Billy Squier’s second solo album, Don’t Say No, made him a superstar. His fourth LP, Signs of Life, made him a laughing stock. Then there’s the album Squier made in between them, Emotions in Motion. It boasts cover art by no less than Andy Warhol and features a cameo appearance by none other than Queen’s Freddie Mercury, yet it seems strangely forgotten — even though its lead single, the 1982 Top 40 hit “Everybody Wants You,” features one of the most indelible guitar riffs of its era.
Emotions in Motion reunited Squier with Don’t Say No producer Reinhold Mack, who in 1981 received a Grammy Award nomination for his work on Queen’s The Game, the rock gods’ most successful studio album on U.S. shores. Squier first surfaced in the mid-1970s with the hard rock combo Piper, whose self-titled 1977 A&M debut Circus magazine declared “the greatest debut album ever produced by a U.S. rock band,” before signing a solo deal with Capitol in 1979. The Tale of the Tape, released a year later, attracted little notice from Squier’s target arena-rock audience, but the album’s lead single, “The Big Beat,” soon achieved mythic proportions within the hip-hop community for its monstrous, John Bonham-esque drums, performed by Bobby Chouinard (whom Squier dubbed “Mr. Big Feet”) and overdubbed with the sound of Squier’s hands pounding the side of a trap case. “The Big Beat” went on to become one of the most sampled tracks in hip-hop history, appearing on classic records from Run-DMC, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, A Tribe Called Quest and Ice Cube, although you might know it best from Jay-Z’s Rick Rubin-produced “99 Problems.”
“I’d always envisioned ‘The Big Beat’ leading off The Tale of the Tape with the BIGGEST drumbeat the rock world had ever heard,” Squier wrote on his website in 2013. “I knew I had something good… but I had no idea just how good.”
Squier originally invited Queen guitarist Brian May to produce 1981’s Don’t Say No; May declined, but recommended Mack, whose production credits also include the Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll and Black and Blue, as well as Sparks’ Whomp That Sucker. Don’t Say No’s first single, “The Stroke,” remains Squier’s most memorable hit, reaching the Top 20 in the U.S. thanks in part to fledgling cable network MTV, which put the song’s video into heavy rotation. Squier told Mack he wanted “The Stroke” to sound like a rowing crew plunging its oars and funneling water: “I saw that as a challenge,” Mack told the New York Post in 2013. “I think I translated it pretty successfully.” Don’t Say No ultimately spent more than two years on the Billboard 200 and sold in excess of 4 million copies in the U.S. (Rick Rubin later sampled “The Stroke” as well, this time for Eminem’s “Berserk.”)
Squier wrote the Emotions in Motion album in “a few short but arduous weeks,” and although the album further honed Don’t Say No’s winning combination of stadium-friendly bombast and sleek power-pop craftsmanship, his relationship with Mack unraveled during the recording process. “That first album we did was dead simple,” Mack recalled three decades later. “Then, all of a sudden, it was big time. He had this little Timex watch on Don’t Say No; this one, he had the Cartier watch. He bought a Porsche at the factory at Stuttgart. He’d been very down to earth. Things changed.”
Squier acquired one other marvel of modern engineering ahead of Emotions of Motion: a 1958 Gibson Les Paul Sunburst (“the Stradivarius of electric guitars,” he proclaims), which replaced the Telecaster Custom featured on the Don’t Say No cover as his instrument of choice. It’s the only guitar present on “Everybody Wants You,” and it’s as central to the track’s success as Chouinard’s drums are to “The Big Beat.” “Everybody Wants You,” which eviscerates the ego and excesses of an unspecified rock megastar — perhaps, if only subconsciously, Squier himself — is all about its fierce but funky opening riff, which stacks two separate guitar parts and adds a snarling bassline for maximum impact. (Enjoy prying them all apart and piecing them back together here in KORD.) Squier later claimed that the original band tracks for “Everybody Wants You” produced by Mack failed to pass muster, so he scrapped them and recorded all new parts himself: “I salvaged the album at the end,” Squier told The Los Angeles Times in 1986. “Ultimately [Mack] didn’t understand what I wanted.”
Squier fared better in his collaboration with Andy Warhol, the century-defining pop artist who, among his myriad other achievements, managed and produced the Velvet Underground in the band’s infancy; the seminal 1967 debut LP The Velvet Underground and Nico features Warhol’s now-iconic banana cover, and he later created the zippered cover adorning the aforementioned Rolling Stones’ 1971 classic Sticky Fingers, which features a close-up image of a denim-clad male crotch, complete with a working zipper and perforations around the belt buckle. “Andy was at the height of his popularity. So I called him up, and he said, ‘Sure,’” Squier told The Boston Globe in 2005. “He asked me what colors I didn’t like.” (Warhol’s diary, posthumously published in 1989, recalls their first meeting a bit differently: “Went to Madison Square Garden (cab $4) to see Billy Squier, he was just going on. Backstage there were about fifty nude girls serving hot dogs and beer and mud wrestling. Took pictures, then realized I didn’t have film in the camera.”) Warhol snapped a series of Polaroids of a shirtless Squier and produced several different silkscreened images for the rocker’s approval; in addition to the Emotions in Motion cover, Warhol’s illustration later graced the picture-disk version of the “Everybody Wants You” single as well as posters, badges and other promotional items.
Capitol issued Emotions in Motion on July 23, 1982. While the album’s title track features backing vocals from Queen’s frontman Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor, “Everybody Wants You” was chosen as the album’s lead single, released on Sept. 14; it peaked at number 32 on the Billboard Top 40 and topped the trade magazine’s Mainstream Rock Tracks chart for six consecutive weeks. The song’s resurfaced in popular culture off and on in the decades since — the Continental Wrestling Association’s Fabulous Ones (Steve Keirn and Stan Lane) used it as their entrance theme from 1982 to 1985, and in 2004 it was mashed up with electroclash duo Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” for the soundtrack to Bravo’s hit reality series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy — but listeners of a particular vintage will also affectionately recall the “Everybody Wants You” riff’s deadpan cameo at the conclusion of “Range Life,” the third single from Pavement’s classic 1994 album Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain.
Squier followed Emotions in Motion with 1984’s Signs of Life, which is where everything goes sideways. He began writing the album after wrapping his first headlining arena tour, but his first choice for producer — Robert John “Mutt” Lange, famed for megasellers like AC/DC’s Back in Black and Foreigner’s 4 — was already committed to helming the Cars’ Heartbeat City sessions, so Squier brought aboard Jim Steinman, the mastermind behind Meat Loaf’s milestone rock opera Bat Out of Hell. Steinman’s pop instincts and Wagnerian production sensibilities steered Squier away from his guitar-heavy comfort zone into a more keyboard-centric context, and while the album earned platinum certification, the critics were not kind. Much more problematic was the music video for Signs of Life’s lead single, “Rock Me Tonite,” which features Squier dancing around a satin-sheeted, pastel-lit bed and playing a pink guitar — chum in the water for homophobes and related Reagan-era douchebags. “Rock Me Tonite” was so disastrously received by Squier’s fans that Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks’ 2011 oral history I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution devotes an entire chapter to how the clip capsized Squier’s career.
“[‘Rock Me Tonite’ is] an MBA case study in How to Make a Bad Artistic Decision,” Tannenbaum told Grantland around the time of I Want My MTV’s release. “When Squier’s manager saw the video, he told us ‘I was speechless.’ When Squier’s label saw it, an executive said ‘The immediate consensus was that Billy’s performance was disturbingly effeminate.’ Squier, who sat in my living room for three hours to recount the event in detail, said ‘When I saw the video, my jaw dropped. It was diabolical.’ Squier also said the video snuffed out his career, after two huge-selling albums. ‘How can a four-minute video do that? Okay, it sucked. So?’” Squier fired his managers and accused “Rock Me Tonite” director and choreographer Kenny Ortega of misleading and exploiting him — charges Ortega denied — but the damage was done: Enough Is Enough, Squier’s fifth album, was a commercial flop, and 1989’s Hear & Now yielded his final Hot 100 chart entry, “Don’t Say You Love Me,” which climbed only as high as number 58. Squier walked away from the music business following the 1993 release of his eighth and final Capitol effort, Tell the Truth, although he later toured with Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, whose Live 2006 release includes a new rendition of “Everybody Wants You.”
Squier occupies a curious place in pop history: he’s reportedly earned millions in writing and publishing revenues from “The Big Beat” and “The Stroke,” but he’s better remembered for the samples sourced from those records than he is for any of the hit singles he headlined, “Everybody Wants You” included. “I wouldn’t want to end up in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the ‘Master of Hip-Hop Samples,’” Squier said in 2005. “But you take what you can get.”
Everybody Wants You (KORD-0039)
