THE VIDEO Tesla, "Love Song," The Great Radio Controversy, 1989, Geffen
Click here to watch this video NOW!
SAMPLE LYRIC "Love eeees all around you-ou / love is knockin' / outside your doo-ooo-ooor-or / waitin' for you / isthislovemadejustfortwo-ooh / keepanop-enheart,andyou'llfindlovea-gain / I know"
THE VERDICT I know, this is another "is this really the summer?" video, but I'm going to go with yes, it is. It definitely feels like summer -- summer tours, big-ass arena concerts, sleeveless t-shirts. It's summer in spirit if not in season (though trust me, I'm pretty damn sure it is summer).
This video begins with a lot of the stock themes we've come to expect from live videos -- the empty arena, the tour bus on the road (Tesla's destination is labeled "Home," as opposed to say Mötley Crüe's "Rockin' and Rollin'"), sped-up footage of the arena filling up, close-up of the guitarist's hands. Oh, and lest we forget, the all-important shot of the lead singer looking pensively out the tour bus window! Yes, life on the road is tough. So tough, in fact, that we get multiple shots of different band members on the bus.
The video starts out with Tesla performing the song while the arena is empty -- I guess we can assume that, for the purposes of shooting a video, they are doing a very thorough soundcheck. Jeff Keith is wearing round sunglasses, a yellow button-down shirt, and jeans -- pretty conservative for him, actually. Then we see Troy Luccketta playing with his kid. Aww, his kid's got a little junior mullet! Glad to see that haircut got passed down.
Shots of roadies prepping the stage fade into Tesla on their bus, which fade into shots of Tesla on stage. It's still just soundcheck time though -- even if we are getting some sort of expository shots of a red flag and a skywriting plane. Things don't really get going until the guitar speeds up just a hair, and we see sped-up footage of the arena filling.
Then, as soon as we hit the first chorus, boom! The crowd's all there. And what a crowd. Seriously, these are the most wholesome-looking women you will ever see in a heavy metal video, and I'm including Stryper videos in that count, people. Seriously, it's like if Norman Rockwell had lived to create a painting of an 80s metal concert, that's how warmly lit and sanitized this video feels.
Though a bunch of the crowd shots make it appear to be daytime, most of the time when we see the band, it's night. Jeff has switched into an unbuttoned patterned shirt and his favorite "we're shooting a video today" pants (the ones with footprints painted onto them). Tommy Skeoch has put on a ruffly pirate shirt -- and let me just say he looks delectable -- further proving that Tesla have upped their wardrobe game for this video.
To underscore the liveness, the crowd sound has been added in a bunch of spots in this video, often when they're showing the men in the crowd. While sweatier than the ladies, these guys look equally wholesome, and extremely pleased to see Tesla. Conveniently, many members of the crowd have made elaborate signs explicitly about this song. Hmm, I think they knew they were filming a video. Does this explain the "best behavior" we seem to be seeing? Or is there already considerable self-selection inherent in being a Tesla fan in the first place?
Everyone in Tesla is going nuts. Jeff is doing his little hip-swiveling dance, and Frank Hannon is somehow headbanging while carefully playing a double-neck guitar. There's a lot of kicking and hair-tossing going on in general, and as we head into the guitar solo, yes, the lighters have come out. Sparklers even! The crowd is starting to look slightly worse for the wear (and sound slightly screamier). We even get the obligatory shot of a guy in the crowd screaming like he is about to turn into the Incredible Hulk, so powerful is this guitar solo. (See "Power Ballad Cliche #9")
Somehow like half the women in the crowd are up on someone else's shoulders, and literally all the women in the crowd know all the words to this song. Everyone's looking a bit sweaty as the song devolves into the everyone shouting part, which is the weakest bit of it (the "love is gonna find a way-ay-ay" repeated a zillion times). For this whole sequence, it's just shot after shot of the members of Tesla having multiple guitargasms, and women in the audience singing along. Tesla, chick, Tesla, chick.
For the very last part, which is quiet, the arena is completely black except for the light from lighters. We then get a patently non-live shot -- Jeff and Frank are sitting in the center of the stage completely alone. We then see, semi-transparent over the image of them, the skywriting plane again, which has written "LOVE" in the sky. Also it's the old-fashioned kind, where the pilot has to do actually loop-de-loops and stuff, not those ones you see making Geico ads over stadiums where they just do the little puffs to sort of type out all the letters. We sort of see the crowds' hands waving again before it all fades out.
So this is a fun video, and a great song. I mean, if there's one thing Tesla's great at (okay, there's more than one, but this is the one I'm going to talk about), it's writing songs that make you feel better about life. "Love Song" is right up there with "The Way It Is" in this respect -- it's the exact kind of song that can pull you out of a horrible break-up. And the lyrics! So, so good. They're that perfect combination of almost nonsensical and totally evocative. Admittedly, I've always heard "is this love made just for two" as "yes this love may just haunt you," so I was making them more nonsensical, but whatever. It's no wonder this song made it all the way to #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 back in 1990.
Perhaps this can explain the wholesome women -- this is one of those songs that got such saturation airplay that it probably got all kinds of folks who had never heard another Tesla song to go to a Tesla concert (another good example of this phenomenon is "Silent Lucidity" by Queensryche). So maybe these just aren't heavy metal girls. Or okay, maybe they're "heavy metal" girls, like the type who are also really into Nelson.
Hypothesis #2 is that it's because this is a hometown crowd -- Tesla are in Sacramento, as evidenced by the radio station banners you can see in the background during some of the daytime shots. Then again, they've also got a hometown crowd in the video for "The Way It Is". But I mean, come on, they're doing a charity food drive in that video, and the crowd doesn't look as wholesome as this one does! That's from January 1990, though that song didn't chart until April. Hmmm. Okay, my official guess is that this video is from summer 1989.
Okay but anyway, point is, the combination of a) this song being really popular with non-metal fans and b) it being a hometown crowd seems to mean that c) this is the most bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked crowd of metal fans you'll ever see in a video. And I mean ever.