As Rock Town Hall gears up for this Sunday’s Oscars extravaganza, I thought we’d take some time to revisit some past movie-related threads. Perhaps when this post first ran Townsman sammymaudlin‘s selection of Fast Times at Ridgemont High was so spot-on for most of us that there was not much to discuss. Perhaps there weren’t enough representative movies. Perhaps Townspeople were tired that day. Perhaps YOU weren’t logged in that day. Now you are, so see if this thread has any legs the second time around.
By the way, if you click on the tag at the bottom of this post that reads “rock movies,” you’ll be transported to a number of movie-related posts we’ve run. The actual Oscars can get boring at times, so these may be a good way to pass the time during the Sound Editing in a Foreign Animated Short Documentary award category, for instance.
This post initially appeared 8/2/08.
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For as big a fan as I was (am) of the movie, I don’t remember a single thing about this TV series. Maybe because…
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As much as I’d like to say that Dazed & Confused (essentially American Graffiti set in the 70’s) was like my high school years, and my freshman year was close, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, soundtrack and all, was, for better and worse, pretty damn close.
I graduated high school in ’82, same year the movie came out. The soundtrack was so, so, so what was on the Phoenix radio stations then: Jackson Brown, (Henley, Walsh and Felder all have solo tracks), Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Poco, Billy Squier, Sammy Hagar, Jimmy Buffet, Quaterflash, The Go-Go’s The Cars… In hindsight the tuness play like a soundtrack to the death of 70’s radio rock and the birth of the 80s.
What say you?
Chainsaw AND Jason Hervey?! The TV version of Fast Times was about as awesome as the TV version of Animal House!
That said, without a doubt, “Valley Girl.”
Hairspray. Only because If…. didn’t have tunes.
I graduated in ’81. My school (and Mr Mod’s) was a very sheltered existense, mostly upper middle class families. I’d say the songs from “No Nukes” best represent the mood of the school.
Dunno about the tunes, but “Gregory’s Girl” pretty much sums up everything about my high school experience. I actually broke up with a girlfriend once (partly) because she thought the movie was “boring.”
Yeah, it’s tough to put a finger on what movie soundtrack came closest to the high school experience Andyr and I shared. A lot of that No Nukes stuff, a lot of prog rock and Zappa, a lot of Zeppelin and Skynyrd… All being listened to and raved about by a tiny student body of upper-middle class East Coast kids. Even my personal take on those times – a lot of ’60s stuff and ’70s punk/New Wave – have not been captured in a movie soundtrack that I’m aware of. Perhaps a lot that could be explored someday if I ever develop a knack for writing screenplays.
Yep. Valley Girl. Good movie, to this day.
Irving “poison dwarf” Azoff was the Executive Producer of this flick. That’s why Jackson Browne, and all of the solo Eagles are present. The director,(i forget her name)wanted more Go-Gos, Police, Elvis Costello, etc.but jerkoff Azoff wouldn’t budge. Solo Don Felder, christ!
I graduated from high school in 1991, and there is no musical movie which sums up my experience. MC Hammer and Bobby Brown and Vanilla Ice were enourmously popular at the all boys catholic kensington high school i attended. If you cross Laws of Gravity with Idiocracy, you might be zeroing in on my high school vibe.
BigSteve, whaddya mean If…didn’t have tunes? What about that fabulous song by David Gates?
I was just a little too young for Fast Times, Dazed & C, Over The Edge, and even Valley Girl, as much as I liked them all (or their scenes, as the movies came out later on). I’m gonna have to say Breakfast Club, musicwise, but culturally it’s gonna have to be Weird Science.
And I have to say I remember being disappointed that the Animal House TV series was cancelled.
Even though I graduated a few years after 1976, my high school was pretty much like the high school depicted in Dazed and Confused. Stoners, jocks, and loser cliques.
Dazed and Confused for sure. I graduated in 80, and Ohio had 3.2 beer for 18 year olds, so it was easy to get beer, even for a sixteen year old that looked all of fourteen, like me. A six of 3.2 on top, and no one even checked the rest. We did everything in cars, too. A DUI just wasn’t that big a deal, and it was assumed that kids driving around were drinking. If a cop caught you, he took your beer and let you go. That’s one of the few movies I’ve ever seen that really showed that completely reckless attitude and didn’t make the characters pay for that kind of behavior without at least one death.
Fast Times had some things that were similar, but the songs in Dazed and Confused were what we heard here in Cleveland 24/7.
I’m also going to say Dazed & Confused is the closest to my high school experience (I busted out of high school in 1980). The stuff I heard the most of in my high school years was Boston’s 1st album, Framption Comes Alive, Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf, Fleetwood Mac & Rumors, Rod Stewart & Kiss
Dazed and Confused couldn’t be much further from my own experience of high school (as well as taking place about a decade before my graduation) but unquestionably it is the “high school movie” that I relate to most. The early Hughes movies were big when I was in high school, I had no use for them then and I have no use for them now. But Dazed and Confused is epic. I could watch it every day and not tire of it.