembered classics courtesy of YouTube. First up, one of the all-time best: The Talking Heads' "Nothing But Flowers."



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Sheena Easton

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Friday Night Videos

Wow. Every once in a while I run across a video that just stops me cold. Bob Seger's "Night Moves" is one of those, and it just stopped me cold. Not because it's astounding and great, mind you. There's nothing wrong with it--the video is a lush, well-filmed exercise in nostalgia, filmed in the early 90s when videos were becoming more cinematic and shedding the cheesy excess of the 80s. What stunned me about it is that I'd never seen it before. Look, in the late 80s I was a pretty damn big Seger fan and when this video came out I was still putting MTV on as a default when I wanted something playing in the background. Those of you who know Seger remember that "Night Moves" was a hit back in 1976, before videos were a thing. So this retroactive video was made in 1994 to promote Seger's first greatest hits collection. The video prominently features Daphne Zuniga--of "Melrose Place" and "Spaceballs" fame--along with Matt LeBlanc, who was just months away from hitting it big with "Friends." And I have never, ever seen this video. I didn't even realize it existed. How is that even possible for me, who takes no small amount of pride in knowing absurdly inane trivia like this? Huh. Ain't it funny how the night moves...

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Harry Belafonte.

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