“I Don’t Think I Was Speeding, Officer, Was I Weaving Or Something?”

Paloma shook her head at the commercial which promised three nights airing National Lampoon’s Vacation to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Clark Griswald’s trek to California.

She knew that I – having not seen it in glorious HD – would be unable to resist the sirens’ song.

She has often heard me echo the query of Imogene Coca’s deranged Aunt Edna – “Am I gonna eat? Or am I gonna starve to death?” and is good natured enough to have not brained me.

There was a time that I could have recited damned near every line of dialogue from Vacation as could most of my buddies. Chevy Chase had been one of our favorites in Caddyshack a few years earlier but, in that movie, he had been a memorable charcter in a large ensemble.

In Vacation, he was The Man, an outlaw on the road, skinny-dippin’ with Christie Brinkley, who had brightened our winter days for several years in the early ’80s in Sports Illustrated‘s annual swimsuit issue.

(Clark Griswald could have been in the Olympics, man)

If lab animals were subjected to as many viewings of one movie as my buddies and I had watched Vacation, PETA would rightfully raise a ruckus.

It was not difficult to exhaust the possibilities for fun in our small town before the late news aired. At that point, there wasn’t much to do other than acts of vandalism involving produce and/or fireworks.

(it was a town of three thousand people in the middle of a lot of corn in the Midwest)

Often, a bunch of us would end up encamped in Kirk The Pyro’s den watching Vacation on late-night cable or VHS.

(his family had a spacious house and cable and VCR before most of us did)

We were beginning to get our driver’s licenses – Vacation had been in theaters the summer we took Driver’s Ed – and, like Chevy, we yearned for the open road and dipping skinnies with Christie Brinkley.

The farthest we usually got was Indianapolis or, more often, Cincinnati and there were no “pool waitress” supermodels frolicking in the coin fountain at the mall.

But we did make good use of numerous quotes – travel-related or not – from the movie and, at some point, usually when it was suggested that we call it a night and head home, someone would rally the troops with words of wisdom from Chevy.

(the more delicate amongst you might want to cover your eyes)

“I think you’re all fucked in the head. We’re ten hours from the fucking fun park and you want to bail out. Well I’ll tell you something. This is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest. It’s a quest for fun. I’m gonna have fun and you’re gonna have fun. We’re all gonna have so much fucking fun we’ll need plastic surgery to remove our goddamned smiles. You’ll be whistling ‘Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah’ out of you’re assholes!”

Here are four songs from the soundtrack…

Lindsey Buckingham – Holiday Road
from Words & Music: A Retrospective (1992)

I can’t hear Holiday Road and not want to cruise through a desert of the American Southwest in a station wagon with a dead aunt strapped to the roof on the way to a theme park thousands of miles from home.

The Ramones – Blitzkreig Bop
from Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: The Anthology (1999)

Not long ago, a client was giving me his last name. “Ramone,” he said. “Like the band. Do you know who I’m talking about?”

He was surprised and duly impressed as I explained that I not only knew his reference, but that Paloma has a framed poster autographed by Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Marky hanging in our treehouse.

The Pointer Sisters – I’m So Excited
from Greatest Hits (1989)

During the first few years of the ’80s, when I was really listening to the radio for the first time, The Pointer Sisters were inescapable. A lot of those hits still charm me when I hear them on shuffle.

But sometimes, the manic I’m So Excited is just a bit too perky.

Vangelis – Titles
from Chariots Of Fire (1982)

As part of the last week of school in eighth grade, our class took a trip to a multi-plex in Cincinnati to see Chariots Of Fire. The movie might have just won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but a slow-moving, British, period piece on distance running and religion surprisingly proved to be a buzzkill for us kids.

(I’ve meant to watch it again as an adult but…)

Vacation arrived just a year after Chariots Of Fire, so the spoof of Chariots Of Fire hadn’t yet become cliche.

The Incredible Shrinking Town

As the love of my life and my partner in crime, Paloma got to to spend twelve hours in the car journeying to my hometown for Thanksgiving.

(as always, she was a trooper, possessing a grace that the wife of a head of state on a junket to a foreign land would be hard pressed to match)

The foreign land in this case being a small town in Indiana and, yes, growing up there in the ‘80s was indeed like being in a John Cougar song.

(he’ll always be John Cougar to me – actually, he’ll always be Johnny Hoosier, the moniker which my buddy Bosco affixed to the budding local hero as he reached critical commercial mass in 1982 with the album American Fool)

This is the third time that we have made the trip. The first time – two years ago – I was greeted by the news of the terrorist strikes in India the moment that i switched on the television in our hotel room.

(I suspect that most guys – upon entering a hotel room – drop the bags, flop onto the bed, and instinctually channel surf)

These three trips in as many years is a reversal from the prior decade and a half when circumstances, lack of funds, and/or lack of transportation meant that the holiday trek was hardly an annual pilgrimage.

The first time Paloma accompanied me, I noticed that things weren’t exactly where I’d left them.

Things, obviously, continue to be less as they once were, but this time I was more struck by the realization that the town is now shrinking.

It’s strange because the town now actually spreads out much farther than it did thirty years ago. There are industrial and manufacturing buildings where there had once been farmland, broken only by isolated farm houses along the narrow, country roads.

Many of those roads are now better paved as there must be far more traffic than the occasional car, pick-up or tractor that posed obstacles when my friends and I would spend summer days biking out to these areas.

(the first two were much more of a threat – especially as drivers sped on the oft empty roads – than a slow-moving tractor)

We had never ventured so far without supervision.

It was no more than five or six miles from our homes, but it seemed to be a fantastic journey.

In the years since, I’ve been ten thousand plus miles from home. The two miles or so from school in the center of town to my buddy Beej’s house on the edge of town now barely registers.

Paloma and I spent the drive home surfing the radio dial and it was virtually wall to wall Christmas music – something JB over at The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ addressed several days ago.

I’m with him that it’s a bit early in the season for such a single-minded aural onslaught, so, instead, here are four “road” songs from the large number available in the files…

Dire Straits – Telegraph Road
from Love Over Gold

It seems that Dire Straits was never cool (at least from what I’ve read), but a high school friend turned me onto the band several years before Brothers In Arms when they were being mostly ignored in the States.

I took to them and, despite its fourteen-minute length, the epic Telegraph Road was a favorite not only for the reflective lyrics but for the ferocity of Mark Knopfler’s guitar work at the song’s crescendo.

Catatonia – Road Rage
from International Velvet

The Welsh alternapop band Catatonia was reaching stardom with songs like I Am The Mob and The X-Files-inspired Mulder And Scully the first time I visited the UK in early ’98.

One of the friends I was with bought a cassette of International Velvet which we played relentlessly as we drove through England, Scotland, and Wales. Road Rage, though endearing and infectious, was, fortunately, not a case of life imitating art during that two-week trek.

Catatonia made little more than a ripple in the States, released a couple more albums, and split up. Lead singer Cerys Matthews has continued her career as a solo act.

Lindsey Buckingham – Holiday Road
from Words & Music: A Retrospective

I can’t hear Holiday Road and not want to cruise through a desert in the American Southwest in a station wagon with a dead aunt strapped to the roof on the way to a theme park thousands of miles from home.

Roger Miller – King Of The Road
from Love & A .45 soundtrack

If asked, there’s nothing I could tell you about Roger Miller. I’m not sure if I know other hits of his like Dang Me and England Swings.

I do know the genial King Of The Road, though. It makes me think of attending school in Southeast Asia in the late ’80s. The lone pop station played the song regularly, so I’d hear it almost daily lodged between then-current hits by acts like Skid Row, Roxette, and Richard Marx.

Adios John Hughes

Last Thursday night, checking the news before going to bed, I read the headline that filmmaker John Hughes was dead. As I am of the age I am, it’s a passing of someone that had a rather measurable impact on my childhood.

In 1983, it was pretty much every line from Hughes screenplay for National Lampoon’s Vacation that my friends and I were quoting (especially on any road trip).

Years later, those quotes provided some comic relief when traveling through Thailand.

“I think you’re all fucked in the head. We’re ten hours from the fucking fun park and you want to bail out.”

“Roy, could you imagine if you had driven all the way to Florida and it was closed?”

“Perhaps you don’t want to see the second largest ball of twine on the face of the earth, which is only four short hours away?

The next thing from Hughes to catch my attention was The Breakfast Club which he wrote and directed.

(Yes, I’m skipping Sixteen Candles – didn’t see it in 1984 and have never seen it all in one sitting)

So, it was The Breakfast Club. And I have no doubt that if I came across the movie on cable tonight I’d be quoting most of – unedited, of course – almost involuntarily.

Like Bender, my friends and I would mouth off to people to “eat my shorts” years before Bart Simpson. Like Bender, we knew that “screws fall out all the time, the world is an imperfect place.”

Later in 1985, Hughes’ Weird Science introduced us to Oingo Boingo, Robert Downey, Jr., and Kelly LaBrock. Bill Paxton as an obnoxious, psychotic older brother Chet who had the lines we were spouting indiscriminately.

“How ’bout a nice greasy pork sandwich served in a dirty ashtray?”

“Chet. My name is Chet.”

“Do you think they’re having a good time being catatonic in the closet?”

The last movie of John Hughes that would really take up space in my world was Pretty In Pink in 1986. During the remainder of the ‘80s, I’d see most of his movies. Though I’ll stop channel-surfing immediately if I come across Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, Some Kind Of Wonderful, or She’s Having A Baby, none were as dear to me as those earlier movies.

I had gone off to college and saw less and less of the friends with whom I had shared those earlier films.

Pretty In Pink served as the transition. I saw it with a girlfriend at a midnight showing on a Tuesday night. The dialogue didn’t become a part of my daily conversations, but some of the music on the soundtrack became future staples.

I didn’t follow Hughes into the ‘90s, but movies made from his screenplays – the Home Alone flicks – must have made him a few ducats.

The guy made a pile of money, created characters and images that dominated the pop culture landscape, and was, based on the reactions I’ve read from actors with whom he worked, apparently a good egg.

Some songs from the movies of John Hughes…

Lindsey Buckingham – Holiday Road
from National Lampoon’s Vacation

I can’t hear Holiday Road and not want to cruise through a desert in the American Southwest in a station wagon with a dead aunt strapped to the roof on the way to a theme park thousands of miles from home.

Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me)
from The Breakfast Club

If I’m a betting man, my money is on The Breakfast Club to be remade (I think it’s been rumored of such a thing).

My friends and I were the perfect age for The Breakfast Club in ’85 and Judd Nelson’s John Bender was one of our first anti-heros. It helped that the movie was eminently quotable.

As for Don’t You (Forget About Me) – it’s still catchier than bird, swine, or ring-tailed lemur flu.

General Public – Tenderness
from Weird Science

Some songs just make me smile when I hear them and Tenderness is one of them. The melody is irresistible.

Of course, the lyric is pretty angst-riddled.

Kate Bush – This Woman’s Work
from She’s Having A Baby

1988′s She’s Having A Baby had a slew of great acts on the soundtrack including Kirsty MacColl, Everything But The Girl and the great Kate Bush. Bush hadn’t released an album in three years and her next one, The Sensual World, wouldn’t arrive ’til the following year.

But the movie made fine use of her lovely This Woman’s Work and the song is arguably her best known song to the mainstream public.