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| LA's Burning Sensations |
I haven’t posted in far too long, and to anyone who is
following this blog regularly I apologize.
I’m starting a new job next year and due to a wrinkle of fate I actually
am still being paid by my old job while I prepare materials for this new job,
so I’ve been focusing on that. But I’d
like to get back into the swing of posting regularly, specifically I still have
voluminous posts coming on country rock, on electronica, another post on
post-rock, among others. But to get my
feet wet I’m writing today’s post which focuses on three obscure songs that I
first discovered via their music videos.
For those of us old enough to remember, before there was Wikipedia,
before there was All Music Guide, before there was iTunes, before there was
YouTube, before there was even an internet, one of the main places to get
exposed to new music was via music videos.
I spent my formative years in Southern California, which did not get MTV
until very late in my “childhood” (I think I was in high school), and so even
if my parents HAD wanted to spend money on cable TV (which they did not) I
couldn’t have seen it. My first exposure
to MTV was through friends who got it then.
At one point around my senior year of high school, my aunt Kris (who is
only 2 years older than me and has always been more like a big sister) and I
house sat for some family friends who had MTV and I can remember us watching it
endlessly even though it was a massive letdown because it was so insufferably
BORING—they showed very few videos even then and it seems in retrospect that
they spent at least an equal amount of time shilling themselves—the constant
station IDs (this was back in the “Moon Man” phase), the endless promotional
contests (the one during this period of time was “Be a Roadie for Bruce Springsteen”,
which couldn’t have appealed LESS to me at the time given my European
synthpop/new wave obsession). Mostly it
seemed very East Coast—very New York centered, very much NOT hip to the new
wave feeling of the time.
Where did we get our music videos if not from MTV? Well, I’ve already posted several times about
the show MV3, a local Southern California show that combined videos with a
studio dance format. MV3 was
world-changing to my friends and I, primarily because of the studio dancers and
their various tribal new wave styles. In
Long Beach, where we lived, very few people dressed like mods or like new
wavers or rockabilly cats, mostly everyone skulked around in their preppy
fashions—plaid or brightly colored golf pants, polo style shirts, sweaters tied
around the neck, Topsider boat shoes.
Seeing these other kids awash in the latest European/New York fashions
was revelatory. In fact, one of the main
reasons I decided to attend college at UCLA (aside from the excellent academics
of course) was because during the 1984 Olympics my family took me to several
events at UCLA’s campus and driving through Westwood I saw TONS of people
dressed in the cool fashions of the time.
I thought I’d died and gone to new wave heaven.
But MV3 was also the source of many odd, rare, distinctive
videos back in the day too that were influential as well. Many were by local bands that had scraped
together enough money to make a video then begged or bribed MV3 into playing
it. Two groups in particular, Fishbone
and the Bangles, achieved fame first as local celebrities for their music
videos. Fishbone’s “? (Modern Industry)” was immensely popular; I think I
could still recite most if not all of the radio stations mentioned in that song
from memory! “The Real World” remains my
favorite Bangles song of all time; I
really love the catchy 60’s London swing to that song and even then I and most
of my friends could tell that Susanna
Hoffs was smokin’ hot, even shrouded up in 60’s fashions as she was.
But there were songs that were even MORE obscure, and the
bands that made them didn’t usually go on to big fame. Burning
Sensations was a band that kind of straddled this divide: while they didn’t have much national
recognition, they were pretty popular in Southern California primarily because
of the video for their song “Belly of the Whale”. The song itself is outstanding—a catchy blast
of calypso/ska-infused rock—and the video looked like a hoot: the band, some very attractive dancing girls/bathing
beauties, and a bunch of other cool characters (their friends I presume) all
hanging out in a club inside the aforementioned whale’s belly. In its own way the video was like a weird LA
answer to what might arguably be the coolest video of all time, the English Beat’s “Save it for Later”,
which was shot in some weird bohemian beatnik cavern club and which convinced
me and many others that England had to be the coolest country in the
world. Burning Sensations were fronted
by Tim McGovern, who had formerly
played guitar for the Motels (the
“Whale” video even has a tribute, or is it a dig at? Martha Davis of the Motels, showing a doppelganger from her “Only
the Lonely” video who pushes McGovern down the slide into the whale’s belly, a
metaphor for her kicking him out perhaps?), and this song was their one big hit
(though they did also achieve recognition for their cover of Jonathon Richman’s “Pablo Picasso” on
the soundtrack for the excellent movie Repo
Man). McGovern’s look in this video
was very fashion-forward: he wears a slouchy
“Rat Pack” style hat and a goatee, literally decades before every hipster
douche on earth adopted this as their “unique” look. Unfortunately after releasing one EP and one
album Burning Sensations kind of faded into obscurity, but for one brief moment
back in 1983 or so, they made LA seem as cool as London.
Another strange local gem was the video for the song “Cool
Nerd” by Danny Schneider. Schneider had started his musical career in
northern California (supposedly at one point even auditioning for Sammy Hagar’s
band. He moved to LA and his band there,
Speedlimit, had some limited
(ha ha) exposure on LA’s premiere new wave radio station KROQ with their cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made
For Walkin’”. Amazingly, iTunes has not
one but TWO compilations of Speedlimit’s output available, including this song
as well as their main single, “In the Middle of the Night”, which sounds like a
cross between REO Speedwagon or Loverboy and perhaps a David Byrne-fronted Animotion. It’s pretty generic early 80’s new wave
tinged bar/arena rock, sounding like something off the original Terminator soundtrack
that might have been playing at “Tech Noir” just before Ah-nold strode in and
gunned everyone down. Schneider’s vocals
sound like a weird hybrid between David Byrne’s strident nerdiness and the
chirpiness of Gary Numan. Weird stuff.
Anyhoo Schneider reached a larger audience (of at least one,
i.e., me) when he went solo and released a single and video called “The Cool
Nerd”. The song is a swinging, sweet,
rapidly plucked acoustic guitar ditty about a guy who’s such a nerd he loves to
dance by himself. Scheider’s high
pitched vocals and that kicky beat make this song extremely catchy in a nerd
rock kind of way that again evokes David Byrne or some other 80’s nerd icon. In the video, Schneider acts out the part of
the cool nerd in a way that was eye catching but it was really his beautiful,
fluid guitar picking that made this stick in my memory for about 30 years (and
counting). The video is posted on
YouTube by Schneider himself and as mentioned the song is available on
iTunes.
Even weirder was the song and video for “How To Pick Up
Girls”, a song by two diminutive sisters from Canada known (a little
perversely) as the Little Girls. The song is really just straight-ahead bar
band rock aside from the chirpy vocals by the Maso sisters but it became a (very) minor hit. The video again is a combination
performance/storyline where various cheesy mulletted Canadian guys try in vain
to pick up the aforementioned (Little) girls.
The sisters’ strange faux-aerobics dancing style is about the most
interesting thing about this video, aside from the fact that they achieved a
form of immortality by dint of the fact that Bret Easton Ellis quotes the lyrics from one of their other songs,
“The Earthquake Song”, in his now-legendary 80’s too-fast-too-soon
coming-of-age novel “Less Than Zero”.
“The Earthquake Song” is a slice of neo-60’s hip-shaking that is very
reminiscent of Josie Cotton’s
“Johnny Are You Queer” and “You Could Be the One”. A strangely peppy and throwaway song to be
featured in such a dark book (which primarily quotes or mentions lyrics by more
durable acts like X, Randy Newman, Led
Zeppelin, etc.).
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