Monday, November 12, 2012

Monday Music

Well it has been raining all day here in the ATL, and it kinda matches my mood and I got home early enough to make an installment  on my Monday Music.



The song's video, directed by future Highlander director Russell Mulcahy and conceptualized by Keith Williams, anticipates Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" in multiplicate.
In the video, a man drives a beat-up convertible through a dust storm to a small town cafe to bring a bouquet to his girlfriend, who is a waitress there. A co-worker hands him a Dear John letter. After having his parked car ticketed for heading the wrong way, he spends a night at the Pickwick Drive-In movie "Famous Last Words" (reminding viewers about Supertramp's album), seeing himself on the film, watching another couple embrace in the car next to his, and meeting a small child with silver teeth, who points out that his car's left rear wheel is missing.
The next day the man, now on the street outside the cafe without his car, kisses a young girl, leaves the bouquet with her, and with his suitcase boards a bus to downtown Los Angeles. An uninterested passenger props his long legs onto the seat in front of him, next to a lady putting on lipstick and wearing a white wig that receives a paper airplane thrown by another passenger. Awakened by the driver at the station, the man, now the last passenger still on the bus, finds himself without anything in his pockets, presumably having been robbed, but still with his suitcase. He thumbs down two rednecks in a pickup truck, who find him easy pickings for practical jokes, pitch him onto Hollywood Boulevard, and throw his suitcase onto him. After a short walk, encountering more rough people, the man suffers a back alley beating in which he is stripped to his underwear and robbed of his suitcase. An old lady gives him an orange umbrella just before rain begins to drench the alley. In spite of a sea of black umbrellas, he accidentally runs into his true love, who is under a white umbrella, and the two embrace and dance together in the rain. The sea of black umbrellas disappears. This final encounter is what had appeared and now appears at the end of the aforementioned drive-in movie.
The five members of Supertramp make cameo appearances in the video. At the beginning, John Helliwell is a street musician playing an alto saxophone. Before the first chorus, Dougie Thomson appears as the bus driver (this was the last filmed video where Thomson would appear with his then trademark moustache and beard). Hodgson plays a guitar-playing bus passenger. Lastly, Rick Davies and Bob Siebenberg play the two pickup truck rednecks.

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