I approached Lou with this idea where he would say he was really Cyndi’s manager. The relationship with Lou and Cyndi was so natural and so loving that I knew we had a winner with this combination of wrestling and rock music. He taught me a whole lot about the business, because I would ask him all the questions. From that minute forward, we spoke every day for years. From the minute we said hello to each other, we bonded, we were buddies. And when he walked in, I walked up and introduced myself. Pitchfork: What was it like working with Lou?ĭW: We’re on the set of the video and Lou didn’t hear song, didn’t hear anything, he just showed up. He called me back about an hour and said that Vince said it was fine. When I learned that Ken knew Vince McMahon, I said to do whatever you’ve got to do to give us Captain Lou for this video. At this point I didn’t know anybody in wrestling. The producer of the video was a guy named Ken Walz, he had a relationship with Vince McMahon. It would be an amazing thing-it would be funny, it would be camp, it would totally fit into the comedy of the video. When we were talking about the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" video, we decided that we would use Cyndi’s mom, and that felt perfect to me, and we were talking about who the father should be, and I said it should be Captain Lou Albano, if we could get him to do it. That subliminal connection to wrestling started in my mind. Pitchfork: When did the idea of bringing the wrestling world into Cyndi Lauper’s career come about?ĭW: Cyndi had actually met Captain Lou Albano on a plane coming back from Puerto Rico before I even knew her. As David Shoemaker writes in his book The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling, "Albano’s Papa was an overacted neon epiphany, wagging his finger and throwing his arms in dismay-all the camp that served him so well as a blowhard antagonist playing to the wrestling world’s cheap seat now made newly potent under the lights of MTV hyperactivity." Albano’s casting was made possible by the video’s producer Ken Walz and director Edd Griles, who had developed a relationship with the World Wrestling Federation (now known as the WWE) and its owner Vince McMahon when they tried to make a movie set in the world of pro wrestling. In it, Lauper’s mother is played her actual mom, while her father is played by Captain Lou Albano, the legendary wrestler and manager known for his flamboyant style and the rubber bands he pierced to his face with a safety pin. Lauper turned into one of the breakout stars of the early MTV era and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" won the first Video Music Award for Best Female Video. In 1983, Cyndi Lauper released the video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", the first single from her album She’s So Unusual. =-=-=-Pro wrestling has been used in music videos before-from Tyler, the Creator’s "Domo 23" to Bif Naked’s cover of "We’re Not Going to Take It" off the Ready to Rumble soundtrack-but the connection between the two goes back over 30 years to the time when both of these worlds first became national sensations.
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