THE VIDEO BulletBoys, "Smooth Up In Ya," BulletBoys, 1988, Warner Bros.
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SAMPLE LYRIC "Oh I send shiv-ARRRs / [smooth up in ya] / smooo-oooo-ooooth upp innn yaa-ahhhhh / [smooth up in ya] / innn yaaaaa-ooohhhh-wwaaaaahhh"
THE VERDICT I know I keep being lazy and grabbing at the low-hanging fruit, but let's face it, "Estranged" took a lot out of me! And sometimes you're just dying to take a jab at a band like the BulletBoys. I collect all sorts of 80s metal paraphernalia -- patches, pins, old issues of Circus and Hit Parader, and most especially, t-shirts -- and I can not even begin to tell you the number of times I have turned down BulletBoys merch. Seriously, anywhere you go that someone's selling some metal-related stuff, they are going to have a whole bunch of pristine, deadstock BulletBoys logo patches or tees or something. And every time, I'm going to turn it down, no matter what the price. (*UPDATE* Scroll to the bottom of this post for more on this note.)
Why? Wellll, they weren't that great of a band. This is probably their best song, and it's an utter sludge-fest (though I will say the rendition on Metal Mania Stripped Volume 2: The Anthems actually made me like it a bit better than I had previously). And sadly for the Boys, they couldn't exactly fall back on their looks, either. To their credit, they stuck with the raunchy stuff instead of trying to switch gears with a ballad, but even this just makes me file them away with other sleazy latecomers like Danger Danger and Babylon AD.
This video combines footage of the band performing on a set with weird cartoons featuring the little sweaty guy who is the band's logo. The cartoons don't do much for me -- the one thing I can say about them is for some bizarre reason, whenever I see them I think about the old strip Gasoline Alley. Honestly, I'm not sure why. The animation falls somewhere in between Depeche Mode's "Strangelove" and Tom Petty's "Running Down a Dream" (weirdly, given the existence of Heavy Metal, not a lot of metal videos make use of animation).
If there's any kind of plot going with the cartoons, I have no clue what it is. We start off with some babes, see the logo guy, some other guy winds up in prison, someone lights a match and burns through the rope around a guy's neck, someone's head gets sliced in half, a bunch of mean-looking heads are suspended by their hair... it's like they found the concept art from some no-budget Queensryche video. A lady's bra comes off, a robot's head explodes, some kind of monster fetus smokes a cigar, blah, blah, blah.
The band footage takes up most of the video, and from the looks of it the only direction given to the Boys was "sell the sh-t out of this song." Every single band member is set to eleven throughout this video, in spite of the song being pretty un-intense. Marq Torien is tossing his grungy-looking hair (I mean grungy in the dirty sense, not the Seattle sense) nonstop and doing the full-on American Idol logo pose every chance he gets. He's wearing a sleeveless black shirt (for me, when your guitarist is shirtless and your lead singer's clothed, this is usually a bad sign), a couple of cross necklaces (for the ladies, we can assume), black and white pants with words including the band's name all over them (again, wearing your own merch = bad sign), and actually a pair of pretty cool fringed boots. And don't forget that late 80s/early 90s must-have accessory, giant hoop earrings on a man. But the that-Sun-In-was-a-mistake hair is what really kills it for me. And Torien's throwing that around like we want it for all four-plus-minutes of this.
In other band member news, Jimmy D'Anda makes creepy Vinnie Vincent faces for the camera every chance he gets. For some reason, Mick Sweda keeps walking all the way over to one of the walls and acting as if he's trying to either hump it, or kick through it a la the "Walk This Way" video. Bassist Lonnie Vincent stands with his legs apart and swings his hair around his shirtless bod in a desperate quest to look like a pre-ZZ Top beard Zakk Wylde (which up to this point would obviously be the only Zakk Wylde anyone would know anyway). There doesn't appear to be a single guitar riff the Boys aren't willing to start doing some windmill arms over.
And every now and then, someone kicking the ground reminds you that there's a layer of water all over everything! So clearly, these instruments are plugged in. The longer the video goes, the more everyone starts just freaking out. The solo seems to make Sweda start to do some Riverdance-esque moves, then either have a seizure or re-enact the strobe-light number from Flashdance. Isn't it hard to mime playing your guitar when you're all pretzeled up like that? Let alone when the bassist is running around you and your chunky lead singer is trying to channel his inner David Lee Roth.
What with all this activity, you can't say the Boys aren't really, really trying. But honestly, the whole time I was doing this post I kept getting confused and thinking I was doing "For the Love of Money," since that's basically the same video. When it's all that much of a blur -- well, let's just say it can't be good.
P.S. Uh, huh huh. Don't even tell me you don't know where I found the title for this post!
*UPDATE* You knew it couldn't last, right? I don't know if it was that I was feeling bad about savaging them in this post, or that I was already kind of on a roll shopping-wise, but tonight I was in one of my favorite vintage stores (where I just recently got an Anthrax "Bring the Noise" tour t-shirt) and, yup, lo and behold, a pristine, deadstock BulletBoys t-shirt. Maybe it was the size (vintage small! So dang hard to find), maybe it was the artwork (band photo on front, vague tour info on back), definitely it wasn't the price (over $20 = more than I really wanted to pay), but long story short, it was the best BulletBoys tee I've ever come across. I know that's a somewhat dubious distinction, but whatever, I totally bought it. I was too impatient to take decent photos of it, but click here to get an idea of what it looks like. In case you're wondering, the back says "BulletBoys on tour! 1989," and the front just has a pic of the band wearing the outfits they wear in this very video. And indeed, it smells like it's been sitting in a box in Canada for 21 years.
