MTV in the 80s Song of the Day

[BlobVanDam]

One of my Van Hagar favourites too. Excellent album all around.

[Jaq]

I always wondered about that video too. It was almost as if the Blue Angels made the video and MTV played it as Van Halen's. Dreams is one of the songs I like to point to when people say things got bad when Roth left, because there's no fucking way Van Halen could have done that song with Roth in the band.

[masterthes]

as everyone has said, great Van Hagar song

[jjrock88]

Dreams would be tied with Human Beings as my favorite Van Hagar song.

[jingle.boy]

One of VH's best - with or without Roth.  Personally, I like the Hagar era better, but that's just me.

[Sir GuitarCozmo]

One of my all time favorite VH songs. Such a great vocal.

[KevShmev]

Mötley Crüe - Home Sweet Home

Decent enough song, but I was never a huge fan of it.  But the video was played to death, and the MTV crowd just ate it up.  Interestingly, it was not that big of a hit on the pop charts, which I guess shows how massive MTV play did not always guarantee you a big hit on the charts.  But, back to the song, I do like how the piano starts the song and then comes back at the end; that is a nice touch.

[Jaq]

My enduring memory of this song will always be how Tommy Lee placed very highly-I want to say top five-in Circus Magazine's year end readers poll as "best keyboardist." And as all he played was the piano on Home Sweet Home...

[KevShmev]

 

[Orbert]

My enduring memory of this song will always be how Tommy Lee placed very highly-I want to say top five-in Circus Magazine's year end readers poll as "best keyboardist." And as all he played was the piano on Home Sweet Home...

Circus Magazine

Well, there you go.


I take your point, though.  Since he did technically play "keyboards" on that album, he's eligible, and since they were quite popular at the time, he was bound to get a lot of votes.  But yeah, it's pretty silly.

Reminds me of the old Playboy Magazine Music Polls, which otherwise were actually very good.  Billy Joel and Elton John always did really well as "Best Keyboardist" and screwed up the rankings with true keyboardists like Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman.  Nothing against Billy or Elton, they're both immensely talented, but they're pianists, not keyboardists, and yes there is a difference.  It didn't take long for Playboy to add the category "Best Pianist" to keep things sorted (and from which point Elton and Billy constantly beat each other up for Best Pianist while Keith and Rick beat each other up for Best Keyboardist).

[BlobVanDam]

I love the song, although mostly the Decade of Decadence version. The original version sounds cheesier (relatively speaking) with the synth piano, the drum sound, and Vince Neill's pitchier (again, relatively speaking) vocals.
A fun and easy song to play on piano too, which is probably why their drummer can do it.

My enduring memory of this song will always be how Tommy Lee placed very highly-I want to say top five-in Circus Magazine's year end readers poll as "best keyboardist." And as all he played was the piano on Home Sweet Home...

Slow year, huh?

[KevShmev]

I think I remember Eddie Van Halen doing well a few years in the Best Keyboard polls in certain magazines, too. 

[Sir GuitarCozmo]

[nosurprise]My memory of that video is the part where the chick's on the someone's shoulders and someone from behind starts to lift her shirt and just before the reveal, it switches to Tommy with his eyes all wide.  Every time I watch it, I think "It's gonna happen this time, I just know it".  Then there's Tommy's face.    [/nosurprise]

[jingle.boy]

[nosurprise]My memory of that video is the part where the chick's on the someone's shoulders and someone from behind starts to lift her shirt and just before the reveal, it switches to Tommy with his eyes all wide.  Every time I watch it, I think "It's gonna happen this time, I just know it".  Then there's Tommy's face.    [/nosurprise]

^This.  Great little power ballad though.  Motley's first too I would suspect.  Theatre of Pain is an otherwise forgettable album.

[BlobVanDam]

I think I remember Eddie Van Halen doing well a few years in the Best Keyboard polls in certain magazines, too. 

At least he did a few notable songs on keys (and did a good job on the few he did), so it's not quite as bad as Tommy Lee, but it was the '80s! There were a ton of bands with prominent full-time keyboardists to choose from!

[Orbert]

I remember Geddy doing pretty well in the keyboardists rankings for a while, which was pretty cool since he tended to do really well in the bassist rankings as well.  But better than Wakeman or Emerson, or even Geoff Downes from Asia?

[Jaq]

I think I remember Eddie Van Halen doing well a few years in the Best Keyboard polls in certain magazines, too. 

Yeah, he was a consistent winner in the Circus poll post-1984-replacing Geddy Lee as Orbert mentioned. The Circus poll was a little on the whacky side on its best years, but once it transitioned into largely a metal magazine, keyboardist votes tended to go to guys who moonlighted at the position rather than actual keyboardists. The Tommy Lee thing was horrible even by those standards.

[KevShmev]

Stryper - Calling On You

IIRC, this was the song that introduced me to Stryper, and I have to admit that this song sounded pretty awesome to my ears back in 1987.  The video was played to death on MTV (like all of their videos in the later 80s), so if you were an MTV watcher back then, there was no way to avoid it.  Still a good tune, although I can no longer listen to Stryper without it being oh so obvious how much Michael Sweet was trying to sound like Dennis DeYoung. 

[Jaq]

After owning the white vinyl version of Soldiers Under Command, I owned the original "controversial" first cover of To Hell With The Devil, which featured a group of angels beating up on a demon that looked like...your average metal head. Down to the Randy Rhoads model Jackson guitar he held in one hand.  I like to think someone eventually saw the cover and said "for fuck's sake, guys, you're selling albums to people who look like this, what the hell are you doing?" and the album was changed to a plain black sleeve. So it looked like Spinal Tap.  I really liked Stryper, though, as they were a pretty talented melodic metal band, but the second Honestly broke big the writing was on the wall for me with them. Calling On You was catchy enough that a carload of drunk metalheads would sing along with it, especially the end...as me and my friends did fairly often.

[KevShmev]

Yep, the ending was easy to want to sing along to.

I liked Honestly a lot, too, and I have to admit that when a girlfriend and I went to my cousin's wedding a few years later, that was the song we requested to slow dance to.

[jingle.boy]

For some unknown reason, Stryper never hit my listening radar back then.  And I've never made the effort to rectify that.

[wolfking]

For some unknown reason, Stryper never hit my listening radar back then.  And I've never made the effort to rectify that.

All of this.

[Sir GuitarCozmo]

Calling On You is awesome.  I got to see them do this at M3 last year and it's no surprise that Oz Fox sings the first line of the chorus live.  Undoubtedly Michael Sweet is winded by that point.    They put on one hell of a show, despite it having been a very short set.

[KevShmev]

Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence

I think this was the one song by them I actually liked at the time when it was first out.  It has aged well, too.  Good tune.

[jingle.boy]

It would appear this thread is 'enjoying the silence' with that pick

Honestly, don't know the tune.

[wolfking]

I don't mind this one.  One of their better singles but wasn't played much here in Australia.  Actually Depeche Mode never really took off here.  I Just Can't Get Enough was a smash, but that was pretty much it.

[KevShmev]

Survivor - Burning Heart

I was a huge fan of this song in 1985, as we were all big fans of the Rocky movies, and this was the main song to Rocky IV, so we almost had to love the song, right?  I can't say it has aged that well for me, but I still always think of Ivan Drago every time I hear it.

[Jaq]

It's definitely not aged well, but then neither has Rocky IV. We were a handful of years from the end of the Cold War, and honestly the writing was already on the wall for the end of it, we just didn't quite realize it. So it's a bit of an anachronism in a lot of ways. The video, as I recall, was one of those "band plays song interspersed with clips from the movie" things, which meant there was a LOT of punching in it. 

[jingle.boy]

Yeah, the luster from this one is long gone.  I still have it on one of my workout playlists for nostalgic purposes.  Otherwise, I doubt it would get any playtime at all.

[KevShmev]

The Training Montage song from the Rocky IV soundtrack (it plays during Rocky's first extended workout session in Russia, before Adrian shows up) is a phenomenal workout tune.  It's guaranteed to get you pumped up and sweating like mad.

[BlobVanDam]

The Training Montage song from the Rocky IV soundtrack (it plays during Rocky's first extended workout session in Russia, before Adrian shows up) is a phenomenal workout tune.  It's guaranteed to get you pumped up and sweating like mad.

You mean the instrumental diddy by Vince DiCola? He also did the Transformers cartoon movie soundtrack the year after that, which sounds just like it. Lots of '80s proggy stuff with synth leads and changing time sigs on that one.

As for Burning Heart, it's ok. Fits right in with the style of Vital Signs. Good, but nothing standout. I've only seen the movie once or twice, so I don't know it too well considering how much I'm into their other stuff from that period.

[KevShmev]

  The video, as I recall, was one of those "band plays song interspersed with clips from the movie" things, which meant there was a LOT of punching in it. 

Haha, pretty much.  That was the standard 80s "song from a movie" video: constant clips from the movie jumping out at you in between shots of the band.

The Training Montage song from the Rocky IV soundtrack (it plays during Rocky's first extended workout session in Russia, before Adrian shows up) is a phenomenal workout tune.  It's guaranteed to get you pumped up and sweating like mad.

You mean the instrumental diddy by Vince DiCola?

Yes.  He also did the one called War, which is the music that plays during the rounds 3-14 montage.

[Podaar]

Survivor was so far off my radar back then that I can honestly say I hadn't ever heard this song until a few minutes ago when I fired up their video on Youtube. Yea, still not my cup of tea but their lead vocalist sure has a clear and powerful voice! 

[BlobVanDam]

Survivor was so far off my radar back then that I can honestly say I hadn't ever heard this song until a few minutes ago when I fired up their video on Youtube. Yea, still not my cup of tea but their lead vocalist sure has a clear and powerful voice! 

Jimi Jamison does have a great voice. So good that I'll even let him off the hook for also singing the Baywatch theme (which is even cheesier, but has even better vocals).

[masterthes]

I didn't know that song was used for Rocky IV, but then I've never seen it all the way through. It's definitely not Eye Of The Tiger