1984 Rock Hit, Featuring Music Video That Nearly Derailed Rocker’s Career, Remembered 42 Years Later

Billy Squier was one of the biggest artists of the early MTV era. With songs such as ”The Stroke,” “In the Dark,” and “My Kinda Lover,” Squier was featured in heavy rotation on the music video channel and quickly became a fan favorite.

But one video nearly derailed Squier’s career—and 42 years later it’s still being talked about.

The 1984 song, “Rock Me Tonite,” came with a Kenny Ortega-directed music video that featured Squier prancing, dancing, writhing on the floor, and tumbling onto a pink satin-sheeted bed.

As recently as spring 2026, the song was debated on Reddit, with one user calling it a “cringe fest” and another admitting that it was hard to take Squier seriously  as a rocker after the video came out.

And during a July 2026 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Motley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, another ’80s MTV icon, recalled that he loved Squier’s music but took pause at the odd video.

“We need you on the ground swimming around,” Lee joked about the direction Squier was likely given.

 “Hopefully….I hope it was his idea,” the Motley Crüe legend added, noting that it would have been worse if a producer had tanked Squier’s video career instead of Squier just having a creative idea gone wrong.

“Rock Me Tonite” was actually Squier’s biggest chart hit. The lead single from the album Signs of Life, the song peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 1984.

At the time, Squier downplayed the damage from the video. In 1986, he told The Los Angeles Times, “People have the wrong impression about it. The video didn’t do anything. It didn’t ruin me. It didn’t come close to that. They forget there were some good things that happened, too. There was no catastrophe.”

“When an album (Signs of Life) sells over a million, you can’t be too unhappy about it,” he added.

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Still, in the 2011 book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, Squier noted that his concert career changed upon the release of the cheesy “Rock Me Tonite” video.

“As soon as that video came out, I was playing to half houses,” he revealed. “I went from 15,000 and 20,000 people a night to 10,000 people. Everything I’d worked for my whole life was crumbling, and I couldn’t stop it. How can a four-minute video do that?”

Four decades later, Squier doesn’t intend to be remembered for “Rock Me Tonite.” In a 2025 interview with Goldmine magazine, the singer said, “I assume that I’ll be remembered for Don’t Say No. …  It’s a classic, and no one is ever going to make a record like that again … but I think most people know that, so I won’t pick that one. I’ll go with [1993 ’s] Tell the Truth. Truth shows my evolution as an artist on all fronts. The playing on it is great.”

“I spent a lot of time thinking about the lineups for the songs and it worked really well,” Squier added. “As for the songs themselves, I think [producer] Mike Chapman said it the best. One night when we were on a dinner break, he said to me, ‘Billy, you are the best songwriter I’ve ever worked with in my life.’”

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