120 Months – April 1988 – The Church, The Damned, Midnight Oil

Our regular picks are all solid songs, don’t get us wrong. But we’d be lying if we said the mystery song wasn’t the star of the show this time around. You are definitely going to want to check this one out!

And welcome back to 120 months. We are going through 120 minutes, the old MTV show. going month by month, choosing songs, choosing videos to talk about, and diving back into the days of, in this case, April of 1988. I’m here with Scott Mobley and Keith Porterfield.

Spoiler alert, we’ve got a mystery song that just, I can’t even begin to describe how excited we are to talk about it. We have no idea how that discussion’s going to go, but I can assure you. If there’s people out here who listen to the podcast, but like tune out halfway through or maybe don’t listen to the mystery song for so I, whatever reason, make sure you stay in and listen to the mystery song for this one because I promise you will not be disappointed.

It may be the 1st time I actually say, you know what? pause the podcast when we get to it, go watch the video and then come back. It may be the 1st pause in 120 months history.

I’m just going to call it right now. Yeah, that’s going to happen. I think that should happen.

You should go watch that. But we’ll get to that. First things first.

April 1988. So let’s talk real quickly about the musical landscape, top 10 in the country around that time was, uh, number one was Whitney Houston, where did Broken Hearts go? Number 2 was Terrence Trent Darby wishing well, which was we played some Terrence Darby on, yeah, KTXT. fantastic song.

Absolutely great song. So he was kind of straddling that line between mainstream and what was still not alternative at that time, but he was kind of, he had one toe in college rock, but I remember that song getting some airplay and clearly it did because it hit number two. Number three, Aerosmith Angel.

The 1st video I ever saw on MTV, by the way, because I was very late to MTV. I remember I was in a store and just happened to see it like on a monitor somewhere, and it really stuck with me, but that was really the 1st time I ever saw MTV because I was, I was in a little town in Colorado that had no MTV, so I was very late to that party. But anyway, that was number three, number four, in excess, Devil Inside, another great song in a band that did get some college radio airplay, but clearly was breaking big at this point with the kick, the album.

Uh, so the top 4 is actually pretty strong. And then it kind of, after that, a little less so, but Gloria Estefan and the Miami sound machine, anything for you was number five. Get out of my dreams, get into my car, Billy Ocean, number six.

Uh, not a bad song. Not a bad song. I kind like that one.

Pink Cadillac by Natalie Cole. Prove Your Love, Taylor Dane, Tiffany still on the chart with, I saw him standing there at number nine, and then Pebbles, if you remember Pebbles, was on the chart at number 10. So I also, I think more relevant to what we’re doing is really the MTV charts, but they just don’t really have monthly charts that are easy to find for kind of what was playing.

And I was trying to find like dial MTV charts to see, you know, what was getting voted. those are hard to find. So I kind of cross-referenced this with like the top 100 videos of of 1988 to see which ones of these maybe were getting MTV played. And it really was Terrence Trent Darby, Aerosmith and NXS, and Billy Ocean, I think, were the ones that were in like pretty heavy MTV rotation as well.

And then the rest of these are really more like radio hits and things you wouldn’t have seen on MTV. That kind of sets the stage for, of course, the show. We’re talking about 120 minutes where they wanted to go beyond what you were seeing on regular MTV rotation and dive into some of the music that you would have heard on college radio at the time or if you were really lucky in in a town like maybe Los Angeles or New York City where they had a radio station that would actually, you know, dive this deep into the indie rock or like UK band catalog.

You might have heard it on the radio, but anyway, that’s where we are. We’re at April 1988. We kicking things off this week with Mr. Keith Porfield.

All right, for this week, I picked a song called Under the Milky Way, by the end of the church. Under the no key, wait. Wish I knew what you were looking for.

Might I know what you were fine? Pretty sure probably most of our listeners are familiar with the song. It was pretty big, uh, at the time.

Um, and for me, I like the church. I’ve always been a fan, but not a huge fan, and I got into them a little bit after this, actually. I was aware of this song.

But the 1st bit of the church music that I bought was the album that came after this one, which was called Gold Afternoon Fix. And I remember liking it a whole lot. I bought the one that came next, which was called Priest Equals Ara, liked it too, although I didn’t think it was quite as good as Gold Afternoon Fix.

And what’s funny is when I was doing my reading about this, turns out the main guy in the church, Steve Kilby, who will get to in a second, does not really care for gold afternoon fix very much, but thinks that priest equals Ara is the undisputed masterpiece of the church’s career. So I may have had those 2 albums backwards. I need to go back and listen to those 2 again because my 1st impressions of those 2 may have been reversed.

But the album that came after that, I was actually the music director at KTXT when that one came out. So I got to hear it without buying it. And that one was not very good, as I recall it.

So I kind of dropped out of the church after that. I did buy their greatest hits package, which was all the stuff previous to those albums. So that’s how I kind of know about that.

And then in the 2000s, I checked in on them once more and bought another album called Forget Yourself, that was actually really good. But the funny thing about forget yourself is that it sounds very much like old school church, largely recorded live. And so in my mind, the church have a very distinctive sound, but I was, again, I was reading about these guys, they have apparently done some concept albums and done some work of like horn and string orchestration and some electronic stuff.

So in my head, the church has a very, like, constant sound, like they very much have a sound to them. But I think it’s just because of the times that I checked in on that band. Apparently, they are a little more eclectic than I give them credit for being.

So, at some point, I need to go check some of that other stuff out. Because like I said, to me, the church very much has its sound, but apparently they played around with that a little more than I was aware that they did. They are an Australian band.

They were formed in 1980. I mentioned Steve Kilby earlier. He’s the bass player and the vocalist, and is the only guy that’s been in the band through the entire run.

They do have what’s kind of considered to be a classic lineup, and that’s the lineup that recorded this song under the Milky Way, and most of the stuff in the 80s. I mean, that lineup featured a couple of guitar players, one named Marty Wilson Piper, one named Peter Copps, and then a drummer named Richard Plugg. So those guys were kind of the band when the church was at its heyday as far as, you know, sales and radio play and that kind of stuff goes.

But all of them have drifted off over the years and now it’s just Steve Kilby and some and some other guys. This song is off the 5th studio album. called Starfish. One of the more successful albums that the church ever had.

It went to number 24 on the billboard, Hot 100, or actually I should say the song went to number 24 on the billboard, Hot 100, and number 2 on the mainstream rock tracks. So as far as charting goes, this was the biggest song that the church ever had, and actually even got voted the best song of the last 20 years by readers of the newspaper, the Australian, they’re in Australia. So again, pretty much this was the top of their success, this song.

And like I said, I have a feeling that most of our listeners have heard it, but it is a gorgeous song, just absolutely beautiful song, written by Kilby and a lady named Karen Jansen, who was his girlfriend at the time and also appeared in a couple of other bands. And the funny thing about this song is that it was apparently not Kilby didn’t really think of it as being what it ended up being. And there’s a great quote about this that I wrote down.

I want to read it. It says, uh, talking about this song under the Milky Way, it says, it’s not really about anything at all. I just wanted to create an atmosphere, and I didn’t even put a lot of thought into that.

History has given it something that it never really had. I don’t think that they expected this song to be what it turned out to be for them. I don’t think that they thought that this was going to be their kind of their undisputed masterpiece of a song, if not of an album, that it kind of ended up being, and it seemed like that was not something that Kilby really thought was going to happen.

As I mentioned, gorgeous, gorgeous song. Largely played on a 12 screen string acoustic guitar. That’s where the strumming part of it is largely built on.

It’s got a solo in the middle of it that I really, really love. But I have never known exactly what that solo was. It’s got a weird sound to it.

Um, and the, the thing I read described it as sounding like bagpipes and went back and listened to it, and that’s, that’s kind of right. It actually does sound a little bit about like bagpipes. I always kind of figured it was probably a synthesizer of some sort.

Turns out it actually is a guitar. It was a fender jazz master being played with an ebo, which is an electronic device for getting sustained on a string when you pick a guitar note so that it doesn’t have the decay on it. It just sustains there.

And then they ran that through a Sinclavier system. And Sinclavier was an old school synthesizer slash digital sampler, stat slash musical workstation setup that was invented in the late 70s and was used a lot in the 70s and 80s. So it’s an old school, early electronic device, electronic music device.

And that’s what they did to get that weird bagpipey sound out of a guitar. So that actually is a guitar solo. It just doesn’t really sound like that.

So I thought that was really cool. So a beginning, just another layer of lushness to that song with that. And then, you know, kill these vocals.

If you’ve ever heard Steve Kilby sing, he’s got a little bit of a baritone voice, but a really, really nice, clean voice. And, um, so again, this is this song is absolutely beautiful, just a gorgeous song. The video is pretty cool too.

I liked it for the band, it’s just them playing with kind of a starting background behind them, but it’s got some pretty cool effects going on. There’s some projection stuff on them as they’re playing. Um, and then there’s a few shots where it looks kind of like they shot it, like shot a broken mirror that was, the band was reflected on because you kind of get like jagged images of them with like kind of cracks going and like part of it’s a little closer to you, part of it’s behind.

It just kind of a weird effect to it, but it’s neat. The rest of the video is largely, it follows this girl around is she’s running around some city carrying a picture frame and looking at things through the picture frame. There’s some other, there’s like a guy in there that’s wearing a trench coat and it seems like she might be following him around during the video and maybe checking him out through the picture frame.

There’s another dude that I thought of as being the boxer gags. He starts off in a boxing gym and she runs into him at one point. So I’m not really sure what’s supposed to be going on there, how that all fits together.

She’s in different places. She’s looking through the picture frame. She’s maybe following this guy around.

At that time, she is definitely following this guy around. So I don’t really know what’s going on with that. But the whole thing kind of vibing, made for a cool video.

So I actually really liked that as well. And so, yeah, you know, I don’t have a whole lot more than this. Like I said, I feel like most people have probably heard this song.

It was huge. It’s had a couple of resurgences. It was in the movie Donny Darko and kind of got his 2nd life there, and has been licensed for commercials and all kinds of stuff.

And in fact, Kilby has said that he will, he will license that song to anyone who wants to give him money. He likes the fact that it kind of has had a life of its own and I’m sure he likes the money and the royalties he gets from it. So you have probably heard the song in an advertisement as well as maybe on the radio or wherever.

But yeah, just a great song. And I think a really representative song for what the church was doing in the 80s and to my mind, kind of just what the church generally sounds like. So I have a feeling you guys probably know this one and have your own opinions about it, have had for a while on this song.

But yeah, that’s the church under the Milky Way. I’m shocked we haven’t heard this in a Milky Way commercial, that being the case. I am familiar with the song.

It’s one of those where I don’t think I appreciated as much back when I 1st heard it, which would have been probably in the early 90s, so a few years after it came out. And I still, it’s not, it’s one of those songs that I feel like I should like more than I do, and I’m not really sure what it is. It’s definitely not a bad song by any stretch, and it really is a very pretty song.

But it doesn’t, it’s not like in my playlist or one that I kind of seek out as, but it seems like it should. It’s, it’s like it feels like it’s in my wheelhouse, but I just have never, something about it has never quite hit for me, but that’s not to, to really say anything negative. It really is a good song.

Some of the notes that I took watching it. I think song wise, there really wasn’t. I think it’s, like you said, it’s very familiar, so I didn’t really think I would have a lot to add to it besides the solo, which one of the reasons that I am realizing that I’ve probably never sat down and really concentrated and listened to this song before.

I’ve only maybe heard it more in, like passing or, you know, someone else, off someone else’s playlist or whatever, is because I was, I don’t really remember that solo until I heard it doing the research for this. Because my 1st thought was, holy shit, there’s a, there’s a magpipe, so in this song. And not one that I particularly enjoyed.

I have to say I don’t I don’t like the solo very much. I don’t feel like it fits particularly well with the rest of the song. So I wrote, like, is that a bagpipe?

And then at the end of the song, when the guitar comes back, It sounds more like a guitar, but it also sounds a little bit like what you hear in the solo, and I started to think maybe it is a guitar sound, and they were doing something a little different with the solo, but it has a similar timbre that the little guitar bit at the end does. And it turns out I guess that was kind of what was going on is that it was a guitar and they were just, they were doing some extra, you know, stuff with it. It’s unique, but I, yeah, it’s a little discordant for being on such a pretty song.

So I didn’t, I didn’t love that, but I was kind of shocked that I’d never really noticed it until this time. And I’ve heard this song, God, 100s of times, I’m sure, but video wise, 1st of all, lovely guitar. That guitar is just beautiful, really.

That, like right off the bat, I was like, ah, that’s a nice guitar. I’d never seen these guys with Florida. I never seen this video before, so I kind of like that they have, I think what the kids these days would call like a norm core kind of look, like they look like pretty normal dudes for the most part.

Like they’re not super goth, at least in this video. They’re not like super got out. They’re kind of more, one of the reasons I really love new orders because they just seem like a couple people that just kind of rolled off the street and went into a studio, started recording like they don’t really dress a particular way or have like a particular style and these guys do a, you know, they’re in black and they definitely have a little bit going on.

But I liked that they all just, you know, they didn’t seem super, super gothy or whatever. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I thought that was, I was expecting that, I think. So, because I didn’t really know a lot about the church, so that was kind of a nice, nice surprise.

The girl with the frame in that story. I never could quite figure out what was going on like you, Keith, I think you basically nailed it. Like she’s following them around.

She’s got the frame. It’s funny because I was kind of thinking of it more as people seeing her inside of the frame as opposed to her looking out through the frame at things, although obviously both are happening. Uh, because my thought was like, this really, like, is she like the original TikToker influencer, you know, where she’s like going around as the, she’s the main character and she’s got this frame and, you know, look at me, which she’s not really acting that way.

She’s not really walking around going, look at me, look at me, but she is carrying a frame around, which, you know, is going to draw some attention, I would think. But I couldn’t quite draw a beat on who the 2 dudes were, who was following who, what was going on. So, and maybe there’s there may not be an answer to that.

And so that may be just kind of a foolish pursuit in general. And my last note was there’s a there’s one bit where she kind of peeks into a restaurant, I think, and they’re making some sort of dish that involves an egg and an eyeball, and I just don’t want anything to do with that at all. That’s that’s my note.

I don’t know what that is. I don’t know if it’s a real thing or a fake thing or both, but, yeah, no, thank you. But otherwise, it’s a classic song.

It’s, I, you know, my, my opinion on it, it’s, it’s certainly not, like if I, I don’t know. I was going from one to ten, it would be like a 6 for me. I think most people probably would put it higher than that because it’s, you know, it’s a classic.

But yeah, nice, great video and definitely a song that if you’re not familiar with, go check it out because you probably will like it. It’s funny to me that you are not a fan of the solo in that song. Man, I love that solo.

And I think it works really well with the song. And one of my favorite parts of it, actually, is when it breaks down into that. I don’t have like a personal thing against, you know, really discordant stuff.

So it’s not just the fact that it isn’t, you know, a super melodic, beautiful solo. I don’t necessarily have anything against that. But for some reason, this one just, I felt like I wanted something else, but I’m not the right person to be, you know, saying anything about this song. because I feel like I’m in a very minority position with even not, and again, it’s not that I don’t like it.

I just, it’s such a kind of revered song that I don’t feel like I should be weighing in on it at all, to be honest, but I’m in a position where I have to, and that’s where I landed. But yeah, yeah, that it stuck out of me because I just had never noticed it before either, the solo. Yeah, that’s, yeah, like I said, one of my favorite parts of the song kind of kind of surprises to me that you didn’t like that.

So sorry to everyone who had Mike’s going to love it and Scott’s going to hate it on their bingo card. Because I love this song. Now, I remember it when it came out.

I don’t know if I saw it on MTV. I don’t, but I do I remember the video. I remember like before even turning it on.

I remember almost everything about this song. I do remember the video like they just being the band playing with sort of the starry whatever around and all that stuff. That’s what my mind had.

So I didn’t remember the girl and all that other kind of stuff. So I was trying to remember why I was drawn to this song when I was in high school because this certainly was unlike anything else I was listening to. It would have been the most mellow thing in my album collection by a landslide.

But I was a big fan of it. And I do remember buying the album and not really caring for most of it. I don’t remember the album really grabbing me, but I haven’t listened to it since 1988 and, you know, my musical tastes were much different than they are now.

So I actually would have had these guys solidly in the one hit wonder category, and I guess they probably went way beyond that, beyond my knowledge of them. So I was really just going on this song. But I remember the basic vibe of the video.

I didn’t remember everything. I really liked the use of the picture frame. I, and, you know, you guys kind of, one of you said she was looking through it.

The other one said she was holding it up, you know, to herself. I don’t know if I have an opinion on that one way or the other, but I kind of liked the look of that. And I liked the, you know, there was one part where they framed the singer’s face at an angle or whatever briefly.

I kind of wish there was more of that. Like it was her holding it up to the band members, holding it up to, you know, different things. I think that would have been a cool way to go with that.

But I don’t not really sure what they were trying to go for. I also liked the film, superimposed on the band. I always kind of liked that look and it was pretty new at this time, I think, but, you know, that I liked the image of that.

So it was some great imagery. The only thing I didn’t remember was that eyeball in the egg thing, which not only was surprising, but it just does not work at all, what that’s doing in the middle of this video for this song, I have no idea. That was just a weird left turn that I wasn’t expecting.

But yeah, this was a nice revisit of a song that I’ve always liked. I’m glad you picked it. I just wanted to throw out.

I looked up real quick. The song was used in a commercial for the Lincoln MKT in 2009. It was not the church.

It was a cover by Sia. And then it says it was used in an Australian Hyundai commercial, but we wouldn’t have seen that. So the video, the part with the eyeball, guys both have mentioned it.

I had actually taken a note about it too, and just got kind of skipped over it. I went and watched the video several times doing this. I think what was going on there.

I don’t think it was a restaurant. I think it was like a fortune teller type place. And she cracks the egg over the eyeball and little thing and it kind of swirls it around or whatever.

And then if you remember the, like the very next scene is the, the guy that I kept thinking of is trench coat guy, I had trench coat guy and I had boxer guy, trench coat guy, like doubles over, like he’s in pain or something. And so I think it was supposed to be some kind of like voodoo thing going on there that she checks out the fortune teller, uh, you know, place after she’s been following him around and then the fortune teller or whatever she is, does this and it like hurts the guy or whatever. That’s, that was what I took from that is because right after that, there’s a scene where he like appears to be in pain.

So I think that’s what was going on there. Okay, fair explanation still doesn’t work in this video. I don’t think.

Like, it doesn’t… It’s a perfectly good explanation for something that still does not belong in a video for this song. I don’t think, but I’m sure there are those that disagree.

One thing I was surprised about too, reading about these guys. You kind of mentioned you thought of them as a little bit of a one hit wonder. These guys have 23 or it might be 28.

I’d have to go back and look, but it was some insane number of studio albums. This is an incredibly prolific band that’s been cranking out records for nearly 50 years now. I think I remember the album after this coming out.

I was probably at KTXT or, you know, it was floating around there, but I just don’t remember ever hearing another song by them and going, you know, oh yeah, the church, you know, I just, in my mind, this was their claim to fame. Probably. I mean, that’s probably fair to say that it is, but I didn’t realize they were, you know, as prolific as they are.

Yeah, definitely their biggest arm, but they’ve gone on for, you know, and still go on. They’re still an active band even now. It’s wild how many times we’ve already had this discussion of like, I thought these guys had like one or 2 songs, maybe a couple albums.

Turns out they recorded 35 studio albums and they’ve been recorded, you know, they’re they are touring to this day and, you know, it’s like, oh, okay, well. Yeah, so up next is a band that I actually, in my head, have kind of put in the same bucket as the church and possibly even confused them at some time or another. I think now kind of doing some research, I realize that’s not actually the case, and they’re probably more different than I realize, because I don’t know them both very well, but I thought it was interesting that they were both on this episode.

So let’s find out a little more from Scott. So for this week, I chose the song anything by the damn. And once again, I picked a band that I thought I knew and discovered that they were doing a lot more than I gave them credit for.

I don’t think this is as blatant a violation as I had with Wire, because I did know that the dam kept going in the after the 80s, but I really hadn’t heard any of it. And I wasn’t that familiar with the songs they were doing post their 1st couple of albums. So a little history first.

And I say little because there is a ton here, but I’m just going to try to hit the highlights. So the founding members of the damned are Dave Vanion on vocals. Brian Jones on guitar, Captain Sensible on bass, great name. and rat scabies on drums, not so great name.

Prior to forming the damned, Avanian, Sensible, and Scabies were all in a band called Masters of the Backside, which also featured Chrissy Hind, who would later go on to be in the Pretenders. She was famously quoted as saying that without her, these guys were the best punk band in London at the time. Brian Jones had come over to them from a band called London SS, which was never too much of a thing, but they did have members of the Clash and Generation X in the ranks before splitting up.

So the dam come together with a little bit of a pedigree. They are credited with having the very 1st punk single released in the UK. Their song New Rose was released in October of 77, 5 weeks before the Sex Pistols released anarchy in the UK.

Their album, damn damn damned, which was their 1st album, also beat, Nevermind the Bullocks to release by about 8 months. And they are also the 1st UK punk band to tour the US. So all of this is to say that this is one of the 1st and most influential and most important UK punk bands of all time.

They actually disbanded fairly close to when they started and then reformed in 79. And they’ve been going kind of on and off ever since. So that brings us to anything, which is the lead single off the album of the same title.

It comes out in December of 86, right before this, or a year before this. Sorry. I haven’t heard this song before.

And so it was kind of taken back at the sound of it. So I did a little digging. As it turns out, the damned around 1984 were a little disillusioned with the state of punk, felt it had become a little oversaturated, a little commercial.

And they also noticed that the goth music was rising in popularity, which had in some ways was influenced by them. Um, so they released an album called Phantasmagoria in 85. This was their 1st attempt at goth.

It was a minor hit. The single Shadow of Love, which is on that album, is on one of the 120 minutes playlists from this month, or we could have gone that way, actually. And there is a song by these guys on almost every playlist around this time on 120 minutes, almost, you know, in the next few months.

There’s at least one song from them. So I thought that maybe they were gearing up for a new album or something. It turns out that what they were gearing up for was a compilation album, which, you know, is probably what they were pushing here. a live album came shortly after that.

So anything is yet another slight transition. It moves a little bit away from Goth, a little bit more into sort of the mainstream rock sounds, both as an album and a single. So, I admit that this was in no way what I was expecting to hear when I chose the dam, but wow, did I love this song?

It doesn’t really sound like the damn, at least not the damned in my head. Uh, but what a jam. I pointed out on this podcast that I’m a fan of this sort of transitional period in British Rock where the punks had laid down some influence and everyone was kind of grabbing that and taking it in different directions.

I’m not sure there’s anything groundbreaking or wildly important about this song, but I really did like it. It’s perfectly accessible. Rock song has a great riff.

It’s produced really, really well. These guys have a sounded look that certainly made them cool to watch it this time. And the video is pretty great too.

It looked to me like that dinner table that they’re sitting at is on some giant turntable that starts spinning faster and faster as they go and, you know, the band tries to hang on and continue to enjoy their dinner. You know, it’s it’s 80s goofy, but I think it really worked for what it is. We’ve seen better videos, but we’ve definitely seen horse videos.

So not what I was expecting at all, but this was a really, really nice surprise. I really got a kick out of this. Did you guys have previous knowledge of like this part of the damned or any part of the damn for that man?

I myself was a damned virgin coming into this. I had never heard a damn song in my life until this song. So, but you’re right, man, this song is a gem.

I really enjoyed it. And yeah, I was thinking kind of the same thing, kind of a goth punk mashup that just really worked. I like the look of the band.

I thought they look went really well with the music. The video was cool. Like you said, the note that I took was, here we have another incident of a band that I don’t want to have dinner with because we keep running into videos where some reason or another, they’re having dinner and things go wrong.

And yeah, getting spun around and slung off the table doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. Yeah, this was absolutely, this was my 1st introduction to the damned at all. And yeah, I really liked it.

I thought this song was really, really good. And I don’t have a whole lot more to add than that. If you like kind of gothy, punky stuff.

Go check this out because this song is an absolute jam. I really, really liked it. You know, it’s not what they were doing when they started.

If you listen to their very early stuff. There’s not the line between them and the Sex Pistols is nothing. Like, they sound very similar to that.

It’s that early 70s or mid 70s, you know, bratty British punk. It’s what they started doing, but they did sort of morph over time and the album before this is very gothy. It’s kind of kind of drony and and he really pushes the baritone part of his vocals and sort of leaning into the Peter Murphy thing a little bit.

But man, whatever they did on this album, I dug it big time. So yeah, I, if you’re not familiar with the damn. If you would have asked me last week, I would have said, start with the punk stuff, but you can start right here.

This is a great song. I’m in the same boat as Keith, this is my introduction to the damned. I’d heard of them.

I’m pretty sure we probably played them on KTXT, so I’ve probably actually heard them in that context, but, I mean, you just get exposed to so many bands, you know, when you’re DJing at a college radio station. They don’t all stick with you. So like I said, I kind of had them in my head.

They fit in the same bucket as the church, so I guess I kind of considered them to be a goth band. I didn’t even know they had a more punk beginning. I’m kind of curious now to go back, um, and check that out because I also really, really, really like the song, like a lot, a lot.

The 1st 30 seconds, I was a little not so sure about the video or the song. Like the, it’s, they start with him in a shower. didn’t necessarily love that. And I was like, a goth song where the guys in the shower just seems completely wrong.

And then they kind of go down the drain and you start to see where they’re going with it. And then everything after that, like the song takes off, the video takes off. And I was like, I apologize.

I was wrong. This is fantastic. I loved every minute after that.

Yeah, once I got, once they kind of got into it. 100% on board. So some of my notes are, that’s how you stretch a budget. Like, they probably had a decent budget for this, but not a huge one.

It could have gone any number of ways and we’ve seen how many ways already that it could have gone in the in the 80s when you have kind of a mid-tier budget. I’d say it’s probably a small to mid-tier budget they had for this. What a great concept.

Like, what a great call. Let’s get this big feast and put it on a table and then start spinning everybody around and just basically that’s the video. I mean, there’s some, you know, a few other things that are happening, but ultimately that’s what you’re watching.

And it totally works. It’s just a great visual. They play it really well.

It’s edited really well. It just it all works. So I was, yeah, one of the best 80s videos that we’ve seen, I think, honestly, especially given that, you know, it didn’t have the, probably didn’t have the budget of the mystery song that we’re about to talk about.

I’ll put it that way. Spoiler alert. Yeah, I just, I feel like they stretched every dollar and made that feel much bigger and better than probably what they actually paid for.

So that was really cool. I, you know, I probably would have skipped the shower part and just and set up the table scene in a different way. Maybe, yeah, just get to that part, maybe a different way, but whatever.

I mean, there’s, I think there was, they were kind of going for something and maybe I didn’t quite catch it there. No harm, no foul. It gets good fast enough that that’s not really an issue.

So I only have one negative thing to say about this song, and it’s really something that I feel about a lot, a lot of songs that recorded in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and maybe this still happens to some degree. I don’t listen to it a ton of new music compared to what I used to listen to, but this one, and we probably heard that other songs that did this where I didn’t point it out, but the song was so good and I didn’t have anything negative to say. I almost felt like I had to think of something negative.

It fades out. And it’s just, I hate songs that fade out. And we’ve never talked.

We haven’t talked about that on the podcast. This is not specific to this song by any stretch of the imagination. And again, I don’t know if we’ve totally gotten away from that, but it feels like for the most part, we kind of have put an ending on your freaking song.

Just don’t, the fade out. I just I’ve never liked it. It always has felt wrong to me from even back when I was a kid and listened to music.

I always thought it was weird that songs faded out. So that’s my, if I have a negative, the video and the song, because the video just kind of fades out too. You don’t really have a resolution on that and and just, yeah, oh, that it’s something that I’m glad went away.

We haven’t talked about this. And I could not agree with you more. I hate songs that fade.

And if I, you know, I’m not a music producer and I never will be, but if I was, it’d be like, no, we’re not doing that. Like, pretend you’re playing it live. Finish it.

You know? You’re not gonna fade it out when you play live, so just do what you’re gonna do then. I think a lot of songs that end up, I’m not a fan of fadeouts either. you know, go ahead and get that out front.

But I think a lot of instances, and this may be the case. I don’t know. I haven’t heard the album version.

A lot of the songs you hear fadeouts on are single edits of longer songs. And if you go listen to the albums, you’ll get a song that does, you know, play out to the end. And so if you’ve got a 5.5 minute song that you want to stick into a 3.5 to 4 minute radio version, one of the things you can do is get to a nice point towards the end of it and then fade it out and just cut off the end of that song.

So, I don’t know, that’s what’s going on here. And I don’t know that that’s what’s going on every time you get a song that’s fading out. But just having listened to enough music over the years where I’ve heard album versions versus single versions of songs, a lot of times what you get on fade outs are the single edits of the song or the ones that have the fade outs on them.

So who knows about this one? But yeah, I agree. I don’t in general like fade outs, but I think that’s often used as a tool just to shorten a song a little bit up for a single version.

Such a lazy way to do it though. Hey, we need to cut this song. Should we edit and try to make sure that this, you know, fits and maybe we get No, no, no, just take the volume knob and just kind of go from like 8 to zero, just kind of get down.

Like, come on, guys. But I think you’re right. That may very well be the case here, and I bet you, I know it is the case a lot of the time.

I think we ran across that with the Smiths, too. Didn’t they just kind of fade? That’s how soon is now.

I think the album version of how soon is now fades too, though. Even at 7 minutes. I think it does, but that, I don’t, you know, I don’t like fade outs, but that’s, I mean, if we were going to think of a song where maybe it’s the right thing to do, that’s probably it.

I mean, that that song is supposed to be like this sort of drony, you know, the nights going on and on and on and you’re getting more and more depressed and it just kind of winds itself down. And that may be, if I had to pick a song that was, you know, okay, you could use the fade out on this one. It would it would be that.

They still could have ended in two. They must have played that song live at some point. How did they end it then?

See, that’s my thing, is that any band that plays live, which is, you know, 95% of bands probably play live. I know there are some bands that are just all studio, but surely they’ve figured out a way to end the song, you know. And so just, yeah, record that.

But now I have to go back and listen to the album version and it probably has a nice ending and I’ll look kind of silly. But yeah, just it’s just weird to me. It’s always it’s always ever since I was a kid.

Maybe it’s that I also have flashbacks to when we had 8 tracks and songs would fade out, you know, halfway through and then there would be this giant click and then it would fade back up and the song would come back because it was like cut by the 8 track. Oh, man, you talk about just like, oh, it’s just like desecrating art at that point when you’re fading out in the middle. Oh, like, I know that that…

And I mean, I get it from, like, a technical logistical standpoint, that’s, like, only really the option other than just having a lot of blank tape at this, at the end of one of the tracks or something, which also would happen. But, man, like fading a song out halfway through and then fading it back in after, you know, change, what a terrible… Especially when it was not…

That’s just… butchering music. which it which it never was. Yeah. But I mean, that’s probably why 8 tracks were only popular for about half an hour. didn’t last very long, but they had a lot of flaws or a lot of flaws.

A lot of flaws, yeah. All right, moving on to, actually, I meant to ask you this while we were talking about the church. Did you say the church was from Australia, Keith, or UK?

They are from Australia. Okay, so we have another, we have another Australian band up. Probably the most iconic Australian rock band, one of the most iconic.

ACDC, ACDC, yeah. As soon as I said that, I was like, yeah, CDC, but, um, maybe one of the most, yeah, they’re in the top five, maybe the most iconic alternative, no, that’s, that could be in excess too. and iconic. And iconic Australian band.

We’re talking about Midnight Oil, the song is unequivocally probably their biggest hit. Beds are burning. How can we dance when our work is turning?

How do we sleep while our bed This is one where I took a page from Keith, where, a lot of times, when Keith Pixie songs, you choose something that has, like, a personal meaning or, like, a personal memory that attaches you to it. And I haven’t done a lot of that, but this one, it’s funny, though, I’ve had to correct my memory of it because of the research that I did while doing this. So, uh, my memory of this song, of hearing it for the 1st time, I was in 6th grade and I was watching the talent show, like 4 or 5 of the popular girls did like a choreographed dance number two, this track.

And that’s how I remember this going down. Doing the research, I looked at the date and I was like, that’s impossible because this came out after I was in 6th grade. So that was not a true memory.

And after I kind of pieced it together, I realized that that song that I heard in the 6th grade that they danced to was actually Glenn Fry, the heat is on, because I also had that memory mixed in with that. And they did this, I think, in junior, they must have been junior high because that’s when this, I was in junior high when this song came out. And it was the 1st time probably any of us had heard it.

I remember one of the girls had been visiting family in like LA and had recorded it off of, I think, probably K-Rock, and the recording even still had the DJ on the end. So, like, as they were dancing to it on stage, like, you could hear the DJ come in because she’d recorded it off the radio. So we were, I was in this small town in Colorado and we just really didn’t get this style of music.

So this was it was kind of totally new to hear it. It goes without saying that being a junior high moron, the message of this song, especially seeing it in that context of like a talent show dance thing, the message was completely lost on me, which is, you know, kind of sad because it’s not subtle in any by any stretch of the imagination. Like it doesn’t, you don’t have to like puzzle through the lyrics to hear what they’re talking about.

It is extremely clear what message they’re trying to send. But let’s back up a little bit. So Midnight Oil, according to Wikipedia, known informally as the oils, which is a term I had never heard until today, basically when I was doing the research for the podcast, but apparently they are known as the oils.

I did see a YouTube comment that called them that as well, so that is not a made-up Wikipedia thing, but I did not know that. But Midnight oil is Peter Garrett is the lead singer, and I think really the only person that’s probably memorable, honestly, from the band. Two of the members have since passed on, one in 2003, and then one recently, the bassist, or the drummer has passed on just a couple years ago.

So some of the original measures members have unfortunately passed. Peter Garrett is still there and he has kind of the front man, the leader and the one that you’re going to remember if you if you see this band for sure. They debuted all the way back in 1978 and kind of developed a little bit of a cult following with their debut album, the next album, uh, titled 1098-765-4321, came out in 1982 and had a song called Power and the Passion that ended up being their 1st kind of hit, particularly in Australia.

Also had a song that was that charted in Australia, and I am absolutely sure did not chart in the United States called US forces, which was about what you would think it would be about, which was kind of an anti, you know, US using their military force to insert themselves into situations that they probably shouldn’t, a song that is as relevant today as ever. I am guessing that song, you know, did not do well over here if it got here at all, but it is, it’s an interesting one. It’s not, it’s a little challenging musically, but it’s kind of, it’s, it’s interesting. you know, definitely one that you can go check out.

It’s on YouTube. Power and the passion, also a very, very good song. Needless to say, this is a band that continued to address politics throughout their career and absolutely became pretty well known for that.

In fact, more so than most bands. There are a lot of bands that dabble in politics or do some, you know, political stuff. These guys were, it was really part and parcel of what they did, even at that point.

They released another album in 84 that hit number one in Australia. They released an EP in 85 that was the top of the singles charts in Australia, so they were developing a following. They were becoming really big in Australia.

They toured the outback in 1986, and that was when they really became much more aware of the plight of the Aboriginal people in Australia. And that kind of became their cause moving forward. Not that they didn’t have other causes and that they weren’t involved politically in other movements, but advocating for aboriginal people, and fairness to them is really a big part of, particularly their next album, which is called Diesel and Dust, which came out in 1987.

And that’s the one we are talking about today. The 1st thing off that was called The Dead Heart. It is also about the indigenous people of Australia, unfair treatment. and possible remedies for that unfair treatment, as is the song, Beds Are Burning, which was the 2nd single.

That one, I think, as I think most people that are listening, know, blew up pretty big worldwide and brought worldwide attention to Midnight Oil and brought worldwide attention to the indigenous peoples of Australia and and the plight that they were dealing with, which is not unlike kind of what happened in the US with indigenous people here and has happened worldwide in other places. And one of the members of the band, I believe the drummer, was talking about in an interview, you know, this song could have been a universal song about that, about just the treatment of indigenous people in general, but we were in an Australian band. We’ve always wanted to be known as an Australian band.

So we made it a point to like mention Australian landmarks and places and make this very specifically about the Australian aboriginal people as opposed to just kind of a general song about indigenous people. It did hit number one in New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. Actually only hit number 6 in Australia, which was surprising, I would have assumed a hit number one, but it hit number 17 on the billboard chart in the US.

So pretty, pretty big song for what was essentially kind of an unknown band at that point. I think they’re on like a couple one-hit wonder lists in the US, and I don’t really think that’s super accurate for these guys just because of songs like Power and the Passion. After this, they had a song called Blue Sky Mining that or Blue Sky Mine that did pretty well.

And I remember seeing it on MTV. certainly we played it on college radio. So maybe they weren’t all, you know, as big a hits as beds as beds are burning, but I’m not sure that I would classify them as a one-hand wonder. Again, I think everybody kind of knows the song.

The video also got a lot of airplay. It’s funny that it started on 120 minutes, but I am pretty sure this worked its way into regular rotation on MTV because I remember seeing it. And it’s kind of one of the songs that just has never really gone away.

Like, I feel like it still just kind of pops up in the zeitgeist and it is still a relevant song, which it absolutely is still a relevant song, you know, both musically. It’s it’s really cool and it’s a very interesting song to listen to. And then lyrically, obviously, those problems have yet to be solved.

So it still is relevant in that way as well. The video really just kind of showcases the band, jamming like in the outback, you really get to see Peter Garrett and all his glory. You know, he’s, I think his dancing was described as like frenetic, and in this video is not necessarily frenetic, but he has a style.

He has a vibe. You know, he dances in a little bit of a weird way, but it totally fits kind of his personality, but it also shows them kind of interacting with the aboriginal people of the outback. And it’s, I think that’s, it’s informative because they’re not all dressed in like tribal gear or, you know, they’re not aboriginal in some of the ways, some of the cliched ways that you might think of that.

They’re, you know, in modern dress. They look like perfectly normal people that are having a really great time and I think it helps contextualize that these are perfectly normal people who are just getting a kind of a raw deal and not like this, not othering them by having them dress up in these, you know, in these outfits or making it seem like they’re super different from you. I like that the video actually makes you realize how much like you they are because they’re just people that are jamming to this band and, you know, they don’t really look particularly different from from anybody else.

And I think that’s a cool aspect of the video. I think that’s intentional, but maybe not. Maybe that’s just something I got from it.

But yeah, having heard the song, whoa, man, I mean, a 1000 times, if I’ve heard it once, I still really like it. It’s a powerful song. Peter Garrett’s a little bit of an acquired taste. you know, and I think if you listen to more Midnight Oil, it’s a, you know, if you don’t like him and his vocal style, it does get a little tough, but it works really well for beds are burning.

And I’m sure you guys are familiar with it, and I’m curious what it felt like kind of going back and diving in again and reacquainting yourself with this one. So, again, this is one that I remember from when it came out. I remember the video.

I remember the song being wildly popular in my high school and, you know, all of that. And I definitely remember the video too. The difference this time is that I did not like this song when it came out.

I didn’t like the vocals. I didn’t like that sing-songy pre-chorus, like not the chorus itself, but the part right before that. I know I remember everyone being enamored with this song and I just didn’t like it.

I will say I’m a little less put off by it now. I think it has its good qualities. I really do like the video.

I think it… The video captures the intention of this song without being too ham fisted. Like it’s a lot of images that sort of build up to what the song is going for, but without being too in your face.

I mean, it’s certainly not as in your face as the song is. So I think it gets the job done. You mentioned the political nature of this band.

That should not be understated. These guys were rage against the machine in the 80s. They were, you know, every song is something political about mostly about Australia, but just about the world in general.

I am not going to sit here and say that I think this is bad. It isn’t. I just wasn’t for me at the time and I think I thought it was a little overrated and maybe overhyped when it came out.

I’ve come around on it a little bit. It’s still not my favorite. That said, I do really like midnight oil.

I think the single that came out right after this one off this album called Dreamworld is a fantastic song. I love the Blue Sky Mine album, almost all of it, but the song Blue Sky Mine and King of the Mountain are both great songs. I like this band.

I just, this song to me was just, you know, if there’s going to be one song that defines this band, I just, for me, it would not be this one, but, you know, everybody, everybody has their own taste, and this song was wildly popular. So I can’t, you know, I have to admit that I’m wrong, but I just wasn’t for me. We mentioned earlier about fadeouts, so I just wanted to give a shout out to the ending of this song, because, man, when you got to end a song, this is how you do it, you know?

Bam, bam, bam. Bye. Yeah, this is the antithesis of Fade Out, which I love.

I agree that Blue Sky Mine, I think, is a superior song. I like Blue Sky Mine better than I like Bezzer Burning, but… your mileage will vary on that. And I think you absolutely cannot understate the politicalness of this band and also the fact that it goes way beyond just the music and them being in a band. like they, Peter Garrett was on all sorts of different boards of in Australia fighting for this.

I saw some YouTube comments where I was like, oh, yeah, I’m from Australia. He came to my school and talked to us about the indigenous peoples like, they are 100% authentic. They walk the walk.

This was not something they were putting on to like sell albums or like, hey, this is going to be our thing. They believed it. They, you know, they went and saw it and saw a problem and wanted to do something about it and they are 100% authentic about trying.

And to this day, are 100% authentic about trying to fix it. And I think that that’s, yeah, regardless of what you think about the music. I think that was pretty cool.

Think of something to compare them to as activists, not just that musician, as musicians that sing political stuff, but as activists, I was trying to think of somebody compare them to it, and I’m drawing a blank, maybe somebody’s got something, but yeah, these guys are the real deal. They are, you know, not just musically, but they are they are doing it. Yeah, as far as, as, you know, walking the walk as as well as talking the talk, these guys might be the top of the heap as far as their political activism goes.

Man, I love Midnight Oil. Well, I say that, I’m a, I don’t have any of their albums. I’m sure it’s going to come as no surprise to you guys.

I have their greatest hits package, but I have I’ve listened to that one enough that I’ve essentially burned a hole in it. Yeah, I love that album, that greatest hits album. And you guys mentioned a couple of my favorite songs.

I was actually thinking about doing Midnight Oil, but I was going to wait for DreamWorld to come up because I do like DreamWorld better than I like. Beds are burning. It is, it’s an absolute jam.

Probably my favorite of their songs. And then you also mentioned US forces, which is another one of my favorites. You know, mentioned the lyrics to US Forces.

My favorite is the 1st 2 lines of US forces are US forces get the nod. It’s a setback for your country. Yeah, that’s it.

And the way he delivers it too. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, those are a couple of my favorites.

I’m glad you guys mentioned those songs, but yeah, I really love these guys. Beds of Burning is a great song. Like I said, it’s not my absolute favorite of theirs, but it is a great song.

This is also a great video. You guys covered all that pretty well. The one thing I’ll say, we talked a little bit about Peter Garrett, and it wasn’t beyond his activism and political side of what he does.

He is an incredibly striking figure. And Mike, you mentioned that, you know, if you know anything about Midnight Oil. You probably know Peter Garrett.

I mean, that’s the image you have in your head. And there’s just a reason for that. I mean, he is there’s nobody else in rock that really looks acts like to me, he’s kind of a mixture of Matt Johnson from the and Ian Curtis from Joy Division in that he looks a lot like Matt Johnson.

He dances a lot like Ian Curtis. And like both of those guys. He’s got a very unique voice.

And he doesn’t sound like either of them. None of those 3 guys sound like each other, but in every case, Curtis, Peter Garrett, and Matt Johnson, once they start singing, you know who’s singing. There’s not, you’re not going to mix any of those 3 guys up with anybody else.

His voice is very distinctive in that way. And like I said, he is he’s just a very striking figure and a very unique front man for this band and I think that works in their favor. You know, if you say midnight oil, you immediately, that’s what pops in your head is baldheaded.

Peter Garrett dancing around the stage with his herky-jerky motions and his really unique voice. And so I think that really works in their favor. I personally don’t get tired of it.

I can listen through to their whole hits package or several of their songs without getting tired of his voice. So, yeah, I’m a midnight old fan. I a fan of this song, a fan of what they do in general.

And so, yeah, this was fun for me. I enjoyed revisiting it and watching the video, listening to the song again. I think I would get burned out if I listened to a lot of Midnight Oil, but in short stints, they’re great.

And some of that does rest on Peter Garrett’s voice because he’s he’s very expressive and it’s it is as unique as it gets, like you would absolutely not mistake him for any other singer on the planet. I don’t think I really think it’s that unique where it’s just like, it’s out, it’s obviously him. They’re genuine, they’re authentic, they’re talented.

They’re everything, you know, you would you would want out of a band. So, I think they deserve your support. I don’t know that they necessarily need it.

They’ve had a very successful career, but for some reason, Maybe, you know, I bet there are a lot of people that maybe are just familiar with beds are burning. So that would be, I think, dig deeper because there are not only songs that are as good, but I think we all 3 sounds like agree, there are songs that are even better out there that just didn’t hit as big. So go check them out.

Okay. This is it. We’re finally there that I’ve been I’ve I’ve enjoyed this episode.

Don’t get me wrong, but this is the moment I’ve been waiting for. I’m torn because we normally let each of us introduce our own songs. I am going to let Keith introduce this in the way I normally do, but I do think that once you hear the artist in the name of the song, it might behoove you to pause the podcast and actually go watch it, because I feel like anything we say about it is going to ruin the experience if you don’t watch it first, but I don’t want to steal Keith Sunder.

So I’m going to let Keith introduce it, but I do want to say, you know, when you hear after you hear what Keith has to say about who it is and what the name of the song is. Pause. Go watch it and come back.

Okay. Keith, what are we doing? Yeah, absolutely.

I think that’s good advice. Man, I’m not even sure how to approach this thing. This was incredible.

Let’s put it that way. We’ll start there. The band we’re talking about today is called Martini Ranch.

And when I pick these things, I don’t, you know, I just generally go with a name that I like. And I saw this and I thought, you know, that sounds like the kind of place that Hunter Thompson would have hung out back in the 70s. So that sounds like a good one.

Let’s go with that. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The song is called Reach.

So there you have it, Martini Grant’s Reach. One day, he bought some guns, and now I’m gonna make that. Hey, hey, hey.

Reach! I heard him say, Guess you say, you’re lucky day. Free Go check it out, and come back and join us.

This bed was formed in 1982. It’s a guy named Andrew Todd Rosenthal, and, of all people, the actor Bill Paxton. They had a couple other guys with them, one guy named Stephen, William, in quotes Billy Bones, Fortuna.

So there were at least a few of them in there, but largely, it appears to have been Rosenthal and Paxton’s deal. They had a couple of EPs out in the 80s. one album called Holy Cow. These guys, obviously, have some connections with Bill Paxton being involved, I guess, because their one album has got appearances from members of Devo, Bob Kassal and Mark Mothersbob both are on there.

Cindy Wilson from the B 52s guests on that album at one point. So there’s all kinds of different guest stars on there. Their music often gets compared to, or what I read anyway compared to Oingo Boingo, Devo, B 52s, some of those type bands.

So kind of gives you a little bit of a thought about what they might be doing. It’s kind of an electro pop thing. Dancey.

This song has got some kind of Western themed touches around the edges. Pretty good song. I would say check it out if you’re interested in kind of 80s electro dance pop.

Okay. All that’s out of the way. Let’s get to the video.

This video is directed by James Cameron, of all people, which I don’t know how that happened. Well, I guess I do know how it happened. Bill Paxton had worked with James Cameron before, but you know, this is the late 80s.

Bill Cameron, at this point, has directed the Terminator and the 2nd alien movie and the Abyss. I mean, this guy’s got big blockbuster hits out there. Um, and here he is doing a music video for Bill Paxton and his bud Andy Rosenthal, uh, for Martini Ranch.

It’s got the director Catherine Bigelow is in this video. Lance Henrickson is in this video, Paul Reiser, Judge Reinhold, some other names that you guys being more movie buffs than I am, might have recognized, but there are some other actors, you know, that are in this video. It’s got title cards, like a movie.

One of my favorite things about the title cards is that at one point it points out that it’s based on a screenplay by Bill Paxton and a guy named Tom Huckabee, the title of that screenplay is Lonesome Cowgirls, colon, Amazons of the Wild West. Bill Paxton, apparently you pinned a screenplay. just insane So it’s set up kind of, it starts with Bill Paxton on a motorcycle and he’s right into this kind of old West slash post-apocalyptic looking town. Like, I kept expecting Roland Duchayne, the gunslinger from Stephen King’s Dart Tower books to show up and start dealing some justice out.

But don’t worry, because there is justice that does get dealt out later in this video. He rides in. They make a bit of a scene of him passing by a blacksmith shop where there’s what’s got to be a female bodybuilder acting as the blacksmith, hammering out a brand that is a martini glass with a swivel stick sticking out of it, which is pretty cool.

He kind of rides up to what appears to be a brothel. He gets out. There like a snake oil salesman that tries to hit him up.

That turns out to be Paul Reiser, of all people. He goes in. suddenly this posse of badass women show up with like the bandoliers and the big guns and cowboy hats on. They’ve got a disc that they put in this little disc player that shows that Bill Paxton into the wanted man, so they’re there to get him.

He tries to escape. They chase him down, they lasso him. They brand him with the brand.

There’s a crazy amount of stuff going into this on this video. I’m not going to go through all of it because I want you guys to have your say as well. And especially being, like I said, being film buffs, you guys probably have different takes even than I did, but yeah, it’s just nuts.

At one point, the 3 members of the band are dressed up kind of like the 3 amigos playing their instruments and like getting dragged behind a car, like they’re dragging them on the ground and they’re laying on their backs, getting dragged around, still playing, still sitting. There’s a part where a guy’s buried up to his neck in the ground. Um, you know, like they used to do with kind of like uh, old torture techniques and he’s got tarantulas crawling around on his face.

Sort of like the dinner thing earlier. I don’t know why we keep coming across videos where there are tarantulas crawling around on people’s faces, but I don’t like it. I don’t need to see spiders crawling around on people’s faces.

At the end, Paxton gathers his own posse, but when the badass chicks show up, all his buddies abandon him and take off. And so they, uh, they get to take Paxton into into custody. This video is insane.

I don’t know how this possibly got made, where the money came from. What’s going on here? But yeah, one of the most interesting things I potentially have ever seen in my life.

Certainly the most interesting thing I’ve seen trying to put this podcast together. So interested to see what you guys thought about this whole thing, but yeah, just just insane, just nuts. Yeah, it was so, you know, Scott texted yesterday and was kind of like, so did you guys know what was about to happen when we, you know, when we picked this and none of us did?

I hadn’t seen it yet. And Scott was like, you know, I don’t want to spoil it until everybody has had a chance. I, you know, I watched it.

I’ve watched it probably 4 times since. I told my wife, I was like, you’ve got to see this. I don’t even know how to describe this.

And she watched it. Yeah, where? I mean, my biggest question is obviously how it happened because, I mean, there’s there’s connections.

Bill Paxton, obviously, you know, was in a James Cameron movie, Lance Hendrickson, you know, who you mentioned, um, was an alien, if I remember right, and ended up being in a great show called Millennial, uh, in the 90s. that was really good. One of the actors that’s in the, they didn’t mention Adrian Pastar is apparently in this, in this video, he started in a lot of stuff, but in one of my all-time favorite TV shows that got canceled way too soon, a Fox show called Profit that was on in 1996, one of the weirdest 90s shows you will ever see. I think only a handful of episodes got aired about this, he was, he basically, he lived in a cardboard box at night, but then he was like this executive at a, at a huge corporation during the day and it gets weirder from there.

So he is in that video as well. The Amazon thing makes sense. That was one of the comments I made to my wife.

I was like, it feels like there’s like an Amazon vibe to the women that are involved, especially the blacksmith, so I can see now how that kind of ties into the concept that maybe they wanted to expand upon a little bit. So that was interesting. But yeah, you I so I don’t know if you guys noticed this.

On YouTube, the video that is linked off of 120 minutes.org is the one I, you know, usually use in the sidebar. I noticed there was a new edit of this that exists. There is a director’s cut.

No, I don’t think Cameron did it. I think the editor did it No, I think Anthony Todd, and I think it was done. It looked like it was done shortly after Paxton died, so I believe it was some sort of tribute to Bill Paxton.

Yeah, it had like a tribute. So I was like, okay, this is obviously new and then I realized it was 2017 that it was done, but it had a full credit. It had a full credit role at the end.

And so that was when I was able to kind of verify that, okay, yeah, that was Catherine Bigelow. Yes, that was Judge Reinhold, Lance Hendrickson, Adrian Pastar, and then Paul Reiser uncredited, which I thought was really interesting. He didn’t want to be credited, I guess, in this.

There’s also a special think section that’s full of people, a lot of which I didn’t recognize, but Robert Downey Jr. is thanked in the credits. And then I did notice that Mark Mothers bowel, Bob Castal, and actually Alan Myers, who’s the drummer also, from Devo, who passed away, but those 3 guys were all thanked from Devo, so I thought that was interesting. But I didn’t know the connection until you mentioned that they actually played on the album because I wasn’t sure if they’d played on this song or not.

My favorite YouTube comment on this video is… I swear I watched this music video at least once a week. What?

How long have you known about this? You watch it once a week, which, as much as I love everything that’s happening, video wise and music wise, I don’t know that I would need to watch it once a week, but it’s just so funny to like be exposed to something you didn’t know existed at all. And something this weird and just inexplicable exists.

And then to find out, some dude’s been watching it once a week for God knows how long. Like, I’m like, where have I been that I didn’t? Anyway.

Yeah, what can I say? I love Bill Paxton. I absolutely love Bill Paxton because Twister is one of my favorite, like, guilty pleasure movies of all time.

And he plays the character. Excellent, just excellent job playing playing this character in the video. Um, Catherine Bigelow plays does a great job of just being a badass and she ends up becoming a, an, there’s 2 Oscar winners involved in this, right?

At least to maybe more. Maybe I’m missing one, but so I think probably the highest production quality video we’ve talked about thus far on the podcast, just because it’s freaking James Cameron, and I mean, I don’t know if you saw the credit role, but it has the credits of, it’s not quite a movie, but I mean, there are 30, 40 people that were involved in the making of this crew wise. I mean, you know, they had a full, full crew shot on film, obviously, and really well developed and color corrected and everything.

So, like, it is top notch in every possible way, as you would expect from James Cameron. How? Why?

Who paid for it? Unknown, I guess, still. Who knows?

I don’t know. Scott hasn’t gone yet. Maybe Scott knows, but I don’t think anybody does.

So many questions that are still unanswered. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t dive too deep because I was, I figured you would, Keith, and if there was something that, but I also, I’m under the impression there probably just isn’t a lot of information about this out there.

This Anthony Todd. You know, on YouTube, it’s on Anthony Todd’s YouTube channel, who is the musician, I guess, who partnered with Bill Paxton to make this album. It doesn’t have that many views in particular.

The rest of his channel, doesn’t have that many views. His most viewed video is actually one of his cat chasing a bagel, and it’s like, that’s, that’s got more views than the James Cameron video, but it absolutely does. I’m going to go to my deathbed wondering about this video now because I have this fear that we’re never going to get answers to any of these questions, but that’s where I’m at.

I’m confused. I’m amazed. I’m elated that we found it and I guess that might be where my, that might be where I, where I end because I don’t know where else we can go from here.

So yeah, wow. I put this on ice cold. I had no idea what it was.

I was just absolutely dumbfounded by what I was watching. you know, my 1st you know, wait, is that Bill Paxton? Wait, does that say directed by James Cameron? I was so thrown by what was going on.

I forgot to listen to the song. The 1st time I went through it, I honestly didn’t take a single note. So I’ve gone back and watched it a couple more times.

I finally forced myself to have a few thoughts about it. I assume that Cameron directed this because he impacts them, we’re buddies. They had just finished aliens when this was made.

You know, you mentioned the abyss. That’s actually after this. You know, Cameron at this time has directed aliens and the 1st Terminator film and a couple of, you know, B movies.

He did like Piranha 2 or something like that before that. So, you know, this is before Terminator two. This is before the Abyss, this is before big capital James Cameron.

But still, he was still a thing at this time. I mean, Aliens was the number 7 movie of the year it came out. And, you know, so he had he had some pedigree at this point.

The 2nd thought I had with all of this project, the song, the film that comes with it, all of it, this thing is just dripping with money. Um, you mentioned that the dam probably didn’t have the budget that this did. I’m not sure Star Wars had the budget that this did.

I mean, there is almost no way. that any of this ever came close to turning a profit. I mean, the album would have had to gone gig up platinum to pay for this. And, you know, especially since yesterday was the 1st time I knew it existed.

You know, I don’t claim to be all knowing, but I don’t think this was incredibly popular. Yeah, from a little perspective. 87 James Cameron is, you know, he’s still married to Catherine Bigelow at this time.

And she is actually in this. You guys mentioned that. We are post-aliens, but we are pre-the abyss.

We are pre-terminator two. We are pre- Titanic Avatar, all of that, obviously. The big time James Cameron stuff is still on the way.

But, you know, the guy just directed, like I said, the number 7 box office hit of 1986. I mean, that’s no small feat. I mean, this would be like getting Steven Spielberg to direct your video after close encounters came out.

You know, it’s it’s that that’s where Cameron is at this time. All that said, I watched this video a few times. I think it just feels like a big waste of money to me.

I, there’s, there’s really not much going on and it’s kind of confusing. Um, the song is also kind of generic. I mean, you mentioned a lot of other bands that kind of sound like this and it definitely fits in there, but I didn’t think there’s anything particularly special about it.

Once you get past everything that’s going on, you know, once your brain kind of wraps itself around the casting and the crew and the obvious money that went into this, I’m not sure that what’s left is very impressive. And you mentioned the director’s cut, I was going to bring that in too. I say director’s cut because that’s kind of what we call those, but I don’t think Cameron did it.

I think it was a tribute to Bill Paxton. Yeah, if you enjoyed this, there’s a 10 minute version of it. That’s, you know, a couple minutes longer, and I think most of that is credits, actually.

I don’t think the movie itself was more than maybe a minute longer, but yeah, but anyway, I don’t know. I don’t think this was great by any stretch, but man, I’m glad we found it. I did not know this existed, and I am so happy that I know it’s out there now.

Unlike the guy on YouTube. I will not be watching it every week. I did.

I did really get a kick out of the fact just that this exists. So good on them. Yeah, I kind of felt the same way.

I, uh, I don’t think it’s fantastic a video. I mean, it is, and it isn’t at the same time. It’s hard to explain, yeah.

I did go to James Cameron’s page, Wiki page, to look, you know, that’s when I looked at what films, and I guess I just missed up on the abyss, but so I want, and I read through that section of that time period just because I wanted to see if they made any mention of the fact that he had done this music video, and they don’t. It’s not in there. So it may be something that he is not overly proud of or whatever.

I didn’t mention this earlier. One of you guys may have, but, you know, Paxton is, at 1st I thought this band got Paxton to be in this video, but that is not the case. This was Bill Paxton’s band.

And so I really just think this was Cameron and him being buddies. You know, he’s he’s in aliens, obviously, and he’s going to be in the abyss, so they are friends at this time. I think this is just a camera saying, yeah, I’ll direct your video.

Lets get all our friends together and make a video. I just can’t figure out where the money came from because there’s a lot of it. The other thing I was going to point out about Paxton, you mentioned him that he was, you know, one of the founders of the band, he was actually a part of the band, is when you listen to the song, the, and I said there was some like Western themed kind of tinges around the edges, and one of those is at certain points, and you see it in the video, he looks at the camera and says stuff like, you know, wow, well, you got me now.

That actually is Bill Paxton. That’s him saying that stuff on the recording of the song. So he actually was there for the recording.

He participated in the recording of the song. It wasn’t just the video. Um, so yeah, uh, yeah.

Who knows how that all came together, but man, you’re right. It’s so much fun and I can’t imagine how close we were to missing this, actually, is one thing that gets me because it’s such a fun deal. And if it just hadn’t been for that band name, I would never have picked this.

I just thought, oh, martini ranch, that sounds cool. And it was this. I wish I would have known this existed when Bill Paxton passed away in 2017 because I would have called every movie podcast.

I listened to and said, if you’re going back and watching Bill Paxton stuff and tribute to the man. Do not miss the video from martini ranches reach. But I didn’t know at the time, so I couldn’t help anybody with that.

This makes me question the whole premise of this podcast because I’m like, should we just have been doing all mystery songs the whole time? Because like what else have we missed? We don’t, you know, we don’t do every mystery song from every month?

because we only you know, we only pick one. Like, what else is out there that we’re just like oblivious to that of 2 Oscar winners and Bill Paxton made a music video about a, and, you know, it’s funny. We’ve kind of danced around the subject of like, we’re not even talking about the quality of it.

It’s not a great song, and it’s really not a great video, except that it’s well made, but like, it’s not a great story. It’s not anything super engaging. The song is just a silly, almost novelty song.

We came so close to missing it. And then I’m like, what else have we missed? Do we have to go back?

Do we need to rethink this whole podcast? Because, like, this is the most fun I’ve had, I think, discovering something, and it’s not even about how good it is. It’s just the fact that it exists.

And the fact that we don’t know why it exists. And I don’t know if we’ll ever know why at this point. I think one of us is going to have to actually reach out.

I was actually really hoping, Keith, when you said you went to Wikipedia. I was hoping you were going to say, I cracked open the Wikipedia page and edited it and added this to the Wikipedia page because that would be, that’s what needs to happen. People need to know about this Although, I will say, one of the YouTube comments was something like, you know, it’s a shame that that things like this didn’t get more attention, you know, when it came out or back in the day or whatever.

And I was like, I mean, it is and it isn’t. Because like, it’s really not that good. And I don’t I think that’s probably why at the time…

It’s not so weird that it needed to be on 120 minutes, I could see MTV actually playing this like in regular rotation other than the fact that it’s very long, but, you know, so is thriller. Please do not think I am comparing this to Thriller. But, you know, it has the length and it has that sort of, you know, cinematic movie quality of videos like that that were a thing at the time.

Not because of the song or not because of the video, but just because of the pedigree, you would have think MTV would have gave it a little more daytime action, but I don’t think they did. So this is a plea to anybody, anybody out there, if you know anything about this video that we haven’t discussed, please, please, please, go to the comments, email me. You can call me on my personal cell phone, which I would never do.

I would never allow anybody to do. Like, I just want to know. I may, I don’t even know who to reach out to to find out.

I mean, ironically, I have interviewed one of the people involved tangentally in Mark Mothersbau, and if I had known that this existed, when I interviewed Mark Mothersbau, I absolutely would have asked him about that. Like, do you remember recording a song? Because he’s not on this specific song, I don’t think.

Maybe, I don’t know. There’s a little bit of electronic stuff going on. I would have absolutely asked him.

Do you remember recording an album with fricking Bill Paxton, like back in the day? Like, what was that all about? I don’t know who else to reach out to to find out because I really, really need.

I need some closure on this. I mean, one thing I learned making the film is you can randomly email people who you think may or may not respond, and some of them will actually respond. And some of them are super nice about it.

Some of them won’t, but there’s enough people involved in this video that I feel like if I reach out to all of them and just be like, hey, sorry to bother you, but like, yeah, I desperately need some sort of rapper around this project of like, how did it come about? Where did the funding come from, if you know, and just what was the vibe like, you know, shooting? I just, yeah, I’ve never wanted to know more about anything in my life.

I don’t think that I want to know about this video. And it’s frustrating to know that that may not ever happen. I had the thought that this may have been like a side project of Alien, because the whole cast of aliens minus Sigourney Weaver is in this.

Jeanette Goldstein, who played the badass Vasquez and, you know, Alan Hendrickson and Paul Reiser. All of the aliens cast, minus Sigourney Weaver is in this. So I wonder if they like broke away from aliens to do this, but then, you know, look at these sets on aliens and look at this.

Like, this still had to be built. Like it wasn’t, wasn’t like they could use the alien sets for this. There was some money somewhere that we’re never going to find.

I don’t think. We keep stressing that and people are like, yeah, yeah, it was just a video. You do not understand how expensive it is to get a film crew out to a shooting location like that, which, I mean, it could be like something like old Tucson, which is like an old, you know, West town that’s set up for it.

I didn’t recognize any specific bits about where they shot this, but to have a crew of, I swear there’s at least 30 people in the credits, I think, because, I mean, it’s all, you know, your directors of photography, your best boy, your key grip, your, you know, production assistance, all down the line, everything you would expect for like a full budget movie, are there, and those people do not come cheap. They’re on a day rate for sure. You have to rent the equipment or whatever and get them out.

You have craft services and it just expands, expands, expands. Like, we were talking easily over $100,000 and at minimum to shoot this. And that’s assuming that, like, all the actors worked for free and that they, you know, that they were kind of on a discount because maybe they had everything from aliens and some…

There’s there’s studs in this thing. There’s stunts, which is that’s that’s a whole other expense that I didn’t even. yeah. Oh, we got to wrap it up.

But folks, if we find out more information, we will do something we don’t normally do on the podcast, we will come back and update you on this. I absolutely will. But I can’t stress enough.

If you know anything about this, please let us know. Please, please, please, please, please. Please let us know.

We would be forever grateful. I think I speak for Scott and Keith when I say we will treasure you forever if you can give us more information about this. All right, folks, that’s it.

We did talk about some other songs today. I don’t know if you remember that because we’ve been very, very focused on this one. A great song, the church, classic.

And I think, ignore me and listen to Keith on that. they have other stuff to check out as well. It’s a great song and you probably know it, but go check out more of the church. The damned, I think, was kind of an eye opener for all of us, it sounds like, across the board, A plus on this particular song, and I am inspired to go actually find out some more about these guys.

So you might be as well. But check out this one. Just, it’s a fun video and a really fun song.

Midnight Oil, I think, needs no further introduction or anything, but if for some reason, beds are burning is kind of the only thing you know about Midnight Oil. I think they have better stuff, and I think that was kind of the consensus too. There’s other stuff you might like even more by these guys.

And I, what else can we say about martini ranch? I mean, if you didn’t listen to us and pause and go watch it. Like, if that’s not the 1st thing you’re going to do now that you got all the way through the podcast, I don’t know what to tell you.

Martini Ranch, the song is called Reach. They have other songs to listen to as well, but I think the videos kind of the point of this whole conversation because it is. chock full of stars. It’s directed by an Oscar winner.

It has another Oscar winner in it. I just, oh, go check it out. You need to experience it.

Everybody should. Thanks for tuning in. It’s 120 months.

Thanks to 120 minutes.org. They’ve helped us by putting all these playlists together and their website’s really interesting. You could spend days going down the rabbit hole of watching kind of kind of recreating old episodes of 120 minutes.

I actually reached out to Tyler Murray, who was the founder of 120 minutes, and she wrote back and was kind of, she was excited to hear about the podcast and had heard of the film, 35,000 watch, the story of college radio, which is kind of started this all off, if you haven’t watched that, go watch that on Tubi. And so we might have her guest on the podcast and have her pick a song and come in and talk about it because she’s put a ton of work into that website. They accept donations as well.

So I actually donated some money to help keep that website going because I think it’s a, A, it saved us a boatload of time. But it’s just, it’s, they’re kind of preserving a bit of history that wasn’t well preserved by MTV that’s hard to find. And it is really fun to go back and kind of recreate those.

So go check out 120 minutes.org. I mentioned the movie, but if you haven’t seen it, go check it out, 35,000 Watts, Story of College Radio on Tubi, and join us here on the podcast for the next episode of 120 months, thanks to Keith, thanks to Scott, and we will see you next time.