John C. Hughes: Puppets!  Well, marionettes.  Everything is better with puppets/marionettes.  Except for this.

Jon Cummings: In which the Dead pretended to be a mainstream rock band for, oh, 4:43, and the folks at corporate radio said, “What the heck, let’s play along.” Of course, it’s a damn catchy tune, and a fun and inventive video. I just noticed something in seeing this for the first time in years: Jerry’s voice, at times, sounds distinctly like late-period George Harrison, and the song’s ironic-oldster stance would have fit perfectly on the Traveling Wilburys’ records.

Dw. Dunphy: Twenty-plus years, a couple thousand shows and a couple thousand drugs, and it was 1987 when The Dead finally had a hit. The power of persistence, I guess. And while I never minded the band in passing, I was never a fan, not even of this, their poppiest tune. An injection of bounce in the song is about all that separates it from standard Dead. Listen carefully, and you recognize their sound owed a whole lot more to Chet Atkins than the Haight.

The Grateful Dead? Country pickers? Don’t act so shocked!

Zack Dennis: This is the only Grateful Dead song I can remember ever hearing on the radio. With my secret love of Phish, I was always predisposed to like the Dead, but when it comes down to brass tacks, I’ve never found their music particularly engaging. This is a nice, light song, nothing for me to complain about, but nothing to really get excited about, either. I remember finding it amusing to see Jerry Garcia described as a “skinny kid” in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and later there was an idiotic “dramatized” documentary about his death, which basically showed a faceless chubby guy rolling around a few times on a cot, apparently having a heart attack.

David Medsker: I am just not a Dead kind of guy. I can see why people like them, and even I love “Friend of the Devil.” Good for them that they finally cracked the Top 40. Now please leave. (more…)

If you were a GenXer coming of age in the 1980s, moviegoing meant heavy doses of Harrison Ford, too much Tom Cruise, an occasional journey into the unhinged eraserhead of David Lynch…and multitudes of Molly Ringwald. John Hughes’ hugely successful teen flicks were hit-and-miss in quality — with the exception of Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, they all play better in the memory than they do in real time. Still, without them we might never have grown to loathe the Brat Pack — and Hughes did manage to give some early-career screen time to several young people who went on to more interesting acting careers (John Cusack, Alan Ruck and Gina Gershon, to name a few). (more…)