Word: greasers
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...songs, and as he sings he is totally immersed in that world. On stage he is a teenage hood, but a likable one, a would-be hard guy who doesn't take himself all that seriously. Much of his act is calculated to produce this image. In his neo-greaser outfit--baggy pants, a workshirt with cut-off sleeves, a leather jacket, and a floppy, oversized woolen ski cap that he periodically pulls over his eyes, throws in the air, or loses among the tangle of amp and guitar cords on stage--he looks like a kid who has some...
...lyrics were also surprisingly different. He sang narratives, stories of a world peopled with semi-greaser kids not too far away from high school graduation who spent most of their time hanging out, trying to be cool, driving old cars down interstates late at night and making periodic stops at lovers' lanes. Even though the characters Springsteen sang about were a particular type (East Coast, specifically New Jersey urban; middle class; apolitical) he managed to convey something of the quality of American adolescence in general--the pain, the self-and-status consciousness, the particular tackiness of those years. His songs...
...store pay enough to send him to a decent school. Hours be fore his crucial final examinations, Jim tosses his school books into a river and, like his father, packs up to live by him self. He works in a summer camp where he falls in with an affable greaser (played with wit and affection by none other than Ringo Starr). Jim learns about girls, about the niceties of shortchanging customers in the fun fair where he works with his new friend, and about the gnawing difficulties of burying the past. Un able to sort things out, he returns home...
Shapiro's attacks on the bounties of popular television are pratfall absurdist, his dithering humor a hybrid of Robert Downey (Greaser's Palace, Putney Swope) and Carol Burnett. Shapiro's tactic is to restage some popular forms-a commercial, an adventure series, the 6 o'clock news-with all due attention to nuances of style. One of The Groove Tube's best sequences, for example, is a Butz beer commercial...
...look of the line outside the movie you'd think David Bowie was playing. It is an audience of dudes, every kind of dude come to panic in Detroit. You see sparkle shirts next to stretch pants, zoot suits and bodysuits, spangles and sequins and satins, conks and greaser crowns, bouffants and bubbles and blond-wigged blacks and silver-sprayed Afros, tranvestites and Amazons. The action is not in getting into the movie as much as it is in getting off on the movie together, in concert. And the getting off means a wisecracky hysteria, a grab your neighbor...