THE VIDEO Judas Priest, "Don't Go," Point of Entry, 1981, Columbia
SAMPLE LYRIC "Don't go, please don't leave me / don't go in the mornin' / don't go, please don't deceive me / don't take it away"
THE VERDICT Can you believe I've run a metal videos site for coming on seven years now, and I've never done a Judas Priest video? Then again, I've been at it that long and never done a Metallica video, either. But it's not for the same reasons. I mean, I'm not afraid of Judas Priest. Am I afraid of Metallica? Well, yes, sort of. Not their music, no. But their litigiousness, yes.
But anyway, focusing on Priest. I don't know why I've put them off so long. Yes, their later videos are, in a word, hella boring. But their early videos — of which there are a surprisingly large amount — are masterpieces of cheese. They really answer the question, "What can you do with £500 and a camera?"
"Don't Go" is no exception to this. We start off with just a door floating in space, with the words "Point of Entry" (aka the album title) stenciled above it. It reminds me of a store in the next town over from where I grew up called the House of Doors. That name cracked me up when I was a kid.
More to my point here though, it is almost exactly like in Futurama when they watch The Scary Door. Yeah, you're probably going to want to click on that link so you understand the other things I say here. (But aren't they both just The Twilight Zone? Trust me, this video is not high-budget enough. It's The Scary Door.)
In any event, we follow the camera through the door, and as in a couple of their other early videos, Priest appear to be playing the song in the back of a tractor trailer. Okay, it's not quite that narrow of a space, so let's be generous. Priest appear to be playing the song in a double-wide trailer. But someone has painted lines all down the sides, so at least it appears to be very long and skinny — that's how stripes work, isn't it?
There's also a large, framed picture of a cloudy sky behind Dave Holland.
I think maybe here and definitely in "Heading Out to the Highway" they might have been trying to recreate the album art but, call me old-fashioned, it might have been a better idea to just actually go outdoors instead of trying to create long, open vistas in tiny indoor spaces. I mean really, a painting of the sky?
Anyway, Judas Priest are just playing the song in their weird box. I should probably also mention that it's windy in there, so everyone with long hair is having their hair blown around. Clearly, this doesn't affect Rob Halford (he's even wearing a hat, and that's sticking on). Everyone else in Priest faces the door, while Rob mostly faces the band.
It shouldn't surprise anyone, by the way, that there's a lot of black leather in that shoebox.
Rob is more or less singing to the other members of the band. "Don't Go" through the Scary Door. They don't want to listen.
Bassist Ian Hill heads through the door first, even though Rob is waving and singing at him. Unfortunately, what happens when he goes through the door is very confusing and badly lit. Ian looks around, looks down, sees a bunch of colorful lights, and then sort of screams. I'm not sure what happened.
K.K. Downing goes next, and luckily what happens to him is way slower, so we can figure out wtf is going on in this video. It really is the Scary Door. They seem to go through it and into weird dreams or fantasies or something.
The other thing that's weird is yeah, Rob is upset for them to leave, but it's not like anything really happens. I mean, the shoebox room doesn't empty out (which quite frankly would make more sense). Instead, everyone who leaves just reappears back in the room and is visible in the background while the next person is leaving.
Anyway, K.K. steps through the Scary Door and is immediately in a hospital corridor. He's wearing all white, and walking down the hallway, which is brightly lit and all white except for a checkerboard floor. I guess K.K.'s a doctor, 'cause he's wearing a stethoscope and stuff.
But let's also mention that the place is full of white rabbits. There are rabbits laying all over the floor, so much that he has to step over them. Okay, so I think what happens through the Scary Door is they are going into their dreams. I mean a bunch of bunnies lying all around a hospital? Dream sequence.
Then K.K.'s bit gets weirder. At the end of the hospital corridor, he makes it to another Scary Door, with a bunch of rabbits lying in front of it. He opens that one and surprise! It's full of dry ice, and a bunch of women in pleather doing all kinds of freaky stuff. They pull K.K. into whatever it is they're up to in there.
This seems to make Glenn Tipton want to go through the Scary Door. He pushes Rob Halford aside and heads on in. Glenn is dressed as a sort of Prohibition-era gangster, with hat and coat and everything. Unfortunately, what exactly happens in his sequence is really, really poorly lit, but he appears to be in a back alley. He runs down some stairs and into a waiting Dick Tracy-looking car, which he uses to flee from what appear to be (as best as I can tell in this video's pitch-black lighting) a bunch of gun-toting gangsters.
Rob Halford goes last. He jumps through what seriously does appear to be the Scary Door — I mean, it's floating around in space with a bunch of stars behind it. Rob is dressed sort of as Jiffy-Pop, but I think really as a space man. He floats around, does sort of a somersault in the air, then pulls himself back through the door.
Does Dave Holland get a fantasy sequence? Nope, not even a two-second one like Ian had. Boo. Instead, the video ends with the lights going out in their little trailer. All we can see is the painting of the sky at the very back, and Rob Halford at the very front, begging the camera not to go. But the Scary Door closes on him, and the camera pulls away.
You know, in addition to the video taking us to a vicinity of an area adjacent to a location, this song is sort of like a sludgy, metal version of "Wake Me Up (Before You Go-Go)." I mean yeah, it doesn't have the implications of going dancing later that evening, or possibly just staying in bed instead, but the lyrics are really not that different in the scheme of things.
I know, I know, I just keep coming up with weird connections between songs that don't really exist. (The connections, I mean, obviously the songs exist!)