Say Goodbye to Hollywood — 3 seconds of fame

Grendel — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:52:05 +0000

I grew up on Long Island, and entered high school during the heyday of the wide post-Farrah side flips (”feathering”), with its straight down the middle part, well before bangs started flipping up high and back. MTV had launched its very first videos and local bands started filming everything they’d ever performed in cheesy bars, bringing in friends and their little sisters to make up an audience. Billy Joel would frequently attend his nephew’s (and my younger brother’s) little league games, so we very dutiful teenage sisters who never missed a game were enlisted to spend an afternoon wearing tight black and white shirts and even tighter dry-cleaned and pressed Calvin Klein and Jordache jeans, holding unlit cigarettes and half-filled glasses of colored water in the dank fog-machine-driven cloud of smoke in a dingy bar in Huntington while Billy Joel and his band repeatedly played “Say Goodbye to Hollywood.” The filmmakers hadn’t counted on the tears: the heavy fog and humidity in the sweaty room caused our audience’s great big mass of hair to go horribly limp (the stiff hairsprayed approach wasn’t yet the rage)!

At the very start of the clip you can almost see Billy in tie and coat and his band with flipped up collars (and hair) in the distance over the top of what looks like my unusually large head, which is pretty much centered in the frame when I swing my many layers around to speak to the person to my right (this was pre-mullet, and yet so close…).

I don’t think the song itself was a rocking hit with our barely-teen aged crowd — we weren’t yet cynical or luxuriating in hormonally-driven depression.

Grendel's Kitchen » Timewarp

Say Goodbye to Hollywood — 3 seconds of fame