This was the first album I bought because I had seen a video on MTV. Much more so than radio, I got my music exposure from MTV. Back in the day they only played videos, with some VJ interludes (Martha Quinn – babe and a half, Nina Blackwood – OK in a blowsy, biker chick kinda way). In fact, at the very beginning, there weren’t even commercials, there were random stock movie clips between the video clips, to fill the spaces soon to be filled with commercials.
At the time MTV came onto our cable system I was renting a house form Mr. M., my boss at Accu, sharing it with a friend who ran a punch press there. The house was an old farmhouse that had been owned by what today would be called a hoarder. There were piles of newspapers making it hard to walk through the rooms, and I shoveled out piles of water soaked Fels Naptha (laundry detergent) in the basement.
It also had a furnace that only heated the bedroom I used on the first floor and the dining room directly above it. The heat barely reached the unfinished second floor bedroom where my housemate slept. The living room had a fireplace that I tried to convert into a heater by putting a hollow-tube grate connected to a wet-dry vacuum in the basement and doors to close it off, but it could not begin to heat a 400+ sq.ft. room, in a house with almost no insulation and old wooden, single pane windows. And that winter saw the coldest day ever in my lifetime, the wind chill got down to 26 degrees below zero and my car (the '79 Mustang) refused to start. The only time it didn’t in the 6 years I owned it.
I was 27 years old at the time, my housemate was 23, I think, a divorced father of a little girl, and one time he set me up on a double date with a friend of the 16 year old he was chasing. She wanted someone for her friend and I said OK, 10 year age difference and all, but when they showed up I found out she was 14! It was a very awkward night for me, to say the least.
We had some lasagna and then we all sat down to watch some MTV.
“How ‘bout that Duran-Duran?” I started (I hated them, but thought they had a younger demographic).
“They’re OK,” she replied.
“How ‘bout the Buggles?” I tried again (They were my favorite).
“Not really,” she said.
And the excruciating dialogue went downhill from there. Obviously, nothing happened that night.
To return to Ph.D., I liked the video because the girl in it, who the lead singer stalked throughout the video, had legs that didn’t quit and I loved to watch her walk, which is pretty much all she was called on to do for the whole of the video.
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