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In 1984, Ratt exploded onto the music scene with the song “Round and Round.” The first single from the glam metal band’s debut album Out of the Cellar became their biggest hit, peaking at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And it was all due to the massive push it got from a music video featuring a comedy legend.
In addition to Ratt bandmates Stephen Pearcy, Warren DeMartini, Robbin Crosby, Juan Croucier, and Bobby Blotzer, the “Round and Round” video starred Milton Berle. The beloved comedian, known to television fans as "Uncle Miltie,” played both a husband and a wife in a scene set at a formal dinner party.
In an interview at the time, Crosby explained that the band had a connection to Berle.
“It’s funny, basically, we just asked him [to be in the video],” Crosby shared. “We had Warren, the other guitarist, go up and ask him, and he said yes. He’s my manager’s [Marshall Berle’s] uncle, so for him, he really is Uncle Miltie.”
In the video, Berle’s male character gets increasingly annoyed as Ratt’s loud musical performance disrupts his dinner party. The late Hollywood icon, long known for cross-dressing in his comedy bits, also appears in full drag to play his character’s wife.
Pearcy once revealed that Berle took over the video shoot.
Speaking with the San Diego Reader, he recalled, “Yeah, Miltie, y’know, when we did that first video ‘Round and Round,’ he was our manager’s uncle at the time, and it was all new back then because all of a sudden you became actors. But when Milton Berle hit that set, he pretty much took over.”
“Don Letts, the director, he was, like, ‘What in the hell...?’” Pearcy continued. “And Milton Berle just said, ‘I’m playing this woman in drag,’ which was his forte, back in the early days on his show, ‘and I’m gonna be the husband, we’re gonna be at dinner.’ It was unreal. We just followed the leader, y’know?”
Berle once told CNN’s Larry King that his desire to be a female impersonator stemmed from “the great female impersonators” from the days of vaudeville.
Berle, who would go on to play a motorcycle rider in Ratt’s 1985 video for the song “Back for More,” spoke about working with the hair metal band in a vintage MTV interview, noting, “There's a generation gap—I'm in my 70s, and the boys are in their 20s.”
Pearcy chimed in to add, "Mr. Television turns Mr. Video!”
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Pearcy also noted that the Ratt band members never took themselves too seriously.
In an interview with Eagle 95.3, the Ratt frontman looked back on featuring Berle in the “Round and Round” video. “That was our manager’s idea. Marshall Berle is his nephew,” he shared.
“We didn’t really take ourselves as seriously as a lot of these other bands. They’re on fire, they’re leathered to the 10, and we just weren’t like that, and we were kinda tongue in cheek,” Pearcy added. “So when we did Round’, our first video, all of a sudden you’re an actor, it was just all new back then, from MTV. It was just all brand new back then, and we just stayed tongue-in-cheek, humor, and let the music do the talking on the road. It was all new, but if you were lucky enough to have a video on MTV, you scored.”
More than 40 years after its release, “Round and Round” remains one of the most memorable videos of the 1980s. The song was also named on The New York Times' list of 15 Essential Hair Metal Videos.
