Grocery Store Jamz

billy joel - it’s still rock & roll to me

all hail the king of bellyaching popstars! this is his first number one single and a reaction to the state of the music industry at the time of it’s recording. apparently,
mr. joel’s handlers at the record company thought he needed to keep pace with the upstart rockers of the day, completely forgetting the fact that they were working with billy fucking joel. alas, it appears his nails are too well-manicured to adequately dig into the flesh of someone to whom he feels the need to make a point. the sentiments are flaccid, the beat is too up-tempo and jaunty, and i can’t help but feel a strain of fellow perennial square bob seger running through this, which is never a good thing. i much prefer his late career shift where he began drunkenly taking his frustrations out on random objects on the side of the road with his car. that, and attila.

-steven, former grocery store clerk

The first time I realized my dad may be wrong  about some things is when I was nine and Erasure’s Chains of Love came on KYIS.FM and my dad literally just switched off the radio and said, “UGH.” Now, I did grow up in semi-rural Oklahoma, but my father is no redneck, gay-hatin’ hick. He wasn’t like “OH, LIKE BDSM. NOT IN FRONT OF MY DAUGHTER!” He’s a liberal, R.E.M lovin’ lawyer who just likes cheap land. He just hates dance music. A month later he did the same thing to “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and I was officially on alert: Dad’s way wrong about pop music.

When I lived in Chicago, I went out almost weekly to sing karaoke at an under-attended bar called the Jackhammer (by the by, if you’re in Rogers Park - it’s TUESDAYS and say hello to Mark the Bartender who Put Up With Me.) with my friend J.J. I would stick to crowdpleasers - Billy Ocean, “Mr. Brightside,” and JJ, ever versitile, vacilated between “Bugaboo” and Donna Fargo without skipping a beat. Once we sang “No Air” to everyone’s confiusion and pretty much only our own delight - I mean, JESUS, the TRILLING on that song! We always had running lists of songs to do in our heads and one night a stranger -total stranger! Out of nowhere started laying in on “A Little Respect.” Now. What. The. Fuck. That song is out of everyone’s range. It’s a vocal DYNAMITE piece that if it wasn’t so gay would be featured in every Judges Pick The Songs in American Idol. But the guy did fine! And JJ and I shrunk into our Bend Me Over Daddies or whatever Mango vodka was on the cheap that night and knew we’d been bested - for now.

INXS - Don’t Change (1982)

An ultimate crime in life’s pacing is that you can’t just close out a relationship. I mean, they end, sure, but they always meander - from just a wee bit (awkward encounter in the grocery store 14 months later: “Someone told me you moved?!”) the drawn fucking out (“Oh, but I haaaaave to meet him for drinks. He still has some of my records and we’re still friends!”). Fuck that, I want a cinematic close. I want to grab my soulful hunk, draw him close for a final kiss (because, really, you mean a lot to me. Which is why I must go!), then jump into the back of an awaiting pick-up truck driven by guest star Tom Petty (but his character’s name is Dingo) where the Eno synths of “Don’t Change” begin to swell and the guitars then burst wide open as the tears and locks of loose hair stream around my face in the wind as we pull away. “Don’t change!” I mouth. It’s a promise of return, unless something better comes along for both of us and in that case we will never ever see each other again, up to and including never being tagged in the same two year old party photo on Facebook. Don’t change, don’t look back. Christ, I love this song.

—meredith

tom petty & the heartbreakers - don’t come around here no more

not only is this song a delicious slice of roots rock-cum-psychedelic new wave cake, it also doubles as a juicy piece of 80’s music-related celebrity gossip. a collaboration with the eurythmic that’s not annie lennox, it’s apparently about a tryst he had with stevie nicks that culminated in her dumping then love interest don henley and uttering the song’s titular line. i vote “yes” for any song that implicitly humiliates a member of the eagles. fuck them. and kudos to you, guy from the eurythmics, for having sex with stevie nicks and giving me another reason to smugly mock don henley.

-steven, actual grocery store cashier

Eddie Money featuring Ronnie Spector - Take Me Home Tonight

Two moments in this video fall into the list of Top 1000 things of all time according to Me:

#432:  At 0:55: Eddie does the best choreographed heart thump through parachute jacket this side of Bel Biv Devoe. And the prop buildup before hand, I mean, the ladder! Throwing away those sunglasses! And don’t even get me started how Ronnie just fucking PUT OUT HER CIGARETTE IN THE CARPET. Probably because it looks likes the Rochester Bank One Auditorium staff forgot to put any food, make up or indeed anything at all in her green room.

I love that he looks like a blowsier Rod Stewart. I also love that he and Kevin James are BFF. Like, if I made a successful sitcom and reaped in over $100 million dollars for a movie about a Blart, I wouldn’t try to make buds with Matt Damon or Julianne Moore or whatever. Nah, I’d probably just beg for The Pointer Sisters and Dave Foley to come over for pesto and beer.

#880: At 2:07 WHERE THE HELL DID THAT SAXOPHONE COME FROM?????? I thought that stage was just ladder, dramatically thrown down sunglasses, hair and Money.

I had to watch this video several times and still go through old Ronnie Spector photos to make sure that is her bangin’ bod all finger snapping and shimmying past that deaf janitor. No disrespect, Ms. Veronica! Eddie doesn’t have a bad hip swivel himself.

True story: I never paid attention to this song when it came on 80s Dance Mix infomercials because I was too kewl. Fortunately, sophomore year of high school, Atom and His Package’s “Punk Rock Academy.” made me a believer in throwing dance parties and demanding that someone please, please Take Me Home Tonight. You won’t regret it, I swear. (Well, this video, yes, you might. But I need to make my point.)

I do regret that Ronnie’s dress has those white side panels though.

merry x-mas

—megglespie

PS: How can I resist these smiles? Enjoy.