The
stated goal of Song And Vision, to
paraphrase myself from column No. 1, is to figure out exactly why pop
songs and movies work so well together. One reason is time, or the lack
thereof. Unlike you or me, pop songs and movies have the power to stare down
time and walk right on past it. It's like that Byrds song, "She Don't Care
About Time." She
might not care about time, but time will eventually make her fat, crotchety,
and an obsessive accumulator of collectible figurines. Citizen Kane, on the other hand, don't care about time, and
time don't care about it. That's what makes Citizen Kane timeless: it successfully
sidestepped the rules of the time-space continuum. No matter when you watch it, Citizen Kane always
takes place in the present. The same is true of "Johnny B. Goode." The song
originated in the mid-1950s but it isn't set there. It's set in the moment you
hear you it. It moves forward with the rest of us, but never, ever changes.
Maybe we prize timelessness in our art so much because it's utterly elusive to
us as people. Orson Welles and Chuck Berry don't care about time, but time sure
did a number on them.
Let's
make one thing clear, though: timeless does not automatically equal greatness. Citizen
Kane and
"Johnny B. Goode" are great, but "Brown Eyed Girl" is as exuberant and
feel-goody today as it was in 1967 when Van Morrison first released it, and I
fucking hate that song. Honestly, I hope every wedding that plays that song
ends in a long, soul-destroying, financially crushing divorce. On the flipside,
dated does not automatically equal bad. Datedness is one of the most underrated
attributes for a song or film. I'm not talking about getting stoned and
giggling through Reefer Madness, or throwing one of those bozo '70s parties where
everyone dresses like the Bee Gees on the cover of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. I'm talking
about experiencing the past as it really felt at the moment when what you're
hearing or seeing was created. I get that from Steely Dan's seminal,
soft-rockin' '70s albums, which I love so much, in part, because of how vividly
they evoke the sunny, shallow environs of Watergate-era southern California. (I
often picture scenes from Shampoo, Night Moves, or The Long Goodbye when I play them.) "Hey
Nineteen" is great because it clearly isn't set in the present. Donald
Fagen and Walter Becker's weariness in spite of the Cuervo Gold and the fine
Colombian seems very specific to the end of the go-go '70s and the oncoming
over-correction of the buttoned-down Reagan era. Steely Dan's best work makes
datedness an aesthetic plus by turning the rules of time on their head, somehow
staying vital by staying put. The same applies to a lot of dated things I love,
whether it's Robert Johnson's bluesy howls from the dark depths of the '30s Jim
Crow South, or the deliriously smutty '60s counterculture satire of Beyond
The Valley Of The Dolls. Experiencing these things is the closest I'll ever get to time
travel.
Which
brings us to the vision part of this column's equation, Back To The Future, a comedy starring
Michael J. Fox as a California teenager who travels back in time 30 years and
unwittingly inspires Chuck Berry to write "Johnny B. Goode." Back To The
Future is
both undeniably timeless (its place in pop culture is beyond question) and
incredibly dated (it's very much a product of its time). Interestingly, it's a
period piece made in 1985 that depicts 1985 as an era as distant-seeming as its
version of 1955. Of course, when Back To The Future was first released, 1985
just looked like "now." It's entirely possible that director Robert Zemeckis
and co-writer Bob Gale referenced Ronald Reagan and Eddie Van Halen and dressed
Fox's Marty McFly up in a denim jacket and Calvin Klein underwear because they
wanted Back To The Future to exist in the same universe as The Breakfast
Club, Girls
Just Want To Have Fun, and other
teen films from 1985. But I'm going to give them way more credit than they
probably deserve. I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements
signifying "the present" in Back To The Future would inevitably look like
1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis
and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like
they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated
black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further
we get from the '80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly—how he walks,
talks, acts, and dresses—acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the
year he comes from. (For you cooler-than-thou folks who were listening to Hüsker
Dü and watching Jim Jarmusch movies in 1985: Congratufuckinglations. You are
awesome. I bet you totally wouldn't have been the guy smoking pot at Woodstock
in the '60s, or doing blow at Studio 54 in the '70s. I guess an archetype is
only a generalization that's true in the abstract, but it's open to question
when applied to each and every individual person living at the time. Hopefully
you can set that aside and stay with me here.)
It's
fitting that when we first see Marty, he's in Doc Brown's office, surrounded by
clocks set exactly 25 minutes slow. Already, he's a man out of time. What
follows is a quick but insightful dissertation on what was cool in 1985. Marty
plugs into a huge amplifier, straps on his fighter-pilot sunglasses, and
strikes a single power chord, which sends him flying back several feet. "Rock
'n' roll," he says, his rapturous tone most definitely implying "arena rock 'n' roll." Then Doc
calls to inform Marty that, once again, he's late for school. So Marty hops on
his skateboard—the "third generation" of skateboarding popularity began
in the mid-'80s—and quite awesomely hitches a ride on the back of a Jeep.
The song scoring these old-timey shenanigans is the first No. 1 hit by Huey
Lewis And The News (and Billboard's No. 9 song of 1985), "The Power Of Love."
If
you weren't alive at the time, it may be tough to imagine how a band called
Huey Lewis And The News not only got on Top 40 radio, but helped define its era
of pop-rock music. But by any standard of popular success, Huey Lewis was a
defining rock 'n' roller of 1985. In 1983 and '84, he scored five Top 20 hits
from the album Sports, which went platinum seven times. (This was back when people
idiotically paid for their music.) In 1986, Huey and his band of News released Fore!, which spawned five Top
10 hits (including two No. 1s) and sold three million copies. A few years after
that, the band was handed a one-way ticket to the county-fair-and-corporate-gig
circuit, but in 1985, Huey was still safely ensconced in a protective shell at
the center of American pop culture. Yes, I'm sure there were plenty of people
who thought Huey Lewis was the epitome of soulless corporate rock in '85, and
history might have proven those people right. But at the time, I didn't know
any of those people. To me, Huey Lewis was the height of coolness and
awesomeness. Of course, I was only 7, which means I was really, really dumb.
But it wasn't just 7-year-olds who bought all those copies of Sports. There must have been at
least a few grown-ups on the same page I was. If Huey Lewis was my favorite
rocker of '85, Michael J. Fox was probably my favorite actor, and I definitely wasn't
alone in feeling that. Family Ties was one of TV's most popular shows in the
mid-'80s, when it aired on Thursday nights between The Cosby Show and Cheers, the '27 Yankees of sitcom
lineups. Taken together, Huey Lewis and Michael J. Fox represent a perfect
storm of song-and-vision 1985-ness approached only by the video for John Parr's
"St Elmo's Fire (Man In Motion)" from the film St. Elmo's Fire.
This
is the part where I make snarky comments about Huey Lewis and the suggestion
that he ever signified coolness for morons like me. Only when I watch Back
To The Future, I don't
laugh when "The Power Of Love" comes on, even though the song hasn't aged
nearly as well as the movie. To me, that would be like laughing when "Earth
Angel" by The Penguins plays during the climactic "Enchantment Under The Sea"
dance. We can argue whether "Earth Angel" is a better song than "The Power Of
Love"— I think they're equally good—but there's no doubt that the
songs represent their eras equally well. It's also worth noting that Zemeckis
is trying to use Huey Lewis to give Marty some residual coolness, and that
makes perfect sense for a scene operating on 1985 logic. Right away, he's
showing Marty doing all these really cool things, and he sets it to a song
Marty (and the average 1985 audience) would have found really cool, so how can
we not help but love the little almost-motherfucker? (A few scenes later, Marty
plays an instrumental version of "The Power Of Love" for the talent-show tryout
with this band The Pinheads, only to be turned down by a nerded-up Huey Lewis
for playing too darn loud. Huey Lewis a nerd? That'll be the day!) Compare how
Zemeckis uses "The Power Of Love" in Back To The Future with how director and
former punk-rock journalist Mary Harron uses Lewis' tacky 1987 hit "Hip To Be
Square" in American Psycho, and the difference is obvious and striking.
The
implication of this scene is pretty simple: Only a psychopath could take Huey
Lewis And The News seriously. I'm not going to argue for or against
that—though for the record, I never killed any cats when I was a
kid—but the irony in American Psycho makes it a different kind
of period piece than Back To The Future. American Psycho comments on the '80s, and Back
To The Future embodies
it. American Psycho views the era with the benefit of hindsight, giving us the
luxury of pretending we always thought Huey Lewis was lame. Back To The
Future shows
things the way they actually were, at least as far as what we liked is concerned.
(The whole time-travel bit is kind of a stretch.) Yes, you loved Michael J.
Fox. Yes, you thought Sports was all killer and no filler. Deny it if you want,
but Back To The Future will be here to refute you long after we're all dead and gone.