Please Be Kind...Rewind: Eddie and the Cruisers

I saw the last 15 minutes of Eddie On The Cruisers last night and I wondered why, admittedly at a younger age, I considered the movie to be relatively decent.
I say “relatively” because I knew that it wasn’t “great” or “awesome” but it was good enough to have me looking for the soundtrack shortly after seeing the movie.
And by “seeing the movie” I don’t mean actually buying a ticket and seeing it; I don’t think a lot of people actually did that. Me, like a lot of Eddie’s audience, came when the movie was played repeatedly on cable.
I’m sure I was caught up in the film’s whole “Maybe Morrison’s not really dead” vibe, or maybe the whole idea that Tom Berrenger is playing the role of a misunderstood songwriter. I will forever think of him as that dude with the scar that killed William Dafoe in Platoon.
Looking at it today, it’s pretty clear how poorly written the entire thing is: the black dude plays saxophone (just like a thinner version of Clarence Clemons) only later to die from smack, just like black saxophone players are supposed to, I guess. Then there’s the guy that was Guido the killer pimp in Risky Business who plays the band’s managers who can’t get a break after the band breaks up after Eddie’s death. He starts fucking with people by pretending that Eddie is still alive, just so he can get the master tapes from the missing second album. These tapes contained the missing “Fire Suite” section, an “ahead of it’s time” recording because it has three sections, an orchestra, and a coda where they go “Can you see the lights/Can you hear the sound/Can you feel the whole world turning around” over and over, like Eddie was at the forefront of the psychedelic movement, even though it was set in 1964.
There’s a chick in the band, but mostly she dances around fetchingly and plays the tambourine.
Eddie, who looks nothing like John Cafferty, delivers one of the best lines in a fictional rock movie ever. While playing in front of an audience of ultra-white and uber-preppy college students, Eddie pokes fun at their un-coothness with the immortal lines “You college kids got all the advantages…Ivory walls…Lecture halls…And you got the Cruisers for the nasty stuff.” They then proceed to play “Down On My Knees,” a song about begging for forgiveness, instead of the fellatio that the aforementioned “nasty stuff” would hint at.
The other thing about the movie, and I didn’t catch it back then, is how the character of Eddie was really nothing more than the frontman of a band that was pretty average until the Berenger character “Wordman” comes along. I mean, why is Eddie so hell-bent on creating a dark masterpiece for the Cruisers’ second album when he had so little creative input?
And when he doesn’t get his way (meaning, the big bad record company refuses to release the sophomore album Season In Hell, he fakes his own death and grows a beard, like any tortured artist would.
But then we learn it was the chick, the one who just banged on her tambourine and acted sexy, that took the master tapes for the second album and hid them…In a junkyard of all places, the epitome of proper tape storage…that Eddie called “The Palace of Depression,” because he was so misunderstood or something.
While it was amazing to see a low-grossing movie achieve some sort of stardom, in turn turning the soundtrack band (John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band) into hitmakers, it was just as strange watching Cafferty and company watch that success drain when they attempted to duplicate it using their own faces. The public, as it seems, was more comfortable believe that “Eddie” was John and that the reality of a band from Rhode Island with a fairly silly name just didn’t translate into the Springsteen-lite they were obviously shooting for.
Cafferty wisely went back to the silver screen and scored a couple of Sylvester Stallone movies (one was the awesome Cobra) and donned the Eddie moniker for the Eddie & the Cruisers sequel, Eddie Lives!, before returning back to the New England bar scene that brought him to the attention of a few movie producers looking to develop a fictional movie with a thin plot. In all fairness, it’s Cafferty’s songs that even keep this movie worth mentioning today.