I’m a bit of a pop music nerd and I genuinely can’t hum a single bar of any Jamie Walters song, which is a weird thing to admit given that “How Do You Talk to an Angel” went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992, and his follow-up single “Hold On” went to number sixteen two years after that, off a platinum debut album.
That’s real chart-cred for an artist who left essentially no trace in my memory. And I’m absolutely casting no shade, it has more to do with my being in college at the time, and having an allergy to any artist I felt the industry was trying too hard to make happen. I actually used to think he was Jimmy Ray. Remember Jimmy Ray? Good times.
Shout (1991) is where Walters started, alongside John Travolta, in a film that Universal positioned as Travolta’s musical comeback. For the uninitiated, a fugitive music teacher at a 1955 West Texas boys’ home introduces rock and roll to kids who’d apparently never heard a backbeat. Like Footloose and Dirty Dancing, it’s a premise that belonged in the 80s, and not a couple of weeks after Smells Like Teen Spirit was released.
Travolta’s Look Who’s Talking money hadn’t exactly restored his Saturday Night Fever status, and Shout didn’t help, earning him a Razzie nomination for Worst Supporting Actor in a film where he plays the lead. The director, Jeffrey Hornaday, had choreographed Flashdance and A Chorus Line before this, which is probably why the musical sequences feel more alive than anything else in the movie, well except for Heather Graham. She shines.
Walters went straight from Shout into The Heights, an Aaron Spelling Fox series about a rock band, where he sang the theme song that hit number one on the Hot 100 while the show was airing its final episodes after its cancellation.
Then Spelling famously cast him on Beverly Hills, 90210 as Ray Pruit, a sympathetic underdog from the wrong side of the tracks (are there tracks in Beverly Hills?), and then the writers turned Ray into an abusive boyfriend who threw Donna down a flight of stairs. Walters later said he’d be out on tour while teenage girls in the crowd held up signs saying “leave Donna alone,” because they’d genuinely thought he was the character. You can’t really push sensitive love ballads if you’re seen as a heel. He eventually left the biz and became a paramedic, then a full-time firefighter with the LAFD. Kudos.
Shout is worth tracking down for the cast alone, which includes the aforementioned Heather Graham, Linda Fiorentino, a nineteen-year-old Gwyneth Paltrow in her film debut, and John Travolta dancing his way back to the well.
-Pop