As I explained in a recent, similar post, I love commercials. There, I said it. Oh, that felt so liberating.
This latest bout of Pointless Ad Nostalgia comes courtesy of the episode of 120 Minutes from 1991 that contained a lengthy, uncomfortable interview with The Pixies. What’s different about these ads vis a vis the Steampipe Alley-era ads I just posted? Well, there’s the three years difference, a small eternity in ad-time.
More importantly, since these ads aired on MTV late at night, they’re pitched at a much older audience. A fashion-conscious audience that would be receptive to a commercial like this one for Cavaricci. That brand has all but disappeared, but when I was in junior high, everyone had to wear Cavaricci. If you had enough money to buy it, that is. If you were me, you wore generic jeans and whatever was on sale at Caldor’s that season.
Why was Cavaricci so popular? Why is anything so popular at any give time? But if this ad is to be believed, they made you very limber and a snazzy dancer.
As I eluded to last week, when I found the bounty of Steampipe Alley tapes, I was looking for something else. That something else was an episode of MTV’s 120 Minutes from 1991 that featured an episode-long appearance by The Pixies, mere months before they broke up.
When this show aired, I did not actually have cable in my house. But my grandparents, who lived next door, did. So I would monopolize their VCR in the wee hours, taping either Mystery Science Theater 3000 or 120 Minutes. Despite being an MTV product, 120 Minutes was a pretty decent window into the amorphous world of “alternative” music back then, and also the only way that I could hear about new-ish stuff in the pre-internet days, since I lived nowhere near a cool records store.
This particular episode is an odd time capsule piece, because it comes from one of those in between periods of music. The indie music scene that launched The Pixies was largely dead. The Nirvana phenomenon had yet to begin, although it was just about to (the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” aired during this episode, and had just debuted a few weeks previous). So in most cases, alternative = British. By my rough estimate, 75 percent of all the videos that air in this episode come from English bands, most of them being shoegazer types like Ride, Curve, Lush, etc.
But my main reason in presenting these clips to you is not to highlight this very brief era. I’ve digitized them because they’re some of the most uncomfortable video you’ll ever see.
For one thing, The Pixies were already well immersed in the tensions that would doom the band. But rather than exercise that misery on each other, they aim it squarely at the show’s host, Dave Kendall. The poor man has to dig and scrape to get the most mundane answers out of them.
This first clip is benign enough. The band is introduced, and Frank Black talks briefly about the inspiration behind the “Here Come Your Man” video. But the fact that he’s wearing a panama hat and sunglasses for this interview should have thrown up some huge red flags. As should have Joey Santiago’s weird fuzzy hat.
One fringe benefit of discovering the Steampipe Alley tapes (other than being able to expose the world to the genius of Mario Cantone): they were also full of some “classic” ads from yesteryear. Anyone who reads this site with any regularity will know that I have a thing for old commercials. Because I think commercials say a lot more about their respective eras than other media do. After all, art wants to be timeless, but ads are aimed at The Now.
These ads are even more special to me. Why? Because they ran on WWOR, an independent station. So the spots are a little cheaper and a little more home grown.
I realize that many of the ads you’ll see below only resonate with me because I remember them from being a kid. I’ll cop to that. Because if you can’t indulge yourself once in a while, you can you indulge, really?
For instance, this spot for Young People’s Day Camp. This ad ran, virtually unchanged, for my entire childhood. The narration, music, and footage stayed the same for at least ten years. I imagine their PR/marketing department was run by one tyrannical, crusty, cigar-chomping veteran who refused to acknowledge that times change. “Look, the ad worked in 1979, it’ll work in 1995. Why shouldn’t it?!”