'Rock and Roll Part 2' by Gary Glitter.
Three things about this song:
1) Everybody on this great planet, especially when they're drinking, always has grand "You know what we should do someday?" ideas. One of my favorites is one that Lane and I have talked about since I moved to Lawrence, but never pulled the trigger on: we want to take Lane's trumpet and set of bongos, set up shop on a street corner downtown, and play this song on a loop, just to see how much money we'd make-- or more accurately, how much we could offset the cost of the amount of beer we'd have to drink before we were ready to actually do this. To go along with our instruments (Lane on the trumpet, me on the bongos) we would take requests from the crowd on different categories, and yell out as many as we could name in the chorus before moving on to the next category. For example, if the category was "Members of the 1991 Minnesota Twins" our chorus would sound like:
"Dah dah dahhhhhhhh dah duh, HEY! KIRBY PUCKETT! Dah dah dahhhhhhh dah duh, HEY! SCOTT ERICKSON! Dah dah dahhhhhh dah duh, HEY! CHUCK KNOBLAUCH!" And so on and so on. We've always thought it would be a crowd pleaser, not to mention a welcome change from every other downtown Lawrence busker with his acoustic guitar and/or harmonica. Alas, now Lane & family moved to Rhode Island, and I'll probably never realize this dream.
2) You know what you're telling people when you tell them you don't like this song? You're telling them that you hate fun. I can't have you in my life if you can't appreciate this song on some level, and I don't think that's too unreasonable. Listen, I've made concessions before with girls in my past. I dated a girl who didn't think that Anchorman was that funny, and definitely didn't like Chappelle's Show. I've dated a Duke fan. And in probably my worst offense, I was friendsies with bensies with a friggin' Yankees fan. (We tried dating for real and it lasted like two weeks. Either we didn't work well as an actual couple, or subconciously I was more pissed than I thought I was that the Yanks signed Mark Bellhorn away from the Red Sox that summer.)
However, everybody has a line in the sand, and mine happens to be drawn in front of this song. I was at a party during my freshman year of college and met a girl. It was the classic tale of romance: boy meets girl at a party, girl finds boy charming and witty, boy thinks girl is cute in a hippie sort of way (and will make the current girl he's chasing after appropriately jealous), boy and girl do a couple rounds of whippits, boy and girl end up making out in the basement, Rock and Roll Part 2 comes on, girl says it's the dumbest song ever, boy extracts himself from the situation and never talks to her again. The moral of this not-quite-Shakespearean love story? You don't EVER talk bad about this song in front of me.
3) So why was I thinking about my history with this song the other day? Because of an epiphany I had: this song is called Rock and Roll PART 2. It stands to reason, then, that there is a Part 1. Why haven't I ever heard of Part 1? Was there even really a Part 1, or is the title some kind of inside joke? Why was Part 1 excluded from the Jock Jams and/or Jock Rock CDs? Why do you never hear it during a sporting event, or any of the Mighty Ducks movies? So I did some investigating. And it was worth it:
Here's what makes me love Part 1 (besides the fact that instead of just three minutes of this glorious song, I now have six): The chorus is absolutely hilarious. I had never heard this version of the chorus in Part 2 before.
You know when you're at a karaoke bar, and you're about six beers past being capable of putting on a decent performance, but you go up there anyway? And then you're too busy winking at some cougar in the second row and strolling around the stage, swirling your drink around in your glass like you're Frank Sinatra, so you forget the lyrics, and you don't know where you're at on the screen, so you completely melt down and have to make up some random lyrics on the spot? And everyone quickly realizes what you're doing, so you start getting heckled, and now the cougar won't make eye contact with you anymore, and you're trying to laugh it off, but inside you're rattled, and you know that you're just dying up there, and the heckling gets worse, and you spill some of your drink on your shirt, and eventually you get booed off the stage? That's what the chorus reminds me of: some drunk karaoke guy panicking and improvising lyrics. "Rock and roooooooll! Rock and roll! Rock and roooooooooll! Rock and roll! Rock and rolllll, rock! Rock and roll!"
Just ridiculous. If you played the instrumental version to an eight-year-old, told him the song was called Rock and Roll, and asked him to write the chorus using crayons and construction paper, that's what he would write. Verbatim.
Gary Glitter, don't ever let anybody tell you that you're not the man.
