Rocktober '80s Song #1: "Caught Up in You" by .38 Special (1982)

The first song of this year's Rocktober is .38 Special's 1982 hit "Caught Up in You."  .38 Special was founded in 1974 by Donnie Van Zant, the younger brother of Lynyrd Skynyrd original lead singer, the late Ronnie Van Zant, and the older brother of Johnny Van Zant, who has been Skynyrd's lead singer since 1987.  Van Zant and rhythm guitarist Don Barnes shared lead vocal duties, and the band also had two drummers.  They band released their self-titled debut album in 1977 and then follow up albums in each of the following two years.  Unsurprisingly, the band's sound was Southern rock.

From their third album and into the early '80s, the band switched to more of an arena rock sound, and they often collaborated on songwriting with with Survivor co-founder and songwriter Jim Peterik, who helped co-write several of the band's biggest hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including 1979's "Rockin' into the Night" (#43), 1981's "Hold On Loosely" (#27), and the band's first Top 10 hit, 1982's "Caught Up in You."

"Caught Up In You" is probably the second-most recognizable .38 Special song after "Hold On Loosely," even if the latter wasn't as successful on the charts.  It's a catchy hard rock song, written by two of the band's guitarists, Barnes and Jeff Carlisi, as well as Peterik.  As I mentioned above, it hit #10 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it also went to #1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.

The video is one of my favorites from the '80s.  It's ridiculously awesome.  I wrote about it back in March of 2017 in a Retro Video of the Week, but I'll restate what I said then, so you don't have to click on that to get a solid summary of the video.  Here's what the video has to offer:

-The two greased-up meatheads arm wrestling

-The creep in the brown leather jacket and a shirt buttoned down halfway, exposing his manly chest hair, making phone calls from a pay phone in a bar.  That's never a sign that you're up to anything good.

-The dude in the trucker hat, sleeveless brown shirt, and red suspenders, with tatted sleeves 25 years before it was cool, fed up with his can of Bud Heavy

-The hot blonde wearing a man's button-down shirt and high-waisted jeans, who narrowly avoids being roofied by the dude in the brown leather jacket, as she gets whisked away to the dance floor by a man who could very well be Chris Collinsworth, wearing a tight red t-shirt tucked into jeans with a white belt.

-I especially like the one guitarist's getup, clearly inspired by a combination of Gallagher and Mork.

-One drummer is shirtless, and the other is wearing what I assume is the only Joe Cowley Braves jersey ever made other than what Joe Cowley actually wore.  Because it's the number 38.  Get it?

-There's the other hot blonde, dancing alone in a blue swimsuit.

-And what '80s club would be complete without a mechanical bull?

-But of course, this is a club that plays all types of music, as evidenced by the fact that there are punks, jocks, new wavers, preppies, extras from Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" video, rockers, and rednecks.

-Is that Sam Kinison playing an arcade version of Gorf?

-All's well that ends well, though, as the guy in the brown leather jacket turns out not to be a creep, but actually some sort of juke joint Lothario, who ends up bagging the blonde after all, or maybe she just stole someone else's hotel key and flashed it to the guy, and that was the plan all along: to rob Chris Collinsworth.