It’s the summer of 1984, and the Replacements–the most loved and most critically celebrated American indie band of the moment (or at least locked in a three-way tie for first with Hüsker Dü and sort-of-indie R.E.M.), poised to release Let It Be, their third LP, which will go on to finish 5th in that year’s Pazz & Jop poll, a symbolic bulwark against Born in the U.S.A. and Purple Rain and all the mega-selling albums that, for many pop fans (Replacements fans included), made 1984 the greatest year ever for pop music–have seen your video. They’ve seen it, and colour them unimpressed. They don’t want to know.
This book started as a poll on a music message board, the poll started with a thread, and the thread took its title from the Replacements’ “Seen Your Video,” one of my favourite songs from Let It Be.
All day, all night, all music video
Seen your video, that phony rock ‘n’ roll
We don’t want to know, seen your video
Your phony rock ‘n’ roll
We don’t wanna know
We don’t wanna know
We don’t wanna know
We don’t wanna know
Like a lot of Replacements fans, I bet–or at least I’d like to think so–I found Bob Mehr’s biography of the band, 2016’s Trouble Boys, depressing, especially the part of the book that covered their post-Twin/Tone years, when they left for Warners. My sense was that Mehr found the story depressing too. It wasn’t just that the band was still driven by the same kind of self-sabotaging behaviour that marked their early years, although the predictability of it all did begin to wear me down. It was more the complete and utter pointlessness of such behaviour at that point. Musically, I never cared for that side of the Replacements right from the outset: “Gary’s Got a Boner” and “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out” were what you had to put up with to get to “I Will Dare” and “Answering Machine.” But the trade-off made sense; without the one, you might not get the other. Skip forward to 1985 and Tim, their first album with Sire/Warners, and they’re still making a mess of every opportunity to reach a wider audience, still alienating the company and the people who are working diligently to promote them–“the suits,” if you will. You usually hate the suits as much as the band hates them in these kinds of scenarios, but here I felt sympathetic towards them. They seemed to genuinely love the Replacements just as much as I did.
Probably the biggest sticking point of all was the Replacements’ hostility towards videos–principled, self-righteous, some combination therein–at a time when visibility on MTV was as crucial to a band’s success as Top 40 radio had been in 1965. You know that Paul Westerberg would love to have had a Top 40 hit; he just didn’t want to get from here to there via a music video.
As a compromise of sorts, they made one for Tim’s “Bastards of Young,” a single-shot non-video that was an unmistakable giant middle finger to MTV (and maybe to Warners, too, though my recollection from the book is that the label was supportive of the concept): camera slowly pulls back from a speaker’s giant woofer, guy passes in front before taking a seat and lighting a cigarette, he shifts around in his seat a bit, then he gets up again and kicks in the speaker. Somewhat reminiscent of Michael Snow’s landmark experimental film Wavelength, though I’m guessing that’s purely happenstance. The video immediately got lots of attention, became infamous over time, and is still remembered (and survives on YouTube, of course) in a way that hundreds of videos from the era aren’t. It is, in a very narrow sense, ingenious.
I’m sure I found it thrilling at the age of 23. (I reviewed Tim for a local monthly, one of my first published reviews.) I look at it now, think about the videos that could have been made for “I Will Dare” and “Answering Machine” and “Color Me Impressed,” and I have to ask: was the refusal to engage with MTV worth it? And I don’t even mean from a commercial standpoint, I mean artistically. Start with what Greg Mottola did with “Unsatisfied” in Adventureland, the scene where Jesse Eisenberg boards a bus for New York to find Kristin Stewart and to find the world. As great as that scene is, I feel like it just hints at what the Replacements turned their backs on.
1984 also saw another fledgling Amerindie band, the Bangles, release their first full-length LP, All Over the Place. It wouldn’t be until “Manic Monday” and “Walk Like an Egyptian” from 1986’s Different Light that the Bangles would really take off commercially; All Over the Place peaked at #80 on Billboard’s album chart, and neither of the LP’s two singles, “Hero Takes a Fall” and “Going Down to Liverpool,” made the Hot 100. But both singles came with MTV-ready videos. “Hero Takes a Fall”’s was good; “Going Down to Liverpool”’s, was, to my mind, unforgettable, and a preemptive alternative–perhaps even a counter–to the Replacements’ conception of what a minimalist No might look like.
“Going Down to Liverpool” is a cover version of a serious, melancholy song, something you might envision as having a serious, melancholy video to match. The original, released a couple of years earlier by Katrina & the Waves (“Walking on Sunshine”), is a snapshot of aimless, jobless boredom during the long tenure of Margaret Thatcher:
Hey there
Where you going with that UB40 in your hand?
I said: Hey there
All through this green and pleasant land
I’m going down to Liverpool to do nothing
All the days of my life
UB40, of course, meaning an unemployment form, not the similarly-named band’s latest cassette. It’s as far away from “Walking on Sunshine”’s ebullience (either contagious or toxic, depending upon your tolerance for ebullience) as could be. I suspect the Bangles loved the song purely for its power-pop jangle, and that politics never figured into it–in 1984, the year of Reagan’s reelection, a pop single about joblessness and despair wouldn’t have been quite in sync with the national mood stateside. But even there, that feeling of wandering around aimlessly, certain that you’ll be stuck doing this for the rest of your life, that’s universal–basically, the story of my every summer since I became a teacher and started getting summers off.
In any event, how do you visualize all that in a video? Obviously, you hire Leonard Nimoy to play a chauffeur, deck him out in sunglasses, and you’re ready to go. The video begins inside a limo, with a crowded shot that could be from some badly matted studio film of the 1950s: Nimoy in the front seat, chauffeuring the band around and not terribly happy about it, the Bangles in the back, or maybe two of them in the back, and the other two on a seat positioned in the middle. Nimoy switches on the radio, “Going Down to Liverpool” starts up. The band is singing along, or, this is a video after all, maybe just lip-synching to their own song. Nimoy keeps glancing back at them via the rearview mirror; they return his glance, at turns vacantly, mockingly, mischievously. Sometimes, completely lost in the song, they don’t pay any attention to him at all.
Two quick thoughts: 1) how the byplay in the mirror echoes one of my favourite movie shots ever, from Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express, Goldie Hawn and Ben Johnson staring each other down via Johnson’s rear-view mirror (they’re in separate cars in that one); 2) I had always assumed Susanna Hoffs was the lead singer on “Going Down to Liverpool,” but it’s drummer Debbie Peterson.
Much as you may find yourself doing, Nimoy tries to puzzle out what’s going on, ultimately giving up and switching off the radio in disgust. But the video can’t end there, so of course Vicki Peterson reaches over and defiantly turns it back on. After another 40 seconds of the song and the mirror and the puzzlement, just before stopping the car and letting the band out, a flash of awareness seems to take hold of Nimoy, something he has finally understood.
Cut to a medium-long shot of a garishly lit tunnel and the band stepping outside the car. Hoffs leans in to fix her lipstick in the window’s reflection, Nimoy leans in on the steering wheel; it’s not clear whether he’s looking at Hoffs or not. The Bangles walk away from the car, they’re briefly reflected in a puddle, the car disappears–not drives away, just literally disappears–and the band starts dancing in long shot. The garish lighting turns orange, and individual shots of each Bangle playing against the orange backdrop are intercut.
And that’s one way to take in the video for “Going Down to Liverpool”: as a much more intriguing, playful, and humorous anti-video than the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young.” I’ve watched it a couple of dozen times while writing this, and I still haven’t figured out all the by-play in the car, how they arrived at the inspirational casting of Nimoy, or how this new band had enough confidence to try something so unusual.
Well, I suppose I do know the answer to that last question: they had Susanna Hoffs, and she alone overwhelmed any and all risk of the video (and with it, the band’s commercial prospects) disappearing. Hoffs, as mentioned earlier, is not the lead vocalist on “Going Down to Liverpool,” as she would be later on “Manic Monday” and the donut-shop verse from “Walk Like an Egyptian.” If you add up her actual screen time–like people sometimes do when arguing for or against Academy Award nominations–she’s a supporting player at best. But you simply can’t take your eyes off her whenever she does appear. She does this come-hither thing with her eyes throughout that’s as powerful as Barbara Stanwyck or Katherine Hepburn in the ‘40s, including right before Nimoy has his flash of awareness. Which must be something on the order of “I am helpless in the face of that.” Even at the end, as all four dance with varying degrees of abandon in long shot and in silhouette, it’s Hoffs who commands your attention. Worth mentioning: “Going Down to Liverpool” was directed by Tamar Simon Hoffs, Susanna’s mother.
So to be fair, the Replacements did not have that, and I think it would be foolish not to acknowledge that however weird and conceptual the video for “Going Down to Liverpool” might be, the Bangles were able to take all that and ride shotgun beside the more conventional and undeniable pull of Susanna Hoffs’ beauty. Maybe the Replacements could have come up with something that put Tommy Stinson front and center, turning their disdain and mockery in the direction of hair metal–maybe they could have split the difference more photogenically and made their point anyway. They chose not to.
Music video in 1984 was still, from the vantage point of 2023, relatively new. New enough that I think the Bangles took a look and thought, “We can do something with this.” Or, not just do something–new enough that they could still do anything.
we don't want to know 