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Watching ‘80s crooner Eddie Money, climb through the ropes, err, on stage at Dundalk’s Heritage Festival last year, I couldn’t get the image of another ‘80s icon, Randy “the Ram” Robinson (okay, fictional ‘80s icon) from The Wrestler, out of my mind.
The beauty of casting Rourke as the battle weary, playing out the string ex-star, of course, wasn’t merely that Rourke, the boxer-cum-actor-cum-boxer-cum-actor, knew his way around a gym and possessed a Stanislavski-willingness to ingest steroids. It was art imitating life with Rourke himself a seen-better-days ‘80s has-been.
Similar to Rourke and "the Ram," with his hair dyed, extra pounds squeezing into a pair of jeans, black shirt and black jacket, sax around his neck—looking like he’d weathered a tough decade or two—Money set out to prove he could hit the right notes as he delivered the songs his middle-aged fans came to hear. Needed to hear, maybe. Stiff-jointed, sweaty, Money mimicked the old moves—not well enough to make anyone in the packed crowd believe he’s still the same guy he was 30 years ago—but that they were.
Well, tonight, Joan Jett (who looks like she survived the ‘80s better than Eddie Money and many of us) puts another dime in the jukebox, baby.
Original riot grrrl, lifelong O’s fan, Runaways co-founder (Kristen Stewart played Jett in the well-received 2010 movie, The Runaways), Jett rocked several albums that went gold or platinum in the day. She takes the stage at the Dundalk Heritage Festival, with the Blackhearts, at 8 p.m. The $5 festival admission includes the show. I wish Dundalk could pull Morrissey or the Psychedelic Furs some year, but hey, I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll, too.
