Men at Work (1990)

"There are several sacred things in this world that you don't ever mess with. One of them happens to be another man's fries. Now you remember that and you will live a long and healthy life." - Louis Fedders (Keith David), offering wisdom to James St. James (Emilio Estevez), as Carl Taylor (Charlie Sheen) watches helplessly, in the 1990 film, Men at Work.

Written and directed by Emilio Estevez, and produced by Cassian Elwes (brother of Cary Elwes), 1990's Men at Work is by no means fine cinema or high culture. Silly, mostly dumb, but with a disarming charm, the film is the type of low budget comedy that once filled theatres before vulgarity became the comedy writer's only currency. It is the tale of two lackadaisical California garbagemen, played by the brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, who long to open a surf shop but become inadvertently entangled in a corrupt toxic waste dumping scheme.


As the chaperon and former Vietnam veteran brought in to babysit James and Carl, Keith David steals the film. When the three of them find the corpse of a local politician on their garbage route, David's character exclaims, "Looks like somebody threw away a perfectly good white boy!" The film is notable, also, for being one of the first of the actress Leslie Hope, then 25 years old. Eleven years later, she would play the wife of Jack Bauer in the first season of "24" with Kiefer Sutherland (who starred with Sheen and Estevez in 1988's Young Guns.). Hope plays Susan Wilkins, aide to the deceased politician who is at first suspected in his death. Through their misadventures, Susan becomes the love interest for Carl, who talks his way into her apartment to investigate the death by posing as a neighbor and phrenologist.

Famed New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote only three paragraphs for his review:

'Men at Work,'' which opened here yesterday, is a good-natured lowbrow farce about two southern California garbage men who dream of opening their own surf shop. It's also about toxic waste, political corruption, a dead body with its face hidden behind a Nixon mask and two dumb cops.

The movie was written and directed by Emilio Estevez, who also stars in the film with his brother, Charlie Sheen. They play the garbage men who find the body, which is that of a white city councilman. A black garbage man who also witnesses the discovery says: ''Oh, look. Someone's thrown out a perfectly good white boy.'' That's pretty much the level of the humor, which also features some practical jokes in the garbage company's locker room, a couple of automobile chases and a final free-for-all at a landfill.

The movie's desire to please is tireless, also engaging. Mr. Estevez's screenplay is not entirely coherent, but it has a number of comically crackpot lines. It is played with spirit by the two real-life brothers and by the principal members of the supporting cast: Keith David, as their partner; Leslie Hope, as the pretty young woman who falls in love with Mr. Sheen, and John Getz. Mr. Getz is genuinely good as a corrupt businessman who does the best slow burns since dear old Edgar Kennedy.

Canby did not take note of the best thing about the film: David's sermon on the nature of French fries. Sitting in a local diner, James reaches across the table and grabs and handful of fries from Louis's plate. In one swift movement, Louis grabs James's hand and refuses to release it. He offers his wisdom on the sanctity of French fries. Only then does he release it.

Truer words were never spoken.

The Cultural Legacy of Ratt

Pictured above are the autographs of four members of the heavy metal group Ratt, obtained at an afternoon in-store appearance and signing at Sound Waves record store at Westhemier and Montrose in Houston, Texas, on December 20, 1990. That night, the group would play The Backstage, although fifteen year old me did not attend that show.

In 1990, Ratt was comprised of bassist Juan Croucier, guitarist Warren DeMartini, lead singer Stephen Pearcy, guitarist Robbin Crosby, and drummer Bobby Blotzer. (You can attempt to decipher the signatures above to determine which one of the five members was not present for the signing.). On the radio at that time was "Lovin' You's A Dirty Job," their Desmond Child penned single from their then-new album, Detonator (released just four months before).

Seventeen years ago, on August 29, 1990, Steven C. Salaris, a Usenet poster, reviewed Detonator in the alt.rock-n-roll.metal newsgroup:

I just picked up the new Ratt album, "Detonator". I am just about done with my first listen to the disc and I think it is really good. The album seems to me to be a lot tighter production than their last two sloppy excuses for albums. This is got a pleasing punch and uplifting sound to it. It is a "fun" album. Stephen Pearcy's voice sounds good and the guitar work is reminiscent of "Invasion of Your Privacy". It has some commercial overtones in it, I think Ratt is going for the big double platinum commercial success. Their is a song on the disc called 'Givin' Yourself Away' which is destined to become a radio/Dial Empty-V hit. The song is a Faster Pussycat/L.A. Guns style ballad. Yawn. Anyways, I like it and that is all that matters to me. I hope all of you out in net land who buy it like it too.

(See also here for a similar September 27, 1990 Usenet review by Ted Batey of Carnegie Mellon University. By the way, in his mini-review Salaris predicted accurately; "Givin' Yourself Away' would be released as a single in 1991.).

As for me, in December of 1990, I knew enough about the band to go to the in-store signing at the record store. (I certainly knew their 1980s hit, "Round and Round."). Apparently, that December, Ratt had just embarked upon a 12-city club tour to prepare for an arena tour in 1991. Wrote the Houston Chronicle's music critic, Marty Racine, on the day of the band's December 20 Houston show:

L.A. arena rockers Ratt are returning to the cellar whence they came - back to the clubs, that is, on a special 12-city "Detonator "tour that stops at the Backstage tonight. Yeah, but what we want to know is, will Denise Wells be in attendance? Wells is the one charged with (and later cleared) of breaking city statutes by using the men's room at the Summit during a George Strait concert. In a highly publicized stunt right out of a Hollywood think tank, Ratt lead singer Stephen Pearcy sent Wells a lifetime backstage pass...¹

(No word on whether Wells attended the show.). That year may have been difficult for Ratt., who had postponed their planned arena tour to 1991 due to a number of problems. Conceding that intra-band strife, a failure to find a suitable opening act, and the general unpopularity of arena tours for hard rock bands at that time caused the larger tour's delay, Pearcy would spin the smaller gigs as series of "warm--up shows for hard-core fans."²


(Pictured above is the tablature of "Lovin' You's A Dirty Job," which appeared in the December 1990 issue of Guitar magazine, signed by the band at the aforementioned December 20, 1990 in-store appearance in Houston.).

Heavy metal, or hard rock, had but a year left in its reign of the charts. By December of 1990, such bands faced less than a year before the release of Nirvana's Nevermind and the coming disregard of what would later be called with nostalgia and slight derision, "hair bands." But no one in 1990 could know with certainty that the end was near. The critics would tell us later that the coming of Nirvana and grunge was "important," just as the rise of punk rock in New York City in the late 1970s was similarly of import. Cobain and Vedder and Cornell and the rest would flush away the remnants of heavy metal, which would only resurface again on nostalgia programs on VH1 (which no self respecting fan of hard rock or modern music watched in 1990). The progenitors of glam metal were left to history as a silly fad or at most as relics of an era of excess, and most music listeners (and critics) seemed to agree.

In 2002, Crosby died. In a December 29, 2002 review of celebrity deaths published in the New York Times Magazine, commentator/hipster Chuck Klostermann wrote that Crosby's death was actually more culturally significant than that of Dee Dee Ramone, bassist for the seminal/influential/hip punk band, the Ramones. In so doing, Klosterman argued:

The Ramones never made a platinum record over the course of their entire career. Bands like the Ramones don't make platinum records; that's what bands like Ratt do. And Ratt was quite adroit at that task, doing it four times in the 1980's. The band's first album, ''Out of the Cellar,'' sold more than a million copies in four months. Which is why the deaths of Dee Dee Ramone and Robbin Crosby created such a mathematical paradox: the demise of Ramone completely overshadowed the demise of Crosby, even though Crosby co-wrote a song (''Round and Round'') that has probably been played on FM radio and MTV more often than every track in the Ramones' entire catalog. And what's weirder is that no one seems to think this imbalance is remotely strange.

What the parallel deaths of Ramone and Crosby prove is that it really doesn't matter what you do artistically, nor does it matter how many people like what you create; what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are. Ratt was profoundly uncool (read: populist) and the Ramones were profoundly significant (read: interesting to rock critics). Consequently, it has become totally acceptable to say that the Ramones' ''I Wanna Be Sedated'' changed your life; in fact, saying that would define you as part of a generation that became disenfranchised with the soullessness of suburbia, only to rediscover salvation through the integrity of simplicity. However, it is laughable to admit (without irony) that Ratt's ''I Want a Woman'' was your favorite song in 1989; that would mean you were stupid, and that your teenage experience meant nothing, and that you probably had a tragic haircut.

The reason Crosby's June 6 death was mostly ignored is that his band seemed corporate and fake and pedestrian; the reason Ramone's June 5 death will be remembered is that his band was seen as representative of a counterculture that lacked a voice. But the contradiction is that countercultures get endless media attention: the only American perspectives thought to have any meaningful impact are those that come from the fringes. The voice of the counterculture is, in fact, inexplicably deafening. Meanwhile, mainstream culture (i.e., the millions and millions of people who bought Ratt albums merely because that music happened to be the soundtrack for their lives) is usually portrayed as an army of mindless automatons who provide that counterculture with something to rail against. The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people.

Now, I know what you're thinking; you're thinking I'm overlooking the obvious, which is that the Ramones made ''good music'' and Ratt made ''bad music,'' and that's the real explanation as to why we care about Dee Dee's passing while disregarding Robbin's. And that rebuttal makes sense, I suppose, if you're the kind of person who honestly believes the concept of ''good taste'' is anything more than a subjective device used to create gaps in the intellectual class structure. I would argue that Crosby's death was actually a more significant metaphor than Ramone's, because Crosby was the first major hair-metal artist from the Reagan years to die from AIDS. The genre spent a decade consciously glamorizing (and aggressively experiencing) faceless sex and copious drug use. It will be interesting to see whether the hesher casualties now start piling up. Meanwhile, I don't know if Ramone's death was a metaphor for anything; he's just a good guy who died on his couch from shooting junk. But as long as you have the right friends, your funeral will always matter a whole lot more.

(Emphasis added; see also here for some blog commentary on Klosterman's piece). Klosterman offers a simple but inescapably accurate premise. Ratt, and popular bands like them, fall victim to the professional appreciaters (as Nick Hornby calls them), or rather, those who make their living fancying themselves superior to those who enjoy music that is, quite simply, popular. You know them,; you remember them. These were the students walking down the hallway in their "Meat is Murder" t-shirts looking disdainfully at you in your "Use Your Illusion" gear. Both the Smiths and Guns N' Roses have their merits, of course, but there are those who use their taste in popular culture to put themselves on a pedestal above those who do not appreciate that which we do. They are now all critics, either for mainstream publications or of the armchair variety with their blogs and podcasts. Their unifying trait is that their taste in music is almost certainly better than, and more important than, yours. If something becomes overly popular, or worse, if it is enjoyed by the kind of people that they find culturally offensive, then the music cannot be of import or significance (even if it is a metaphor for a larger trend).

There lingers, it seems, a nostalgia for Ratt on the Internets. Indeed, I'm not even the first to ruminate upon a 1990 Ratt in-store signing. See here for one writer's memory of a December 18, 1990 in-store at Spec's in Tampa (with photographs, no less, of an event only two days before the one I attended in Houston.). Says another blogger in a more recent entry: "Warren DiMartini was one of the few guitarists in the glam metal era that was actually talented." I'm not familiar enough with the Ratt ouevre to agree or disagree, but I can reserve judgment.

UPDATE (11/12/07): In a recent email, Salaris, now a parish priest in Missouri, reflects upon his 17 year old review of Detonator and his time as a heavy metal fan during that era:

Some of you may remember a time when MTV actually aired videos! It was mostly through MTV and metal-oriented magazines like "Hit Parader" (remember that one?) that introduced me to bands like Ratt. "Round and Round" was the first Ratt song I ever heard. At that time, late 1980's to early 1990's, metal bands like Ratt, Poison, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Ozzy Osbourne, Dio, Stryper, etc. were hitting it big. Besides simply enjoying that type of music along with other styles like progressive rock, I also really liked the girls that were also into Ratt-type music. For me, metal = BABES!! Not the preppy/yuppie types that predominated the college campuses beack then, but the big-hair, leather-n-lace, short skirts and high heels types! In college and grad school, my friends and I would go to concerts and clubs to enjoy the music, the "scenery," and meet girls. To be quite honest, my friends and I were NEVER into the decadent lifestyle of the bands that we enjoyed so much. Yeah, we drank and had fun, but we never did drugs, and we never got into trouble with the law. I was too much of a nerd and my parents brought me up to be smarter than that. Music was an outlet for me, particularly when I was in graduate school working on a Ph.D. in mammalian physiology (I wrote that 1990 review of Detonator one afternoon from the desk in my lab while my experiments were running). We would emulate those rockers not by living like they did but by growing our hair long and trying to dress like them. I even took vocal lessons for a short while. It was part of who I was and for me it was a way to "rebel" against parents and the "establishment." In grad school I met Sheryl, a pre-med/electrical engineering major who turned out to also be a metal-babe. Sheryl and I quickly became more than friends. Weekends consisted of dressing up and going out to clubs and parties. Again, because of our studies and career goals, we never got into anything "decadent." As Sheryl would comment, "I don't need to shut down half of my brain to have fun!" I couldn't agree more. Sheryl and I have been married for 14 years and we have an daughter who is just about to turn 5-years-old. As I got older, bands like Ratt and Motley Crue had less and less appeal to me. I matured and they did not. I still think of myself as a "metal head" but the metal bands that have stayed with me are Iron Maiden, Dio, Judas Priest, and similar bands that I consider "thinking person's metal."

1. Racine, Marty. "Moon Man slides into his `Night'/New Orleans guitarist busy with blues blend," Houston Chronicle, December 20, 1990.
2. DeVault, Russ. "Night Beat: Ratt's Monday Date A Warm-Up for a Monster Tour Next Year," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 14, 1990.

"The Ballad of Alice Cooper"'

Above: The cover of Alice Cooper's 1989 "Trash" album.

Any indie credibility I may still retain will be forever lost with this admission: In 1990, I bought, and very much enjoyed, Jon Bon Jovi's Blazy of Glory, the album of music released in conjunction with and "inspired" by the film Young Guns II. I was fourteen years old.

There is a story to the album. Originally, the producers wanted to use Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead or Alive" (from his band's 1986 Slippery When Wet album) for the soundtrack of the Brat Pack cowboy sequel. This was not to be. In a 1990 interview, Jon Bon Jovi recounted how his soundtrack-album came to be:

Though I was quite flattered, I realized that the lyrics didn't fit this movie, and that I would have to write something that was lyrically correct . . . When our tour ended in February, I went to the set (of 'Young Guns II' in Santa Fe, N.M.) with the song, 'Blaze of Glory' in hand and played it for the stars of the movie as well as the producers and director. Then, they gave me the script and I wrote nine more songs.¹

Thus was born "Blaze of Glory" (a song still in the popular memory and which was recently performed by contestant Phil Stacey on American Idol). Mr. Bon Jovi would consistently deny that this was a solo album (although this was perhaps said only to preserve harmony in his band). During this period, Mr. Bon Jovi fielded many questions about his then-feud with his guitarist Richie Sambora (who earlier in the summer of 1990 had contributed a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary" to The Adventures of Ford Fairlaine soundtrack and was to release his own solo album, Stranger in this Town, the following year).

On August 13, 1990, Mr. Bon Jovi appeared on the radio program, Rockline, to promote the new album and presumably, his cameo in the film, which had been released only twelve days before. I remember listening to this broadcast. During the show, he also played an unreleased song he had written about Alice Cooper, who at that time was still riding the waves of success from his 1989 album, Trash, and its hit single, "Poison." Never released commercially, and little known, the song Mr. Bon Jovi played was called "The Ballad of Alice Cooper," though for years, I misremembered its title as "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," the song's final lyric. Self-referential, and featuring allusions to Cooper's past work, the song stuck in my memory:

Used to be a billion dollar baby
I used to be the eyes that made you scream
Used to be the one that I could talk to
But now there's something else [Alice?], there's you and me
I used to think I really didn't need you
But I used to think that only women bleed
And I ain't gonna cry no more
I've been to hell and back before
Watch me as I walk out the door
Because Alice doesn't live here anymore

(Lyrics courtesy of SickThingsUK). SickThingsUK quotes "Renfield" (actually Cooper's personal assistant Brian Nelson, according to the SickThingsUK webmaster) as saying that both Bon Jovi and Cooper recorded demos of "The Ballad of Alice Cooper."

A number of years ago, I Googled the few lyrics I remembered and rediscovered the tune (an mp3 bootleg of which lurks somewhere on the Internets). During a July 1991 interview with Hot Metal (transcribed in its entirety here at the Alice Cooper eChive), Cooper, promoting his album Hey Stoopid, was asked by an interviewer about the song:

I asked after a song called The Ballad Of Alice Cooper which Jon Bon Jovi once told me he'd written for Alice around the time of Trash, but which didn't make it onto the album.

"It didn't make this album either!" Alice answered, laughing heartily. "And every time I see Jon, he gives me one of these 'Hey, how's the song doin'?' looks and I go...(catches his breath). And it really is a good song! But you know the reason why I can't do it? 'Cause he's talking about me and I really can't do that! I told Jon, 'Jon, it's such a great song, you do it about me, but it's hard for me to sing The Ballad Of Alice Cooper about myself!' We laugh about it every time I talk to him - and for the rest of my life, every time I see him, he's going to ask me when I'm going to do that song!"

One would think that in the era of bonus tracks and repackaged editions of old albums that the demos of this song would have resurfaced as a bonus sometime in the past few years. There is little reference to the tune on the Internet, save for the stray references one would expect on Alice Cooper and Jon Bon Jovi fansites. Someone has posted an mp3 of the song, presumably from the Rockline radio appearance, online, but it is of low audio quality. I would say that it is forgotten, but the song never really entered the public imagination, as it was apparently only played publicly the once on a nationally broadcast radio program seventeen years ago.

1. Paul Willistein, "Career Guns Are Blazing for Rocker, Jon Bon Jovi," The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), August 3, 1990.