Ever hear a song you’ve known for most of your life and realize that while you may have heard it a zillion times, sung along with it almost as many, you know the words, you even know the guitar solo enough to scat sing along with it while you wail on your air ax – you still have never really realized just how awesome, or, in fact, how dirrrrrrty it was until, say, you’re sitting at your desk on a Thursday morning trying to catch up on two days of e-mail, and it comes up on your iPod. That was my morning. This was the song.
Though Shalamar, who started out as the studio creation of a Soul Train booking agent, were one of the few disco groups to weather the turn of the 80s, this Top 20 hit from 1984, featured on the soundtrack of Footloose, also marked the beginning of the group’s end. Singer Howard Hewett was the sole remaining original member of group by this time, and soon after, he too would follow former members Jody “Hasta La Vista, Baby” Watley and Jeffrey Daniel out the door to launch a solo career, leaving the group adrift for the rest of the decade before they finally broke up.
The video finds Hewett dressing up in his favorite Zorro cape to visit the gayest not-gay-bar in the world where he finds keyboardist Delisa Davis holding up a wall and looking slutty. When he makes a move for her though, a table full of mustached mobsters gets all upset, some phony violence ensues – whoah, who’s that guy with the pecs? – but Hewett, Davis and guitarist Micki Free manage to escape unscathed when Free unleashes a guitar solo that entrances and, presumably, pacifies the totally gay un-gay bar’s patrons. The 80s were awesome.