[caption id=”attachment_1244” align=”alignnone” width=”500” caption=”Billy Squier in a pensive moment…complete with Coke endorsement.”]
Years ago—sometime between Weird Science _and _Iron Eagle III—I heard this movie line:
“The human body is a fascinating specimen. 99% of it may be operating perfectly, yet if that remaining 1% is defective, the body dies.”
Or something like that. The actor may have been Donald Pleasance, and he may have played a detective. Standing over a corpse. Surrounded by police tape and murmuring cops. Or it may have been David Warner, and he may have played a doctor. Standing over a corpse. Surrounded by test tubes and murmuring lab techs.
But I’m not here to talk about 80’s character actors. I’m here to talk about arena-rocker Billy Squier, he of the crunchy riffs and throaty whine.
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Billy Squier’s 1982 release Don’t Say No _went triple platinum, and his follow-up album _Emotions in Motion _hit double platinum. He managed to balance pop star status with arena rock credibility, back in the days when an outsized voice and matching hair overcame awkward stage presence. Toss in Squier’s contribution to the _Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack, and we’re looking at a rock star who filled arenas and dominated the MTV rotation. So if 99% of Billy Squier’s career operated perfectly, what about the remaining 1%? Here’s your answer:
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Billy’s performance reminds me of that cousin who gets really drunk at your wedding and claws his way out of a morass of inhibition and repression and decides to finally, _finally _show everyone—including his wife—what he’s been hiding all these years.
And good for that cousin, because sometimes it takes alcohol to reveal our truer selves. But we’re talking about Billy Squier here. The Stroke _Billy Squier. _Everybody Wants You _Billy Squier. Guitar rock god Billy Squier. Nothing about _Rock Me Tonite says guitar rock god. It almost says Flashdance, but where Jennifer Beals exuded a sort of masculine femininity—the welder moonlighting as an exotic dancer—Billy Squier exudes incongruous androgyny and a collection of flailing, cat-on-the-prowl, hair-tousling, sweatshirt-ripping, herky-jerky attack and retreat dance moves that are so bad we wonder if Billy secretly courted self-destruction. If so, he got his wish. _Rock Me Tonite _was the defective 1% that killed Billy Squier’s career.
Of course it’s easy to poke fun at the past by comparing it to modern standards of cultural literacy, and the problem with Rock Me Tonite _isn’t its terrible 80’s-ness. Well, maybe that’s part of the problem. But there’s a larger issue here. I’ll call it the PATT Syndrome, taken from Eddie Murphy’s 1985 single _Party All the Time.
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Just as Eddie Murphy became what he used to make fun of—a fame-bloated Rick James-wannabe, slumming it with groupies, sycophants, and someone who looks like Chris Penn—Billy Squier became what rock stars make fun of: Pink grapefruit satin sheets, drummers with hats, and choreography taken from the guy who directed Xanadu.