Videodrone #13: Reach

Videodrone is a weekly feature looking at music videos from the last half century. 

Reach (1988)

I watched a lot of videos on MTV (and elsewhere) in the '80s and '90s, but there were plenty more that I never saw. But one of the fun things about doing this feature is tripping over previously unseen weirdness, like this video from a synth-pop act called Martini Ranch.

I actually had heard of the band because one of the members was none other than Bill Paxton, who was much more well-known for his acting work in movies like Aliens, Weird Science, True Lies and countless others. And I knew that before he became famous as an actor, he directed and starred in the 1980 video for "Fish Heads" by Barnes and Barnes, a truly weird and wonderful novelty song that ended up getting played on Saturday Night Live and the following year on MTV. 

Paxton was already a known commodity as an actor when he joined Martini Ranch and released two EPs and an album on Sire Records. For their 1988 album Holy Cow, Paxton and bandmate Andrew Rosenthal enlisted director James Cameron (who had made Terminator in 1984 and Aliens in 1986 with Paxton) to helm the video for their song "Reach." The song itself is cowboy-themed and not too dissimilar from "I Wanna Be a Cowboy," the 1985 novelty hit by British new wave act Boys Don't Cry.

For the Martini Ranch video, Cameron made a 7-minute Western opus featuring Paxton in the lead role, but also plenty of cameos from the likes of Kathyrn Bigelow (Cameron's future wife and director of Near Dark, which also starred Paxton), Lance Henriksen, Paul Reiser, Jenette Goldstein, Judge Reinhold, Adrian Pasdar and Bud Cort. 

Paxton plays a cowboy who rides into a Western town on a motorcycle to pick up a prostitute at a brothel when a gang of women led by Bigelow captures him. The other guys in Martini Ranch (who are dressed as a mariachi band) are also there and captured, eventually getting dragged to their deaths while playing their instruments.

Paxton tries to escape but the gang catches him and drag him out of town as well. The video looks like it cost a pretty penny, but it was hardly ever played on MTV and the song certainly wasn't a hit. The album Holy Cow also features appearances by Devo's Bob Casale, Alan Myers and Mark Mothersbaugh, Cindy Wilson of the B-52's, film composer Mark Isham and actors Reinhold and Cort.

Martini Ranch did get a song on the soundtrack of the 1988 movie You Can't Hurry Love as well as 1989's Brain Dead, which starred both Paxton and Bill Pullman, who were often confused for each other. That appears to be the end of Paxton and Rosenthal's musical collaboration; Rosenthal later changed the band name to Swifty's Bazaar and released an album. Last year, Rosenthal (as ANDY) released the album Androgyne & Transformation.

Paxton, of course, went on to a successful career on the big and small screen before he died in 2017. After his death, the out-of-print Holy Cow was released on vinyl, along with a DVD featuring the videos for "Reach" and "How Can the Labouring Man Find Time for Self-Culture?" directed by Rocky Schenk. I'm guessing more people have seen the video since Paxton died than when it was released in '88, but that's just how the music business goes.