The Heat May Be On, But Glenn Frey's Blood Runs Ice Cold

It begins with soft, metallic clanging, like wind chimes shifting in the breeze. Then there is a demonic "unwinding" noise, akin to a drawbridge slowly descending over a moat, or the doors of the Taj Mahal opening one massive hinge at a time, perhaps. With a gigantic WHOOSH, out comes that diabolical instrument, unleashed into the night: the saxophone.

On a soundtrack dominated by electro-funk, Glenn Frey showed up with the Yuppie Rock, and this time, he brought the heat.

The heat was not without its irony however. Just as Kenny Loggins, a perfectly capable songwriter, didn't write "Danger Zone," so Glenn Frey, a man who surely knew his way around a pop composition or two, didn't actually write "The Heat Is On." I know, I just shattered all your childhood dreams. We can take a moment to rest, if you need it.

"Danger Zone," of course, was written by the producer of the Top Gun soundtrack, the supremely lubricative Giorgio Moroder, and so it's only fitting that "The Heat Is On" was co-written by one of Moroder's proteges, and the producer of the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack, the only slightly less lubricative Harold Faltermeyer. So yes, Glenn Frey didn't actually compose what arguably turned out to be his biggest solo hit. I'm almost positive that Don Henley has never avoided an opportunity to remind Glenn of this little factoid every chance he gets. In sound, style, and attitude, though, "The Heat Is On" is much closer to "Footloose" than "Danger Zone," with its Winwood-esque keyboards, giddy hand claps, and "get up and rock this party" chorus (although this song probably hasn't rocked a party in a long, long time - maybe your step-dad's retirement party?).

But that's not the most amusing part. The most amusing part about the fact that Frey didn't write "The Heat Is On" is that the lyrics, with their overall nebulousness and pseudo-tough guy posturing, still fit in perfectly with the man's whole wannabe badass aesthetic. In other words, if he didn't come up with this shit, he easily could have. What exactly is the titular "heat" in question?

The heat is on
On the street
Inside your head
On every beat
And the beat's alive
Deep inside
The pressure's high
Just to stay alive
'Cause the heat is on

Is he cooking Top Ramen or something? Is it wintertime? Why the hell is the heat on? You're jacking up the energy bill buddy. Well, I guess he's supposed to be talking about cops, you know, the "law," the "fuzz," the "man." Maybe it's a prescient statement on global warming. No wait, I think I've got it: it's a song about gonorrhea.

The video features another in a long line of '80s film editors (possibly Jude Law's uncle?) who fancy themselves rock stars. Listen dude, you better leave the rocking out to Glenn Frey and his hypnotically androgynous sax player. As far as Glenn's gender is concerned, of course, there can be no doubt, as he's sporting some prominent chest hair, as well as a serious five o'clock shadow. If the "heat" is really "on," he should probably shave that thing. Most unintentionally hilarious moment(s): Glenn taking a break from his patented "eyes closed" singing method in order to stare directly into the camera and, after four suspenseful drum beats (or, as we're somewhat led to believe, microphone fist pounds), provocatively mouth the word "on" (1:35 and 2:24).

"Axel F": The Unfaltering Glory of Harold Faltermeyer's Timeless And/Or Extremely Dated Theme

I love that the official name of the theme tune from Beverly Hills Cop is "Axel F." It is not called "Beverly Hills Cop Theme," not even with parentheses. Nor is it called "Axel Foley," which is the character's full name. No, it is simply called "Axel F," which suggests a certain intimate familiarity, like what one might find written on a hastily scrawled memo, taped to the police captain's desk. With "Axel F," we're on the "inside."

Out of the slimy ooze that was Giorgio Moroder, there arose a protege. And that protege was Harold Faltermeyer. Not content to merely work alongside the master on various soundtrack albums and Donna Summer releases, Faltermeyer finally carved out his own plaque in the Eurosleaze Hall of Fame with this nimble one-man show. But "one man" hardly means "one synth," as Wikipedia makes abundantly clear:

Faltermeyer recorded the song using five instruments: a Roland Jupiter-8 provided the distinctive "supersaw" lead sound, a Moog modular synthesizer 15 provided the bass, a Roland JX-3P provided chord stabs, a Yamaha DX7 was used for bell and marimba sounds and a LinnDrum was used for drum programming.

Whoa, look out for that supersaw. What's amazing about "Axel F" is the ebb and flow, the sturm und drang of all the different synthesizer parts. My tongue-in-cheek breakdown:

• 0:00-0:14: The ominous main theme
• 0:15: A synthesizer imitating that sound a record kinda makes when you turn it on while the needle is resting in the middle of a track (sort of a "whoosh")
• 0:16-0:24: Freaky imitation bass line, with freaky imitation cymbals
• 0:24: Imitation handclaps that always make me think of the very last seconds of "The Safety Dance" (it must have been a common button on that particular synth model)
• 0:24-0:33: Behold the imitation bass drum!
• 0:33-0:49: Everything all together now, goosed along by the new kid on the block, an imitation snare drum
• 0:49-1:10: An alternate main riff (perhaps what Wikipedia calls "chord stabs"?), accompanied by the sound of what appears to be termites quietly munching in both stereo channels
• 1:10-1:28: Funky breakdown, with imitation bass solo and munching termites; at 1:20 they're joined by what sounds like the flick of Tinkerbell's wand
• 1:28-1:44: Back to the main riff, with imitation bass drum, meaner and leaner this time
• 1:45-2:20 Sensual bridge with imitation marimbas; they multiply and multiply and they keep growing and growing and it seems like nothing will stop them until they finally meet their doom at the hands of ...
• 2:19: Monster imitation drum fill
• 2:21-2:41: Then it's back into the safe, comforting arms of the alternate riff (from 0:49-1:10)
• 2:42: And the main theme drives us on home, Faltermeyer's fancy fingers taking us back where we began, all the pieces locking together in peerless mathematical symmetry, like an Escher illustration (but an Escher illustration starring Eddie Murphy)
• 2:58: And, hey, one last dose of imitation handclaps for good measure

Rarely is the public granted the opportunity to see a master at work, but in the video for "Axel F," such is the opportunity we have been granted, for it stars, if I'm not mistaken, Mr. Harold Faltermeyer himself. I didn't realize that Faltermeyer also happened to be the neighborhood pedophile, or possibly former Major League pitcher Curt Schilling. It's also odd that he's sequestered himself in a top-secret computer laboratory, as I don't believe Beverly Hills Cops was an international cyber-thriller, but maybe there were complications going on behind the scenes that we didn't hear about. However, once he's spotted by Mystery Woman peeking through the Venetian blinds, things start to get a little weird. Right around 1:44, two things happen: 1) Faltermeyer, sans hat and sunglasses, suddenly busts out his synth equipment in the middle of the lab, which is, suspiciously, no longer in black & white, and 2) the hat-and-sunglasses Faltermeyer finds himself magically, and dangerously, transported smack into the midst of the Beverly Hill Cop action! See him jog alongside Eddie Murphy and Judge Reinhold (at 2:01 and 2:26), sneak up to Victor Maitland's mansion (1:57), and dodge the nefarious bullets of Maitland's henchmen (at 2:19)! Something about the whole deal doesn't seem right, as if Faltermeyer wasn't really in the footage to begin with. Besides, this ain't no beat for a rookie. He's in over his head. Sure, enough, in the last shot, it appears as though Faltermeyer has pushed his luck just a step too far, because here comes a giant semi-truck, look out!!!!!!!!

And so, Harold Faltermeyer's first hit ... was his last.

Never Ask For Whom The LaBelle Tolls; She Tolls For Thee

In 1984, Patti LaBelle must have been the biggest singer in the universe. At least that was the conclusion I arrived at while looking at the credits for the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack back in elementary school. Because she didn't just have one song on the album, she had two. I mean, not even Shalamar had two songs on that album.

And then, I didn't hear the name Patti LaBelle for a long time.

Ages later, I heard about this group from the '70s called LaBelle. Any relation to that legendary soulstress on the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack? Indeed, a direct relation. "Lady Marmalade" didn't really appeal to me for years (the chorus sounded like gibberish and/or French), but a little while back I downloaded the full Nightbirds album, and holy Superdome, this is some nasty - I mean nasty - New Orleans R&B. But I guess the group never topped it, and to paraphrase the title of her infamous duet with Michael McDonald, Patti headed out "on her own."

Pop success eluded her (although she scored a couple of R&B hits) until that fateful rendezvous with Jerry Bruckheimer and/or destiny, where she landed the opening cut on the soundtrack, "New Attitude," which hit #17. I feel like if the distraught woman from "Neutron Dance" eventually got her act together, and then wrote a song about it, that song would have been "New Attitude":

Running hot
Running cold
I was running into overload
It was extreme

I took it so high
So low
So low, there was no where to go
Like a bad dream

Somehow the wires uncrossed
The tables were turned
Never knew I had
Such a lesson to learn

I'm feeling good from my hat to my shoe
Know where I am going and I know what to do
I've tidied up my point of view
I've got a new attitude

I'm in control, my worries are few
'Cause I got love like I never knew
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
I've got a new attitude

Hey, so I just found out that she sings "like I never knew" and not "Aaaahm ooh-pah-doo!" as I had thought for all these years. Let it also be said that the producer, a certain Harold Faltermeyer, inserts just the right amount of that squiggly "tire screech" synth effect wherever necessary. Now, for the first minute and forty-five seconds of the video, Patti looks like a reasonably fashionable young African-American woman, but at the 1:45 mark, she suddenly transforms into ... a Japanese toilet brush? I didn't realize getting a new attitude meant sticking your fingers in an electrical socket. Maybe those wires hadn't quite uncrossed yet.

Despite only making it to #41 pop, in my mind "Stir It Up" looms just as large in Patti's legend, and it did make #5 R&B, and also accompanied a better scene in the movie (if I recall correctly - it's all a blur). For starters, 1) it's got a synth riff that could've toppled the Ottoman Empire; 2) it's got a pseudo-gospel chorus that the Pointer Sisters would've stolen a thousand brand new Chevrolets for; and 3), it's got a sax solo that could've cracked Glenn Frey's balls. The two best YouTube comments: "In the 80's, jazz-saxophone players were always hanging out on rooftops. It was actually a pretty big problem at the time" and "Came here for Bob Marley actually haha." No, it's not that "Stir It Up" - but Patti LaBelle might be the only singer who could've won a contest with Bob Marley for most untameable hair.

"Neutron Dance": Where Molecular Chemistry And R-Rated '80s Cinema Collide

Dictionary.com definition of "neutron":

noun, Physics.
1. an elementary particle having no charge, mass slightly greater than that of a proton, and spin of ½: a constituent of the nuclei of all atoms except those of hydrogen. Symbol: n.

Quite what this word has to do with dancing is one of the great riddles of our time. I've heard of the square dance, the line dance, even the Riverdance, but I can't say I've ever seen anyone do the Neutron Dance. It may be so small that one can only witness it through a high-powered microscope. Nevertheless, on their contribution to the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack, the Pointer Sisters claim they have been doing it. So what exactly is this dance? For our answer, we turn to surprisingly prolific and eclectic songwriter Allee Willis, co-writer of everything from Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" to the Pet Shop Boys' "What Have I Done To Deserve This" to the Friends theme "I'll Be There For You" (!). It turns out the Neutron Dance isn't as harmless as it seems. From a Songfacts.com interview:

It was not written for Beverly Hills Cop. It was written for a movie called Streets of Fire. This was a movie that came and went. And we were told that there was a scene on a bus that was leaving town after there had been this nuclear holocaust, and that a '50s doo-wop black group was going to be at the back of the bus that the lead couple was escaping on. And so Danny Sembello and I just met that day, he was the younger brother of Michael Sembello who had a hit at that time called "Maniac." I was very disinterested in songwriting at that point, and I'm writing with this kid who's never had a record before, and I just wanted to get him in and out. He was a phenomenal keyboard player, and I just said, "Play the most common sounding old fashioned '50s black music bass line that you can think of." And he just started doing the (sings rhythm for "Neutron Dance"). And I'm someone who could write a melody to a spoon falling on the table. So I literally sang that melody down. First time down, he just kind of followed and went to the right places. And then I said, "Let's just write this quick lyric." Because I knew everyone in town was competing to be in this movie, so I didn't really have a lot of confidence we would get it. And it was a very autobiographical lyric for what was going on with me at the time. I was very dissatisfied with songwriting, really feeling like I wasn't able to fully express myself through it, because I'm writing for other people, ultimately you're saying what they want to say ... And it was all this stuff going on in my life: "I don't want to take it anymore, I'll just stay here locked behind the door. Just no time to stop and get away, because I work so hard to make it every day." Really a lyric about all these things falling apart in your life, and you know what, just get it together and change your life.

So, in a way, "Neutron Dance" is a mid-life crisis song a la "Pressure" or "Dancing In The Dark"? And according to Willis, not all of the crises were conceived via dramatic license:

I used to have a little pink 1962 Corvair, and as we were writing this song, I look out the window, and there's someone out in front of my house trying to jimmy open the door of the Corvair. So I race out of the studio, and as I'm running out - and I tape everything - everything - so I have this, and I'm "Hey!" You hear me racing out of the room and screaming back at him, "Someone stole my brand new Chevrolet!" and that was that line. And when I saw that movie - I went to a pre-screening of it - it was mind boggling to me for many, many reasons, but the first one of which, "Neutron Dance," which is the song that opens the movie, on that line, "someone stole my brand new Chevrolet," this cigarette truck that Eddie Murphy is locked up in the back of, screaming through the streets of Detroit, slams into this Chevrolet. And "I'm just burning, doing the Neutron Dance," which to me meant someone could push the button tomorrow and we could all go up in smoke, so make your change now. On that line, a car explodes. I mean, I couldn't have written a better song for a movie scene if my life depended on it.

Ummm ... I'm not sure that an action sequence featuring a truck crashing into a Chevrolet truly captures the apocalyptic tenor of the chorus, but if she's satisfied, I'm satisfied. So in addition to being a mid-life crisis song, it's also another Secret Cold War Allegory song a la "1999" or "I Melt With You"? And here we were, thinking all these '80s songs were completely vapid and apolitical. Apparently Willis even ended up on the Soviet "enemies" list:

The Russian government named me as one of the most dangerous people living in the United States, because they mis-translated it as "neutron bomb." The first verse they translated as "a powerful nuclear explosion is approaching, it will annihilate everyone; who cares if you have no car, no job, no money, just dance, dance, dance." And this was a huge article in Pravda, and I was supposed to be going to Russia with BMI, and I wasn't let in the country. I mean, it was nuts.

Look out Communist Bloc: that Pointer Sisters song is going to topple your regime!! But what the KGB seems to have missed is that "Neutron Dance" is really about fighting for survival in a world gone berserk. It's like the "Stayin' Alive" of the '80s, or the cheesy dance-pop version of "The Message." There's some fairly bleak imagery here:

Industry don't pay a price that's fair
All the common people breathing filthy air (Lord have mercy)
Roof caved in on all the simple dreams
And to get ahead your heart starts pumping schemes

Lord have mercy! It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how the Pointer Sisters keep from going under. When your heart starts pumping schemes instead of blood, you know you've got a problem. And all this time I thought it was a song about electrons and laser beams (which is, if I'm not mistaken, the source of the fluttery sound I'm hearing every time the title is uttered during the chorus). For years I thought the lyric "I know there's a pot of gold for me" was actually "I know there's a particle for me." Turns out doing the Neutron Dance is more like signing up for food stamps.

And yet, in the music video, clearly the Pointer Sisters haven't let the perils of modern society get them down. Dressed in short neon skirts and clutching glowing florescent dildos, they're having more fun as movie theater ushers than I ever did back in college. Bronson Pinchot makes an appearance as the exasperated and ultimately ineffectual theater manager: "I don't want you stopping ... to go fix your make-up, to go make phone calls, to buy Raisinettes. Do you know how that works?" This guy must have dealt with a lot of slacking off in his day. But sadly the sisters have other plans, as they gradually take over the theater and encourage the audience to dance directly in front of the screen. Hey, I paid good money for these seats! One of the sisters also appears to be frantically spooling the film in the projection booth. Here's a word of advice: if your film is about to screen, and you've left it up to a Pointer Sister to piece it together in time, you really haven't delegated responsibility properly.

Beverly Hills (Cop) 9021-Oh Yeah!!!

When I was six years old, I think I had a fairly different definition of "great movie" than I do now, because I totally thought that Beverly Hills Cop was a great movie. It was great because 1) there was that scene where Eddie Murphy put a banana in a car's exhaust pipe, which was the funniest thing ever, 2) the guy who played Balki from Perfect Strangers was in it, and 3) it had that awesome, awesome soundtrack.

My family had the soundtrack on cassette, and we played it in the car nonstop. I would stare at the list of artists in wonder, forming opinions based on incomplete information. I was not aware, for instance, that Glenn Frey had been in the Eagles, or that Danny Elfman had been in Oingo Boingo, or that Patti LaBelle had been in ... LaBelle. As far as I was concerned, these artists' musical histories began and ended with the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack.

A couple of years ago, deep in the thick of my newfound '80s nostalgia, I caught the opening of Beverly Hills Cop on TV. "God, I haven't seen this since I was a kid," I said to myself in a tone of misplaced curiosity. So, I decided to record it and watch the rest over a week or so. Well, maybe I'm a party pooper, but the first thing I realized was this: Beverly Hills Cop is completely implausible! Perhaps I am ignorant in the ways of 1980s law enforcement, but I feel like if any police officer tried to behave the way Axel Foley behaves in Beverly Hills Cop, he would have his badge immediately revoked and would be knee-deep in lawsuits, criminal charges, and overwhelmingly negative 24-hour news coverage. Hey, I don't know, maybe police officers acted like that all the time, and still act like that, and I'm just naive. But Axel Foley spends the whole movie bluffing his way into restaurants and mansions and countless potentially fatal situations without any sort of clear objective, legal preparation, or even a back-up plan. Not that realism is Beverly Hills Cops' aim, mind you. I just thought I would point this out.

So, now that I know a bit more about cinema than I did when I was six years old, I've realized that Beverly Hills Cop is, essentially, a mildly amusing, highly cartoonish early Jerry Bruckheimer production with a message that boils down to something like, "Look at how scared all these rich white people are of a black guy!" Some other observations: 1) as a kid, it seemed like Beverly Hills Cop was such an intense action movie!! Watching it now, the action seems impressively tame, with only a couple of cars blowing up at a time, and editing that almost gives the viewer a sense of where people "are" and what they're "doing," which we simply cannot have; 2) Once upon a time, back in 1984, merely making fun of gay people counted as comedy. You didn't have to make fun of gay people in a certain way, or include some sort of cultural commentary in your gay impersonation. You simply had to impersonate a gay person, for no particular reason, and people would laugh at this.

So, tastes change, but my younger self was entirely correct about at least one aspect of Beverly Hills Cop: the soundtrack is still awesome. Maybe I'm a pushover these days, but asking me to remove even one single track from this album would be like Sophie's Choice. For the most part, the soundtrack delves into a genre I've hardly explored on this blog, a genre that's probably best described as "electro-funk." Most of these guys were trying to be Prince or Rick James, or both. For example, Rockie Robbins does his best "1999" rip-off with "Emergency":



Junior and Shalamar actually seem to be doing more of a Michael Jackson thing with "Do You Really (Want My Love)" and "Don't Get Stopped In Beverly Hills," respectively, the former perhaps a highly perverse re-make of The Move/ELO's "Do Ya," and the latter featuring the requisite imitation Eddie Van Halen "Beat It" solo (although by the fade-out, it ends up sounding more like Stevie Wonder's "Maybe Your Baby"):





Kind of makes you want to get stopped in Beverly Hills, doesn't it? Although sadly not featured on the soundtrack album, the Purple One himself did, in a roundabout fashion, make a musical appearance in the film (during the - if I may say so - fairly ludicrous strip club scene), via notorious female pet project Vanity 6 and the infamous "Nasty Girl."



What I'm trying to say is, the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack is so loaded, it's got great songs on it that aren't even on it. From Wikipedia:

In 1981, Prince, himself a rising musical star, suggested that his three female friends—his girlfriend Susan Moonsie, Boston native Brenda Bennet, and his personal assistant, Jamie Shoop form a girl group that would be called "The Hookers". Prince's vision was that the three women would perform in lingerie and sing sensual songs with lyrics about sex and fantasy.

Such a noble, noble vision.

Prince had been wanting to mentor a girl singer or group since the late 70s when he saw the film A Star is Born with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kirstofferson. The original trio recorded a few demos before Prince met Denise Matthews, a nude model and Canadian B movie actress, in January 1982. Prince was so taken by Matthews' charisma that he decided she would be the perfect frontwoman for his "Hookers" project. Around this time, Prince and Matthews began a romantic relationship. With Matthews' arrival, Shoop was dropped from the group. Matthews was eventually re-christened Vanity. Prince had originally suggested that Matthews use the stage name "Vagina" (to be pronounced /vaginɑ/); she declined and renamed herself "Vanity" instead. Other versions of the story suggest that it was Prince himself who coined the name "Vanity", as he said that looking at Matthews was like looking in a mirror at the female version of himself. With the new trio finalized, Prince renamed the group Vanity 6 (the number representing the group's breast count).

If only all musical groups formed with such lofty aspirations. To the surprise of very few, the project quickly fell apart (morphing into the equally short-lived Appolonia 6) and Vanity later became a born-again Christian preacher. Hey I'd study the Bible with her, if you know what I mean.



At any rate, for other soundtracks, R&B goodies such as these would have been plenty of material to package a bunch of leftover pre-recorded crap around. But the Beverly Hills Cop Soundtrack had other ideas.