Betcher Bottom Dollar: Tapeheads at 35
An irreverent look back at an irreverent musical comedy
My mother spotted movie stars coming out of movie theaters while we waited to go in.
Friends and I once spotted Bernard King while waiting in line to see Sophie’s Choice. “What’s happening, baby?” he replied after I’d shouted, “B!” on 59th Street to my friends’ envy. But unless he was cutting out early, he wasn’t at the show before ours. We waited a while before the theatre let out. But my mother wouldn’t know Bernard King.
She knew Hermonie Gingold, for one, while walking near Carnegie Hall. But on two different occasions at the Sutton Theater on 57th Street just east of Third Avenue, she readily spotted two hard working supporting actors. Simon Oakland was the first. I saw him in too many shows after that to name. But Bullet with Steve McQueen and, maybe Tony Rome with Sinatra, were his biggest. If you search him on IMDb, you’ll see more of his shows that you’ve never heard of than those you recall.
The other supporting actor was Clu Gulager, and he was on virtually every show I bought or sold on Madison Avenue or Broadcast Row during the 1980’s.
In 1988, he was in one of the greatest movies ever made about making (short form) political movies: Tapeheads. Gulager plays a U.S. Senator aiming for The White House who is caught in extramarital perversity with our heroes the Video Aces, John Cusack and Tim Robbins, circuitously having video evidence of the liaisons.
I don’t remember spotting Robbins off camera despite hearing he lived down the street from me. But I did meet Cusack, kind of. We were going up in an elevator at FOX. I was going for an interview and ran into FOX friends on the way. He was with a crew, sucking all the air out of the cab. Despite my being in sales, I was never in the proximity of someone so commanding, and, with so much energy. It turned out we had something in common. He didn’t win a Primetime FOX gig and neither did I.
That, 1988, was the year of Tapeheads, where Mary Crosby, the villainous agent, tells Cusack at diner that she’d do anything to get what she wants. Anything! And, despite having mistakenly drank from a candle wax holder, he was cool enough to respond, “Let’s dance!” She grabs him and says, “I’ll lead.”
Robbins falls in love with a neighbor who’s an artist, and turns out to be the disgraced Gulager’s daughter. Otherwise, the film’s videos are remarkable in their originality. Its most resounding is for Roscoe’s Chicken.
Whether or not they got paid for that one, Don Cornelius was brilliantly cast as a prototypical agent. “Baby Doll” was impulsively creative, with Robbins splashing every color of the rainbow over the set while the band was playing. The Black Cowboys and the Swanky Modes, played by soul legends Junior Walker and Sam Moore, were remarkable. The fact that Mike Nesmith of The Monkees was the producer of the film (he also has a bit part as the water delivery man) only adds to its irreverent brilliance.
The way out-of-print soundtrack, meanwhile, was produced by Blondie bassist Nigel Harrison, and includes songs by Bo Diddley, King Cotton, Devo and Fishbone interspersed amidst original material by the Swanky Modes like “Ordinary Man,” “Betcher Bottom Dollar” and “Audience for my Pain.”
The film (but not the soundtrack album) includes the song “Repave America” written and performed by Tim Robbins, credited as Bob Roberts four years before that film was created. “Repave America” also appeared in the Bob Roberts soundtrack with the lyrics slightly altered to become the even more jingoistic “Retake America.”
It was an important music movie; one I’d include in a syllabus of such. But like Frank Costanza on Seinfeld, rather than tell you anymore, you need to go in fresh.
In memory of Clu Gulager who died in 2022. “But I wanted to be President!”
VIDEO: Tapeheads film trailer
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