Videodrone #22: Unreal is Here

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

Unreal is Here (1997)

In the mid- to late-80s glory days of MTV, hard rock acts found success with the power ballad: A slower song that builds into a powerful climax. These songs helped heavy bands like Motley Crue and Scorpions reach a wider audience (i.e., women) and usually translated into huge album sales. At the same time, the videos for these songs were usually what propelled them to popularity, featuring live footage, dramatic-seeming shots of the band backstage, and wistful shots of the group traveling on buses and planes. See "Home Sweet Home" by the Crue, "Wanted Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi and "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" by Poison for three examples.

Fast forward to 1997. Bon Jovi managed to transcend its hard rock roots and remained successful throughout the 

90s and beyond, but many of the metal and hard rock acts that ruled the '80s saw their popularity diminish after 1991 thanks to the rise of alternative rock. One act that remained under the radar even in those giddy times for indie rock was Chavez, an NYC-based band formed in 1993 by guitarist-singer Matt Sweeney (previously of the bands Skunk and Wider), guitarist Clay Tarver (formerly of Boston's Bullet Lavolta), bassist Scott Marshall (son of director Garry Marshall) and drummer James Lo (who also played in Wider).

Signed to legendary indie label Matador, Chavez played an angular math-rock style and released its first album Gone Glimmering in 1995. Their video for "Break Up Your Band" was featured on Beavis and Butt-Head and they toured with Guided By Voices and Bardo Pond. The group released Ride the Fader in late 1996 and in 1997, unveiled the video for "Unreal is Here," directed by Tarver and Marshall (who both went on to become TV and film directors).

The video opens with the band's name in lights before a show at the Hollywood Bowl as fans wait in the packed venue and the group disembarks from a helicopter in rock star style. Chavez plays "Unreal is Here" at soundcheck and it indeed starts off slow like a power ballad. Cut to shots of the group presenting a big check to its "CHAVEZ KIDS" charity and receiving platinum and gold records from its label while adoring throngs of fans surround them. There are scenes of backstage antics, long bus rides, interviews and photo ops. 

What's so funny about all that? The joke is that as great as Chavez was--and they were great--they never achieved a fraction of the success that those big-name hair metal bands scored in the '80s. And that's okay. Especially since Chavez was in on the joke.

Ride the Fader was their last album. The band never officially split, but they didn't release any new material or play shows from 1999 to 2006, when Matador released the comp Better Days Will Haunt You. It featured a new song and Chavez played a few shows in support of it. In 2017, the band released the EP Cockfighters.

Sweeney ended up becoming a notable session guitarist and featured player. In 2001, he joined Billy Corgan and Slint's David Pajo to form Zwan, he's worked with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Iggy Pop, Guided By Voices, Probot, Johnny Cash, El-P, Andrew W.K. and Run the Jewels, among others. He also formed The Hard Quartet with Stephen Malkmus, has produced albums for numerous artists and hosts the web series Guitar Moves.

Marshall has directed three movies and worked as second unit director on several of his father's films. Tarver has also worked as a writer and director, including serving as the co-showrunner and executive producer of HBO's Silicon Valley.

Chavez is probably known to about 2% of current music fans, but at least those of us who appreciate them have a glimpse of what might have been with the video for "Unreal is Here."

Videodrone #21: Pepper

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

Pepper (1996)

In 1986, the Butthole Surfers were the last band anyone would have expected to score a top 40 hit. They had just released their second album, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, on Touch and Go and the few mainstream publications that wrote about them referred to the band as the "BH Surfers." Led by frontman Gibby Haynes and guitarist Paul Leary, the San Antonio band's live shows were outrageous and anarchic, with generous helpings of fire, nudity and unpredictability. They made fans of young musicians like Kurt Cobain and Kim Thayil.

The Surfers released albums and toured regularly through the late '80s and into the '90s until they surprised everyone and signed with Capitol Records in 1991. They also signed on to the first Lollapalooza tour with the likes of Jane's Addiction, Nine Inch Nails and Siouxsie and the Banshees, which introduced the Surfers to a whole new audience of impressionable alt-rock loving 20somethings. 

Gibby guested on Ministry's 1991 single "Jesus Built My Hotrod" and then Capitol teamed them up with producer John Paul Jones (yes, THAT John Paul Jones) for the recording of their 1993 album Independent Worm Saloon, which found the Surfers working in some conventional rock stylings into their weirdness. The first single, "Who Was in My Room Last Night?" got airplay on MTV and rock radio and even got a boost from MTV's new show "Beavis and Butt-head." As grunge and alt-culture caught fire, the Surfers were riding the wave as elder statesmen.

Fast forward to 1996. Grunge was on the wane, but alternative rock was still hanging around, led by the non-sequitur lyricism of Beck. In April, the Surfers released "Pepper," the first single from their forthcoming album Electriclarryland. The song clearly owed a debt to Beck's "Loser" in its spoken word delivery and tape loops, but the band also cited trip hop acts like Massive Attack and Tricky as influences. I wrote it off as derivative (lyrically, it was reminiscent of "People Who Died" by the Jim Carroll Band), but the song took off. It was played constantly on alt-rock radio and MTV and ended up going to #1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and #26 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay Chart. 

The video was directed by Gavin Bowden, who also directed several Red Hot Chili Pepper vids, as well as clips by Lit, Live, Dishwalla, Matchbox Twenty, Rollins Band and Buster Poindexter. It featured black-and-white footage of the band getting arrested after kidnapping a character played by Erik Estrada, while also featuring the band in color playing on a '60s variety show. Even at the band's most commercial, the video was appropriately weird.

As it turned out, the Surfers' biggest hit was also a curse: Their fans hated them for selling out and it became impossible to follow up. They spent two years working on their next album, After the Astronaut, but the label wouldn't release it (coincidentally, the band is releasing After the Astronaut this week, 25 years after their last album). As a result, the Surfers split with Capitol, all while in the midst of a lawsuit against Touch and Go for more royalties on their early albums. 

In 2001, the group signed with Disney and released Weird Revolution, an album that received a 0.4 rating from Pitchfork. The lead single from the album was "The Shame of Life," which featured Gibby rapping over another trip-hop beat and a chorus written by none other than Kid Rock. Strange days indeed. On the plus side, the Surfers were one of the bands featured in Michael Azerrad's seminal 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life.

Since then, the Surfers released a couple of compilations and reunited to tour a few times, but they've been on hiatus since 2016. They've remained in the zeitgeist, releasing a documentary and coffee table and placing the song "Human Cannonball" in the last season of Stranger Things.

The history of the Butthole Surfers remains proudly weird, but the weirdest thing they ever did was to release a hit song.

Videodrone #17: Everything's Ruined

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

Everything's Ruined (1992)

Last week, I wrote about one of the most expensive (and ridiculous) music videos ever made, MC Hammer's 14-minute magnum dopus, "2 Legit 2 Quit." But what happens when you don't have much of a budget to make a video?

In 1992, Faith No More was at an interesting spot. The Bay Area band had been around since 1983 (under that name; previously the group was called Sharp Young Men and Faith No Man). They scored a rock radio hit in 1987 with "We Care a Lot," but things blew up for FNM after the addition of new singer Mike Patton and the release of their 1989 album The Real Thing. Specifically, it was the single "Epic," a Chili Peppers-esque hybrid of funk and metal that took off, especially thanks to the video getting popular on MTV. 

The band rode that album for nearly two years, touring extensively, playing Saturday Night Live and the MTV Video Music Awards, and maintaining popularity in both the alternative and metal scenes. For their follow-up, Patton was more involved in the writing process and the results were unexpected, as the band completely moved away from the funk-metal sound of the previous albums and into weird and wonderful territory. Released in June 1992, Angel Dust sold well, but fans of The Real Thing weren't quite sure what to make of it.

The first two singles, "Midlife Crisis" and "A Small Victory," received expensive, high concept video treatments, and by the time the band wanted to release "Everything's Ruined" as the third single, their video budget from Warner Bros. didn't have much left. So FNM and director Kevin Kerslake, decided to make the cheapest video possible.

The song itself is pretty straightforward by Angel Dust standards, a catchy ripper of a song. But the video is something else. It features the band (and some kids) performing in front of random B-roll footage of a couple getting married, wildlife, explosions and some graphic surgery. The extras in the video were found through a competition on MTV's Most Wanted, an MTV Europe show. In one scene, the band pretends to run away from footage of a giant tortoise. It's simultaneously ridiculous and awesome.

"It was our idea to take this further and make a video as cheap as humanly possible, in one of those video booths like they had at county fairs, where you sing and dance in front of a blue screen," keyboardist Billy Gould wrote in response to a question on the FNM blog. "We didn't quite get to do that, but we got it as close as possible."

I never saw "Everything's Ruined" on MTV back when it came out, as it likely got played infrequently and late at night. But thanks to YouTube, you can now watch it for yourself and see how, like one commenter noted, it's both the worst and greatest rock video ever.

Videodrone #14: Down In It

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

Down In It (1989)

It's not often when a young band's video shoot turns into a murder investigation, but that's exactly what happened when Nine Inch Nails filmed the 1989 clip for their first single, "Down In It."

Trent Reznor was (and is) the mastermind behind NIN, recording the majority of the instruments on the band's debut album Pretty Hate Machine. Based in Cleveland, the band's sound was electronic, featuring tons of synths but also incorporating heavy industrial and rock elements. It was angry, visceral and exciting. 

Reznor was recording a video for "Down In It" in the warehouse district of Chicago. It was low budget, but full of trippy effects, with Reznor being chased by band members Chris Vrenna and Richard Patrick through various locations. The climax features Reznor falling off the top of a building, with the final scene showing his lifeless body on the ground as Vrenna and Patrick stood over him. 

In this pre-drone era, the band used a camera attached by a rope to helium balloons to fil the final scene, but the rope snapped and the camera floated away. The camera eventually ended up in a cornfield in eastern Michigan, where a farmer found it and handed it over to local police. They turned it over to Chicago police after noticing the city's distinctive L trains in the background. Chicago authorities couldn't find any evidence of a murder matching that location and turned the case over to the FBI. After watching the footage, FBI agents began investigating whether it was evidence of a cult killing or a snuff film, noting that the "body" appeared to be rotting in the video.

Flyers were distributed looking for leads and an art student who worked for H-Gun Productions, the company that filmed the video, recognized the "victim" as Reznor and informed the FBI that he was very much alive. This was in September 1990, a year after the video was filmed. 

Chicago police announced that there was no body, after all, and in March 1991, the tabloid "news" show Hard Copy aired a sensationalistic report about the whole thing (see below). It's really a classic of the era, with reporter Rafael Abramovitz editorializing about Reznor's nose rings, interviewing the Michigan cop who initially investigated the footage, and talking to Reznor and the production crew about it. Reznor found the whole thing amusing, which seemed to annoy Abramovitz, who chided him for wasting a year's worth of police work that could have gone into solving real crimes. The band's label, TVT Records, took full advantage of the publicity, including clips from the Hard Copy report in the press kit for the UK release of the album. Some British journalists wondered if the whole thing was a publicity stunt, but Reznor insisted it was a just a stupid accident.

As it turned out, when the video was aired on MTV, the network refused to air the final shot of Reznor's body, which was covered in corn starch to give it that "freshly dead" look. 

Pretty Hate Machine was eventually a huge success, going triple platinum, but it had a slow build. Released in October 1989, it entered the Billboard 200 in February 1990 but continued to gain momentum over the next few years. NIN was part of the first Lollapalooza lineup in 1991, which is when I started seeing quick late-night TV ads for it. 

The band's rise coincided with the alternative rock explosion of the early '90s. NIN's videos for songs like "Closer," "Hurt" and "The Perfect Drug" were in constant rotation and often pushed the boundaries of what censors would allow. But it was that first video that put NIN on the map in more ways than one.

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.

Videodrone #10: Be Chrool to Your Scuel

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

Be Chrool to Your Scuel (1985)

Live by the video, die by the video. Thanks to MTV, it didn't take long in the '80s to become a star and it took even less time to come back down to earth. By the end of 1985, Twisted Sister had been on that rollercoaster ride, punctuated by releasing a big budget video that was immediately banned by the same network that introduced the band to the world.

Formerly known as Silver Star, Twisted Sister was formed in 1973 in New Jersey as a glam band inspired by the New York Dolls. Guitarist John Segall, who later changed his name to Jay Jay French, was one of the first members of the group. Much like the Dolls, TS started out wearing women's clothing and makeup, although look eventually became more ragged and scary than feminine. The group had a rotating lineup over the next several years, adding singer Danny "Dee" Snider in 1976; the band played in the Tri-State area and its sound grew heavier as it built a strong local following. 

Twisted Sister released its first album, Under the Blade, in 1982 on a small British label called Secret Records. After appearing on the U.K. music program The Tube, the band was signed by Atlantic Records and released You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll in 1983. They got some recognition in heavy metal circles but still remained pretty underground. I remember hearing them on heavy metal radio shows in the Boston area in the early '80s. 

But everything changed in 1984 when the band released their third album Stay Hungry. Specifically, it was the video for "We're Not Gonna Take It" that blew up on MTV; it featured a guest appearance from Mark Metcalf (Niedermeyer from Animal House), who basically reprised his character as the strict father of a metal-loving teenager. The video became an MTV hit and the single went to #21 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The followup video, "I Wanna Rock," also featured Metcalf (and his Animal House co-star Stephen "Flounder" Furst) and the song reached #68 on the Hot 100. The album got to #15 on the Billboard 200 and went double platinum in its first year.

I saw them play as part of the first concert I ever attended in July 1984. TS was third on the bill below Cheap Trick and Ratt and above Lita Ford. "We're Not Gonna Take It" was a hit by this point, and the band came out and really impressed with their high-energy performance. Twisted Sister was not making technically proficient or complex music, but they played catchy three-chord rock bangers extremely heavy and extremely loud. Snider was a good frontman and knew how to work a crowd. Although I never bought Stay Hungry, I appreciated Twisted Sister as a live act and indeed, saw them again a few months later opening for Dio.

Twisted Sister also had a cameo in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, making a video for their song "Burn in Hell" on the Warner Bros. backlot that was interrupted by Pee-wee. And the band got more attention when they came under fire from the Parents Music Resource Center in 1985, which led to Snider joining John Denver and Frank Zappa in testifying before a highly publicized Senate committee that fall.

A few months later in November 1985, the band released its fourth album Come Out and Play. Hard rock and metal was at its commercial peak at this time, but Twisted Sister made a calculated decision to appeal to a wider audience. The first single was a cover of the Shangri-Las' 1964 hit "Leader of the Pack," complete with a video featuring a cameo from screechy comedian Bobcat Goldthwait and the band as members of a biker gang. But the song didn't appeal to the band's core audience of metalheads and the single only went to #53 on the Hot 100.

This put a lot of pressure on the second video, the unfortunately spelled "Be Chrool to Your Scuel," which began with quotes about music videos from Snider and Sen. Ernest Hollings taken from the PMRC hearings. The song featured co-lead vocals from Snider and Alice Cooper and had instrumental cameos from Brian Setzer on guitar, Clarence Clemons on sax and Billy Joel on piano. The video was directed by Marty Callner, who directed the band's big videos from its previous album as well as specials for Robin Williams, George Carlin, Diana Ross and Fleetwood Mac. Goldthwait appears in the extended intro as a weirdo teacher in front of his bored class, which featured a young Luke Perry among the students. He goes to the teachers' lounge and listens to Twisted Sister on his Walkman, turning him into Snider and four other teachers in the lounge into a member of Twisted Sister and the guy sitting next to him, legendary horror makeup artist Tom Savini (who did the makeup and SFX for the video), into Cooper. Setzer, Clemons and Joel did not appear in the video.

Turns out the entire school is full of zombies and there's plenty of gore, including zombies eating each other, another getting its neck sawed into and Snider taking a bite out a zombie's arm. When MTV executives reviewed the video, they banned it, no doubt with the PMRC controversy fresh in their minds. So "Be Chrool to Your Scuel" never aired on MTV, which didn't help the album's sagging performance on the charts. Come Out and Play only reached #53 on the Billboard 200 chart and achieved gold status (selling over 500,000 copies), which was a disappointment after the success of the previous album. (Side note on Goldthwait: He's had a successful second career as a writer and director, while still doing standup and working as a voice actor. He also was an opener for Nirvana on part of their final tour. I just saw him open last week for Michael Shannon and Jason Narducy's R.E.M. tribute band. He doesn't do the screeching thing anymore.)

The band's next album, 1987's Love is for Suckers, was originally intended as a Snider solo album but Atlantic wouldn't release it unless it was called a Twisted Sister album. It featured all of the classic-era band members except drummer A.J. Pero, who left the band in 1986 and was replaced by Joey Franco. Guitarist Reb Beach (later of Winger) played almost all the guitars on the album; producer Beau Hill said TS guitarists French and Eddie Ojeda also recorded parts. The band did away with the makeup and toured the album for one month. Two days later, Snider quit the group. The label then dropped the band and the official breakup was announced in January 1988.

The hiatus lasted for 10 years before the band recorded a song for the soundtrack of Snider's horror movie Strangeland. The group reunited for a 9/11 benefit show in November 2001 and since then has recorded two new albums: a re-recording of Stay Hungry called Still Hungry in 2004 and a Christmas album in 2006. Twisted Sister has toured several times since then. Last month, the band canceled their world tour because Snider's health wouldn't allow him to participate; a month later, they announced the tour was back on with former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach taking over for Snider.

Twisted Sister's time in the commercial limelight was brief, but they made a lasting impression. Even if you didn't like them, you still remember them. That's more than a lot of bands can say.

Videodrone #2: Modern Love

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

Modern Love (1977)

When it comes to musical innovators, one artist who never gets enough credit is Peter Gabriel. Whether it was his prog-rock musings and way-out-there stage costumes with Genesis, or his solo career explorations into art-rock, or his embrace of world music sounds, or his work with human rights organizations, Gabriel has never been one to rest on his laurels. He also was an early adopter of music video as a medium, starting with his 1977 self-titled solo debut (later referred to as Peter Gabriel 1 or Car because he called each of his first four solo albums Peter Gabriel).

The album's first single was "Solsbury Hill," which went to #13 on the U.K. singles chart and later became iconic through its use in movies and commercials. The second single was "Modern Love" (not to be confused with the David Bowie megahit of the same name that was released in 1983), a ripper of a power pop song that featured Gabriel musing on the difficulties modern love while backed by the legendary Robert Fripp and Steve Hunter (known for his work with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed) on guitar. 

Gabriel had originally wanted to release the innuendo-laden song as the first single. Still, the video is classic Gabriel: Weird and full of crazy imagery. It was directed by Peter Medak, who went on to direct movies like The Changeling, The Krays and Species II and episodes of TV shows as varied as Hart to Hart, Magnum P.I., The Wire and Breaking Bad. 

Parts of the video were filmed at a mall in Shepherd's Bush, a London suburb, with Gabriel dressed in a fencer's mask and wearing athletic gear and jumping around on a moving escalator, singing, "Ah, the pain, modern love can be a strain." As the story goes, during the recording of the song, producer Bob Ezrin felt Gabriel wasn't getting enough emotion into that line, so he had an engineer hoist Gabriel up a ladder and duct-tape his armpits to a pillar in the studio. That seemed to get the desired result.

In the video, Gabriel is at first seen approaching a group of models and then later sings while surrounded by cutouts of another model. "Hey, I worship Diana by the light of the moon/When I pull out my pipe, she screams out of tune/In Paris my heart sinks when I see the Mona Lisa/She gives me the wink, then she shows me the freezer/Ah, the pain, modern love can be a strain."

Of course, if you lived in the U.S. in the summer of '77, you probably didn't see this video. There was no MTV for another four years and Gabriel was much more prominent in the U.K. at the time. There were different programs over there that would air videos. I never saw the video until a few years ago on YouTube; if it aired on MTV, I never saw it.

But Gabriel would obviously keep making videos that fared better. "Games Without Frontiers" and "I Don't Remember" from his 1980 album (often called Melt) and "Shock the Monkey" from 1982's Security, which became a hit on MTV. Everything blew up for Gabriel with his 1986 album So and its lead single "Sledgehammer," which had an innovative video that combined live-action and animation and absolutely dominated MTV. The song hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the video won nine MTV Video Music Awards. Gabriel became a superstar, primarily thanks to that video. 

That momentum was derailed when it took Gabriel six years to release the follow-up album, Us, in 1992. It fared well and had videos that got a fair amount of MTV play with "Digging in the Dirt" and "Steam," but the success paled in comparison to So. Plus the rock world was fully in grunge mode by that point. 

Over the last 30-plus years, Gabriel has retreated into more of a low-profile role, releasing only three more studio albums, the most recent of which is 2023 I/O (although he's got a new release coming out in 2026). He's also done soundtrack work and has remained active in political and human rights initiatives.  I enjoyed his most recent album, but if you only know Gabriel from his more popular stuff, you should check out those first four solo albums. They're all excellent and interesting.

Gabriel was a well-known figure in the rock world long before his video stardom, but his first foray into video was certainly memorable, even if not that many people remember it.

Videodrone #1: Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)

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

Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright) (1976) 

If you've been on social media in the last month or so (and who could blame you if you weren't?), you may have seen folks lamenting the so-called death of MTV on New Year's Eve and writing epitaphs to the once-dominant music video cable channel. As with many things on social media, this wasn't actually the case.

While it's true that MTV doesn't play music videos anymore, that's been the case for a long time now in the U.S. In the U.K. and Australia, MTV still ran some music-only channels that were shut down at the end of 2025. But let's face it, reality TV has been the name of the game at MTV for the last two decades.

MTV launched in August 1981, playing music videos 24/7 and introducing a new way for fans to experience music and a new way for artists and labels to market their wares. MTV was a cultural touchpoint throughout the '80s and '90s, and to a lesser degree in the '00s. Artists were able to become big acts thanks to a popular video and labels would drop big bucks on conceptual clips (that of course would be recouped as part of the onerous contracts artists used to sign). 

But as is well-documented in the excellent book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, MTV quickly realized that just showing videos 24/7 (and later adding specialty programs like TRL, 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps and Headbanger's Ball) wasn't a great way to make money. Starting in the late '80s with game shows like Remote Control (which was great, btw), reality TV shows became more attractive for sponsors. The Real World debuted in 1992, in which seven 20-somethings were picked to live in a New York City loft for three months and their every move was documented on video. It was clearly heavily edited and drama was often manufactured, but it was a big hit and ended running for 33 seasons. Other shows followed, like Road Rules, Jersey Shore, 16 and Pregnant, Jackass, Punk'd, filling the station's prime programming hours. By the 2010s, videos were an afterthought on MTV. 

The other factor, of course, was the internet and specifically, the 2005 debut of YouTube as a place where users could upload videos that anyone could view on demand. It took a while for the video quality to move beyond super-grainy VHS clips of vids recorded off MTV in 1982, but eventually you didn't need MTV to find videos. Labels began uploading new videos from their artists, fans using their smartphones could record live music and upload it immediately, and YouTube became the place to find just about anything (including tons of non-music-related content).

Also, the music industry obviously has changed in a big way since the dotcom boom of the late '90s. File-sharing sites like Napster ended up taking a big bite out of music sales of physical media like CDs. Streaming has started to turn things around, with $5.6 billion in revenue generated in the first half of 2025, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The artists aren't seeing much of that revenue.

Music videos are still made by most artists as a promotional tool, but there's no guarantee anyone beyond diehard fans will see them. Still, with social media, if a video gets popular on TikTok or elsewhere, it can generate some buzz. 

All of that is a long-winded intro to this weekly feature, in which I'm going to look at one video per year for the last 50 years. While they weren't necessarily commonplace, music videos were made by artists all the way back to the '60s. Mostly performance clips, but you'd get the occasional conceptual video, like Bob Dylan's iconic 1965 clip for "Subterranean Homesick Blues," in which he displays cue cards based on phrases in the song.

In 1976, which is our arbitrary beginning point, the music scene was in a state of flux. There was a lot going on, including stadium rock, AM gold soft rock, early disco. Rod Stewart was adept at all of these styles. He got his start in the early '60s but broke out in '67 as lead belter of the Jeff Beck Group. A few years later, he joined the Faces and also began a solo career. Those Faces albums are pretty great, hot slabs of blues- and R&B-oriented rock (my take on the Faces classic "Stay With Me"), but the success of his solo career and growing band tensions led Faces to split up after four releases. 

Stewart's seventh solo album, A Night on the Town, was released in June 1976 and was a huge hit, hitting #2 in the U.S. and #1 in several other countries. "Tonight's the Night (Gonna Be Alright)" was the first single and it ended up spending eight weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.  

The song proved controversial in the U.S., as Stewart spends the entire 3:56 talking his girlfriend into having sex. The BBC objected to the line "Spread your wings and let me come inside," but there were arguably worse ones. In the U.S., the Rev. Jesse Jackson protested the song as leading to loose morals in America's youth. 

The video probably didn't help matters, as Stewart sings to girlfriend Britt Ekland by a fireplace. He pretends to play an acoustic guitar at first and then focuses on selling Ekland on doing the deed. Wearing a cheesy bow tie and his patented shag mullet, Stewart succeeds in convincing Ekland to go upstairs. The clip ends with Rod the Bod and his lady getting ready to get it on as Ekland's breathy French spoken-word outro plays.

Stewart was an early video adopter, filming many clips for his songs in the '70s (including "Hot Legs" and "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?"), which served him well when MTV came along and was desperate for content to fill its 24-hour broadcast day. 

"Tonight's the Night" was a good predictor of Stewart's career path in the late '70s. It got progressively cheesier as Stewart delved into disco, new wave and then went into full-on MOR soft rock mode. By the mid-80s, he was churning out crappy soundtrack ballads, the most egregious being 1993's "All for Love" with Sting and Bryan Adams for the Three Musketeers soundtrack. In recent years, he's been cranking out "American Songbook" albums of standards and touring constantly. 

For me, Rod Stewart is a classic case of a guy with all the talent in the world who did what he wanted and was successful, but wasted what made him cool in the first place. But at least he left behind a wealth of cheesy music videos for us to enjoy and/or ridicule.

Unsung: Seen Your Video

Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at V66, the short-lived Boston-based music video channel from the mid-1980s.

In this age of on-demand streaming of pretty much anything you want, it's interesting to look back on how different things were for entertainment options when I was a kid. You were pretty much at the whim of radio and TV programmers in terms of when and what you could see; if you missed the episode of Happy Days that featured Robin Williams as Mork from Ork (which originally aired in February 1978), you had to wait for summer reruns to see it again. There were no DVRs or on-demand options, or even VCRs (at least nobody I knew had one then) to record the episode.

Artists had been making music videos since the 1960s, but I didn't really become aware of them until 1979, when a Toronto station called CITY-TV began airing a show called The New Music. In addition to running interviews with the hottest musicians of the day and concert footage, the show would air music videos. I remember seeing "Ashes to Ashes" by David Bowie, "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by the Police, "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads and "One Step Beyond" by Madness, among many others. This coincided with the beginning of my lifelong obsession with music, so seeing videos was a cool new way to enjoy it.

I remember hearing about the launch of MTV in the U.S. in August 1981; a few months later, we would move to Richland, Washington, where my dad had taken a job. The cable system there, like many in the country, hadn't picked up MTV yet, so it was just a concept at that point. But there were other ways to see videos: USA Network's Night Flight was a four-hour show that featured full-length and short films, concerts and rock videos, and HBO had a show called Video Jukebox. 

A few years later, we moved to Kingston, New Hampshire, where the cable system again didn't have MTV available. NBC launched Friday Night Videos at 12:30 a.m. Saturday morning (right after Late Night with David Letterman); I would try and stay up and watch it up but would often fall asleep part way through because it was so late. One time, I was fading in and out while watching Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance," which led to some really strange dreams. And the Boston CBS affiliate had a show called Hot Hit Video that would air in the afternoons after school. Sometimes I would go with my friend Jeremy to his girlfriend's house in a neighboring town where they got MTV and watch videos for hours.

During my senior year of high school (1984-85), I discovered a new video channel called V66. It wasn't on our cable system, but you could pick it up with an antenna on the UHF band (if you cut the cord from cable now, you can still pick up UHF stations with a digital antenna). We had one TV that wasn't on cable and one day I was watching and flipping stations and came across channel 66, which was playing "How Soon is Now?" by the Smiths; I was blown away by the song, but also the fact that this station existed.

WVJV-TV (aka V66) went on the air almost exactly 40 years ago, on February 12. Launched by Boston-area radio veterans John Garabedian and Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsburg, V66 followed the same format as MTV, with video jockeys introducing music videos and concerts and hosting events in the Boston area. The station played a wide variety of music, from rock to pop to hip hop, mixing in local unknown acts with major artists. Local artists featured included Til Tuesday, Del Fuegos, Extreme and the Fools. With the New England Patriots getting ready to take on the Chicago Bears in the 1986 Super Bowl, V66 even produced an answer video to the Bears' popular "Super Bowl Shuffle" called "New England, the Patriots and We." It's as hilariously cringy as it sounds (see below), and the Pats ended up getting demolished by the Bears.

In July 1985, V66 aired the big Live Aid benefit concerts (in addition to ABC). Eventually in an attempt to increase ratings, the station added news shows, sports highlights, comedies and syndicated programs. Ratings were measured by 30- and 60-minute blocks; it was difficult to maintain steady ratings when a viewer might change the channel if they didn't like a particular song that was airing. (Interestingly enough, MTV came to the same realization a few years later and began airing non-music-based programming like the game show Remote Control and later reality shows like The Real World and Road Rules. MTV still exists, but you won't find music videos anymore, just endless viewings of tedious "reality" shows.)

I didn't watch V66 a whole lot because the signal was so fuzzy; I lived in the boonies so V66 would kind of come and go. I would check in every so often and watch it for a while before it got too staticky. When I went to college in the fall of 1985, I didn't have a TV in my room anymore (we just had a bit TV in the dorm lounge; it was a different time, kids), so I wasn't able to watch V66 anymore. And then when I came home for the holidays that December, the local cable system had finally added MTV, so I watched that whenever I could.

V66 didn't stick around for very long. Garabedian was hoping it would become a national network, but by the summer of 1986, the station was sold to the Home Shopping Network; it went off the air on my 19th birthday, September 21, 1986. The station now broadcasts the Spanish-language network Univision to the Boston area.

Although it wasn't around very long, V66 made a strong impression on music fans in the Boston area. Local filmmaker Eric Green watched the channel as a young child and in 2008, began working on a documentary about V66, interviewing former staff and viewers. The documentary, Life on the V: The Story of V66, came out in 2014. It's been out on DVD since 2015 and is screening at the Somerville Theatre on February 27 as part of the theatre's February offerings. It's a fun look at an interesting blip in the Boston media landscape. I interviewed Green about Life on the V for my podcast in 2012 while he was making the film (listen to parts 1 and 2) and again in 2015 after it was released (listen here). 

Fast forward 40 years and music videos are still made, but they're nowhere near as influential as they were in the '80s and '90s. You can find them on YouTube whenever you want, but you're hard-pressed to find then on TV anymore. Certainly not on MTV. But for a short time in the mid-80s in Boston, you could get your video fix on V66. And that wasn't a bad thing at all. 

Day After Day #342: The Only One I Know

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

The Only One I Know (1990)

By 1990, MTV was still primarily known for playing music videos. The Real World wouldn't debut for two more years, and after that, reality TV began to gradually take over the network. But in '90, you could still watch videos on MTV pretty much around the clock, although like radio, the station was heavily formatted and played a tight rotation of the same songs repeatedly. 

I was still watching a lot of MTV in 1990, but I was more interested in the specialty shows that would air late at night. Specifically, I would make sure to tune in to 120 Minutes on Sunday nights to see the latest alternative rock videos; often, you could see videos for songs that weren't being played on the radio yet. 

In addition to American bands that I was pretty familiar with, I liked to see what was coming out of the U.K. Bands like Ride, the Stone Roses and the House of Love were doing some interesting stuff, as was a band called the Charlatans. Retro sounds were popular on both sides of the pond; the burgeoning Madchester scene was embracing soul and R&B from the '60s and '70s and when you listen to the Charlatans' breakout single "The Only One I Know," you can definitely hear those influences.

The Charlatans were formed in Birmingham in 1988 by bassist Martin Blunt, who brought in Rob Collins (keyboards), Jon Brookes (drums), Jon Day (guitar) and Baz Ketley (vocals). After Ketley left, he was replaced by Tim Burgess, who had played in a band called the Electric Crayons. Right from the start, the band was heavily influenced by '60s soul and garage music, including the Spencer Davis Group, Stax Records acts and the Doors, as well as more recent bands like the Stranglers and Joy Division.

The band's first single, "Indian Rope," was an indie hit, which led the Charlatans to sign with the Beggars Banquet offshoot Situation Two just before the release of their next single, "The Only One I Know." The song featured a combination of nods to their influences: a few lines taken from the Byrds' song "Everybody's Been Burned," an organ riff from Deep Purple's 1968 cover of "Hush," a guitar part from the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On."

The lyrics themselves were written by Burgess about a teenager wondering why their feelings towards someone else aren't reciprocated.

"The only one I know/Has come to take me away/The only one I know/Is mine when she stitches me/The only one I see/Has found an aching in me/The only one I see/Has turned her tongue into me/Everyone has been burned before/Everybody knows the pain."

The song was released on the band's 1990 debut Some Friendly. It hit #9 on the U.K. Singles Chart and #5 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. The album went to #1 in the U.K. and #73 in the U.S.

"The only one I know/Never cries, never opens her eyes/The only one I know/Wide awake and then she's away/The only one I see/Is mine when she walks down our street/The only one I see/Has carved her way into me."

The Charlatans had originally planned to release "Polar Bear" as their second single but were talked out of it by their label and others who recommended "The Only One I Know" instead. The song's sweeping groove was led by the organ, which despite the retro vibe, made it sound very different from pretty much everything else coming out at the time. 

Much like fellow up-and-comers Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr., the Charlatans were challenged by another band from the 1960s with the same name. Nirvana ended up settling out of court with a British band from the '60s called Nirvana. Dinosaur Jr. started out in 1985 as Dinosaur and released two albums before they faced a legal challenge from a band called Dinosaurs that featured former members of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company; they added the "Jr." to their name, while Dinosaurs split up in the late '80s. And the Charlatans became known as Charlatans UK in the U.S. after a '60s act called the Charlatans laid claim to the name.

Along with the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, the Charlatans became a key part of the Madchester and baggy (aka trippy dance music) scenes in the U.K. in the early '90s. Baker left in 1991 and was replaced by Mark Collins on guitar. Their next album, 1992's Between 10th and 11th, didn't reach the U.K. top 20, but the lead single "Weirdo" was a hit. Later that year, Collins was charged with armed robbery after a friend robbed a store while he waited in a car outside; he claimed he didn't know about the robbery until after it happened and pleaded to a lesser charge, serving four months in prison as a result.

The next two Charlatans albums were successful in the U.K., hitting #8 and #1, respectively. The band was working on its fifth album in 1996 when Collins was killed in a traffic accident. They decided to keep going and added Primal Scream keyboardist Martin Duffy to fill in. The band has continued on, releasing nine albums since 1997 and touring regularly. Brookes died in 2013 at the age of 44 from a brain tumor; Peter Salisbury has served as the band's touring drummer since 2010.

Day After Day #318: Underwhelmed

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Underwhelmed (1992)

Discovering new music has changed a lot over the years. In the '70s when I first started listening to music, it was the radio. By the early '80s, it was all about video. MTV was such a game changer, even if it wasn't perfect. It took way too long to start playing videos by black artists other than Michael Jackson and it would play certain videos endlessly until people were sick of them. But MTV was able to give bands exposure that normally wouldn't get any.

By the late '80s and into the early '90s, my favorite show on MTV was 120 Minutes, which would air on Sunday nights and feature bands you wouldn't normally see during the rest of the week. Although some of those bands, like R.E.M. and Midnight Oil, would end up getting more mainstream airtime. 

One such Sunday night in early 1993, I saw the video for "Underwhelmed" by the band Sloan out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was an instant grabber, starting with a guitar drone before bassist Chris Murphy starts singing about a woman he's interested in.

"She was underwhelmed, if that's a word/I know it's not, 'cause I looked it up/That's one of those skills I learned in my school/I was overwhelmed, and I'm sure of that one/'Cause I learned it back in grade school/When I was young."

The band kicks in, featuring Patrick Pentland and Jay Ferguson on guitars and Andrew Scott on drums, and Murphy's smartass character continues.

"She said, 'You is funny'/I said, 'You are funny'/She said, 'Thank you'/And I said, 'Nevermind'/She rolled her eyes/Her beautiful eyes/The point is not the grammar/It's the feeling/That is certainly in my heart/But not in hers."

By this point, Sloan had been signed to DGC, which was clearly hoping for another Nirvana. Sloan was lumped into the emerging grunge scene, but they were more influenced by acts like Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. But hey, why mess with a good gimmick?

"We were talkin' about people that eat meat/I felt like an ass 'cause I was one/She said it's okay, but I felt like/I just ate my young/She is obviously a person with a cause/I told her that I don't smoke or drink/She told me to loosen up on her way to the L.C./She skips her classes and gets good grades/I go to my classes rain or shine/She's passing her classes while I attend mine."

Murphy has said the song's lyrical approach was influenced by the Minutemen's "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing." A different version of the song had been released on the band's EP Peppermint, which was released in 1992 on Sloan's self-run label Murderecords. They re-recorded the song for their DGC debut Smeared, which came out in October '92 in Canada and in January 1993 in the U.S. 

"She told me a story about her life/I think it included something about me/I'm not sure of that, but I'm sure of one thing/Her spelling's atrocious/She told me to read between the lines/And tell her exactly what I got out of it/I told her affection had two Fs/Especially when you're dealing with me/I usually notice all the little things/One time I was proud of it, she said it's annoying/She cursed me up and down and rolled her Rs, her beautiful Rs."

"Underwhelmed" hit #25 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. For its follow-up album, 1994's Twice Removed, Sloan decided to buck the grunge trend and went with a quieter, Beatles-influenced power pop sound. The album was a masterpiece, but it pissed off the label; after the band refused to re-record the album, the label pulled promotional support. Sloan split up briefly in 1995 before reforming and asking to be let out of their DGC deal. They then began a run of excellent albums that has continued to this day, with 13 studio albums under their belt.

Sloan is decently successful in Canada, but never could get beyond cult success in the U.S. They've managed to forge a comfortable existence, playing clubs in the U.S. and theaters in Canada. The band has released four limited-edition box sets of their first four albums, the latest being for Smeared. For the first three box sets, the band has done full tours, but for Smeared, they just played two sold-out shows in Toronto this weekend. I was lucky enough to go to the second one last night; my daughter Lily already had a ticket and got me one when we decided to visit her. I've seen most of their Boston-area appearances over the last 28 years, but this was the first time I've seen them (or anyone) in Toronto. It was pretty goddamn great; they played Smeared front to back and then a bunch of B-sides and rarities from that era; the songs were louder and more raucous than their later albums, and they recreated it pretty flawlessly, albeit without the long hair and the slamming around the stage like 20somethings. Sloan hadn't played many of those songs in decades, so it was great to see them rip through them while also seeing my daughter get into them as well.

Day After Day #272: Punk Rock Girl

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Punk Rock Girl (1988)

It's weird to think about how much power MTV had in its prime to create hits. I've written about other bands like Duran Duran and Big Country who became stars because of their videos, but one of the most unlikely success stories was that of the Dead Milkmen and "Punk Rock Girl."

The band actually got its start in 1979 when Joe Genaro and a high school friend created an imaginary band called the Dead Milkmen with a fake back story; they would record homemade cassettes as their fictional characters. In 1981, Gennaro was attending Temple University in Philadelphia when he started jamming with bassist Dave Schulthise and drummer Dean Sabatino, using the name Dead Milkmen. Rodney Linderman joined as lead vocalist in 1983 and the group started playing on Philly's punk rock circuit and then nationally. 

The Milkmen made some self-released cassettes before recording their 1985 debut album, Big Lizard in My Backyard, on Restless Records. The album started getting played on college radio, especially the song "Bitchin' Camaro." The following year, they released Eat Your Paisley, from which the single "The Thing That Only Eats Hippies" became a hit in Australia. The band released Bucky Fellini in 1987.

They were getting some attention, including in 1987 from Detroit Tigers rookie Jim Walewander, who invited them to see the game in which he hit his only major league home run. The attention grew in 1988 when the Milkmen released Beelzebubba, which featured the single "Punk Rock Girl." 

Sung by Genaro, the song featured a very un-punk and prominent accordion as the protagonist dreams about having a wild punk rock girlfriend. He wrote it years earlier after he graduated from Temple after a musician talked about wanting to write a punk rock nursery rhyme.

"One Saturday I took a walk to Zipperhead/I met a girl there/And she almost knocked me dead/(Punk rock girl) please, look at me/(Punk rock girl) what do you see?/Let's travel round the world/Just you and me, punk rock girl."

The song drops many pop culture references as well as locations in Philadelphia, where the low-budget video was filmed; some of the filming took place at the abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary.

"I tapped her on the shoulder/And said, 'Do you have a beau?'/She looked at me and smiled/And said she did not know/(Punk rock girl) give me a chance/(Punk rock girl) let's go slam dance/We'll dress like Minnie Pearl/Just you and me, punk rock girl/We went to the Philly Pizza Company/And ordered some hot tea/The waitress said, 'Well, no/We only have it iced'/So we jumped up on the table/And shouted, 'Anarchy!'/And someone played a Beach Boys song/On the jukebox/It was 'California Dreamin''/So we started screamin'/'On such a winter's day.'"

The song got as much credit for being "comedy rock" as for being pop-punk, but whatever it was, the video was immediately popular, getting up to #1 on the Dial MTV request list. It peaked at #11 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart in February 1989. One of the band's promotional appearances was on Club MTV, a dance music show hosted by Downtown Julie "Wubba Wubba Wubba" Brown. The Milkmen were supposed to lip sync their performance, but to do so, the band got MTV to agree to some conditions: a tuba for Lindeman (instead of keyboards) and an oversized drum kit for Sabatino. After clowning their way through the performance while the kids in the studio replicated a mosh pit, the guys were interviewed by Brown and managed to handcuff her to the tuba (see the grainy video below). According to the excellent book I Want My MTV, Brown was not thrilled and threw a tantrum backstage.

"She took me to her parents/For a Sunday meal/Her father took one look at me/And he began to squeal/(Punk rock girl) it makes no sense/(Punk rock girl) your dad is the vice president/Rich as the Duke of Earl/Yeah, you're for me, punk rock girl/We went to a shopping mall/And laughed at the shoppers/And security guards trailed us/To a record shop/We asked for Mojo Nixon/They said, 'He don't work here'/We said, 'If you don't got Mojo Nixon/Then your store could use some fixin'.'"

The song is fun and infectious and kinda reminds me of Camper Van Beethoven's "Take the Skinheads Bowling" from a few years earlier. Of course, the band's label wanted Genaro to sing more songs on the next album, but the Milkmen resisted. The album, 1990's Metaphysical Graffiti, didn't perform as well. The next year, the band left Restless and signed with Disney-owned Hollywood Records. The first Hollywood album, Soul Rotation, was poppier and featured more Genaro lead vocals, but it didn't do well. Another album also flopped and the Milkmen broke up in 1994.

The Milkmen got a boost in the early '90s when Beavis and Butt-Head featured "Punk Rock Girl."

Linderman played with the Celtic punk act Burn Witch Burn while Genaro played with several bands, including Butterfly Joe and the Low Budgets. Schulthise went to Indiana University to study Serbo-Croatian language and culture, and Sabatino played with a few bands, including Butterfly Joe. 

The Milkmen began discussing a reunion after releasing a compilation and DVD in 2003, but ended after Schulthise died by suicide in 2004. The surviving members played two tribute shows to Schulthise in November 2004 with Dan Stevens on bass. That lineup reunited in 2008 to play a few shows, including the Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin. They've released three albums over the last 13 years, including 2023's Quaker City Quiet Pills.

"Punk Rock Girl" has been covered by many artists, including Ben Gibbard, MxPx, Diesel Boy and Streetlight Manifesto. In 2022, a stage musical called Punk Rock Girl premiered in Long Island, New York.