THE VIDEO Def Leppard, "Foolin'", Pyromania 1983, Mercury
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SAMPLE LYRIC "Is anybody out there? / Anybody they-ere? / Does anybody wonder? / Oh oh does anybody cay-a-a-are? / Oh / I just gotta know / If you're really they-ay-ere / and you really care-are / 'cause baby I'm not / f-f-f-foolin'"
EXCESSIVELY DETAILED DESCRIPTION This song opens with a bit of what I think is acoustic guitar, but which is in the video dramatized by a weird looking woman who has her eyes sewn shut playing a harp surrounded by fire (see? This is so why I live for this stuff). Then Joe Elliott's head appears in a little halo of light in the upper righthand corner when he starts singing. The screen does this crappy page-turning effect, revealing Joe singing into a microphone. This is before Hysteria, so he doesn't have his notorious hockey haircut. Instead, he has a totally cute Jane Fonda-style shag.
Smoke starts billowing behind Joe, then we see the harp lady again before panning out to see the whole band. My man Steve Clark turns out to have been the one with the acoustic guitar, but he throws it to the side as Joe kicks in with his patented high-pitched but not loud screaming. With "Is anybody out there?" we find that Joe is chained to a triangular-shaped platform accented with red neon that's attached to a sort of a giant skull. The whole set he's in is sort of like Metropolis, but like, if Metropolis had a crapload of skulls on top of all the buildings. (For real: I had my film geek bf look at it and he was like, "Eh, I'll allow it). Anyway, Joe is splay-legged with his wrists chained by his sides, and he keeps arching his back. He's wearing a tiny white sleeveless shirt and high-waisted white pants (I think their record company just supplied DL with an endless stream of high-waisted white pants -- in all of their old videos at least half the band is rocking them).
Anyway. Joe bops around enough to make sparks explode where his wrists are bound, but it doesn't set him free. Instead, it just cues flashpots back on Def Leppard's set. We finally see shots of the rest of the band, starting with Rick Savage (white shirt, high-waisted red pants), then going to Rick Allen (who admittedly at all times eschews white pants in favor of Union Jack tiny shorts and nothing else), then Phil Collen (black or navy shirt with white polka dots, high-waisted white pants). We don't see Steve, but I can tell you he's wearing high-waisted white pants, a white blazer, and a navy bandanna. Hot! Anyway, we're in the chorus again (already!) and now we see everyone singing. Steve and Phil share a mic since they're totally BFF, and both Ricks sing too.
As the chorus ends, another flashpot goes off, and we get a shot of someone adjusting a spotlight (this shot does not necessarily feel intentional -- why the hell is it in there?). The harp lady comes back, then we see Joe trying to use pelvic thrusts to free himself from his triangular prison as more smoke pours in, then (again) the fake page-turning effect. The page turns onto a shadowy set with some fake sunset clouds painted on in the background. A woman who looks like she's going to be all hot and turns out to be really scary looking (she looks like the "Queen of the Reich" without her helmet) gazes into a crystal ball. She sees Joe chained to the thing with the sparks exploding at his wrists, then sees him singing. For some reason, this makes her scream, then her image turns into a little triangle that flies backward into the fake sunset clouds.
This enables Joe to finally break free, and he holds his hands up and sort of screams at them. He sits all the way up, then we see more of the band playing normally and as we hit the chorus, we see Joe hurrying, stooped over, through a dark room lit only by some random neon rods. There are a series of explosions behind him and he hustles on out of there. Then we see some kind of small explosion in front of a crappy skull picture, and on stage Joe thrusts his mic stand at the camera as Phil tears into the guitar solo. We see a lot of him down on his knees, and I must say he can bend pretty far in his white pants, even if all this posturing is to the exclusion of seeing very much of Steve, who stays in the back.
As the chorus is reprised, we see the crappy skull drawing lit from above by what appears to be maybe a hole with the grim reaper peeping through it? More light is cast and we see that the skull is on the wall in a stonewalled room with flames coming out of a hole in the floor. More flames shoot up, then the band members "jump up" from inside the hole (i.e., they play footage of the band members jumping into the hole backward). For the final "and you really care-are" we get a close-up of Joe, who for various reasons unknown to us has matted down his hair and changed into a different white tank top that say "Le Club" on it in pale blue. Yowza.
The fake page turning thing again gives us the band performing. Steve and Phil are again sharing a mic, which awesomely shows off how Steve's spotted bandanna/scarf totally matches Phil's shirt, which I love. Joe's still in the Le Club shirt, implying to me more that they shot this video sequentially than that they were worried about continuity. The video ends with Joe jumping off the stage, then a triangular picture of him chained to that thing flying backward as everyone left onstage raises their fists and a wall of flashpots go off.
THE VERDICT This song has a lot of things going in its favor. One, to my mind a good Def Leppard video should make you want to put on a bandanna, stat, and this one definitely does. Steve Clarke (my personal favorite Leppard, god rest his soul) is looking h-o-t! No man can rock a jacket shirtless like he. Second, cowbell. Mad cowbell! Which I love. Plus it has the positive association of making me think about college. When I was in school, I often ran on campus and in the neighborhood surrounding, and I'd always listen to my trusty Walkman (and yes, I didn't go to college very long ago -- I just loved my kickass cassette collection way too much to ever really bother with CDs. I went straight from a Walkman to an iPod, with nary a Discman between. No joke). Anyway, when I wasn't blasting the soundtrack to Less Than Zero or Night Songs, I usually tuned to a local classic rock station that was generally inoffensive. The one song, however, that they were always guaranteed to play -- they must have played it once an hour, there was just no other explanation for the fact that they played it all the freakin' time -- was "Foolin.'" So yeah, I have many, many memories of running, listening to this song.
Hmm, I guess reading back over this it was at that point that I decided my post was done. Some kicker, eh?
P.S.: Post updated with big, colorful, new images April 2010!