Femme Fatale, "Waiting for the Big One"

Waiting for the Big One-One  

THE VIDEO Femme Fatale, "Waiting for the Big One," Femme Fatale, 1988, MCA 

SAMPLE LYRIC "I'm waiting for the big one / not just anyone / I'm waiting for the big one / it's gotta be a big one" 

THE VERDICT Can you believe it's already the last post of 2010? I can't, that's for sure. Anyway, rather than trying to do some kind of climactic New Year's post, I decided to go with something a lot less, well, special. 

Why? Well, one, because I didn't want to bust out of December's forgotten videos theme. But two, because what is New Year's Eve and the beginning of a new year if not anticlimactic at best, and totally depressing at worst? Exactly. So this week it's another forgotten clip from the deepest, darkest recesses of the vault. 

I briefly mentioned Femme Fatale in a post a little while back, and I noticed that doing that appears to have made me dangerously close to being the source for Femme Fatale information on the internet. So I figured, why not go all in? And while I'm at it, why not pick the less well-known of their two already not-very-well-known songs? 

"Waiting for the Big One" is sort of like the "Hot Stuff" of metal. Ooh, or like that "Manhunt" song from Flashdance! I wish Femme Fatale whoever wrote their songs had been more gifted with metaphor. This song is already absurdly un-subtle, but in the right hands this could have become the heterosexual woman version of Spinal Tap's "Big Bottom." I mean the whole song is about "looking for a big one." But it doesn't feel like we mean the one. We don't need Mr. Right. We are seeking Mr. Well-Endowed. 

What this track lacks in lyrical specificity though is made up for by this video. It's basically the same video as "Falling In and Out of Love," just with slightly different spotlights and some new costumes. Camera spinning around, band wildly pantomiming, colored lights turning on and off — check, check, and check. 

Most of the action here comes from Lorraine Lewis' different outfits. She keeps changing. We've got a sort of striped minidress thing that appears to be made of multiple different pieces that are somehow strapped together. That 80s favorite combo of cropped bustier, high-waisted cutoff jeans, boots, and jacket. My fave, a very Tawny Kitaen-esque white minidress with a black sash. At one point she appears to have on high-waisted spandex bike shorts with what looks like a black coconut bra — very Bobby Brown back-up dancer.

 

In case the outfits and the lyrics haven't done enough to make this video every young hetero male metalhead's wet dream, let's talk about how Lorraine interprets the song. She starts out fairly upright — jumping around the guitarist and bassist. Quickly though, this becomes too much for her. She winds up sitting on the stage, wiggling around on her butt. She kneels down in the minidress, alternating putting her hands between her legs or over her chest to cover herself — it's not very much fabric to work with. 

Soon even that's too much though — yup, she's crawling around face-down on the stage. I would say it's at that point that I feel I can comfortably say to myself Lorraine, you will never be taken seriously as a musician. You are acting like an extra in "Girls, Girls, Girls." 

But truly, the crescendo comes at the end of the video, when unsatisfied with their ability to thus far convey the song's meaning, Lorraine crawls underneath the different guitarists and sings between their legs. She sings between a man's legs. 

Is that not enough for you? Still? Really? Well, it wasn't enough for Femme Fatale either. Because Lorraine is now smiling at his crotch and pointing to it with her thumb. For real, people, I can't make this stuff up. It's the kind of thing where I want to be charitable and be like "well they were just joking around with that stuff," but realistically I'm like nope. I guess that's The Big One. Ew, ew, ew. 

They should have had Steve Vai be the guitarist for this band. What?! Ew, no! I don't know anything about him in that way. I just mean because his constant guitar-humping and tongue-wagging seems like the perfect counterpoint to Lorraine Lewis' unquenchable lust for the stage. 

It makes you realize in retrospect how hard a band like Vixen was working to be taken seriously — say what you will about those ladies, but they stayed upright in their videos. I mean, every single other thing on the internet that you can read about Femme Fatale is the sort of usual — great look, bad timing, one hit had decent exposure, blablabla. And of course everything is like "Oh Lorraine Lewis is really quite talented, blablabla." 

But I dunno, listening to this song I have to say to myself, really? I mean sure, put 'em in the soundtrack to Don't Tell Mom the Baby-sitter's Dead. But otherwise I mean really, Femme Fatale. Really. I just don't think it was in the cards. 

Oh man, now I feel like I'm ending the year on a down note! Really, I should be ending it on an up-note — I just made it through 52 solid weeks of heavy metal blogging. That should count for something, right? 

I mean, it's not like every week is going to be "Looks That Kill." Some weeks are going to be "Waiting for the Big One." And you know what, I'm kind of okay with that. We take the good, we take the bad, we take the thrash, we take the glam — we explore every part of 80s metal! And we're going to keep rocking in 2011!

Alice Cooper, "Poison"

Don't Call It a Comeback

THE VIDEO Alice Cooper, "Poison," Trash, 1989, Epic

Click here to watch this video NOW!

SAMPLE LYRIC "Poi-saaaaaahn / you're poison runnin' through my veins / poi-saaaaaaahhn / I don't wanna break these chains"

THE VERDICT This video is like a time capsule of what heterosexual men thought was sexy in 1989. High-waisted thongs, high-waisted jeans, straight blond hair a la Christina Applegate and curly light-brown hair a la Rebecca Gayheart (actually, this gal looks quite a bit like Keri Russell). If you were to extend this into a full-length feature, it would also need to have clothes from Merry-Go-Round (it may already have this come to think) and Designer Imposters fragrances (which I know they still make, but I feel like approximately 1988 through 1994 was their heyday). I guess I should also note if you're really into this stuff, the uncensored version of the video lets you see the Keri Russell-looking-one topless.

Other than the two afore-described ladies lounging around, fonding chains, and trying to poison Alice, this video mostly features, well, Alice, looking at once especially leathery and the same as he's always looked. He's surrounded by a relatively generic-looking bunch of musicians who I'm pretty sure aren't the same guys who appear in the other videos from this album. Definitely not "House of Fire," though the "House of Fire" guys may well be the iteration of the band that appears in Wayne's World (digression on that to come!).

In this vid, he's got one guy with Zakk Wylde-esque hair (as always, I mean the hot Zakk Wylde, not today's Zakk Wylde) and a blonde guitarist who is seriously hott (yes, with two t's). He looks like the best of Duff McKagan crossed with the best of Taime Downe somehow shoved into one guy. Possibly after this video they realized they needed to surround Alice with way less hot guys. They should've put Kip Winger back in the band! (*Rimshot*)



Here's the promised Wayne's World digression: I also like that even though it's a bit later, the Alice Cooper of Trash always makes me think of Wayne's World. Alice is of course in real life a big-time conservative, which pains me greatly. I bring this up in the Wayne's World vein because his cameo in that movie (as well as his special guest appearance on The Muppet Show, which was one of my favorites growing up and is what I associate Welcome to My Nightmare Alice Cooper with) makes me think that unlike those other metal conservatives (I'm talking about you, Paul and Gene) Alice seems like a nice guy who's not unwilling to make fun of himself.

Of course, notorious metal conservative Ted Nugent and his tongue-in-cheek performance as himself on Undeclared combined with his real-life douchery only confounds this picture further. (As does big-time metal liberal Dave Mustaine's seeming inability to make fun of himself.) Sigh! As long as we're talking Wayne's World though, let me also mention the guitarist in Cassandra's band Crucial Taunt -- it's Marc Ferrari from Keel! He did the music for the movie and plays in her band. Also, regardless of your party affiliation, you must agree he's ah-dorable.

Long story short, we've got babes, we've got Alice, we've got a bright blue background, some pieces of diaphanous red fabric waving through the air, chains, chairs getting kicked over -- it's pretty much what metal videos are starting to look like at this point in time, as the 80s wind down and we head into the early 90s, when basically all metal videos will look like this (viz. 1991's "No More Tears," which is basically the same video just with more water and an exceptionally hot young Zakk Wylde). What I really want to talk about here is the song.



This was Alice Cooper's big comeback song -- I mean yes, there were singles in the 80s, like that horrible Friday the 13th one, but not like this. This song is what happens when you go out and hire yourself a hitman. I don't mean a mafioso, and for once, I don't mean Bret 'The Hitman' Hart (though get ready 'cause I'm about to go on a big tangent about wrestling). I mean a producer who can write songs that the whole world wants to hear, regardless of who's singing them. I mean what else has Desmond Child worked on: Bon Jovi's biggest albums, 80s KISS, 80s Aerosmith... think about it. (And I'm not hating, I have heard Alice himself say as much about this album.) I mean think about this song -- it's freakin' genius. Who could screw it up? Nobody.

I've been thinking about this lately because of something that happened to me, about which I am very, very ashamed. As I've mentioned before, I love professional wrestling (shut! That's not the thing I'm ashamed of!), and as I don't think I've mentioned before, I've finally found in my fiance a man who's willing to watch it with me (so let's throw out all your gendered stereotypes about who watches what right now, okay?). Anyway. I hadn't watched it consistently in a couple of years when we started watching it again this past January, at which point I got really into not just wrestling for the zillionth time, but the music of wrestling.

Now, back when I was first watching wrestling in the 1980s, sure, wrestlers had entrance music. But except for Hulk Hogan's Rick Derringer theme ("Real American" -- don't act like you don't remember!), it was mostly instrumental and repetitive. A lot of it I would guess was public domain (e.g., Ric Flair's "Also Sprach Zarathrusta", Randy 'Macho Man' Savage's bizarre choice of "Pomp and Circumstance").

As it turns out, at least for WWF/WWE wrestlers, these are all written by the same guy, who also plays many of the instruments, which is a heck of a thing to do. Anyway, he's been doing that for a couple of decades. But long story short, at some point in the 90s, they began to shift away from having theme music to wrestlers having theme songs. And while these theme songs vary in musical style (girl pop for Tiffany, Jimi Hendrix tribute for John Morrison), a great many of them are pretty much lyrical metal. Though some feature performers from nu-metal bands (e.g. Randy Orton's theme, which I have grown to utterly love), there's nothing nu about the sound they wind up with.



So it wasn't really a surprise to me that I wound up really digging the theme song to Monday Night RAW -- it's this rocking, rollicking thing that you could imagine Slaughter or even Cinderella doing. Or really anyone doing. It's that kind of song -- there isn't a band on earth that could screw this thing up, that's how well-produced it is. And as if to prove my point, once I finally went to figure out who performed the Monday Night RAW theme ...it's ...ulp ...oh god ...it's Nickelback. Yes, the band widely reviled as bottomfeeders of basically, well, the entire music industry. Nickelback. A band basically synonymous with suck. Why, why couldn't it have been Creed? Or Uncle Kracker? Or something else equally embarassing? But no, it's Nickelback. Yes, dear reader, I like a Nickelback song. By accident! By accident!

But here's the thing: Could Nickelback have accomplished this one their own? Oh hell no. You know who produced the album this came from? That's right, the former Mr. Shania Twain, Mutt Lange. Do you know what else he produced? An assload of hits for AC/DC and Def Leppard. If this were performed by AC/DC or Def Leppard, I wouldn't be ashamed. But this is the damnedest part of the whole thing. If this were performed by AC/DC or Def Leppard (particularly the latter), it wouldn't sound that different. That's the thing. Producers, composers, lyricists like Desmond Child or Mutt Lange -- they help you create songs that are just impossible for performers to screw up. Or for listeners to get out of their heads. Thus explaining why Ke$ha has a hit with a song ripped off from "there's a place in France where the naked ladies dance."

P.S.: In all my distraction with this song's production, I forgot all about the weird Burning Man-looking sculpture in the video. It's hard to see in grainy black and white, but I think Alice is tied to it at one point.

P.P.S.: One other thing I love to do with all these wrestling themes is come up with the perfect 80s metal band to perform them. The Big Show's "welllll" is just calling for the voice of Glenn Danzig, and similarly, the wailing in Edge's theme would be well-suited to Geoff Tate and Queensryche. I'm pretty sure the new theme for the newly 'dashing' Cody Rhodes was written explicitly to rip off Slippery When Wet-era Bon Jovi, so why not have them cover it? Winger are perfect for the sleaze-rock of Dolph Ziggler's theme, and come on, a silly rap-rock theme for The Miz? Somebody call Anthrax!

P.P.P.S.: I know a lot of people find this post because they're searching "who are the girls in the Alice Cooper 'Poison' video" or something like that. I can't find any info whatsoever on the blonde (sorry!), but many sources point to the brunette (who I described as looking like Felicity/Keri Russell) being a gal named Rana Kennedy. So far as I can tell, she's now a Pilates instructor in North County, and most of the other work she did even back in the late 80s/early 90s was fitness modeling. (Cue NBC's little 'The More You Know' shooting star thing.)

Twisted Sister, "Hot Love"

Blond Guys in Black Cars

THE VIDEO Twisted Sister, "Hot Love," Love is for Suckers, 1987, Atlantic

Click here to watch this video NOW!

SAMPLE LYRIC "Talkin' 'bout hot love, you're makin' me cray-zay / hot love, you're makin' me ba-a-ad / hot love, you're makin' me cray-zee / think I'll go maaaaaaad"

THE VERDICT Summertime, and the videos are cheesy! Well, it's the tail end of July, and even though I personally have another two whole months of summer ahead of me, I'm wrapping up our special summertime videos block. Seven weeks' worth of sun, bikinis, and outdoor concerts -- not too shabby, I'd say.

Let's wrap it up with some Twisted Sister. Now, I know most of this video takes place at night, but come on, the car wash scene? It's totally summer. Not to mention all the late night drag racing. Since it's Twisted Sister (and since we can see the cars' license plates), we know we're in New York (probably Long Island), and obviously, this kind of stuff isn't going to work there in winter. Nope, "Hot Love" is definitely a summertime video.

It's also a pretty cheesy video, but very much within Twisted Sister's wheelhouse -- when they aren't making videos with Niedermeyer from Animal House (aka "the Maestro" from Seinfeld), they're making videos where it feels like it's the 1950s. In this case, we've got two rows of classic cars and kit cars lined up to illuminate a drag strip. A bunch of very 80s-looking guys, plus the members of Twisted Sister who aren't Dee Snider (and who are basically confined to reaction shots in this video) watch as Dee loses the race.

To whom does he lose? Well I'm glad you asked. I'm not good with cars, so I can't tell you anything about her ride except that it's black, and has those little visors over the back windshield that were so cool in the 80s and that no one has had since. She's wearing red heels, and a red miniskirt-belly shirt combo featuring I'm going to say zero underwear, and sort of a ripped apart and then laced up again look. She also has a giant Triumph motorcycles belt that is so large it looks like a fannypack. Her most salient feature? She looks like Christie Brinkley... on crack. No seriously. Have you ever seen that SNL skit with Kelly Ripa, where she highlights her hair with crack? That is more or less exactly how this woman acts.



Dee takes a Polaroid of her, and we're reminded just how unattractive he is -- oy, that is a face only a mother could love. But of course, since it's a heavy metal video, this reasonably attractive blonde woman (who admittedly does have a great body) is all over it. As are the Twisted Sister guys, who make "OMG" faces and give Dee the thumb's up.

Dee starts passing his Polaroid around to show the guys, as if they can't see her standing like ten feet away from them. He starts to approach Christie, but she gets in her car. Dee attempts to give chase, and we see that he shares taste in footwear with Jon Bon Jovi and Punky Brewster (pink Chuck Taylors).

Dee tries to hit on the woman while driving, further cementing the Christie Brinkley connection -- it's not entirely unlike her sequences in National Lampoon's Vacation. Well, except this woman gets a bit dirtier. In an homage to the album's cover, she pulls out a lollipop in the shape of the Twisted Sister logo and pretty much begins fellating it (Love is for Suckers, get it?).

Dee is freaking out and jumping up and down in his car -- he reminds me of the Big Bad Wolf characters in old cartoons, whose like eyes pop out, and then they stamp the floor a bunch while steam pours from their ears, and then their tongues unfold like giant staircases and they have to pack them all back in their mouths. I'm pretty sure, given that this is Twisted Sister, that this is intentional. But oh! Party's over, Dee. We see him making crazy eyes in his rear view as he gets pulled over. Christie laughs at him and waves goodbye, which combined with Dee getting pulled over for reckless driving is the most realistic part of this video.

We then follow Dee as he goes around to various dudes standing around or sitting in classic cars, showing them his Polaroid to try to identify Christie. He doesn't have any luck. But then suddenly, it's daytime. Dee is driving around with Jay Jay French when he slams on the brakes and throws his car into reverse.

Good work, Dee, you've found her. Christie is cleaning her car, in the extremely practical outfit combo of a white miniskirt, black cowboy boots, and a white halter top. We get a lot of close-ups of her cleavage and implied upskirt shots, just to keep things classy. Jay Jay has to bite his thumb he's so excited by the spectacle, while Dee keeps his cool -- he's more interested in checking out her car.



Next comes more or less the most ridiculous shot of the video. After getting extra-sexy with the soap suds and making Jay Jay damn near pass out, Christie does this enormous stretch, and we see that her halter top is being held together -- rather improbably -- by a single black plastic button that is being made to do a lot of work. The camera zooms way in on her cleavage, and then -- uhoh! -- our next shots are of the button landing in a pool of soap suds. Implied nudity! Like I said, classy.

I should also mention that interspersed with the car wash sequences are shots of the band actually performing the song. It's dark, and poorly lit to boot, so we mostly just see individual band members waving their instruments in the air and making ridiculous faces at the camera. Like I said, if you're in Twisted Sister and you aren't Dee Snider, you're barely in this video.

We then get a long sequence of shots of Christie smiling maniacally and counting with her fingers, interspersed with shots of classic cars peeling out, interspersed with semi-opaque shots panning up her body (in the red outfit from the beginning of the video). As she gets crazier and crazier, we also get shots of the band getting crazier and crazier.

Suddenly, for no reason I can discern, her car bursts through a fake brick wall. We get all these quick shots showing her license plate (New York plate "NO JOSHN"), the front of her car, and then another license plate (no visible state but based on the colors and the time period, Pennsylvania plate "HOT LOVE"). Lord only knows why this is like the climactic shot in the video.

We then finally see Twisted Sister performing, although it's so badly lit it's hard to tell what the heck is going on. They are on top of some risers and surrounded by cars, with more cars behind and somehow, up above them. It sort of reminds me of the junkyard from A Nightmare on Elm Street IV in "Love Kills." Except that you can actually see crew members standing on scaffolding operating the spotlights (I'm not kidding), so that kind of takes away from it.

Anyway, it's just the band overselling the bejeezus out of the song, mostly backlit and hard to see anyway. At the last minute, Christie's car pulls up right into an empty spot in front of the center of the stage. We see a close-up of keys dropping into her hand, then the camera pulls back so we can see she is tossing her keys up in the air and catching them, taunting Dee. (Also, she's changed into a strapless pleather minidress.)



Dee, who's now wearing a giant coat and looking vaguely like the Undertaker in a frightwig, suddenly reaches up and catches them before she can. He's super-pleased with himself, and Christie is super-pissed. He pulls out, leaving her onstage making exasperated arm gestures with the band, who are still plugging away.

Dee gives his final "yeah-ahh-ahhh!" through her sun roof. Then the camera pans around her car, and we see that it now has the "Hot Love" plates on it. I'm sorry, catching someone's keys counts as a legal transfer of ownership? Guess I have to remember that. Anyway, the rest of the band is still making faces as Christie walks up to the car. It cuts to the car pulling away, and since she's not there, we have to assume she's in it.

Dee then turns toward the camera looking pleased, and next thing we get Christie now full-on blowing the Twisted Sister lollipop. Honestly, it's one of the more risque things I've seen in one of these videos, and trust me, I've spent a lot of my life watching heavy metal videos. Ew.

It's funny, it makes me remember that a friend of mine had this record at the time, and I was really scandalized by it as a kid. I had very little idea who Twisted Sister were (in fact, in retrospect I was inexplicably confusing them with Swing Out Sister), but I found the album cover very scary, and the sentiment that "Love is for suckers" alarming. Ahh, the innocence of youth.

Fun fact about this album: Even though it's not very good, it's definitely not for lack of effort -- this is a little bit of a who's who of 80s metal. Kip Winger and Reb Beach of Winger, plus Steve Whiteman and Jimmy Chalfant of Kix all contributed backup vocals (and in Beach's case, some guitar, too). Fascinating! But even more so -- and this is allmusic claiming this (click on the name, then click through to "movie entry") -- Luke Perry?!?! Yes, as in Dylan McKay from 90210 -- Luke effing Perry apparently contributed vocals to this album. Wow. All I can say is, WOW.

P.S.: If you're amused by the title of this post, bonus points for your intimate knowledge of 80s metal!

Scorpions, "No One Like You"

Escape from... San Francisco?


THE VIDEO Scorpions, "No One Like You," Blackout, 1982, Mercury

Click here to watch this video NOW!

SAMPLE LYRICS "There's no one like you-ouu / I can't wait for the nights with you / I imag-ine the things we'll doo-ooo / I just wanna be lafffffed by youuu-ouuuu / no on like you-ouuuuu!"

THE VERDICT Though the Scorpions often had really bizarre cover art (like this NSFW one, or this other one, which is more or less Spinal Tap's original idea for Smell the Glove), the Scorps generally had enough good taste not to recreate their album covers in their videos... at least until this one, which starts off weird and only gets weirder.

Before we get too far into the video, let me mention that "No One Like You" is a totally badass song. The guitar riff at the beginning sounds like the tryout version of "Rock You Like a Hurricane," and Klaus Meine's slightly weird were-they-translated-from-German lyrics are as compelling as ever, as is his delivery. I mean, "girl, there are really no vords strong eee-naah-aaff / to dee-scribe all my lahng-eengs for lafffff" rules, and Klaus honestly sounds straight-up sexy on "ooh babe, I just need you like nev-ar be-for-ore." As we shall see, this isn't the case, but it's a great vocal.

So what's going on here? Well, for one, we're talking about the original video, not the World Wide Live version where they're traveling around Asia. What we've got here is some kind of island prison -- possibly Alcatraz, probably somewhere in Europe -- where Klaus appears to be on death row. He's waiting around for a visit from his lady, who bears a strong resemblance to Beverly D'Angelo in National Lampoon's European Vacation (admittedly, the hat helps a lot).



He's got a pic of her hanging in his cell, along with an American flag -- uhh, what's up with that? Well, maybe it belongs to the guy he shares his cell with, who looks about 90. But whatever, there are a lot of things that are a bit off about this prison. I mean, one of the guards is a little person. Nothing against, but like, don't prison guards seem like the kind of job that would have a height requirement?

If you were hoping to see anyone else in the band, look fast -- as Klaus gets marched down the hall, that's all you'll see of Matthias, Herman, or Francis, they're the guys giving him the thumbs-up from behind bars. In the meantime, his lady friend is making her way out by boat. Whether it's San Francisco or Europe, I don't think that shark is really there, and heck, I'm no ichthyologist but that first fin looks like a dolphin to me.

Anyway, as soon as the lady gets into the prison, they let her loose on Klaus, making me want to scream "NO TOUCHING!" Klaus' especially long hair in this video distracts me, as does how tall this woman is compared to him. Watching this video you have to have the same suspension of belief you have during Krokus videos (especially this one), though a little less since Klaus is a great vocalist.

This lovely little moment gets broken up by the re-enactment of the album cover, wherein Rudolf Schenker shows up, clad in white and inexplicably with forks over his eyes, screaming and smashing a guitar. Why the heck are there forks over his eyes? How did he get out of his cell? And which came first, the bizarro cover art or the concept for this video?

And believe it or not, that is not the weirdest part of this video. No, that's still to come, when suddenly we cut from Klaus in bed to Klaus in the chair with the priest by his side -- and the woman, dressed in leather, throwing some kind of switch that causes a bunch of flames to shoot up. Wait, what?!



Just when you think things can't devolve any further, we get more shots of Klaus in bed. I never needed to see his chest hair. Is it shaved into that shape a la Nic Cage in Valley Girl? Or does it just grow that way? These are questions I never wanted to ask. Similarly, seeing his bikini briefs, not something I wanted.

But the real coda is that when he covers his face with his hands, we can see he's wearing a wedding band. Uhh, buddy, that is not a dream you want to be having about your spouse! Luckily, he looks out the window and verifies that he just has a lovely prison view, and so no, he's not himself imprisoned.

Still though... between this, all the afore-mentioned album covers, and well, all their other videos (blowing up the ladies' futuristic castle in "Rhythm of Love"?!), the Scorps' relationship to women is, let's just say, conflicted at best. Not that we can't say this for almost every other heavy metal group, of course.

Also, the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking this is Alcatraz. Not because of any actual ability of mine to verify this, but really because it reminds me a lot of the Testament video for "Over the Wall."

P.S.: Also obviously, since it's almost Valentine's Day, I had to do a love song, and so this post is for my partner, who there truly is no one like.