TEASER - 180: Miami Vice: Heartbeat / Death Drug (with James Majure)

Junk Filter

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We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the premiere of NBC’s crime drama Miami Vice with a new episode of Junk Filter’s continuing series on the show. James Majure returns from Athens, Georgia to discuss the bizarre duelling vanity musical projects of stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas that appeared as the success of the show culturally peaked.

Philip Michael Thomas struck first with a strange solo album for Atlantic Records in 1985, Living the Book of My Life, that came with a famously terrible music video for the single “Just The Way I Planned It”; for some reason PMT promoted this project by reissuing a forgotten anti-drug exploitation film he made in 1978 (co-starring The Gap Band), retitled Death Drug, where he plays a rising musical talent who tries PCP and immediately goes insane, which features ludicrous new sequences shot on a camcorder that make the project even more incoherent.

Don Johnson on the other hand had a solo rock album for CBS Records the following year, Heartbeat, with full label support and an all-star cast of collaborators. It spawned a Top 5 hit with the title track and came with an expensive album-length music video project for HBO that feels like a lost Sonny Crockett episode of Miami Vice.

We also discuss one of the most bizarre episodes of Vice that has this eighties psychedelic vanity production energy, Season 4’s “Missing Hours”, featuring alien abductions, UFOs and (inexplicably) Chris Rock and James Brown.

“Miami Vice at 40: You Can't Go Home Again” by Chaim Roth, for Miami New Times, September 24, 2024

Music video for Heartbeat (Don Johnson, 1986)

Music video for Just The Way I Planned It (Philip Michael Thomas, 1985)