Awesome 80's Video #1: "No Way Out" by Starship

(Full disclosure: This post springs from an e-mail I wrote to a few friends. Personal references and in-jokes may have been deleted. Awesomeness is hopefully retained)

Welcome tp yet another new recurring feature here at the blog, a periodic look at the best music videos of THE decade for music videos, the 1980s. This week, let’s look at Jefferson Starship’s "No Way Out," a song from the album that was reportedly so cheesy that Paul Kantner finally said, “I’ve had it,” and left the band, leading directly to the formation of the Starship we all know and love that Built [insert your city here] on Rock and Roll and made “Mannequin” a hit.

I will spare you a blow-by-blow of this video and will instead highlight some of the features that make you wonder how much blow was consumed during the shoot. Besides, I can’t really explain what’s going on here except in broad strokes. It’s a concept video that combines mad scientists, Catholic confessionals, geisha imagery, and Mickey Thomas’ ill-suited mustache, yet it doesn’t all come together very well. In fact, in this upload of the video I link to, the clip actually freezes for a second—surely the result of a flaw in the recording, but it seems as if the video itself is saying, “Wait a minute, let’s take a timeout and figure what the hell is going on here.”

First, let’s talk about the song, which is actually not bad and, one has to admit, is catchy as all get-out. It starts with a very 1980s-sounding keyboard hook, then goes into some funky time shifts and some guitar solos to complement that constant keyboard sound. In other words, yep, it’s the eighties.

And of course, it being Mickey Thomas, he’s gonna sing his ass off. I only wish in this case he sang his ‘stache off, because it just bugs me for some reason. Is he trying to pull off an Oates look? Because, sir, I know John Oates. I rocked out to John Oates. I recently bought a vintage Rolling Stone with John Oates featured on the cover. And you, Mickey Thomas, are no John Oates.

We start with Mickey and his gal going to the castle/lab/whatever, and we get one of those great non-musical intros that used to make videos look so pretentious—I mean, cool. They’re greeted at the door by Grace Slick, who has little to do in this entire clip except make ghastly faces. What did I say about cocaine earlier?
Then Mickey is led up to a confessional booth. See, the song is about his woman not buying the story he came up with as to where he was last night. So we get a confessional/lie detector thing going with some exaggerated effects and noises (the sound design cracks me up in this video—watch this clip and notice how ridiculously noisy all the sound effects are) and oh, yeah, SPECIAL GUEST STAR Father Guido Sarducci. Well, he is a priest, so he fits here, but really all he does is smoke and sit around with no discernible purpose...yes, pretty much like every Father Guido Sarducci appearance ever.

There is some weird stuff going down in the laboratory part, and Grace Slick is still being creepy, but the most bizarre sequences are when Sarducci starts watching some scene play out in front of him. It’s a dude who I am pretty sure is the drummer being entertained by a geisha-like woman trying to be “mysterious.” He digs it, though, so the drummer, who looks like either an eighties porn star or an eighties pro wrestler—wait, is there a difference?—watches her get out of bed and start swaying, so his reaction is to pick up a nearby dumbbell (back then, all swingin’ singles kept one on the nightstand) and start doing bicep curls while she “performs.”

Well, it’s better than watching Mickey Thomas do it. At least this guy’s moustache suits him.

From this point on, it’s more creepy bedroom scenes, more special effects, several re-used shots, footage of Mickey Thomas out on the town with a bevy of beauties, and a weird exchange of cash between Grace and Mickey’s video girlfriend that I can almost certainly assure you is not a drug deal.

I could go on, but please, experience this for yourself.