WTV: Piledriver – The Music Videos (1987)

With Rick Derringer’s passing today, I got ambitious, and by ambitious I meant I did some Internet Archive deep digging to find my 2002 review of the VHS to Piledriver : The Wrestling Album II. Which was actually a redo of one of my first attempts at a retro rant, waaaaaaay back in the day, I’m talking RSPW Territory. I forget where I posted the original, but the redo was on the site of a guy I honestly wish I knew what he was up to now, Jeff “The Heel” Conner. Since Joe Marotta is adamant that the OVP Podcast will NOT cover it (nonetheless, if you don’t listen to OVP…[ALLEN LUDDEN]…why not?!!? https://www.youtube.com/@OVPsWWF1987Canon ), enjoy this trip back to me in the midst of grad school. I will Megabucks Sez as needed, probably cringing at myself all the way:

We start with the Coliseum Video cube logo, which can also be seen on…THE CLOSING LOGO MEGAMIX VOLUME ONE, AVAILABLE FOR ORDERING AT MY HOME PAGE! (Thumbs up, expecting cheap pop) (Megabucks Sez: Link not included, because, well, the site doesn’t exist anymore, and I don’t want the cheap pop to turn into a Hogan on Netflix reaction when you realize that. And yes, I used to belong to a project that preserved TV and movie company logos on VHS, which eventually evolved into the AVID Database.) They also use the song heard in 8-bit form on the first NES Wrestlemania game. (Why that one didn’t make it on Wrestlecrap along with In Your House and Backstage Assault, I’ll never know) (Note from The Heel:Because it was a TREMENDOUS game given the technology restraints on 1987. Thank you & sorry to interrupt.) (Megabucks Sez: Well, no one’s perfect, not even The Heel. And I forgot to look before seeing that he Sez’ed my writing too. P.S. DID R.D. ever put the original WM game in? I have to check.)

Taped in some unknown WWF control room.

Your host is producer George Stevens, a WWF Control Room dweller not unlike Sean Mooney, Todd Pettingzoo, and Michael Cole. (Megabucks Sez: And Craig DeGeorge, but his mother wouldn’t let him in the Room. And…I’ll leave the Craig jokes to Joe and Quinn at OVP. Really, follow them!) He’s got eight exciting videos for us. And exclusive interviews from Slick, Honky Tonk Man, and Arnold Skaaland, the foreman in the Piledriver video, which is up first.

But first, some comments from Joe Broaska, who isn’t really a construction foreman, he just plays one (poorly) on TV. In a really corny Brooklyn accent, he recalls how those “wrasslas” made his crew look puny. He could probably finish the building in two days if the WWF guys were helping. Sorry, Joe, Ric Flair was in the NWA at the time, and I doubt the Hulkster could carry a jackhammer to ++++. Anyhow, that leads into the first video…

VIDEO #1: Piledriver (Koko B. Ware) = Honky Tonk, Jimmy Hart, and Peggy Sue drive through a construction site manned by various wrestlers. Bam Bam and Billy Jack are so mad they can throw their tools and make dirty looks. But fear not, here’s the Hulkster and his pickax! (Megabucks Sez: Pickax Bomber?) Honky is run off as the song begins when Don Muraco dumps a board and sends dust into his face. Koko sings while doing choreography with HHH’s best friend, Mr. Sledgehammer (before he was a star). Hulk has fun with cement, and the wrestlers are basically smitten with women’s asses. Hey, it’s Vince McMahon! (Megabucks Sez: like milk…) And Arnold Skaaland’s port-a-potty is forklifted! Also appearing in this video are Oliver Humperdink and Superstar Billy Graham, the latter of which was part of something mighty interesting that I discovered in the video. Koko sings, “First you think you’re so strong (camera is on Hulk), but something goes wrong (now we see Superstar).” Combined with Graham’s “You and I know the reason why” photograph with Hogan from the Slammys, this would definitely be one of the proverbial “things that make you go hmmmmm.” (Megabucks Sez: a false memory on my end. It was Muraco, not Graham).

George talks about how much fun everyone had on the Piledriver video, and then we go to Skaaland, who didn’t mind the cement, but understandably found it rough when his outhouse was picked up. Quoth George: “Arnold was FUN to work with!” Unlike the Honky Tonk Man, who is on next. We all want to see him dance and hear him sing and play the guitar, you know. He’s “hacked off” because his pink Cadillac got all dusty in the Piledriver video, and all the girls grabbed at his jumpsuit. But that’s OK, because HTM promises the best video ever is up next:

VIDEO #2: Honky Tonk Man (by, uh, refresh my memory? 🙂 )More fun with Honky, Jimmy, and Peggy Sue (Not Sherri here, and obviously not Jimmy). No Jesse “Lee Lewis” Ventura on the piano this time, though.

Basically, Honky’s making an appearance at some bandstand in “Honkywood.” There are signs such as “Honkymania” and “Elvis Who?” and everyone’s dancing and all the girls are going crazy, fainting and trying to steal HTM’s scarf again. (Back in ’99, I theorized that this could have been Ivory in her “I can only last 5 minutes without my scarf!” phase) The catch? A disclaimer at the end of the video: “The characters in this video were paid for their performances by ‘The Honky Tonk Man’.” See, no one really likes Honky because he’s a bad person and all…ah, the days before “shades of gray”…

(BTW, as a sidenote, this has been bugging me for some time, and still is: Does anyone know the title and artist of the song HTM used to use before switching to his Piledriver theme?) (Megabucks Sez: And indeed I learned eventually that it was another WWF creation, Hart and Maguire? And not only that, but if you listen carefully it was repurposed into the Bushwhackers theme!)

Well, George is back, and he speculates that a lot of editing was needed in the Honky Tonk video, since a lot of people wonder if he can really sing and play the guitar (insert the Guitar Shot of Doom on Randy Savage from SNME). He also points out that the people in the video were acting as if they were watching Elvis in his heyday, so he had to stick in that disclaimer to give us an “honest presentation.” Thanks.

Now George tells how he gets really nervous about working with wrestlers, and Ax and Smash of Demolition are no exception. (Megabucks Sez: Ah, here we go…) Apparently, the Demos told George that they wanted their video to feature “Bombs going off. Buildings being destroyed. Chaos! And of course, footage from our matches.” Says George, “If those two guys told YOU that’s what they wanted to see, would you do it any differently?”

VIDEO #3: DEMOLITION-! (Rick Derringer) (Megabucks Sez: RIP. And yes, we used to put ~! at the end of things we really like.) = One of my two favorite songs from the Piledriver album. And this is one of those videos I can picture Beavis and Butt-head watching. “Uhhhhhhhhhh, is this, like, KISS? Huh huh huh.” “Yeah! Fire! Fire! Fire! Hehhehheh! Explosions! Yeah! Hehhehheh! Look, that’s house’s blowing up! Yeah! Yeah! Kick his ass! Hehhehhehhehheh!” “Uhhhhhhhh, settle down, Beavis. Huh huh huh…” Basically, a lot of Demos clips interspersed with disaster scenes that seem to have been taken from old B-movies. I can notice the Killer Bees, the Young Stallions, Siva Afi, and Brady Boone in there. But what’s important is of course that the song ROCKS, and is made a little cooler when remembering what a Demolition fan I was back in the day.

George says that Rick Derringer can play a “mean” guitar, and Demolition is one “mean” tag team. But now it’s time for another kind of “mean”…Mean Gene Okerlund. (Insert clip of Gene interviewing King Kong Bundy and the mi [Megabucks Sez: Edited by the Buzzr Censors for your protection] from WM III) “Informative, humorous, and always entertaining” is how George describes Okerlund, not elevating his reputation in my eyes any. (Megabucks Sez…he was trying to be edgy by pretending to hate Mean Gene) Anyway, we’re about to see Mean Gene as we never saw him before:

VIDEO #4: Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Koo (Rick Derringer and Mean Gene Okerlund) = Gene is Dexter Peabody, music appreciation expert for Mrs. Brooks’ class. He’s supposedly there to show a filmstrip on classical music, but it predictably ends up being a video for the song, with him and Derringer singing, and Hulk Hogan guitar-synching. To Mrs. Brooks’ shock, Okerlund is now wearing a blue wig and Bret Hart-style sunglasses. In a related note, he is also acting like a total moron, making stupid faces and dancing like a sideshow freak. This I believe helped earn this video its spot in the late, great Wrestlecrap. (Megabucks Sez: wait, WC shut down some time in 2002? Someone must refresh my memory.) And Mean Gene acting like an idiot…sorry George, I think I HAVE seen this Gene before. Anyway, all the students, of course, dance along and Mrs. Brooks gets into it as well, as she turns into a kind of early Stacy Kiebler, lifting her skirt up at various times during which I think I hear the word “pussy” in the song. This and the line about “getting high” were also mentioned in the Wrestlecrap article. (Megabucks Sez: you know, for kids! Like seeing Superstar Graham’s uncensored surgery months prior! And this makes the video for this Temu Hot for Teacher…)

Mrs. Brooks made the video “fun” for George, who wishes his high school teachers were more like her. Sex Ed teachers, maybe? Anyhow, speaking of pretty women, next comes Girls in Cars. But first, a word from Jim Johnston, who wrote the song and is a well-known figure in WWF music, and has remained so today (Megabucks Sez: well, “today” being 2002 of course). Supposedly they got the idea when all Rick and Tito talked about were girls, and how you’d see them driving by and you tried to catch them but you never seemed to see them again. All right, but I wouldn’t expect websites to be devoted to deciphering that meaning, ala Don McLean’s American Pie. Unless some college professor decides to listen to it in reverse and, like with the Popeye theme, declare in a pompous voice, “Backwards, it says ‘give me a f*ck,’ then there’s a little gibberish (pronounced with a “g” sound, not “j”), followed by ‘give me a f*ck now.’”

(WE INTERRUPT THIS REVIEW TO ALLOW MYSELF TO JUMP AND SHOUT LIKE A LUNATIC FOR FINALLY WORKING THE POPEYE JOKE IN!!!!!!!!! NOW BACK TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED REVIEW.)

(Megabucks Sez: Oh man, the Popeye thing. See, when I was in grad school one week I fell down the rabbit hole about backmasking in songs. Some you probably know…the Stairway stuff, some Beatles, Another One Bites the Dust = It’s fun to smoke marijuana. Then I got to this one website that was pointing the finger at cartoon shows and TV theme songs, one of which was the “Popeye the Sailor Man” theme song, which, when played backwards, sounds like…what 2002 me mentioned. I had several laughing fits that week thinking about it, such that my chest was cramped from it all. So this all became another personal meme…amped up when I found RealAudio clips of the backmasking, and the Popeye example played the song normally, but before they did it backwards, they had this snooty-sounding professor explaining it as 2002 me recapped. Back to 23 years prior now…)

VIDEO #5: Girls in Cars (Robbie Dupree and Strike Force) = Basically, it’s, well, lots of girls and lots of cars. While it seems simple, the song has nonetheless been the source of many questions for me. For example, I always wondered why Strike Force were billed as singing in the song, but I don’t seem to hear anyone who sounds like Santana or Martel. They don’t even appear in the video, and the only reference to them is one glimpse of the Strike Force Mobile driving by. And was anyone else confused when they gave the song to Ted DiBiase for the NES WrestleMania game? Or worse yet, when Jimmy Hart sang it at the 1987 Slammys? I mean, Strike Force and the Hart Foundation were feuding at the time, right? Maybe I will be the one to write that analytical essay at this rate after all! (Megabucks Sez: It all comes back to Strike Force doesn’t it? And my theory is, the song avoided featuring wrestlers because, being that it sounded like it fit a total heartthrob team, it was originally planned for the Can-Am Connection, but then Zenk Happens, and they just transferred it to Martel’s new tag team with a gratuitous Strike Force reference stuck in.)

SLICK is next, eating a whole bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. (Megabucks Sez: …like milk.) Between that and the Hoochie Koo lyrics, I am amazed at the stuff our “family entertainment oriented” friends at Titan got away with in the ’80s. Slick tells us that he can beat Koko B. Ware, Robbie Dupree, and Jimmy Hart singing AND dancing. As a matter of fact, he dances so good, he can even beat Michael Jackson, bro-tha! Preach it, Slickster! So he can eat in peace (Heel here again. I must note that Slick bid us to “leave me (him) alone so I can eat my yardbird!” Yes, he really called fried chicken “yardbird”. Oy.) Slick introduces us to…

VIDEO #6: JIVE SOUL BRO-! (Slick) = Yes, it’s my other Piledriver favorite. Total blaxploitation, as Slick gets funky on the mean streets, gets dissed by several women, and eventually ran out of town by everyone (including a kid on a Big Wheels). Also, lots of special effects involving closeups of the Slickster’s mouth, which was also mentioned in Wrestlecrap, but I didn’t mind it much. Guess I just accepted the camp of the whole thing. In fact, it all RULES IT big time. With all the “retro” names being entered for the Royal Rumble (Perfect, Goldust, Venis, Godfather), why can’t they bring back Slick in (to quote the great Gorilla Monsoon) some way, shape, or form? (Megabucks Sez…past me, you had NO idea what was coming in the decades [!] to come…)

Back with Slick, who is asked if he’s going to pay for all the KFC. He thought it was on the house for a star like him. Maybe he can get the Heel and I some free BBQ Wings. But speaking of stars, George talks about the “biggest” star of all: Andre the Giant, who is the star of this video:

VIDEO #7: Stand Back (Vince McMahon) = On the surface, it’s an Andre tribute, mostly with clips from WM III and the Battle Royal from the March ’87 SNME (where Andre, in his first match as a heel, eliminates Hogan). (Megabucks, er, 1987 Vince Sez, THEY WERE LIKE BROTHERS!) A lot of stuff from his face days as well. It was funnier when Vince was singing it at the 1987 Slammys, which was seen as early as 2001, thanks to his angle with Chris Jericho and [Mr. Black] (who even busted a Travoltaesque move to the song!) Anyhow, as you may or may not know, the lyrics were apparently meant as a message from Vince to Jim Crockett and any other WWF competitors. So maybe it was timely for Jericho to bring it out of the mothballs, after Vince had bought WCW.

George again, and he reiterates that some of these videos made him pretty nervous. For the last one, the likes of the Hart Foundation, Slick, Ted DiBiase (said with a slight Italian accent), Honky Tonk Man, and Butch Reed all wanted a starring role and pestered George non-stop, nearly ruining his home life. It would be too easy to make a joke about that one. Oh, what the hell…OK, I think Rena already did that to him. (RENA JOKES = BUYRATES!!!) (Megabucks Sez: The Heel and I had a personal meme about shaming Sable.)

VIDEO #8: If You Only Knew (WWF Wrestlers) = This is Piledriver’s answer to Land of 1,000 Dances from The Wrestling Album, with everyone getting together to sing. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere as funny as 1,000 Dances. Lots of cheesy ’80s video effects and various WWF clips, including “highlights” from the Bam Bam/Volkoff feud (the culmination of the Battle for Bam Bam angle) and the formation of the Megapowers. Hey, look, it’s Outback Jack with the other babyfaces!

BOTTOM LINE: Hey, it’s ’80s music videos, so you can’t go wrong. Even when things get cheesy, you can’t help but laugh, and that to me helps makes this video a good time. Plus I do like most of the songs, so that helps as well. Recommended for nostalgia, and some pretty good theme music.

(And I’ll see you in a while with some more rock and wrestling…)