A couple of years back my buddy Phil Wilcox turned to me and said “did you ever think that, if Bruce Springsteen didn’t exist, John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band would be the biggest band in the world?” My answer was that I had not thought about this. In fact, I would put the amount of time I have spent thinking about John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band in my life at around zero minutes. I have always known their hit song “On The Dark Side” because everyone who has listened to an FM radio station at any point in the last 36 years knows that song. It is still played on what’s left of classic rock radio literally every single day (and yes...I know what literally means). So far and wide is this song’s reach that none other than Arcade Fire lightly plagiarized it for their 2007 tune “Keep the Car Running”. I know this because I asked their ginger guitar player about it once and he ignored my question and walked away. I was vaguely aware that said hit song came from the 1983 flick Eddie and the Cruisers...a film about a fictional band called, umm, Eddie and the Cruisers. What I didn’t know until I googled it just now is that John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band are from Rhode Island...which is crazytown because no bands are ever from Rhode Island. And don’t go giving me that “but the Talking Heads met at RISD” shit. Doesn’t count! Even though they were formed the year before Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, JC&BBB’s are probably remembered exclusively for sounding exactly like Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band. They provided original songs for Eddie and the Cruisers and its 1989 sequel (as well as “Hearts on Fire” from the Rocky IV...a boss ass tune that sounds nothing like The Boss) and have done fuck all since. They still play a handful of gigs every year at baller venues like the Windjammer at Misquamicuit Beach...when they aren’t hosting karaoke or trivia. Maybe they still make enough Dark Side loot every year that they can just hang around RI...fuckin’...crushing Narragansett beer and coffee milk...eating quahogs and not worrying about much. So that’s those dudeses deal. I figured since I spent a good 2 minutes reading the JC&BBB wikipedia page I might as well go ahead and check out Eddie and the Cruisers. What happens is this: Eddie and the Cruisers just completely sucks. Like, it doesn’t even make crazy sense! It takes a fairly interesting concept and proceeds to balls it up in every way possible. So...right away...we open with a clip of Eddie and the Cruisers playing “On the Dark Side” at a gig in 1963. This is all well and good except this song sounds NOTHING like anything that came out in 1963. We are talking pre-Beatles invasion here, y’all. I have no idea what the members of JC&BBB look like and am way too lazy to find out...but these Eddie and the Cruisers sons of bitches are a carbon copy of the E Street band. They got a tall black dude blowing sax and everything! Even the drummer uses the same grip as Max Weinberg! So now we jump ahead 20 years to a TV studio in the year 1983...where the nakedest actress pre-Julianne Moore Ellen Barkin explains the entire plot of the movie to us in one tidy scene. You see--Eddie and the Cruisers were set to hit it big but then Eddie drove his car off of a bridge and their lost masterpiece of a final album, A Season in Hell, disappeared along with Eddie. She thinks Eddie is still alive ‘cuz he named the album after a Rimbaud poem or some shit. Totally checks out. She figures if she can track down the surviving Cruisers then she can find out the truth about Eddie and maybe shake this lost album loose. I don’t know how you went about all of that without the internet and Facebook but it must’ve been hella hard. It’s at this point that I realize that I didn’t see Ellen Barkin’s name in the credits. When asked about this flick she said “I hated making that film. I think people were all fucked up on drugs.” Sick burn, girl! She decides to start with the band’s pianist, played by man who played Cleveland Indians catcher Jake Taylor in Major League Tommy Berenger. “He was the guy who wrote all of the lyrics...the band called him the ‘word man’” one of the TV producers says. And he, in turn, called them the unoriginal nickname men. We flash back to 1962. I mean...I guess we do. There are never any subtitles of any kind. They also didn’t bother aging or de-aging the characters as we jump back and forth between the decades. Like, they couldn't have at least given Berenger some salt and pepper in his temples or something?? Maybe Netflix will pick up this movie and give it the Irishmen CGI treatment and older Berenger will look like Joe Pesci’s balls. Probably not though. Anyway...so it’s 1962 and Eddie and the Cruisers show up at a bar on the Jersey Shore...because OF COURSE they are on the Jersey Shore. The bar is closed but the late night cleaner (Berenger) lets them in and they set up and start playing...for reasons that are totally unclear. Their manager shows up in the form of dismembered Sopranos’ star Joe Pantoliano. He’s all “wuss a matter with you fellas?? Where’s the FIRE!?” This Eddie cat is all “I ain’t feelin’ the music...I’m just sayin’ words!” (“Me and the boys are playing...and we just can’t find the sound”--KISS). It turns out that, even though the band is named after him, this Eddie can’t write any tunes! Not unlike how J Geils didn’t write any music in the J Geils Band, you dig? As luck would have it this late night floor mopper is a regular goddamn friggin’ Randy Newman and is quickly drafted into the band to give it that E Street swing. We jump back to ’83 where Berenger is now working as a high school English teacher. Barkin goes to see him but he ain’t interested in talking about the old days. When he gets home from work he finds that his janky ass trailer has been ransacked. As luck would have it Joey Pantses house has been trashed as well. They speculate that the culprit is someone looking for the lost Cruisers album. Joey Pants suggests that there’s no time like the present to reform the Cruisers and cash in on this renewed interest in the band that I guess is happening because they say it is. Unfortunately...or fortunately...there’s already a scab version of the Cruisers fronted by their bass player Sal doing time on the dinner theater circuit. They go check them out and they sound like ass. Kind of reminds me of the time I went to see Blind Melon with some chump stepping in for the dead guy. It’s a fairly common practice; almost everyone from the band Badfinger is long dead but you can still go see a band called Badfinger featuring the band’s third drummer. It’s a crazy mixed up world we live in. We flash back yet again to the day Tom Berenger writes “On the Dark Side” for the band. All of the other members are puzzled because it is 1963 and this must sound like alien music...but Eddie is digging the shit out of it! “C’mon man...put some swing into it! It’s as easy as gettin’ laid!” Mmm hmm. Back in the present day Berenger and Sal and crush a couple of PBR’s and lament the fact that Eddie is no longer alive. “If that cat was still around we might have a shot at the bigs!” There’s also a bit about how the original sax player OD’d in a hotel room...and I guess we are supposed to feel bad for a character who they didn’t even bother to write any dialogue for. Let me just pump the brakes right here because I feel like we’ve all had enough already. Sure...this Eddie kid had some really nice biceps and whatnot...but he didn’t write any of the songs! So Tom Berenger...who DID write all of the hit songs...never bothered to write any new songs?? For ANYONE!?? Like, the best he could do in life was to teach English and live in a trailer park?? And people keep going on about this lost album. Wouldn’t the guy who wrote the tunes know what the tunes sounded like??? Couldn’t he just re-record the songs...or at least hum them out for a motherfucker?? You know who doesn’t know what the songs from the lost album sound like? US!! The AUDIENCE!!! Because they never bother playing any. There’s a scene where the band has just finished recording “A Season in Hell” and we hear a few seconds of a tune that sounds just like the rest of them. But then the suits come in and are all “this stuff is garbage! You want to be a poet...go to Greenwich Village! They want Dark Side...you’re givin’ them opera!” Eddie and the Cruisers playing opera!? I’d love to hear what that sounds like. Unfortunately they didn’t think it was necessary to record fake songs for the fake lost album. Sorry doodz. There’s another super long flashback to a frat house gig where some class warfare erupts and Eddie and Berenger get into a fight because Berenger starts making moves on Eddie’s girl Joann. Have I mentioned her yet? Ahh, who cares. Berenger seeks her out in the present day and she takes him to this magical trash alter right out of Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King and WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING!!?? Oh...right...this is where Eddie stashed the tapes for his lost album the night he drove his car into the drink. She gives up the tapes but says that Eddie is prolly gonna come looking for them later back at her crib. This is rather curious since Eddie is supposed to be dead. A strange man shows up in a ’57 Chevy and there’s like 5 seconds worth of suspense...but...AHHH...it’s just Joey Pants! They give him the tapes and then go inside to ball I guess. Ellen Barkin’s documentary on the Cruisers is finally shown on the TV...and who do we spy watching it from the window of a store with TV’s in the window?? Motherfucking EDDIE!!! The dude is ALIVE! And the impact of this big reveal is totally blunted by the existence of a sequel called “Eddie Lives!” So that’s the end of that. I’m gonna go listen to The River and try to forget everything I just told you. The end.