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.

Videodrone #11: Heartbeat

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

Heartbeat (1986)

There have always been performers who have tried to have crossover success. Actors who attempted singing careers and vice versa, with varying degrees of success. 

In 1986, Miami Vice was the hottest show on TV and its two lead actors both took their shots at music stardom. Philip Michael Thomas, who played Det. Tubbs on the show, self-released an album in 1985 that didn't do much. His co-star Don Johnson, who was at his sex symbol peak, had grander ambitions and the support of Epic Records behind him when he released the album Heartbeat in 1986.

Not only did Johnson record an album, but he also made a one-hour longform "concept movie" to promote it. The short film was dialogue-free, basically an interconnected series of Miami Vice-esque music videos that told the story of a Johnson as a documentary filmmaker who gets involved with gang warfare, family drama and other hijinks, including trippy dream sequences. The label spent over $1 million to make the film, which includes appearances from Paul Shaffer, Lori Singer, David Carradine, Sandahl Bergman and a young Luis Guzman and Giancarlo Esposito. It was released direct-to-video on VHS and pay cable channels. 

Epic put a lot of money into marketing the release of Heartbeat. I remember seeing the world premiere on Friday Night Videos and MTV gave him a little advance pub with a behind-the-scenes clip (see below).

But it was the title track that people still sort of remember. The video for "Heartbeat" was released in September 1986 and featured scenes from the film (which wasn't released until May 1987) intercut with Johnson singing the track with a backing band that included Dweezil Zappa on guitar (the album also featured guest spots from Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ronnie Wood, Dickey Betts and Bonnie Raitt). Johnson certainly thought he had something special.

"I wanted the record to be modern, tough rock and I think I achieved that on some level," he told the LA Times in 1987. "I didn't want it to sound like something that other people designed and I just stopped by for a few minutes to do the vocals. And I made it clear to Walter [Yetnikoff, who was president and CEO of CBs Records at the time] that I would walk away from it if I didn't think it was credible. I was prepared every step of the way to throw it away and walk away."

That said, it's fairly generic mid-'80s AOR that would fit right in on a Michelob Light commercial in 1986, but hey, that's what the kids were into, right? Or maybe the housewives that swooned over Johnson every Friday night when a new Miami Vice episode aired. "Heartbeat" also fit into the mold of the atmospheric, moody rock that Vice liked to feature, but it never was used on the show (although two songs by Philip Michael Thomas were used in a 1985 Miami Vice ep). The song has the same vibe as the "rock music" released by actor Jeremy Renner in the last decade or so. Nobody asked or wanted it, but there it is nonetheless.

"Heartbeat" was a hit, going all the way to #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album hit #17 on the Billboard 200 and went gold. The song had actually been around for a few years. It was written by Eric Kaz and Wendy Waldman and originally released by Waldman in 1982 with Peter Frampton playing the guitar solo, and then by Helen Reddy in 1983. Both those versions are little more uptempo than Johnson's, but their versions came and went long before Johnson's made a splash.

Johnson would release one more album, 1989's Let It Roll, which featured plenty of studio help from the likes of then-girlfriend Barbra Streisand, Steve Jones, Omar Hakim, Joe Lynn Turner and Bruce Kulick. It didn't chart in the U.S. But he did have some success with "Till I Loved You," a duet with Streisand that was a top 40 hit from her 1988 album of the same name.

He hasn't recorded any more music since then, instead working steadily in movies and TV. But there have been plenty of performers who have had success in acting and movies, although most of them are musicians who became actors: Will Smith, Ice Cube, Ice-T, to name a few. There are also actors who have released music and toured, including Kevin Bacon, Kevin Costner, Bill Murray (touring, anyway), Renner, Bruce Willis, Jared Leto, Ryan Gosling, Jack Black, Zooey Deschanel and Keanu Reeves. 

But 40 years ago, Don Johnson took a big swing. Wisely, he eventually stuck to what he was really good at.