Album: Women and Children First
Year: 1980
In was 1985, and I was seeing a matinee (probably ditching class) of Better Off Dead, a teen comedy starring John Cusak as a guy who was suicidal after a breakup, and who kept failing to kill himself in a variety of funny ways, the impetus for a film that was an hour of dark comic genius followed by a half-hour of Hollywood ending. (And spawned the “I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS” meme that probably nobody remembered until I just now reminded them of it.)
There were two things I remember from that actual showing: 1) that the audience laughed hardest a a joke that had been in the trailer (“Now that’s a real shame when folks be throwing away a perfectly good white boy like that.”) and 2) the sequence involving Cusak’s character imagining a claymation hamburger playing an Eddie Van Halen guitar to what is Van Halen’s horniest, thirstiest song, “Everybody Wants Some!”
It was silly as fuck, of course, but it reminded me in the deepest part of my lizard brain that even while I was at my alt-rockiest, I just love this dumb-ass song. And I’ve never stopped.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #1934: Van Halen – “Everybody Wants Some!”