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Pop Rock Nation

Tag: Howard Hewett

  • The Daily Awesome 8/26/10: Shalamar “Dancing in the Sheets” (1984)

    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.

  • The Infatueighties Countdown: #99: “Looking for a New Love”

    My friend Jim calls Shalamar the most underrated pop group of the Eighties, and he might have a point. The threesome of Howard Hewett, Jeffrey Daniel and Jody Watley created some of the most bubbly, well-crafted pop-R&B of it’s time, even incorporating new wave and rock textures into their music by the time of 1983’s “The Look”. They’re probably best known for the hit singles “This is for the Lover in You” (which Babyface re-recorded with the three original members in the late Nineties) and “A Night To Remember”. If Jeffrey Daniel’s face looks familiar to you, it’s because he appears in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” and “Bad” videos. He apparently was also moonwalking almost a year before MJ “created” it for “Motown 25”, as the below listed clip will demonstrate.

    Anyway, Shalamar’s story is worthy of it’s own column sometime in the future. Back to the topic at hand. The female third of Shalamar, Jody Watley, reintroduced herself to the market as the high-fashion edition of a Janet Jackson or Madonna. With Prince associates David Z. and Andre Cymone (who she later married), her first album was a Top 10 success and also won her the Grammy for Best New Artist, largely due to the success of “Looking for a New Love”, an attitudinal slab of techno-funk that spent a month at #2 on the U.S. singles charts (thankfully, it spent that time behind a song worthy of beating it: U2’s “With or Without You”.

    While Jody’s subsequent albums failed to set the world on fire, her first album is easily one of the best dance-pop albums of the Eighties, and very easily the equal of Janet’s “Control” or Madonna’s debut. She was certainly a more striking visual artist than the other two: with a highly defined fashion style adopted from several years living in London, not to mention cheekbones that you could cut yourself on. She was also the first woman I ever saw with a tattoo, but that’s neither here nor there.

    Finally, let’s give her some long-overdue props for originating the phrase “Hasta La Vista, Baby” two years before Tone Loc used it in “Wild Thing” and three before Arnie uttered it in “Terminator 2”.

    This is the extended version of the single…sounds like it was sped up a bit too.

    Oh, and one more thing…she was voguing and embracing gay culture before Madonna…as this video from 1989 (“Vogue” came out a year later) will attest to. Hey, is that Rakim rapping in a video filled with drag queens??

    …By the way, if this list had stretched to 150, both “A Night To Remember” and “Friends” would have been included.