May 22, 2014

Ray Stevens: The Statler Brothers clip...

Hello one and all...it's been a couple of days since I posted a blog. I decided to take a brief break so that some of my older blog posts could potentially become discovered in the archives. Today's Throwback Thursday installment from Ray Stevens is an early '90s appearance on The Statler Brothers Show. I believe this performance is from early 1992 or it could be from late 1991. The Statler's TNN program debuted in the fall of 1991 and Ray happened to be among the first series of guests.



The song, "Power Tools", is the lead-off track on Ray's 1991 project titled #1 with a Bullet. It became the album's second single release early in 1992 (the first single happened to be the album's closer, "Workin' for the Japanese" in the late summer of 1991). One of the surprise hit programs on TV at the time happened to be a sitcom called Home Improvement that had debuted in the fall of 1991. Also, do-it-yourself programs on public television such as This Old House and New Yankee Workshop had long received mainstream recognition. As a side note, after Bob Vila's departure from This Old House in 1989, he moved on to a similar series called Bob Vila's Home Again through the mid 2000s. Do-it-yourself, machismo-oriented men became something of a trend/fad in the early to mid '90s and Ray's song was definitely timely and topical. It's anyone's guess as to why the footage you'll see in the clip never made it into an official music video. "Power Tools" wouldn't become a music video until the mid 2000s and it was in animated form instead of live-action.

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