Com-Pak Music Theater: The Wonder Twins

revision on 20 June 2024: I added a comment with a link to a cool YouTube video I just found. –JHM

Tonight’s edition of Com-Pak Music Theater brings you more cheese and lots more hair. 🙂

Family legacies in pop music performance have always been fascinating to me (I’m going to post about Wilson Phillips one of these days), and I just recently learned that the duo behind (in front of?) tonight’s band are “double-legacy.” This family apparently made the Guinness Book for being the first one to produce #1 hits in three successive generations. When your grandparents are former radio, TV, and music stars, and your father is a former teen rock idol… Well, I won’t say “what else can you do?” (plenty), but it was certainly in their blood.

Welcome tonight’s guests: Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, best known for fronting the band that bears their family name. I’m not gonna go into a big thing about why I still like the music. *shrug* I just do. 🙂 Anyway, as is typical for me, I’m just now catching up on 17 year-old music videos, and I’m more here to talk about the video.

Nelson: (Can’t Live Without Your) Love and Affection (1990)

What just tickles me about this one is just how much attention someone paid to detail and little bits of humor in what is, essentially, a throwaway pop video. They dubbed the fully-reverbed-and-chorused vocals from the album over the first vocal line in the video (”Here she comes.”), and the funny part is to watch Matthew in the video look up and around to see where all the reverb came from. I laugh at that every time I see it. 🙂 There’s little touches like the “VAGUE” magazine cover (watch for the model to pop back up later).

What amazes me, though, is how much work they put into things. They’re pulling the trick where the video speeds up and slows down, but watch Gunnar and Matthew closely: their lip-syncing and strumming [mostly] stay with the 1x-speed music. That had to be tough to do (probably involved some really silly-sounding fast and slow music on the set). There are sections where they do the video backwards (especially at the end) and still lip-sync forwards. None of this is rocket science, but it’s just a lot more work than I would have expected for a video like this.

Also, the guitar melody (with that little trill) is one of my favorite musical elements in the song, and it was neat to hear them play it with the acoustics (especially with that 12-string Matthew is using).

Nelson: After The Rain (1990)

On that subject, I gotta throw one more at you. The video itself is not all that exciting for me (especially the over-done heavy-handed “Don’t listen. You can do anything you want.” message). However, once you get past that, they take the video as a chance to splice on a musical intro that sounds like something they might use at a concert. It’s a little thing and easily done, but it added another facet to music that I already really enjoyed. By the way… I would so hang that poster up here in the computer room if I could get my hands on one. 🙂 Oh, and I think all the hair-tossing is just absolutely hilarious specifically because of how cliché it looks now. 🙂