CAPTAIN VIDEO!: 38 Special, "The Sound of Your Voice"

Greetings, Videots! It feels like it's been an uncomfortably long while since we last spoke, but it's always difficult for CAPTAIN VIDEO! to get a solid bead on time here in the 1980th Dimension — one minute, you're minding your own business; the next, you realize you've been wandering around the freaky hospital depicted in Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" video for something like ten years.

Speaking of being lost in a time warp, let us now turn our attention to the members of 38 Special, who had the extreme misfortune of releasing a very 1980s album — Bone Against Steel, their ninth studio outing — in the summer of 1991. From a distance, this seemed like no big deal at the time; for many if not most intents and purposes, '80s rock was still moving right along at the dawn of the '90s, and this particular summer brought big records from an array of veteran AOR acts, including Tom Petty and Van Halen.

Looking more closely, however, one quickly realizes that even during the period when all of the previously named acts were at the absolute height of their success, there were some key differences between them — most notably the extreme eagerness that 38 Special had long displayed when it came to trading in key aspects of their sound in order to achieve and/or maintain commercial success. While it would be silly to argue that rock acts like Petty and Van Halen never made concessions to Top 40 trends, they basically always sounded like themselves — even when Van Halen swapped out David Lee Roth for Sammy Hagar, they still had Eddie's guitar tying everything together.