Rod Stewart, Bryan Adams, and … Kevin Costner? Looking back at MTV wonders and why Robin Hood Ruins Everything.
Little ten-year-old me loved Rod Stewart and thought he was the ultimate sexual badass with his gravelly brogue and perfectly teased blonde mullet. “Infatuation” (Camouflage, 1984) felt dirty as hell in all the best ways to a pre-pubescent boy. In the video, Rod leers at blonde bombshell Kay Lenz (an actress who made a hefty career out of appearances in nearly every hour-long ’80s nighttime soap or cop show) with giant binoculars from a noir-esque hotel room lit by dancing shadows, and the camera keeps revealing a wall full of compromising photos of Lenz’s fully formed ass. Seems Rod is a bit of a perv, but this all felt normal at the time. The eighties, man.
Stewart is his usual hyper-sexual weirdo here, mugging at the camera, bulging out his eyes and the veins in his neck, shaking his rear end and stalking Lenz. Meanwhile, some giant goon from Abbott and Costello monster movies shadows Stewart and eventually punches him in the face for some reason. The three have a comic climax showdown on a merry-go-round – you know, as you did – and Lenz drives off the victor with an unnamed male model while Rod looks on, pouty and defeated. The song is bubble-gum bullshit of the highest order with a drum machine slapping out a monotonous beat while fake horns blare with pointed accents to give this thing some semblance of soul.
A quick detour because Jeff Beck is involved
Suddenly, mid song and mid video, guitar hero Jeff Beck appears out of nowhere to dazzle with one of his amazing solos that proves to be both atonal and lyrical in true Beck fashion. A few years later, Beck turned up again in Rod’s “People Get Ready” video, the two reuniting like lost lovers at a train station, where Beck plays a stinging, impossibly high, and thrillingly gorgeous motif.
For Stewart – one of the key figures of early MTV – we worked backward to discover that he fronted the Jeff Beck Group in the late sixties, who almost became Led Zeppelin before Led Zeppelin. Indeed, Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page partly modeled Zeppelin after the Jeff Beck Group because he knew how to steal a good thing when he found it. Can’t fault Page for being a brilliant tactician. But I always felt he got off on crushing Beck in a fit of jealousy since Beck could outplay Page with one arm tied behind his back. The two made a fascinating yin/yang pair back when they were both shredding with the Yardbirds. Beck went on to be, well, Beck, and Page conquered the world. I picture Michael Corelone trying to explain this kind of thing to people who don’t understand: “It was between the Yardbirds, Kay.”
Beck wasn’t fit for the rock star life, and the Jeff Beck Group (in this influential incarnation anyway) disappeared promptly after the pretty awesome Truth (1968) and the pretty decent Beck-Ola (1969). What might have been. “I Ain’t Superstitious” from Truth is a rock-boogie masterpiece with call and response/asides from Stewart and Beck that rival anything Plant and Page managed a year or so later on Zeppelin’s debut album.
While Beck went the jazz fusion instrumental route, Stewart funneled his good looks and original voice to a solo career that defies easy description. He showed up on rock radio in the seventies with “Maggie May” and the like, tried some disco, and then hit a perfect ten-point landing right in the image-conscious early years of MTV. He milked that for all it was worth before shuffling off to VH-1 harmlessness with remakes of show tunes. Before that, though, songs like “Infatuation,” “Some Guys Have All the Luck,” and, my other favorite, “Young Turks,” embedded themselves on my psyche forever. “Turks,” which sounds a lot like “Dancing in the Dark” to me now, is a wimpy little oddity (from Tonight, I’m Yours – 1981) that displays in its clumsy sincerity the best of what MTV offered at the time: miniature story songs with matching cheap and earnest videos that emphasized the joy of being young. “Young hearts be free tonight…Time is on your side!” Stewart yelps with utter conviction in the chorus, and we believed him. Oh man, did we believe him. I love this song.
Bryan Adams and one power ballad to rule them all
Another blonde with a torn voice we didn’t believe in the same way was Bryan Adams, who became an early-MTV legend with an endless stream of hits and key videos like “Cuts Like a Knife,” “Straight from the Heart,” “Run to You,” “This Time,” “Heaven” and the preposterous, propulsive, and ubiquitous “Summer of ’69,” which elicits all kinds of strange feelings: Friend groups, sunny afternoons, my old house, front yards, back yards, side yards, the ickiness and allure of girls, playgrounds, jealousy, and pretty much every other strong emotion and visual connection that kids felt as they morphed into eighties teenagers.
Adams fled to VH-1 much quicker than Stewart and should be tried in the Hague for the absolutely retched “Everything I Do, I Do It For You,” a power ballad that shows why grunge needed to slap us across the face. Sure – it’s from his album Waking Up the Neighbors (1991), but it’s ALSO the key power ballad from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, released that same year.
A Word About Robin Hood and Adulthood
Let’s stop to discuss this film for a moment, shall we? There is no better pop culture document of where we stood in the late-80s/early 90s than this inflated, marketing-driven vanity piece, starring an out-of-his-element and never-more-irritating Kevin Costner. Golden boy Costner (much better in other films) not only mars the film with a performance rightfully mocked for years, but also, of course – the way fake auteurs always did – showed off his unrestrained God complex behind the scenes by wrestling the film away from director Kevin Reynolds so he could boost his own limp performance (and showcase scenes of his naked ass) at the expense of Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham, who is the only one in the film who understands the assignment.
We had to put up with this kind of thing in the early nineties as we figured out how the ’80s were going to translate to a new decade: Pompous star vehicles that showed our culture eating itself as fevered egos pushed projects that existed to sell McDonald’s toys and self-regard instead of any interesting/original (doesn’t have to be serious) point of view on literally anything important. In that sense, a song like Adams’ “Everything I Do” (produced by “Mutt” Lange, naturally) fits perfectly into this distressing framework as a warning that the curtain needed to come down on this part of our lives and come down quickly. Maybe we should all try to be adults?
That’s the thing, though. What did being an adult mean in this context? In our hearts, we hoped it meant the world we had glimpsed was within our reach. Maybe we could treat things with respect. Maybe we could make our art shine with both beauty and ugliness that would help us transcend our limitations, bring out the hidden aspects of our imaginations, and live for some kind of universal human truth instead of hiding away our secrets and barreling through the mirage of “real life.” Didn’t happen, of course, and it never will. It’s depressing that guys like Costner and Adams got it right. Adams is catching strays here, but Costner, at least, is the kind of guy to yell “I told you so” while he counts his money and then jets off to act like a mythical cowboy, when we know he’s about as hard as wet Kleenex. Yeah, yeah – they win. What do they want, a medal? Guys like Costner got everything else, so why not?
(Incidentally, Adams sucked Stewart and Sting of all people into the even more ridiculous “All for Love” from The Three Musketeers soundtrack just three years later. A Young Guns for idiots, Musketeers isn’t even good enough to be remembered, so remind yourself to avoid the stupendously awful video for “All for One,” which approaches Jagger’s and Bowie’s “Dancing in the Street” for the most smug, off-putting, and ill-advised video of all time.)
Anyway: Looking back on Rod Stewart’s work makes me feel like a hopeful child in all its simple cheesiness and innocent sleaze. Listening to Adams, I’m reminded that innocence eventually turns sour when we turn a blind eye to “childish” things. We become adults who look down on the kids we used to be and then give them the products we think they deserve. Oh, blonde gods – take us back, but not too far that we forget what we were supposed to be in our daydreams that weren’t so childish after all.