THE VIDEO Winger, "Miles Away," In the Heart of the Young, 1990, Atlantic
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SAMPLE LYRIC "Miles away! / no you're never turning back / and I just can't waaaayyy-aaait anyyyymore [whoa-oh!] / Miles away! / nothin' left of what we had / just whennn I neeeeeded you most / you were miles awaaaaaaaa-aaaay"
EXCESSIVELY DETAILED DESCRIPTION Kip Winger stares mournfully. A woman eats alone. A dude uh... washes his hair. All in glorious black and white. Yes, I hope you're ready for a whole fistful of Winger.
As a leather-jacketed, hairy-chested, precisely-stubbled Kip begins to sing (with shimmering water in the background), we are introduced to the video's plot. As Kip's visage flickers in and out, a foxy brunette pouts pensively alone at a table. She refolds a letter as the showering dude closes his eyes and makes an agonized face. After we see Kip looking more like that dude from Beauty and the Beast (the 80s show with Linda Hamilton, not the Disney movie) and we have a glance at Paul Taylor (sorry, the most relevant link for this poor fool was so nonsensical I simply had to include it), she puts the letter aside and gets up from the table.
As the dude continues massaging his scalp in the shower, she tosses on a leather jacket over her lacy camisole. Kip and Rod Morgenstein pose for the camera, then our protagonist finally gets out of the shower to find her letter. He takes it pretty hard. For the record, he's a 20-something-ish Latin looking dude with short hair and a goatee (for whatever reason, once the clock turns on the year 1990, all heavy metal video protagonists suddenly have short hair, fyi).
Everyone in Winger belts out the chorus, and we even finally catch a glimpse of the loathsome Reb Beach. They're all standing in front of the water while lights flash across their faces. Kip gnashes his teeth while the main dude dries his tears with her letter. Winger keep on rocking, and he still can't stop his sniveling, finally tearing up the tablecloth and upending everything upon it. The camera lovingly displays his musculature throughout. I mean jeez, are those Bugle Boy jeans he's wearing? Although actually these shots are much more in line with the Guess? Jeans school of photography.
He runs out of the house and into the front yard of their cute little bungalow-style house, and, clinging to the swinging chainlink door in the fence, he looks frantically up and down the street to see if she's still around (apparently she's on foot, since he doesn't seem to think she's made it very far).
Oh, snap! She's got another man! We next see the woman hanging onto another dude while riding behind him on a motorcycle. Not that the other guy seems so great, but this guy looks like a total scuzzball. Think Rob Lowe in Wayne's World, only this guy is no tastydelicious Rob Lowe (he's not even Chad Lowe). The members of Winger let this moment sink in by turning slowly to look mournfully at the camera. A shot of the dude hanging his head, sitting out in the yard fades into a shot of the girl and her new guy on the road. She's all rubbing his back and stuff. Trashy. The latin dude should forget about her. But no, instead he takes his rusted ass beater car out to try and find her. It looks like they're driving on the exact same road, but he doesn't find her. He's lucky he doesn't, since now she's fondling her new guy's biceps and kissing his ear.
He's either really sobbing or inexplicably dripping with sweat as the girl suddenly appears in the backseat of the car. She leans forward and rubs his shoulders, but then -- doh! She disappears. She was just a figment of his desperate imagination. He looks a little like he's going to puke, then rubs his eyes. Finally home again, he tries to reach her via the phone. He reaches either her or his mother (telling him that she always thought that girl was no good), either way, a lot of yelling and pounding the table with his fist follows. He then spends about five minutes delicately hanging up the phone, as if one false move would cause it to explode. Then he (I think, it's a little hard to tell) busts out a rosary.
We next see him looking like utter crap atop his rumpled sheets. She, meanwhile, has already hopped into bed with Mr. New. Shots of the main dude writhing in agony and screaming are interspersed with shots of her and the other guy getting it on (they basically look like out takes from a Chris Isaak video). They roll all over the place. The solo I guess provides a rather obvious subtext for all of this.
As this winds up, we see the main dude laying in his rumpled bed. The light has changed enough that we know he's like, passed out crying and woken up at a later time. He looks around all bleary-eyed and briefly catches sight of his tv, which he left on. A nurse walks across the screen. He grabs at his sheets, then finally gets up and walks down the hallway. We then see the girl rubbing ...um, a guy's back. It's hard to tell if we're seeing her now with her new guy, or if the main guy is remembering the good times they had writhing around on the bed together. He keeps staring into space in a squinty, focused way implying that this may be a fantasy sequence. But I can't see the guy she's with clearly enough to get a positive ID. Ok, I'm thinking fantasy sequence, because next we see the main guy sitting on the floor in the doorway with the same bed the girl was just on in the background. (Note: Going back through the vid frame-by-frame, it definitely is her with the new guy, not a fantasy sequence. So much for my powers of deduction).
Winger kick it up one last time, and there's much singing along. Now the guy is sitting at the bottom of their stairs beside a large stained glass window which doesn't seem like it'd be part of the same house they showed before. The camera pans past a guy and a girl nuzzling on a motorcycle (it may or may not be her, we don't see it for long), then we see the main guy looking around as he uses a pay phone. Oh, I think it is her, because she and the guy are really going at it now, and he has that same lame haircut every man had circa 1990 (long to the ears, then a fade). Meanwhile, the dude is holding the phone up to his neck and sighing.
The couple making out on the bike pull apart, and next we see the girl through a peephole in a door. She's looking around nervously. The next shot's from inside, and we see the main dude is doing the peeping. He's also wearing a vest with no shirt, but I'm not going to go there. Then we see the girl again. She turns away, then pauses, then finally turns back and approaches the door again. He caresses the doorknob, then sits down beside the door, crouching out of sight. We can see her walking outside through the large window beside the door, and through the venetian blinds she's visible trying to peep in through the window. She gives up and walks away as Kip stares meaningfully into the distance.
THE VERDICT Not sure about this one. From the looks of it, just when he needed her most, she was like, two inches away. Maybe he figured out that she'd spent their time apart riding around on motorcycles and getting it on with other guys? It's pretty clear that he sees her out there, but he's like, I've done my crying and I'm not letting you come back. He's sort of the tough chick of the video.
Probably this makes sense, since this is a Winger video. No matter how much you hear the whole Kip Winger played with Alice Cooper (who after all is a Republican, lest we forget), Kip Winger is a classically trained musician (and also a classically trained man-ballerina), don't let his entire career be boiled down to just one word on Stewart's t-shirt, etc., you have to face the facts that at the end of the day, their music is just plain wussy. The guys in this band make the boys in Stryper look fierce. Seriously.
In spite of Kip's mighty choppers, songs like that classic ode to statutory rape "Seventeen" are utterly toothless. Maybe it's because he sings with one of those little drive-thru operator/Britney Spears mics in "Easy Come, Easy Go." Maybe it is all about the Stewart/Beavis and Butthead dichotomy. I don't know. I just know that at the end of the day, I can't really get myself to care for Winger.
That said, I don't mind this song. Not to start a recurring theme here, but I feel like if this were a Cinderella song I would absolutely love it.