Oldies and Oldies.

 You know you're getting old when songs you heard as a teenager when they were released are used to advertise an oldies show.  An example is Hall and Oates' "I Can't Go For That."  Ironically that song is older than what were labelled rock and roll oldies when it came out.  In 1981 Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" was only 27 years old.  As I write this "I Can't Go For That" is 40 years old.

I suppose to a long of younger people it does sound like an oldie, with its early '80s production.

My First Computer.

My dad was going through some old receipts today, and found one for our family's first computer.  It was the classic Commodore 64.  We also bought a 1541 floppy disk drive and a 1701 monitor.  Total price with tax was $1278.91.  If you think that's expensive, adjusting for inflation that's the equivalent of $3110.38 in 2021 Canadian dollars.  All for a system with 64k of RAM.  Yet talented programmers could pull all sorts of things out of that machine, including synthesized voices.  We later added a Roland DG dot matrix printer to this, but I can't provide a cost figure for that.

Rare And Live.

 Don't worry, I'm still alive.  

Here's some rare footage for your entertainment.  It's Strange Advance in Montreal, from their 1985 tour.  In the past a couple of clips from this have been up, but subsequently disappeared.  Now you can see a hour's worth of them in action.  I think this was also aired on MuchMusic at the time.  It's rare both because it's a mid '80s TV broadcast, and because Strange Advance toured only a couple of times.

A reunited version of the group played several gigs in 2019, but any plans they might have had to go on the road this year were obviously cut short by the pandemic.  

How Did I See This?

YouTube sometimes recommends some surprising stuff that reminds me of my youth, like the following video.

Even before listening to it I thought that I knew the song.  Sure enough once it started playing it was obvious I did, as a mangled version of the chorus has occasionally popped into my head for over 30 years.

Righeira were an Italian duo of Stefano "Michael" Rota and Stefano "Johnson" Righi.  "No Tengo Dinero," " I have no money" in Spanish, was released in 1983.  It was produced by the La Bionda brothers, a successful Italian act from the '70s who had gotten into record production in the '80s.

I assume the version of this video I saw was the shorter 3 some minute version.  How I saw it is a real good question, as Spanish language dance tunes weren't exactly big on the Canadian charts in 1983.  I assume the catchy video caught the attention of some Canadian video show producer, who played it simply because it looked cool.  No doubt it got stuck in my memory because it was something unusual for Canadian TV in the '80s.

Magnum Redux.

Tonight was the debut of the 21st Century version of Magnum PI  As someone who watched the original when it was new I have mixed feelings.  On the one hand they definitely had some hints of the old show that people who saw it will recognise, including TC's Hughes 500D(as it was in those days) helicopter in its familiar striped paint job, the Ferrari 308 GTS Magnum drives in part of the episode, and Zeus and Apollo.  On the other hand there have been changes given the contemporary setting, such as that Magnum and his buddies are now vets of Iraq instead of Vietnam, and that Higgins is a woman this time around.  The latter is sure to upset some old fans, but it doesn't bug me much.  But it looks like they might be setting up a romance between Higgins and Magnum, which would be pretty cliché.

I'm not quite convinced about Jay Hernandez, the new Magnum, just yet.  To me he doesn't seem to have the charisma that Tom Selleck did pretty much from the start of the original series.  It will be interesting to see if that changes as the series progresses and we get more familiar with the new version.  Perdita Weeks will probably have an easier time of things as Higgins, since she won't face the kind of direct comparisons any male actor would to John Hillerman from the original.  But it remains to be seen how their versions of Magnum and Higgins  will play off against each other. 

One critique I have is the obvious use of CGI in some places.  They probably didn't want to boost their budget by doing certain scenes with practical effects, but they just didn't seem right for this show. 

Will the series succeed?  The revived Hawaii Five-0 has had a successful run, so it's possible.  But revived series have also flopped, like the new version of Ironside a few years back. 

The Look Is Gone.

The other night I saw a drawing of a character that reminded me of Christina Applegate.  So I ended up looking at a few clips of Married With Children(or Married...with Children as some sources render it) on YouTube.  One thing that struck me was how it was a multi camera show filmed to video, a format that has disappeared from sitcoms, and the rest of North American scripted TV as well, other than the remaining US soaps.  In the '80s it was incredibly common, but looking at those clips in 2017 it was just one of the things that made them look dated.  Current productions all look like they're filmed now, whatever the actual equipment used to capture them is.   But I'm kind of surprised that I didn't notice the change, even though it happened a good while ago already.

Of course filming to video isn't completely gone.  It's still very common for reality TV, and shows like Saturday Night Live.   It still works for those formats, giving them the appearance of happening as we watch them.  I suppose sooner or later someone will try it with a sitcom again, but it will probably be used deliberately to make it look like a '70s or '80s sitcom.

Today's Cassette, August 7, 2017.

This morning I found another box of cassettes that had been misplaced.  So out came the player and the self titled album by Max Q.  The band was a collaboration between eclectic Australian musician Ollie Olsen and Michael Hutchence of INXS.  Max Q was released in 1989 and was the band's sole release.  It's out of print, which surprises me a bit given Hutchence's fame.  And some of the lyrics from the song "Ghost of the Year" are disturbing in retrospect:

I'm counting on you
To count the fingers on my hands
That's the amount of time I've got.

Hutchence died in 1997, his death ruled a suicide.

Do They Even Remember It?

Going about my business this afternoon I heard a song I know I haven't heard in 20 years, if not more.  "Notorious" was the single released off Loverboy's  1987 album Wildside.  Co-written by Mike Reno with the late Todd Cerney, Jon Bon Jovi, and Richie Sambora(something I didn't know) it sounds like an attempt at producing another "Hot Girl's In Love."  And it's "nah nah nah, nah nah nah notorious" line in the chorus was probably intended for having an audience sing along live. 

Not having heard it in so long I found myself wondering half seriously if the guys in Loverboy even remember the song.  Of course they might not want to.  Although "Notorious" did generate some airplay it didn't help Wildside, which became their first album not to go platinum, and the group soon broke up over tensions between Reno and guitarist Paul Dean.  Like some other bands that got lumped into the arena rock/AOR category they presumably just ran out of steam, not being pretty enough or having the right sound to keep up with the hair metal bands popular at the time.  In fact it could be seen as ironic that Bon Jovi and Sambora co-wrote "Notorious," since Bon Jovi probably sucked up market share that would previously have bought Loverboy albums.

See what you think.  Here's the promo video for the song. 

Maybe I Shouldn't.

Recently I stumbled across the Stingray Retro channel on my cable box.  All they do is play old videos from the '80s and '90s, with the occasional early 2000s vid thrown in for variety.  But I'm starting to wonder if I should be watching it.  I'll be sitting there, see a video from the '80s, and suddenly find myself filled with a mix of nostalgia and melancholy.  I remember a bunch of those videos, having watched them when I was a teenager, and it just reminds me the late '80s were 30 years ago already.  It's also sad seeing someone like Michael Hutchence, knowing he died too young.

One thing that's odd is the poor quality of some of the oldest videos.  They look like they were taken off someone's old VHS cassettes.  Did they come out of the vault at Muchmusic or something? 

A Song For Today.

Here is a song appropriate for today.  Well, the title is at least.  Warning, it mentions cat kicking.



I'm sure most of you can figure out who Ronnie is. But Connie? That would be Konstantin Chernenko. If you remember who he is you're old like me.

There Was More.

German singer Peter Schilling is a classic example of a one hit wonder(internationally at least).  His 1983 single "Major Tom(Coming Home)" was a major hit in various markets, including Canada and the US.  Nothing else Schilling released had any international impact.  But of course, being recorded in the album era, the song was part of an album, Error in the System.   "I Have No Desire" was another song on the album, and it's quite catchy.  The lyrics seem just as relevant in our era of 24 hour media saturation as they did in during the Cold War tensions of the early '80s.

The early and mid '80s were a good time to be a German group, with acts such as Trio, the Scorpions, Nena, and Alphaville making an international splash.  You could also include American Tony Carey as well, as his albums, under his own name and as Planet P Project, were recorded in West Germany with mainly German musicians.

Generic Can Be A Problem.

I've been on a bit of an '80s and early '90s nostalgia kick of late, having spent a lot of time looking at old TV commercials on YouTube.  And this morning I was thinking of the days when music videos were the hot thing, and there were who knows how many video shows on both network and local TV.  But one I remember is kind of hard to look up.  To the best of my knowledge the title, or partial title, was Rock and Roll Video.  As you can imagine it's pretty hard to find something like that when it's such a generic phrase.  Of course CBC's long running daytime video show was Video Hits, another generic title, but it's much easier to find when you know the broadcaster.

Take This.

If you read my last post, and it bummed you out, maybe this one will make you cheer up a bit.  Catchy and breezy, isn't it?

The VHS Advantage.

I rented a movie yesterday.  As I began to watch it I remembered one of the advantages of the VHS video cassette for watching movie rentals.  If there's ads at the beginning you can fast forward through them.  DVDs force you to watch through all the crappy ads.  I sat there last night for what must have been 5 or 6 minutes of trailers for movies I have no interest in, and an ad trying to get me to by a Blu Ray player.  On the other hand you don't need to rewind a DVD.

To most younger readers a VCR is a curiosity at best, something your older relatives might still have in their house, plugged in or not.(I say most because I'm sure there are some young movie buffs who own one to watch movies that will never see the official digital light of day, but are still found on VHS.)  I'm old enough to remember when they were high tech and expensive.  The first ones I saw in the flesh were in grade school, where they were used to show us kids stuff that was taped off TV.  This was early enough that I doubt we were ever shown anything commercially made.  These early machines even had mechanical recording timers on them.  I wonder if some might have been Betamax machines, Sony's home video format which ultimately lost to JVC's VHS format, despite its supposed better quality.

I'm not sure when my family got our first VCR, but it was some time in the mid-late '80s.  But we'd been renting videos for some time before that.  When video rental stores began to appear they rented machines in the early days alongside the actual cassettes.  After all most people initially didn't have a VCR due to the cost.  So when you came home from the video store not only would you be carrying a bag of cassettes, you'd be carrying a big metal case with a heavy VCR in it.  I'm not sure when the practice ended, because of course once we got our own machine we didn't need to bother renting one anymore.

One thing I can't remember is whether the ancestor of the DVD, the LaserDisc, was ever offered for rent locally.  The format was pretty much a flop in North America, so it's quite amusing to see interviews with musicians circa 1980 speculating on what the format might mean for the industry.  A number of them talked about producing visual material for the format, but other than a few concert videos these plans fizzled as the format did.  I do remember seeing a few used discs in Saskatoon in the mid '80s, so a few of the machines did reach the market in this area.

Surprisingly Fresh.

After much delay the remake of the 1984 Commie invasion flick Red Dawn finally hit the theatres this week. Seeing a review in the paper this morning I decided to check the Rotten Tomatoes page for the film.  It currently has a rating of 11 percent.  Sure, the film is a failure with the critics, but it's quite a way above the "Watch this film and you might die, it's that horrible!" level of something like Ballistic:  Ecks vs. Severe. It actually has several positive reviews, although even those are of the "damning with faint praise" genre.  Still, positive reviews are positive reviews.

No doubt some US right wing commentators will claim the bad reviews are because US movie reviewers are all a bunch of leftist traitors.  But the reality is that the concept of the film is ridiculous.  It's even more ridiculous given the decision to change the villains in the film to the North Koreans from the Chinese after the bulk of filming was done, delaying the release of the film.  The change came because the studio was afraid the film might not get played in the increasingly lucrative Chinese market with the Chinese as villains.  But it's a decision that may have hurt the film.  Viewers might have a slightly easier time suspending their disbelief with Chinese baddies, but the North Koreans?  Even with the help of the macguffin used in the film they'd have trouble invading a Sandals resort, let alone the United States.

Thinking about the 1984 original I realised this morning I remember nothing of its debut, or the critical reaction at the time.  I remember other Cold War oriented pieces of the era, like The Day After and the later "Soviets conquer the US!" miniseries Amerika, but not the original Red Dawn.  I wonder what distracted my attention.

It will be interesting to see how much money the film makes.  Will the nostalgia some people have for the original fill theatre seats?  Will the premise draw in younger viewers?   The initial box office results will probably tell the tale.

I Question His Taste.

I must say I'm a bit disappointed with Mike Wilner after what I heard on today's Blue Jays pre game show on the Blue Jays Radio Network.  Today's Blue Jays-Orioles game is in a rain delay.  Over the PA system they apparently were playing "Here Comes The Rain Again" by the Eurythmics.  Wilner claimed it was the worst song of the 1980s.  Seriously?  Worse than some of the third rate hair metal that charted?  Or the more egregious of the schmaltzly power ballads that were so popular?  I don't think so, Mr. Wilmer.

A Public Service.

Annoyed that you can't figure out what the hell that music in the new Blackberry ad is?  Wondering why it sounds a bit like Queen?  That's because it is Queen, with their theme for the 1980 flop Flash Gordon.  I've  never seen the movie, and looking at the clips here I'm in no hurry to.  (Melody Anderson's acting looks pretty bad here.) One thing that's amusing to me about the Queen footage in the vid is Brian May doing piano parts on an Oberheim OBX analog synthesizer.  For those not familiar with it, an OBX cannot do realistic piano sounds.

Remember This?

I don't know about you, but I always wondered what Parks Canada was thinking using this piece of music in their 1980s ads.  I like it(nice Minimoog lead), but it's hardly the kind of thing you'd think would attract people to parks.  It sounds more appropriate as a sci fi, spy, or mystery TV theme.  And of course I'll ask the obvious question, does anyone know what music is?

A Bad Case Of Remakeitis.

Hollywood's lazy remake habit is bad enough, but you really have to wonder what they're thinking with some of them. There's a remake of Red Dawn currently in production. The original starred the late Patrick Swayze as a member of a group of teenagers who take up arms when the Soviet Union invades the US. The premise was ridiculous in 1984 and is even more ridiculous now even with the main bad guys switched to the Chinese this time. Does this mean that Amerika will be remade next? It makes about as much sense. I can't help but suspect that whoever greenlighted the Red Dawn remake was a kid back in the '80s and it was his favourite film.

Advertising Many Years Time Ago.

There are always surprises to be found on YouTube. One of these is the commerical above, a Molson Canadian ad from circa 1985. This ad, which features a cover version of the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night," predates Nike controversial use of the original Beatles recording of "Revolution" in a TV ad by two years. I saw this ad numerous times during its run on Canadian TV and it stuck in my head, so it was interesting to stumble across it on YouTube after not literally seeing it for 24 some years.
Pop culture is often ephemeral, but TV commercials by their very nature are extreme examples of this. While a musician, novelist, or filmmaker hopes their work will be a hit and have a long life those who make commercials know that their works will in the majority of cases have a limited lifespan. Their life may be as short as a day or two, and in general most ads hang around only for a few weeks. There are of course campaigns with longer lifespans, but even in those cases they tend to alter gradually as time passes, and even the most successful will eventually outlive their usefulness. Eventually today's successful ad elements like Erin Esurance will join the Taco Bell chihuahua in the nostalgic memories of those who saw them.

Given this it's surprising to see such "ancient" material online. Things that people might be expected to want to experience again, like TV shows and music, have often been the subject of less than careful treatment. An example would be Doctor Who, for which some of the earliest episodes are no longer available because the BBC didn't bother to preserve them. Old commercials are even less likely to be preserved, since their intended goal has been accomplished and there is no real viewing audience that would be interested in acquiring them on DVD. So their appearance on YouTube is mere luck of the draw, the result of being captured when a TV show or movie was recorded for later viewing off TV. It's reasonable to assume that for many ads the only existing copies will be such happenstance archiving, especially those ads made locally or regionally. So don't be surprised if that Coke ad you really loved in 1989 isn't available online.