I caught an episode of The Music Video Exposed on VH1 Classic this weekend. That’s not one of the shows that I ordinarily go out of my way to watch. You can tell that I was still very young during the golden age of MTV–most music videos hold very little appeal to me, and they’re usually completely secondary to the song itself, as far as I’m concerned.
I caught the tail end of the episode dedicated to Wayne Isham. The name honestly meant nothing to me. I had conked out and was too tired to keep up with the game I had been playing on the Xbox, so I powered down and settled for watching VH1 Classic until the show I was waiting for came on.
As it turned out, I got lucky. Wayne Isham directed the video for Livin’ on a Prayer, and the Prayer video was one of the ones featured in his episode. There’s no profound insights here, but some interesting storytelling from Wayne Isham himself. I had always figured that the silhouette of the guy running through the curtain of sparks was deliberate–but that’s the director, abruptly realizing that he was parked in the middle of the shot. That may have been a complete accident, but I always thought that it worked.
As for the rest of it, there’s nothing really profound there, other than a few brief interview clips with Richie. He mostly talks about how Isham helped the band break big. Not sure when it was recorded. Judging by how Richie looked in the clips, it was probably fairly recent.
The other neat video included in the show was the video for Skid Row’s 18 and Life, another one of my favorite songs. Once again, nothing terribly profound, but at least on that one they got Sebastian Bach to show up. Bach’s comments were more interesting–he was remarking on how, even after all this time, he can watch the video for 18 and Life without getting embarrassed. He has a point–Isham did do a fantastic job on that video, and it really does stand the test of time better than many of the other videos from the same time period that tried to tell a story.
It was kind of neat, just tuning in randomly and getting the scoop (such as it was) on the videos to two of my favorite songs.