Airplay is virtually a thing of the past for most veteran country artists, and the Bellamy Brothers are no exception. But David and Howard Bellamy, whose big hits like “Let Your Love Flow” and “If I Said You Have A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me” came in the 1970s and '80s, have suddenly found favor at YouTube, thanks to their humorous but somewhat controversial new video “Jalapenos.”
The clip, which features people wearing masks of President Obama, Sarah Palin and Tiger Woods, went up in June and quickly tallied 100,000 hits in a week, says David Bellamy, the younger of the brothers, who wrote the song.
“Now we’re well over 800,000,” he adds. “At 50,000 to 75,000 a week we should get to a million soon.”
“Jalapenos” takes on a frustrated anti-politician, pro-traditional conservative values stance. “Life ain’t like a bowl of cherries,” it observes. Rather, “it’s more like a jar of jalapenos...’cause what you do and say today, it don’t go away and stay--it‘ll just come back and burn your ass tomorrow.” It ends by invoking Woods, Bill Clinton, John Edwards and Bernie Madoff as bad examples.
The Brothers had performed the song live a few times to extremely favorable response, says Bellamy.
“People really loved it, so we got some friends together one afternoon and shot a video, got it up on YouTube and it took off like crazy!” he says. “[Country video channels] CMT and GAC don’t play us old guys much anymore, so we did a duet video with the Bacon Brothers last year in the Memphis jail for ‘Guilty Of The Crime’ from our album The Anthology, Volume 1--which is better known in Europe than here, though the video did get quite a bit of play. What’s weird about ‘Jalapenos’ is that it’s really low-budget—like an Ed Wood production!”
Weird for Bellamy, too, is some of the reaction among viewers and programmers. Comments on YouTube’s “Jalapenos” page range from anti-liberal and anti-politician invective to fears and claims that the video is being banned.
“The socio-political climate is hot enough that people watch and want to comment one way or another,” notes Bellamy, “but we didn’t shoot it to be one way or the other. What happens is that country music has a lot more right-wing fans, so you get right-wing comments more than anything else. But I think we’re harder on Tiger Woods than Obama or Palin!”
The Bellamys did in fact find trouble, not so much with viewer/programmer interpretation of any political commentary, but with the song’s reference to Viagra and a rhyme of “Glenn Beck” and “erect.”
“Radio—what little there is for us being an old act--didn’t mind us saying ‘ass,’ but didn’t want us to say ‘erect,’” says Bellamy. “I found that really funny, since it’s said on the commercials that run on TV every five minutes! But we put it on YouTube and it went wild, so it’s almost our first underground hit.”
Noting that he and his brother have successfully “offended the people we are trying to offend—everyone!,” Bellamy says that they’re “fed up with the whole thing” in terms of their own current political philosophy.
“We’ve met more Republicans than left-wingers--but that’s because we’re in country music,” he says. “There are lots of things the Democrats do that we don’t like, and lots of things the Republicans do we don’t like. So I think more than anything else we’re saying that there’s such a mess you have to laugh about it—because you don’t want to cry!”
The sentiment really isn't that far from the Bellamys' 1985 hit "Old Hippie," which described the plight of a 35 year-old aging hippie unsure of his place in a changing world.
"Old hippies," pondered Bellamy. "That's kind of us, too."
He's reminded, too, of another Bellamy Brothers country hit that resonated with the counter-culture--"Get Into Reggae Cowboy," from 1982.
"We were in New York walking down the street not too far from Central Park with our cowboy hats on and this rasta guy with a boombox on his shoulder jumps off the wall and says, 'Hey, cowboy. Get into reggae!'--and it seemed so funny to us because we grew up around reggae," recalls Bellamy, who grew up with his brother in Florida. "We were into any type of island music almost as much as country, pop and rock, and used to pick oranges with Jamaicans--and looked forward to it because they sang all the time. So it struck us as funny that a rasta guy would yell out instructions at us, and I went back to the hotel that afternoon and wrote the song."
The Bellamys' affinity for island music goes both ways, apparently, as Bellamy says that Mel Tillis tells a story about being in Tahiti "and the only thing they found in the record shop was Bellamy Brothers!"
Meanwhile, the Brothers are set to release The Anthology, Volume 2 on Oct. 5. It will include "Jalapenos."
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[The National Highway Transportation Safety Association advises that law enforcement is cracking down on drunk driving over the Labor Day weekend. Plan ahead and have a designated sober driver, take a taxi, or utilize public transportation.]
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