RW50 - The Oxidizer

This week, Dan and John talk about:

The show title refers to John’s super hero fantasy.

Happy Holidays!

Dan is blowing up the microphone again. Merlin is 100% right, Dan is a monster!

At one point John was talking to his mom who was in the room and asked him a question, ”They are in the pocket of the coat. That’s the one” and if they are not in the coat, they should be in the jar.

Draft version
The segments below are drafts that will be incorporated into the rest of the Wiki as time permits.

Casual games (RW50)

John doesn’t know what Super Mario Run and Candy Crush are.

Once John was on a long flight and he was bored, because he had already done all the crossword puzzles and he had played the trivia game of the in-flight entertainment system until he had vanquished the aircraft itself. There was a guy a couple of rows in front of him playing a game with little jewels descending and you line up three of them and they explode. That seemed like a dumb mom game and John kept doing what he was doing while this guy kept blowing up those little jewels, meaning that it was not only a mom game after all.

John sat and played Tiddlywink and got finally curious enough so he had to know what that was. When he landed he did a little internet research and found out the name, but he had already forgotten it when telling the story to Dan (probably Bejeweled). He downloaded it and like all of those games it is just diabolical because its whole purpose is to ruin you. Now John spends a certain amount of time every day lining up jewels and blowing them up. It is a bit like Tetris. At first he thought it was Candy Crush which he has been invited to for many years. At least they don’t invite him to play Farmville anymore!

Dan and John continue to talk about casual mobile games, like Threes. Organizing and stacking is a very soothing thing for John and always has been. He had a roommate years ago who was watching him doing some Sudoku or something and to him these games seemed just like putting the dishes away, it seemed like a chore to him.

The other day an old friend, a Rock photographer from the Grunge years, had sent John a DM on Facebook, asking him to buy prints of his famous photographs of Perl Jam for Christmas. There are a lot of people in the world who would like to buy a big beautiful print of Perl Jam, but that person is not John. His friend has pictures of Mad Season as well and he did a lot of those iconic pictures, but all that stuff depresses John. That is what happens when you go on Facebook. Often enough somebody tells you that their band has booked a show at a Youth Rec Center somewhere and they would love The Long Winters to headline the show. If the Long Winters would want to headline that show, they would have been the one to book it. It is a common thing for young bands to do a thing like that.

Holidays (RW50)

This episode was recorded on Christmas Eve Eve. Dan’s family celebrates a multitude of holidays. Hanukah is the original and most amazing of all holidays because it is incredible to think that those lamps would have remained lit considering how little oil there was. You got to have a big part about that! This year in 2016, the first day of Hanukah starts on Christmas Eve. Dan is trying to remember if that has ever happened before, it has certainly not happened in his adult life and it has to be pure coincidence when it takes place. Hanukah cycles, but not like Ramadan which cycles through the year and you can never know when it is going to land. Hanukah just cycles within a little coral, but it was still very confusing to Dan when he was a kid that you could never predict when it was going to be. It is a totally different calendar and Dan didn’t understand why.

The loaves and fishes miracle (RW50)

Whenever John revisits some of the great Bible stories, his is continually surprised at how prosaic the miracles are. Somebody said the other day that ”It is like turning loaves into fishes” and John sat with that for a minute and after a minute he went ”Wait a minute! Loaves into fishes? That can’t be it!” If you already had loaves, why would you turn them into fishes? John would turn a bunch of fishes into loaves, because loaves are better than fishes. So John looked at the parable and it was very similar to the oil in the lamps, where they only had a small amount of oil until the lamps would go out, but then the lamps were still lit. Holy cow! Past a certain number of days it has to be God intervening, like when your gas tank runs down and you are on E and you keep going for another 85 miles.

In the loaves and fishes parable there were a lot of hungry people at this party and there were only a few loaves and fishes. Somehow Jesus was able to feed a multitude of people, into the thousands, with just a few loaves and fishes. He didn’t turn loaves into fishes, he turned a few loaves and a couple of fishes into a multitude somehow. It does not say that he waved his hand over them and suddenly there were like 5000 fishes, but it says that with those very few food items he was able to feed that many people, however that worked. It seems like if Jesus had some amount of food and there was a large group of people, it is easy to imagine that the story got inflated over the course of time. There were probably 50 people and 15 loaves and 11 fish, but as time went on the number of fish in the story got smaller and the number of people at the party got bigger. It doesn’t feel quite like a miracle. When something magical happens that benefits the people who wind up on the right side of history and it happens at a crux moment, then it is a miracle.

If John's Suburban is on E like it typically is because it uses a lot of gas, and he is driving up to the Goodwill on 145th, he hopes he is not running out of gas on the Freeway, because that would suck, and then he gets off and is happy to have made it and on the 145th he can at least park it here and find a gas station. As the truck keeps driving and the needle is just bouncing on the peg of the E he makes it all the way to the Chevron. There is a Goodwill at the other side of the street and so he goes into the store first because he hates going to the gas station. That story doesn’t qualify as a miracle, but if there was a pregnant lady in the truck who was about to give birth and he made it all the way to a manger or wherever, it starts to sound like a miracle. You always have to contextualize these events. Small miracles happen all the time. Every time John is looking for his passport and he finds it, it is a miracle.

When Dan was deep into Buddhist meditation, he listened to a guy on a podcast about that topic who said that pretty much nobody is enlightened today in the way that the Buddha was. Maybe there is one person deep in India or Tibet and no-one really knows about, but back in the time of the Buddha, you could be enlightened just like that if you did it right. People would listen to one talk from the Buddha for 20 minutes and they would already be enlightened. All of the people who were going to get enlightened have gone enlightened already, because we are in this cycle of repeating rebirth, death and karma, which is called Samsara in Buddhism (which is also a pretty name for a girl, but it means suffering, so Dan wouldn’t recommend dating her). It is not that it is harder to do than before, but the people who are good at it have already done it and are out.

It might be the same with miracles: All the good ones have already happened. The best kind of miracle is finding your passport or your keys. If you think about it: Moses was walking through the brush and he found a burning brush. The miracle was that the brush was burning without burning up and then the bush talked to him and we have been saying his name ever since. Moses is also a beautiful girl’s name. It all goes back to him wandering in the scrub.

If you take a look at the topography and the flora and fauna of the Middle East, it is not a lush country, especially if you are out wandering in the dessert. He found some tumbleweed that was burning-ish and that is all it takes. John comes across burning truck tires and burning cars at the side of the Freeway all the time! There are inexplicable things on fire right and left, but not a single one of them makes John the king of the Israelites, which he resents a little bit. Dan is not sure if John would qualify, but John rejects that as well: As any good modern jew he is a non-practicing jew, and like any good non-practicing jew he spends Christmas eve at a Chinese restaurant. The fact that John is not Jewish should not be that big of a deal. The conservative rabbis might object to that, but those are crazy and they don’t consider 9/10 of the real Jews as Jewish enough.

John’s as the king of the Jews (RW50)

John was undergoing some head-shrinking. Once any good head-shrinker realizes that you are self-reflective, which is bad for business, they lean in and say all the same: You have to eat less and exercise. When you get down, you need to say positive things to yourself to get back up. A psychiatrist is going to say that there are pills you can take that help you and they are giving you a lot of stratagems to learn how to say good things to yourself, while a doctor is giving you X-rays and then tells you that it doesn’t look broken, and you should stay off it and take two baby-aspirin a day. But basically it is all the same practice: If you meditate a little bit, eat better and exercise, you learn to say positive things to yourself. The rest of it is just a cloud.

The issue of neuroticism came up, which is a new theme in John’s life. Not that he is neurotic, but it is now playing a larger role in his whole scheme. John is not claiming to be some kind of trained Freudian, but he has read a lot of books by Jews and he understands what neuroticism is. They laughed and laughed, two goys laughing about Philip Roth. Things like that qualify John to at least throw his hat in the ring for king of the Israelites. You got to modernize! John is very curious about the Israelites. He also thinks he would do a much better job of running the CIA than whoever Donald Trump puts in there, by far. Running the Israelites is a bigger job than running the CIA, but John would bridge a lot of those unbridgeable gaps between the Liberals and the Hard-right. He has read some of these books. He doesn’t know anything about the Kabala, but who does?

John would weave his sophistic charm. The Israelites are no stranger to charm and might see right through that, but then he has that goyish cuteness that often sways even the most cynical Israelite. The very most cynical ones would not be swayed, but you could not reach them anyways, in either direction. The way to reach the cynics is to anoint them and touch them with a golden finger, which would relieve them of their cynicism. If he could chose between feeding 5000 people with a few loaves and fishes or anoint the cynics, John would chose that, because everybody could go hungry for a couple more days, but if you went through a whole population of people and took the cynics out and turned them into euphoric people? What a transformation you would make in a whole civilization!

Superpowers (RW50)

John talked about this already in RL34. There is a fan-art illustration of John as the Rustman.

Sophisticated people won’t just ask you if you would want to fly or be invisible, but they want a genuine conversation about which superpower you would want to have. John used to say that he would be the rust, the Oxidizer, who would have the ability to remotely rust any kind of ferris. You would be able to end all war by rusting everything. The gun can’t fire, the tank can’t move, you could stop any machine instantly, unless it was a machine entirely made of Titanium, but there is surely some kind of Titaniumoxide, John is not a metallurgist. That is a tremendous power!

Dan wonders if telepathically controlling people and telling them that they don’t want to be at war anymore would be better than rusting their gun. If your superpower is too super and you became either giant blue penis man (Dr. Manhattan) or Gene Grey who has powers beyond the limits of her control and who lifted up the Golden Gate bridge in some dumb movie, then it is not fun anymore! You are not having a good time and you are not helping anybody. It is like the AIs in the movie Walking Phoenix that started talking to each other. She doesn’t want to be your friend anymore, but she is having multi-dimensional conversations with other AIs. If John had the ability to telepathically change people’s minds, nobody would have an independent viewpoint or their own thoughts and nobody would be interesting to him anymore. John would be in there, monkeying around, and the world would become a puppet show. He would probably instigate war, just to keep things interesting. You want to keep your superpower somewhat contained because otherwise life is boring.

Even Superman has kryptonite, his love for Lois Lane, which inhibits him even more than kryptonite, and his pathological Dugardorism, which is the ultimate inhibitor. Superman is always trying to do good and his powers don’t confine him, but it is his Pollyanna! John doesn’t have Pollyanna and if he had these powers, he would be trouble. Being the Oxidizer would be pretty hot! John’s friend Mike always said that his superpower would be to cause explosive diarrhea in anyone at a distance. Dan finds this also a very weak superpower. John’s oxidation would work either by line of sight, or it would be confined to 5 miles.

It has to be necessary that you are there and you can’t just destroy all machines from your armchair, that would be pretty dumb. You can oxidize things selectively, so you could keep the motor of the tank running, but just oxidize the trigger. It is not just about ending war, because once people understand that you are the oxidizer, you arriving at the scene and the very threat of you oxidizing their things would already inhibit people using them. They would say ”Wow, I know that you don’t like Limb Bizkit, but before you oxidize my Macintosh stereo receiver, let me go over and change the channel!” John would not be able to make people kill each other, but he would just ruin their stereo equipment.

If you had John’s friend’s Mike’s explosive diarrhea superpower, then you could still not defeat Superman, but you could make him have explosive diarrhea. Even Superman is not going to want to continue to do whatever he is doing right at that moment, because he just had explosive diarrhea and he is going to break off whatever his attack on you is and he is going to fly very fast to the nearest restroom. Every villain is going to have the same reaction. Nobody is going to continue their activity if they have just shat themselves explosively.

This superpower is pretty compelling and could change the course of history if an army was marching towards you and suddenly everyone in the army had soiled themselves. Dan interjects that it would be better and cleaner to just put everybody to sleep. What are you going to do, not inviting him? He is just going to show up and if you would reject him, he would make you poop! He would be Humiliation Man! Nobody wants something out of control coming out of their bottom, no matter what it is. If they hadn’t been eaten for 24 hours, there would be water or something.

Removing cynicism and myopia would be a tremendous superpower, better than putting everybody to sleep. To go up to somebody and say ”Whether or not jet fuel can melt steel beams isn’t really what we are talking about” or ”Hey, guess what: Sandy Hook did happen!” or whatever you needed to do ”Your hot take on the lyrics of Baby It is Cold Outside is pretty small potatoes now, given everything else that is happening, like that there are Nazis in the White House, that particular hot take, maybe you could stow it for a while” John wouldn’t be inputting ideas, but he would be relieving people of the burden of fixating on ideas.

The lyrics of ”Baby it is cold Outside” is a fascinating cocktail party conversation that if everyone isn’t too drunk maybe won’t become an angry screaming match. John is not saying that he wants to change people’s thoughts about it, but he wants to give them a little bit of perspective that it isn’t especially interesting and it isn’t actually a gateway into understanding anything. It is a song from the 1950s where Dean Martin is bubalubalubing, it is not a thing to talk about. John didn’t even know that song existed 4 years ago. It is not a song he remembers ever playing in restaurants. It seemed like a forgotten song, but now he hears different versions of it all the time.

The idea of the Oxidizer is growing on Dan, but anytime you make a wish, whether it is on a monkey’s paw, with a Genie or with a really smart computer that can grant wishes, they always find a way to convolute it, change it or twist it. Dan thinks that if John is sitting across from him and John says something Dan doesn’t like, he can just stab him with his knife, but John is like ”Not so fast, genius, try your knife now!” and Dan flicks out the switch blade and it doesn’t work, but Dan brought another knife that rusts in front of him and he still stabs John with it. Now John got Tetanus.

Part of the oxidizer’s powers is that he can control the rate of oxidation. Some things you would just oxidize a little bit and you could monkey with certain rifles so they exploded when the bullet was fired, and you could do that with somebody’s iPhone, too, but it wouldn’t be as dramatic. They’d shake and people would be mad at AT&T. This comes a little bit from John’s practical joke background. If somebody was about to stab you with their knife and the knife is crumbling as they move it through space, that is a good gag!

The oxidizer would get his powers from the Superpower-Genie and they would be sitting across a table in a lunch room figuring out the conditions. The oxidizer would say that he wanted to be able to oxidize anything he can see, but then all you needed to do is to cover a knife with a handkerchief and you could stab somebody, and so the oxidizer says he wants to do anything within 5 miles from him, but what about an ICBM? The oxidizer could oxidize the shit out of it as it enters his 5 mile dome, they go back and forth like this until the settled on what the powers are.

John assumes that is how it works. The guy with the laser beam eyes has not a very cool power! Dan explains that his name is Cyclops, but it is not lasers, but kinetic force. He cannot protect his force, but has to have his protective goggles. He is a mutant and cannot chose his power. John is a vocal supporters of mutants, but his mutations are just not that great, like anxiety or the ability to read other people’s emotions incorrectly.

There is one mutation called ”need to eat two pieces of gum every time someone offers you gum”, which makes it a bit of an awkward transaction, because you have to ask ”Can I take two?” - ”Sure!” They are offering you a piece of gum and you got to double down on it? You can justify it half a dozen ways: Gum has gotten smaller! The same is true for a Hershey bar: If somebody would offer John a Hershey bar now, he would smack it to the ground. A Hershey bar now is the size of a piece of gum in 1974. It is the size of a poodle’s tongue and John is talking about a toy poodle.

Dan talks about Trident gum, which has individual paper around each of them. The gum would have an aluminum or tin foil wrapper around it inside a little sleeve. There was one gum with that stupid Zebra called Fruit Stripes where the paper was a tattoo and the flavor would only last a couple of minutes. There is a website called Things 90s Kids Realize, ”a warm and fuzzy cup of nostalgia for my fellow 90s kids”, and #26 is that Fruit Stripe Gum is a Great Disappointment.

Missing some music throughout the years (RW50)

The Christmas song ”I gave you my love last Christmas and you didn’t reject it so this year I’m giving my love to someone who wants it” with this super-banal melody sounds like it has been around forever. John is very surprised to find out that this song is by Wham, because he has been pretty up on Wham and their musical catalog and he has been pretty present in the Wham cosmosphere in 1984 when this song came out.

John wasn’t into Wham, but Wham was around and he didn’t hate it, although he was a metal head and shouldn’t have had anything to do with it. At the time you couldn’t really say that if somebody writes a good pop song you are just going to love it. John is just going to eat up whatever Missing Persons put out, even though it is not Metal. Like with Punk Rock, everything you do that doesn’t conform to metal is actually way more metal than metal.

The reason John didn’t know this song is that in 1984 we were in a very weird situation where pop bands did Christmas songs every year, but those were always sub-par songs. It was the same Christmas as ”Do they know its Christmas”, a song that subsumed everything beneath it and gobbled up the culture in everyone’s mind, because it was so omnipresent and and also such garbage. Wham’s somewhat sad-sack wheapy Christmas-pop tune didn’t even register. In all of its many cover versions it is a terrible song and all of the versions are terrible, because it can’t be redeemed. John never heard that song from 1984 to 2014 and all of a sudden it is everywhere.

John likes most pop stars (RW50)

Jonathan Coulton and John made an album of tremendous Christmas songs that should be universal standards and maybe 20 years from now they will be, but right now we have to hear Dean Martin, Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande. John is not opposed to Taylor Swift. Shake it off is a killer number! John likes all of the pop stars with the exception of the histrionic ones like Pink. He never really dug a ton of Pink’s music because her image was pretty Rock ’n’ Roll and she dated dirt-bike stars and stars of motocross, but her music was pretty milk-toast. There ought to have been more guitars in her music and it should have been a little bit harder, but John was sure captivated by her and liked her image. He would have bought what she was selling.

John was a big fan of Mary J Blige who was an antecedent of Taylow Swift. Taylor got a lot of Joie de Vivre, she got a lot of Vim and Moxy, she manages to keep positivity despite the fact that everything around her should be turning her into a brittle, calculating and mean-spirited empress, but she is not! She just keeps on keeping on. Dan wonders if she is part of the Illuminati the way that Beyonce and Katy Perry are, but John doesn’t think so. She bought a house in Hyannis Port two doors down from the Kennedy compound because she was dating some Kennedy nephew. That was an amazing moment for John, first of all that these callow, dim-witted Kennedy nephews still have such a hold on the popular culture that one of them, like Conor Kennedy (John says Jeff), could just by virtue of being a Kennedy be dating Taylor Swift. Not to say that Taylor had the best taste in men. Going down the list she has dated: John Mayer, really? John followed his snapchat for a while until he couldn’t bear it another moment. He just wanted to figure out what people did on SnapChat, but it was like putting your foot in a can of old paint. That is what following John Mayer on SnapChat is.

Bad beaches at the East Coast (RW50)

Taylor Swift bought a house in Hyannis Port and then the Kennedy nephew broke up with her because he is such a Hollister, or Abercrombie and Fitch, that he doesn’t even know. He is the personification of entitlement and he is entitled to break up with Tyler Swift. John doesn’t know what she did with her Hyannis Port house, but it would be awkward to continue to vacation there. Cape Cod isn’t that great, frankly! It is only legendary because it was the Yankee’s first vacation place. It is where you went to the beach when you lived in Boston. Hardcore heroin addiction is a real problem there because the year-rounders are a very small group. In the summer, Cape Cod is invaded by the preppy tourists and vacation home owners, but in the winter, the only people there are the townies who are proper old Yankee people. John has some good friends who live there all around, like The Parkington Sisters, a group of 5 sisters, all of them wonderful musicians.

When the rich people go away, what is left is kind of like Maine. The people who are left behind are old-scrobble American people who are wind-blown and working hard to survive. The beaches in Cape Cod are not great. From one side, you are pummeled by the hateful Atlantic and on the other side it is muddy clam-digging brackish water clam-holes. Nantucket is the same way. Why would you go down to a beach that smells like sea life is dying on it, because if you can afford to go to Nantucket, you can afford to go to Bahamas or Jamaica or you can drive to Florida.

As a West Coast person, John has very strong feelings about what a wonderful beach is. The Oregon and the California coasts have wonderful beaches, but the East Coast beaches just do not pass muster. John understands why the Kennedys are in Hyannis Port, because when Joe Kennedy bought that place, they puttered down there in their Lincoln that you had to start with a crank. But nowadays? They could vacation anywhere!

John is not the king of the Kennedys and he still has a lot of time, but Dan recommends that he picks something where he has at least some genetic connection to.

70s, 80s and 90s kids and the cultural break points between them (RW50)

John has been hearing about 90s kids a lot lately, for example you would only get this reference if you are a 90s kid, and he doesn’t know who these 90s kids are at all. Are these the ones who were young people or teenagers in the 90s? John is born in 1968 and would say that he was a 70s kid, but he was 12 at the dawn of the 1980s, so he was a kid still in the 1980s. He thinks of 80s kids as people who watched the Smurfs, people who never knew a life before video games, who always had a console of some kind, who were caring about the first iteration of My Little Pony, whereas the 70s kids are kids shared Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels, Disco and Soft Rock AM Radio.

If you are a 70s kid, you never knew a time where there weren’t muscle cars. Even though new cars started to become shitty, there were always muscle cars all the way through High School. On the parking lot of John’s High School there were 15 muscle cars and they were all 15-16 year old cars that were carefully buffed and treasured and worked on by their owners. By the time 80s kids were in High School, the muscle cars that were around were all kind of 80s muscle cars, like the Camaro IROC Z and Fox Body Mustangs.

If you saw Smokey and the Bandit in the theater and you wanted that Pontiac TransAm, you are a child of the 70s. If you saw the Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark or the first Star Wars in the theater, you are a child of the 70s. You had to be at least 5. Dan is a borderline 70s kid, he was 8 in 1980. John was 13 in 1981 when Indiana Jones came out and that was right in his wheelhouse. He got the sexual tension and understood the Nazis, but the Ark of the Covenant is still mysterious.

John was a big fan of Karen Allen, who also was in Animal House. John’s mom went to see Animal House in order to vet it, because someone had taken his young sister to see Jaws and it ruined her. She wouldn’t get in a bath tub. As his mom came out of the theater, she said ”No way are you going to see Animal House!”, but John found somebody who would take him to see it against his mother’s wishes, because he so needed to see it. It absolutely colored his view of the world from that point forward.

John was old enough to know that a lot of fans of the Rolling Stones started to feel that they had lost the plot a little bit with the album Tattoo You, but it was actually a great Stones record. It was a record they threw together with riffs that Keith had written in the early to mid 1970s, but it got Start Me Up on it and it sounds like the Rolling Stones. When Undercover of the Night arrived in 1983 however, it was clear even to John that the Stones had become pickled and something was deeply wrong.

To be aware enough of the world around you to know that the new Stones record was garbage requires that something about you is no longer a child. By then Duran Duran had come out with Girls on Film and they had an R-rated version of the music video. John’s sister was a massive Duran Duran fan and she worked in a record store so she had all of the British imports. They had the Betamax tape of the Duran Duran music video collection which included the R-rated Girls on Film and by the time 1983 rolled around, John was very interested in watching that or watching Night Flight. He had become a man! John thinks he is a child of the 70s.

It really is weird how much that right-hand turn that happened in 1980 changed culture over night. It is easy to look back and say that the culture changes at the turn of a decade, but when John thinks of the 1990s, he thinks of the 1980s just going over a speed bump and then they are in the 1990s. Grunge made an alteration for John personally and it was a big event, but culturally it was just a small speed bump. That includes the fact that the cold war came to an end, but it still feels like they didn’t handle that transition very well.

The cold war came to an end, but George HW Bush was president and it should have been a moment like it was in the Czech Republic where people were electing poets. Václav Havel should have been the president of the world in 1990, but in America they were small and insular while their primary antagonists, the entire Warsaw Pact, tumbled apart. All of a sudden these fascinating nations like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary were back in the game, but America was like ”Yeah, I guess so, it is the end of history, maybe. Let’s get into a war with Iraq.”

America handled it very poorly and is feeling the repercussions of it now. They should have gone into Eastern Europe and Russia with a generous sense of ”Hello, our brothers, here is a kind of Marshall-plan of redevelopment, here is how you structure a thing”, not colonizing, but offering their help. Let’s send over each other’s playwrights! It was just the wrong administration. If Al Gore would have been president on 9/11, we would have done a completely different thing. Maybe 9/11 wouldn’t even have happened, because he wouldn’t have been such a snot-nosed punk about reading his CIA files.

If Clinton had been president in 1989 instead of 1992, America’s reaction to the fall of the iron curtain might have been tremendous instead of just like such a sputtering runny peanut butter response. That is why the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s is just a speed bump, whereas the turn from 1979 to 1980 is this hard right turn, not politically, but they were puttering along and people were feathering their hair.

It seemed like a world where Foreigner 4 was the way they were, but all of a sudden it was like ”(Keep feeling) fascination” and you go ”That’s cool!” That guy was wearing eyeliner! Foreigner 4 and Back in Black were these pillars that suggested that there was a new thing now. Those were very popular records in 1981. Those and Jone Jet all occupied the same cultural moment, like ”I love Rock ’n’ Roll”. Every time John hears that song, he goes through puberty again.

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