Lonely is the Night

The music industry is littered with the corpses of careers that at one time seemed destined for greatness and then either just fizzled out or crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. An artist who saw his career go down the tubes almost instantly is Billy Squier, who for a few years in the early '80s was kicking ass and taking names, so to speak.

Squier was a Wellesley, Mass., native who bounced around the music scene throughout the '70s until his band Piper debuted and made some noise by opening for KISS (the bands shared the same manager). I'm unfamiliar with his Piper albums, but they're considered to be fairly good. Squier went solo in 1980, but it was his second album, 1981's Don't Say No, that propelled him into stardom with the monster hit "The Stroke." I was a 13 at the time and can testify that song was absolutely HUGE on rock radio that year. We all thought it was about masturbation, but supposedly it was a critical shot at the music industry's insatiable desire for hits. Whatever the case, the song was terrific.

Unfortunately, the video is unavailable for embed on the YouTubes, but here's the song:



Don't Say No had several radio hits on it, including the Zeppelin-esque "Lonely is the Night," "My Kinda Lover" and "In the Dark" and the album made a splash on the brand-new MTV channel that all the kids were watching (except me, because we didn't have it in Canada; but in the Toronto area, we did see the videos on CityTV's "The New Music" show, which was around way before MTV debuted). Squier was able to deliver the hard rock the boys liked while also providing the catchy hooks and good looks that the girls dug. It was a winning combination.

His next album, 1982's Emotions in Motion, did nearly as well. He had big hits with "Everybody Wants You" and the title track and was opening for Queen before headlining his own shows. Up-and-coming act Def Leppard opened for Squier in the Boston area in early '83. He was a definite heavy hitter.

So it was with great anticipation that his fourth album, Signs of Life, was released in the summer of 1984. The first single, "Rock Me Tonite," was a synth-laden song that hit #15 on the charts, not quite at the level of some of his previous hits but still fairly solid. But it was the video that forever changed Billy Squier's life. Choreographed by Kenny Ortega of "Dirty Dancing" (and later "High School Musical") fame, the vid has Squier prancing around his bedroom in a pink tank top and looking a tad too wussy for some of his hard rock-lovin' fans. The video definitely was trying to appeal to the ladies, but I know for me, it totally just seemed like he was going for a wider mainstream audience (aka pop fans) that I didn't care about. And frankly, the whole thing was pretty ridiculous. See for yourself:



Squier suddenly lost all the momentum he had been building for close to a decade. Radio stopped playing his new material. MTV stopped playing his videos. And just like that, one of the rock powerhouses of the early '80s was gone. Squier himself has pointed to that video as leading to the demise of his career, and there have been several video roundup shows that have poked fun at it as one of the worst videos ever.

Sad thing is, if he had gone with a live treatment of the song, he would have had little to no problems. Like this performance on SNL, which only had a small amount of prancing:



Squier released a couple more albums in the '80s, but the only splash he really made was in 1989 with "Don't Say You Love Me" (featuring the uber-stupid rejoinder "...just say UHHHHH!"), which was on the MTV and got a lot of rock radio play around here. It sounded like classic Squier and the video was full of hot chicks and Squier trying to look tough, but it was only a minor reprieve:



He never really did anything of note again and eventually started releasing blues albums on indie labels. Squier has had a bit of a renaissance in recent years after rap artists like Run DMC, Jay-Z, Dizzee Rascal and Kanye West all sampled Squier's 1980 song "The Big Beat." Squier resurfaced in the news a few years ago when he and his neighbor Bono got into a dispute over fireplace smoke getting into Bono's apartment in Central Park West; ah, the problems of the rich. In addition, he joined Ringo Starr and His All-Star Band for a few tours and this summer, the 30th anniversary reissue of Don't Say No was released. So at the very least, Squier should be living comfortably thanks to royalties. But I'm sure a day doesn't go by that he doesn't think about what might have been...if he hadn't released that damn video.

Fix Up, Look Sharp: