I knew that song would get this thread going again. I am so smart. 
Saga - On the Loose
Very cool song, and I am pretty sure this was their biggest hit ever. Wind Him Up is pretty great as well. And apparently this band has an extremely fanatical fanbase, but I can't say I've ever heard anything else by them except those two songs.
Oh Saga, now here's another "Jaq remembers WAY too much about MTV in the early days" story.
Let's flash back to the early days of MTV, shall we? Our wayback machine is set to late 1981, when MTV was young and having 20 some channels was state of the art. MTV back then was not the MTV we came to know, of course; it was twenty four hours a day, seven days a week of music videos, with only a couple of hours on Saturday nights devoted to whatever concert they could get their hands on. In 1981, there simply weren't that many videos, and most of them, the lion's share, came from British bands, which is where the form really came into being, which is largely why the British new wave invasion happened in the first place. MTV then had two methods of survival without boring you to death by playing a handful of videos constantly; the first was to cut up any of the concerts they played into single songs, which is why nine times out of ten in late 1981 you could tune into MTV and see a live REO Speedwagon video, as that was (1) MTV's first concert and (2) cut up into something on the order of 12 single song videos. The other method was to play any music video out there, and damn the genre. And the more videos an artist had, the better! This is why Rod Stewart was one of the champions of early MTV, why you could see Iron Maiden play Wrathchild live, the video for Juice Netwon's Queen of Hearts, Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes, and Turn it On Again by Genesis in a row. Followed by REO Speedwagon and something by Madness. In Fall 1981 you couldn't get out of an hour of MTV without something by Madness playing.
And in the midst of all of these videos, in the freewheeling, anything goes days of MTV, were two videos by a band called Saga: Careful Where You Step and Don't Be Late.
These days, Saga sounds like a meeting point between prog rock and AOR, but back when those videos were thrown into the fire just to fill a spot, they sounded
otherworldly to young me. I loved these guys! Young me didn't realize you could have more than one keyboardist in a band, or the keyboardist playing unisons with the guitarist, and what are those spacey sounding vocals (they were vocoder vocals, for the record)? And what's more, a lot of people liked Saga here in my neck of the woods in Virginia. MTV, you see, wasn't available everywhere when it launched, so if you were fortunate enough to have MTV, you felt kind of like a colonist out on the edge of the musical frontier.
And then On The Loose came out, and that's when things got really fun with Saga. Saga played the Hampton Coliseum as an opening act
three times on their tour for Worlds Apart, and for a while, they were sort of our band. I even think a member of the band married someone he met here on one of those tours. So it was kind of neat when Worlds Apart took off, so to speak. Because it felt like WE made a band, and it was quite possibly the last dying gasp of the more territorial music scene of the 70s, where a band could sell out arenas in St. Louis and play bars in Philadelphia. I'll always have a fondness for Saga for that reason...doesn't hurt that their first four albums are fuckin brilliant too.
Topic: MTV in the 80s Song of the Day (Read 313207 times)
