Old-Time Rock ‘n’ Roll:How The 1980s Embraced 1950s and 1960s Oldies Music
Gladys Knights and the Pips recorded the hit I Heard It Through the Grapevine
in 1967. Marvin Gaye recorded a bluesier, less upbeat version which topped the charts in 1968, and became a classic. Jeans-maker Levi Strauss, struggling in the mid eighties due to being perceived as a dated brand, decided to use a mixture of the past, teen rebellion, and sex to market itself to the fifteen to nineteen year old male market. The company launched The Launderette
commercial in 1985 to promote its 501 jeans brand. Gaye’s version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine
plays in the background while a young, good-looking man with slick hair confidently strides into a laundry mat. He’s dressed in a black shirt with blue tight-fitting jeans. Everyone else looks like they’re from the 1950s. Kids look at him admiringly. Women with high hair eye him. They want him. He walks up to a washing machine, takes off his shirt and jeans, and places them in the washer, leaving only his white boxers on his skinny, fit body. All eyes are on him as he then sits and waits, half naked, for his load to finish. Nick Kamen, the half-naked studly rebel became an obsession to many. The commercial was a hit in the US and Europe. It boosted the Levi brand due to girls forcing their boyfriends to buy Levis.
Levis continued using the mixture of rebellion, fifties-sixties scenes, oldies music, and most importantly, men who strip down to their underwear in ads during the remainder of the eighties. In another commercial, The Ronettes Be My Baby
plays while a confident, studly man wearing Levis driving an old pickup rescues a couple with a broken down car on the side of a deserted dessert road. The couple is a beautiful damsel dressed in fifties garb and her nerdy companion, dressed in a tan suit, looking like Back to the Future’s George McFly. The denim-wearing hunk takes off his jeans but does keep his shirt and jacket on. He uses the pants to tow the car to safety. The woman decides to ride with the pant-less stranger, leaving the McFly look-alike in the towed car. The pant-less stranger then decides to shift his truck into a higher gear, the jeans rip, and George McFly is left in the dust as the new lust-birds leave him behind.
Marvin Gaye’s rendition of I Heard It Through the Grapevine
also aided in marketing California Raisins. Clay animation, widely known as claymation in the late 1980s, uses stop motion animation with clay model characters. The 1987 claymation California Raisin commercials featured sneaker-wearing raisins singing and dancing to I Heard It Through the Grapevine.
Kids enjoyed the animated products. Their parents also enjoyed the commercials, according to advertising guru David Martin, due to the song. Raisin sales jumped 9% after the commercials aired. Only 5.4 million was spent on television advertising for the Raisins, which was cheaper than McDonald’s $344.1 million for its nod to nostalgia Mac Tonight
commercial. The Raisins topped the charts as the number one commercial for 1987.
©2021 Tim Sheehan