Video

The Screamin Honkers Music Video

When CNN Producer Fritz Meyer approached us about collaborating on a music video, we were excited to give it a shot, especially since he was going to foot the bill. We worked through storyboards together for a video around Bruce's song "What's Wrong With That?", and shot it in one day using Bruce's apartment, building and the area around it in Long Island City in Queens NY, just across the East River from Manhattan.

You can see the World Trade Center in the background of one of the shots. That's Bruce's green car we temporarily put gates on, and you can see friends and fans in the last shot, including our then-manager, the late Bill Held, Susan Chicoine, Henry Eshelman, Peter Cherr and others.

Through hard work and lots of pleading, we managed to get the video shown on a few TV shows — music video shows on Friday and Saturday nights tried to compete with the then-fairly-new MTV cable network — such as Hot Tracks on WABC, and Night Flight, hosted by the great DJ Meg Griffin. The budget for the video was about $1,000, if memory serves. It shows, but thank you Fritz, for making this piece of Honker History.

The Screamin Honkers in the Notorious Film "Ishtar"

Our friend and actor David Higlen saw a notice for auditions for bands to be in a feature film, and The Screamin Honkers passed the audition. We were dressed by Wardrobe, then spent a couple days mostly waiting in a trailer for our time in front of the camera — filmed at the nightclub "Trax" on the upper west side of NYC.

We said a passing "hi" to Dustin Hoffman or Warren Beatty but didn't really interact with them beyond that.... When the film was in editing, we heard that we might be left out. Then we heard we were in. When we attended the premiere, and saw that the scene we and a few other bands were in were meant to be mediocre at best, we wondered whether it was a compliment or not to have been included after all.

But given its reputation as one of the most expensive (for the time) and worst comedies ever, it's kind of fun to be considered a part of that piece of film history.