Ratt – Round and Round
1984
424K Likes
Best comments
1.“This song makes me want to lift weights as I smoke a cigarette and ask my step-sister if she's gonna get the door or what.”
More comments
- 2.“Love how Milton Berle makes a cameo in this video. His nephew was Ratt's manager.”
- 3.“When I was 11 or 12, they were playing in a garage down the street from me. One day walking home from school, one of them offered me 5 bucks to stand outside the garage and look out for the police. I bought my first rock 'n' roll cassette... and the rest is my rock 'n' roll story.”
The story
Ratt's biggest hit, and one of the songs that got the hair metal decade rolling. Round and Round came off Out of the Cellar in early 1984 and climbed to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. Producer Beau Hill talked the band into adding a bridge, because the version they'd been playing live in 1983 didn't have one.
The video is a stuffy dinner party with a metal band in the attic. Milton Berle plays both the head of the house and the lady of the house. He was in his seventies and barely known to the MTV crowd, but his nephew Marshall managed Ratt, and according to Songfacts he did it for free. The family can't take the volume and bails from the table. A shy young woman, played by Lisa Dean, follows the noise upstairs, losing her dress and wig on the way, and shows up in the attic as somebody else entirely. Dean later played the title role in Michael Jackson's Dirty Diana video. The butler gets the last word, dancing like a full-on metalhead in a room of his own.
The New York Times put it on its list of 15 essential hair metal videos, Rolling Stone ranked the song number 20 among the greatest heavy metal songs in 2023, and it has turned up in Supernatural, Stranger Things and a GEICO ad about a house with a Ratt problem. Forty years later, still a problem.
