Tag: music videos

Remembering Headbanger’s Ball

On By bigbadburchIn Memories7 Comments

I’m going with the anniversary theme again today, and this one wasn’t something I was originally planning on but it fell in my lap so I decided to run with it. On April 18, 1987, MTV aired the first episode of Headbanger’s Ball. The first episode featured guest hosts Lemmy Kilminster and Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor of Motörhead. This was the start of an institution that ran for 8 years on Saturday nights on MTV.

While MTV had previously flirted with an all-metal show called Heavy Metal Mania, hosted by Dee Snider, Headbanger’s Ball would become the true home of metal through the late ’80’s and early ’90’s. It was blocks of all metal music videos, with interviews, live footage and occasional off-the-wall content sprinkled in.

Guests hosts filled the first handful of episodes, then MTV VJ’s began hosting the gig. Kevin Seal was an early host, then Adam Curry ran the show for a few years. In the ’80’s, MTV kept the programming mostly true to the music of the time – hair metal. There were heavier bands played at times though, and Headbanger’s Ball was the only time on MTV to see thrash, power metal and other forms not related to the hair bands.

For me personally I saw occasional episodes of the Curry-hosted shows, but it would be into 1990 when I became an every-week watcher of the Ball. By this point Riki Rachtman was the host and the show transitioned away from hair metal and into the more aggressive strains of the genre. The studio got a set designed by Rob Zombie at one point, the hours were expanded and Headbanger’s Ball was one of the most-watched programs on MTV.

The early ’90’s period of the Ball saw a slew of bands get airtime – thrash mainstays like Slayer and Megadeth, legends like Ozzy, and a lot of new blood from a lot of metal avenues came up on the show. The new grunge acts got some Ball time, like Alice In Chains and Soundgarden. Rap metal like Biohazard was around before nu-metal was a thing. The “alt-metal” scene was very well represented on the Ball, with acts like Danzig and Type O Negative getting frequent appearances. And extreme metal also got in the act a bit, with Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel getting some airtime.

I don’t remember exactly when it was, I’ll peg it sometime in 1994, the writing kind of started to appear on the wall for the Ball. The show would lose an hour of true programming and that got swapped with something called The Countdown to the Ball. The countdown played ten videos that were popular elsewhere on MTV, stuff like Pearl jam and whatnot.

The end of the main era of Headbanger’s Ball came at the turn of the year in 1995. In typical corporate TV fashion, no announcement or farewell episode was given. Rachtman and the staff were simply called and told not to come back to work after filming what wound up being the final episode. MTV ran a show called Superock in the old Ball timeslot awhile later, before airing re-runs of The Real World 24/7 and giving up on music videos altogether.

I was one of many pretty upset with the sudden demise of the show. It was a fantastic place to learn about new bands and upcoming releases. Remember, this was just before the Internet became a household thing – this kind of information was not at everyone’s fingertips or instantly accessible. It was a few years before the Internet became a reliable source of news and commerce. Seriously, you should have seen some of the websites up in 1995 – it was unreal.

So Headbanger’s Ball went away. Metal went into a fairly dark place in the late 1990’s, but then came roaring back in the early 2000’s. And with it, MTV saw fit to bring back the Ball. It showed up on MTV2, again with guest hosts in the beginning but with a long run from Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta at the helm. The show has gone through various cancellations and renewals over the years both on MTV and online, so its status today is murky at best.

For me and many other young metalheads that watched over the 8 years that Headbanger’s Ball ran, it was Saturday night church of the metal variety. We got to see some videos that we knew would be played during the time, and we got to see a lot of stuff we never would have otherwise. This wasn’t MTV, it was a small subset of MTV that happened to catch on with a large fanbase and last even through music’s most seismic shift in 1991.

We also got to see a lot of stuff we wouldn’t have otherwise in the pre-Internet era – we got a candid interview with Ozzy Osbourne after No More Tears released. We got Megadeth skydiving somewhere “in the vicinity” of Area 51. Alice In Chains went down a waterslide, Soundgarden went bowling, and a bunch of acts went across the Iron Curtain to play the Moscow Peace Festival, with MTV and Headbanger’s Ball right there on the action. Even in more simple TV studio interviews, we got candid talk from bands all over the metal spectrum.

For the 2000’s MTV2 revival, I’ll say this – the show did a lot to put metal back into the consciousness, and also brought a lot of the 2000’s era extreme metal into a new light. The show would be hosted for awhile by Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta, still today an advocate for heavy music far and wide.

But nothing for me will replace the original. It was Saturday nights, skipping over the run of Saturday Night Live and choosing instead to wreck my neck for a few hours with first Adam Curry, then mainly Riki Rachtman and the truly heavy tones that came from his tenure on the gig. Riki today is doing spoken word tours across the country recounting any number of experiences, including Headbanger’s Ball, and I hope to catch one someday.

It was Saturday nights from 11 to 1, for me in the Central time zone. Then for awhile 10 to 1, then 11 to 2, then one day it all went away without so much as a thanks. But the work done by Riki and the Headbanger’s Ball staff, the fans of metal worldwide, and most importantly the bands themselves, lives on all these years later. Headbanger’s Ball was how we found this stuff and was our church, and is very responsible for a way of life that continues 28 years after the show originally went off the air. It’s one memory of sitting in front of the TV that I’ll truly never forget.

This is an apparently unofficial compilation of a bunch of HB highlights over the years. Worth checking out if the video stays up.

Cool Music Videos

On By bigbadburchIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Today I wanted to chill out for a bit and have a look back at a handful of cool music videos. The music video used to define the landscape, MTV was as important in getting people to buy records as radio was. Nowadays more acts than ever can make really good videos, but it takes a lot to get eyeballs on them. They aren’t the way to reel in listeners like they were in the past.

There is no connecting theme here or anything – I’m just pulling up a few videos I remember from way back, or whenever on the timeline they fall.

Dire Straits – Money For Nothing

This video made use of early computer animation in an unlikely and groundbreaking way to put forth a video that took on a life of its own and stood out even beyond Dire Straits’ massively successful Brothers In Arms album. It was the talk of everywhere when it hit.

What’s funny is that I don’t think I’ve seen this video in full since it originally aired on MTV. I never have looked it up on YouTube, until now. The video might seem dated by today’s standards, sure, but I still remember how unreal it was at the time. It probably won’t land with younger audiences much, though I see some love for it in the video’s comment section.

Tool – Prison Sex

This was crazy stuff in the early ’90’s – another kind of animation technique not widely used at the time and in part put together by Tool’s guitarist Adam Jones. The video itself got played fairly regularly on MTV for a bit – until people found it too uncomfortable and yanked it from the airwaves. It got a second life on Beavis and Butthead a bit on down the road.

I’m not entirely sure what the song is about, though plenty of other Tool fans will be happy to slug it out in arguments over the meaning. It’s certainly not a pleasant topic, some form of abuse. The video disturbingly yet also amazingly portrays that theme in its animation.

Journey – Separate Ways

If you would have told me decades ago that I would unironically consider a video of Journey playing air instruments in front a pier-side warehouse one of the best videos of all time, I would have looked at you really funny. Yet here we are and I am offering just that opinion – this video is fantastic.

This is just so unreal and so 1980’s. Journey crafts a wonderful pop rock song and gets zero budget for their video apparently, so this is what we get. And after I reached adulthood and looked back on the video I couldn’t help but smile fondly. It is as goofy as it gets, but damn if it isn’t awesome.

Guns N Roses – Estranged

I went over this song pretty extensively in September when I did my in-depth analysis of the Use Your Illusion albums. I didn’t get too much occasion to discuss the video specifically though.

The song is an absolute masterpiece and the video matches the music blow-for-blow. Video-wise it’s the end of a trilogy that also includes Don’t Cry and November Rain, though I don’t know if the songs themselves play into that (they kinda seem like they do, at least loosely).

The video was clearly big-budget, I would assume more money went into it than many theatrical release movies of the time. It does spell the end of Guns N Roses’ time in the sun, as the band would splinter apart in a few years after this final single from their double album was released.

The video showcases Axl’s eccentricy and self-centerness, sure, but it’s still an honest take of the band at the time and probably goes a long way to painting the picture of this song. The way the song goes into its final movement, one of the most powerful in music, right when Axl jumps off the ship around the 7 minute mark is just perfect timing.

Kiss – Lick It Up

Kiss missed out on the music video format with a lot of their early material. It’s a shame that such a visual, theatrical band didn’t get to shoot music videos for their top-flight 70’s output. Just imagine what we could have gotten out of that.

Instead, we get ’80’s no-makeup Kiss wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland but with hot women who want to party. It’s like Mad Maxine Beyond Thunderdome, I don’t know. I do know that I really like this video, even if it is honestly kinda cringe.

The song is one of Kiss’ stronger ones from their ’80’s catalog and this video is – well, certainly a video. I can’t help but like it though, this is what I grew up on. It does appear that ¾ of the band is all about the video, while Gene Simmons might have benefited from keeping his demon makeup on.

Muse – Knights Of Cydonia

Let’s wind up with something from this side of the millennium line. This goofy western/sci-fi/kung fu mash up to a sillier than shit song about who knows what somehow winds up being one of the best music videos ever committed to film.

The video is just splendid. It’s a mini feature film, replete with plot and characters. The band only appears as brief hologram projections, I guess that’s fine since they looked like the Gallagher brothers playing alongside James Hetfield anyway. The good kung fu cowboy guy and the girl ride off into the sunset after bad cowboy kung fu guy is digitally vaporized, so I guess everyone goes home happy in the end.

There isn’t a lot more for me to say about it. The video is widely celebrated as one of the best music videos ever made and the song is towards the top of any list of Muse tracks. A pretty good marriage of song and film here.