THE VIDEO Dio, "Rock N Roll Children," Sacred Heart, 1985, Warner Brothers
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SAMPLE LYRIC "Rock n roll chilllldren! / uh-looone uh-ga-ai-ai-ai-ain / Rock n roll chilllldren! / without a fri-ie-ie-iend / but they got rock n roll!"
EXCESSIVELY DETAILED DESCRIPTION The video opens with a lengthy prologue that is usually cut up, but I'll present it here in full because, you know, I'm like that. Stuff that is in brackets is what usually gets cut, no brackets means it's what you'll always see (if that is, like me, you are often in circumstances where you would see the video for "Rock N Roll Children").
[The video opens on a dark, damp street, with the camera hovering above it. A man walking towards us drops a newspaper in a garbage bin while another man, walking away from us, approaches a girl waiting beside a building. Even though costumes will soon place us firmly in the 80s, a car from the 40s or 50s is visible parked on the street.]
[Camera zooms in behind man's head: "Excuse me, I think you're really sexy."]
[Close up of girl's face. She's approximately 14 and definitely not sexy: "Get lost."]
[Guy's head, from side: "Hey, I was just saying I like you. I think you're really beautiful."]
[Girl shrilly interrupts him: "I said beat it!"]
[Super-hot teenage boy approaches, gently shoves guy: "Yeah, beat it!"]
[Guy moves away: "Hey, you know you should be more polite."]
[Girl, turning toward him: "And you should mind your own business."]
[Hot guy: "Yeah, I said beat it." Shoves other guy's chest.]
[Guy, pointing at hot guy and turning away: "Watch your step."]
[Girl rolls eyes at hot guy, who's looking hot -- he totally looks like a young George Lynch! Other guy, still pointing, finally walks away.]
Girl opens her arms in exasperation. "You're late."
[They start walking down the street. Hot guy: "Hey, I rescue you and you complain?"]
Girl, upset: "Where's the guitar?"
Guy, looking especially hot: "I wanted to..." (Girl interrupts: "What's in this bag?", rummaging through the shopping bag he's been carrying the whole time.) Guy: I wanted to talk to you about that."
Guy: "You see, I sold it."
Girl, incredulous, or at least incredibly pissed: "You did what?"
Guy: "I got myself a job, okay? But I needed to invest a little money."
Girl: "You gotta be putting me on!" [Points at herself and says, "Hey, that was mine too, you know!"]
Guy pulls valet hat out of bag. "Come on...(silly voice) Can I park your car, madam?"
Girl: "This is it. This is the end. You look path-et-ic." She turns away from him.
Guy, indignant: ["Look, I could pay for the guitar in a couple of weeks.] I could be making 200 bucks a week."
Girl, disgusted: "Oh, so you sold out. Yeah, well maybe I'm getting out now, too!" Lightning flashes and they both look around, startled. Thunder crashes.
Guy: "Crazy weather..."
And the song at last begins as the girl pulls the guy into the dusty curio shop they have been standing beside the window of the whole time.
The camera's above them as they enter the shop, which is dark, deserted, and full of crap like empty bird cages and old globes. As lightning flashes again, we first see Ronnie James Dio, who's looking rather dandaical in a white collared shirt with some kind of large brooch at the neck and a rather foppish black jacket. He's expressionless as lightning illuminates his face, and since he's pretty much out of context with what's been happening so far, we can't tell where he is.
The girl and boy pause to look into a crystal ball (which contains something we can't see) while a marionette spins over their heads, then we're back with the lightning and RJD as he begins to sing. We cut away from him, and back outside the mean guy is back, gesturing toward the curio shop, and he's got a cop with him (imagined dialogue: "See, officer? The chick I was sexually harassing was right here").
The boy and girl lean in close to the crystal ball, but its still unclear exactly what's inside (a person, probably Dio). The girl notices the guy and cop through the window (we also see a large model ship) as rain streaks down it, and she gestures to the boy, who looks up. They run backward into the shop and take refuge in a large wardrobe. We then see Dio singing again, more animatedly, and we can now tell that he is also inside the curio shop. As he sings, "Just like somebody slammed a door -- Bang! Yeah!" the doors of the wardrobe slam shut on the boy and girl. The doors then reopen, to reveal that the boy and girl are gone and have been replaced by light and fog. Meanwhile, Dio has crept over to the door (the way it's shot, he looks about three feet tall) and he turns the sign in the door's window from "open" to "closed" and draws the shade, giving us a meaningful look.
The boy and girl emerge, finding themselves in a shadowy, spooky world made entirely of two-by-fours. They walk cautiously, and we cut away momentarily to see that RJD is now watching them in the crystal ball, which he waves his hands around dramatically. The light from it causes him to look especially creepy. The boy says, "What's happening?" and we see an overhead shot of the world they're in -- it is actually a giant, spooky maze made entirely of two-by-fours and lit by a full moon. They're starting off, as far as we can tell, in the center of the maze.
Before we go any further, allow me to give a quick description of the two main players. The Girl is quite short (probably about my height, 5' 2") and a little heavy. Okay, by a little heavy, I basically mean not built like the women in every other heavy metal video. Her face looks like a 50-50 mix between Ashlee Simpson and Kelly Osbourne (I'm not kidding at all), and she has medium-length dark brown hair cut in a sort of rocker shag. She's not wearing much makeup. She has on a sleeveless white t-shirt with a large red cross on it accompanied by black silhouettes of airplanes, and she has a black bandanna tied around her neck. She's also wearing two studded belts (one wide, one narrow) over the shirt, and yellow and black tiger-stripe leggings. I can't see her shoes well but they're flats, possibly Converse.
The boy is, again, so hot. He totally looks like a young George Lynch. He has kind of spiky, somewhat long hair that's very teased. It's dark brown but has been highlighted blonde, and he has that sexy olive skin (just like George). He's wearing a t-shirt I can't see very well underneath a black, sleeveless vest, and he has a red bandanna around his neck. He's also wearing slim black jeans, and has another bandanna (that's I think yellow but might just be white -- the lighting in this video is horrible and all of the colors are washed out and very drab) tied around his left thigh. He has another one tied around his right calf. He's definitely wearing Chuck Taylors.
Anyway. They're in the spooky room, walking around horror movie-style (eyes wide, arms out, moving sideways). The girl's holding her arm out toward him, but he's already peeping down a hallway. As he passes through the doorway, a gate crashes down, trapping him there, and he turns and runs up to the bars as the girl panics. She brings both her hands to her face and we can see that she's got a bunch of bandannas, bracelets, etc. tied around both wrists.
She begins walking toward him, slowly, with one arm out, then we come in close to her face as a look of puzzlement comes over her, and she slowly turns her head to look over her left shoulder. There, behind her, we suddenly see a woman in a red dress holding a wrapped gift standing next to a Christmas tree, while a man and another teenage boy sit on a couch beside it. There's also a coffee table with some more gifts sitting on it. The man stands up and crosses his arms, and the woman holds the gift out and says either "Merry Christmas, dear" or "Merry Christmas, Sarah" (sorry, not sure), causing RJD to really go nuts with waving his hands around his crystal ball. In the ball, we see the girl start to smile and walk toward them, while the boy slams his hand against the bars and turns and walks away.
The girl accepts the gift from the mother, who clasps her hands together in delight. She takes the top off of the box, and we cut to a shot of the boy running down the halls and falling and sliding. The girl (who, I'm sorry, is actually wearing fingerless gloves with two large, studded cuffs on her wrists) has unwrapped a bouffy white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. She looks at it oddly, and as she holds it up to herself she suddenly sees herself in non-rocker clothes with un-teased hair and no makeup on. Disgusted, she hurls the shirt to the ground and starts crying. We see both the real her and the illusory non-rocker-her cry and run off, and the father points after her. The mother crys, the brother laughs, and the father admonishes, and as we see them all closely we can see that they're all a little weirdly made up (like if Andy Warhol touched up a Norman Rockwell painting).
Dio waves his hands over the ball, and we see that the boy has happily found his bedroom, which contains a messy twin bed covered in clothing and crap, a pile of albums, clothes, and so on on the floor, and a bulletin board with lots of posters, flyers, and a paper skeleton. He sits down on the bed, happy to find that in this weird, wooden universe he apparently hasn't sold the guitar. Just as he picks it up, a thuggish older man in a wifebeater and jeans enters and shoves him, hard. He recoils and the man yells at him (inaubibly), tears one of his posters off of the bulletin board and shreds it up, then begins taking off his belt. The boy takes off and we see him running down different wooden hallways.
Next we see the girl running (and I see now she has black bandannas tied around her legs -- clearly the costume person on this video had a big Punky Brewster fetish). She sees a white door with a man wearing black pants, a white dress shirt, and a bowtie standing beside it, and tries to run through it. He holds the door closed with one hand and with the other, grabs her and pulls her aside. He then opens the door for two blonde girls (one of whom is wearing a really strange hat not unlike the one the boy had at the beginning of the video), who look at the girl in disgust before walking through. The girl tries to go as well, while the door is open, but the man grabs her by the ear and pulls her back the other way.
We see another shot of the whole wooden maze from above as the boy runs through the center room, then we see the girl enter a classroom where several girls in white shirts, socks, and blue plaid skirts sit at desks and another girl writes on a chalkboard, and a man in a suit passes out papers. The girl, confused, carefully sits down at a desk, and as the man comes to her gestures to herself. He holds out her paper, tears it into tiny pieces, and throws the pieces in her face, and the girls at the other desks laugh at her. She shoves the books off of her desk, stands up slowly, then runs away.
Next we see the boy run up to a windowed door, pressing his hands against it. A closer shot reveals a handwritten "help wanted" sign in the window, and an older man with glasses wearing a white coat approaches the door from the inside, sees the boy, and jerks the sign away and pulls down the window shade. The boy whirls away.
The chorus is reprised as RJD waves his hands, and in the crystal ball we see the boy catch a basketball, toss it back to someone, and then catch it again as it is thrown at him with force. We then see him struggle for the ball against a gym teacher in green sweatpants while several other boys in green shorts jockey for position by the hoop, then the boy gets the ball away and makes a throwaway shot. Mercifully, they don't ask us to believe that he makes the shot, the ball simply goes away, and all of the guys yell after him as he runs off.
Dio waves at the crystal ball, and the girl stops running suddenly, surprised to see herself working on a motorcycle with two boys. One of the boys reaches over the bike and either simply shoves her or tries to grab her breast (hard to tell, but I'm leaning toward the latter -- making me love Dio even more for his sensitivity to sexism), and as she falls away we see both of the boys laughing and high-fiving each other in the crystal ball (assholes).
Next the boy is stopped short as he runs into a vision of himself having his long hair cut off by a slightly crazy looking barber. He turns and runs away, emerging in that main room again, where the girl has just shown up as well. They approach each other cautiously, and she puts out her hands and touches him to make sure it's really her. Realizing they've found each other again, they embrace, and he lifts her off of the ground. Suddenly they break apart, and realize they're surrounded by all of the people from all of the different scenarios -- the scary dad, the creepy guy, the laughing girls, the barber, the teacher, and they yell and circle around them until Dio picks up his crystal ball and smashes it against the ground.
This breaks the spell (or whatever), and the boy and girl run out of the wardrobe, which is still full of light and fog. They leave the shop, and emerge (somehow the boy has recovered his shopping bag). There's someone else standing outside the window but apparently it's not the guy from before. They grab each other and kiss, and we see Dio inside waving his arms to show that he's actually been wearing sort of a poet blouse (or whatever they call those things) and a cape the whole time. As the girl and boy embrace, the boy reaches behind her and drops the shopping bag into the garbage bin. They turn and walk up the street, and she grabs his ass (lucky). We see a close up of the outside of the curio shop's door, and from inside Dio's hand reaches up to raise the shade and change the sign from "closed" back to "open" -- ready for business, or at least, to teach some more rock n roll children a life lesson.
THE VERDICT I'm quite enamored of this video, even though I find it a bit discomforting to watch (it's the same thing as videos like "18 and Life", I always feel bad for the people). Anyway. My main revelation in writing about the video, and more importantly, in finding the complete video, is that having the entire prologue explains some mysteries but creates others.
First, it makes the girl more sympathetic. In the edited version, it just seems like she wants the boy to be there for her and (it is implied) become a rock star and take her with him. Its only in getting all of the dialogue that we find out that the guitar was a joint purchase, so it no longer seems that she's just being belligerent about his getting the job.
Adding in the whole exchange with the creepy guy helps to explain why, once inside the curio shop, they run and hide. Though the video always includes them seeing the guy and the cop outside the window, without the prologue there's no reason for them to run and hide, unless they're a lot sketchier than they had seemed (they're not doing anything illegal just by being in the store). Though it's still unclear what pretext the creepy guy brought the cop over on, it at least serves to not just make the kids seem unjustly paranoid. (As Dio might say, "it's always a mystery").
The one part really still unexplained is why, even after realizing that they do truly only have each other, the boy still throws out the valet uniform at the end. The prologue makes him slightly less sympathetic (after all, he pawned the guitar they both owned) but at the same time more so (in the usual edit, we just hear him say, "I could be making 200 bucks a week," making him indeed sound like a sellout, but in its entirety he prefaces that statement with, "Look, I could pay for the guitar in a couple of weeks," implying that he's at least made a plan to get it back). However, as they make their jaunty exit, uniform in the garbage, now he not only doesn't have the means to keep his job, he also by extension has thrown away their shot at getting the guitar back. D'oh! Clearly, after their reconciliation, when the girl figures this out she's going to kick his ass.
This video reminds me a lot of the Stephen King book Needful Things, only instead of trapping its victims in their nostalgic fantasies, keeping them from living in their crappy realities, it instead traps its victims in their crappy realities, later releasing them and encouraging them to return to living a nostalgic fantasy. This video is often criticized for being Dio's label's desperate attempt to put a youthful, attractive face on his music (since he was basically neither), but I do like it because it really embodies the almost uplifting message that Dio is constantly trying to put forward to his true believers -- that you don't have to be youthful, attractive, or embraced by mainstream society to find community in music. What can I say, it's Dio! He is seriously the nicest guy ever. How can I be snarky? I'll save it for "Rainbow in the Dark."
P.S. Giant new photos added in memory of Ronnie James Dio, 5/16/10.