ROADIE

While Meatloaf and his best friend Gailard Sartain are delivering Shiner Beer, they find an RV that has broken down. Meatloaf is good at fixing anything, so he repairs the RV and agrees to drive it to its destination, which happens to be Hank Williams Jr's gig at a honky tonk. This leads to Meatloaf becoming a roadie for Mohammed Johnson's (Don Cornelius) Rock and Roll Circus Tour. Part of the reason Meatloaf goes for the job is to be with Kaki Hunter, who is saving her virginity to become an Alice Cooper groupie. That's pretty much the plot of Roadie.

Roadie was made in 1980, when you could have a cast as diverse as Art Carney playing Meat's dad, Gailard Sartain playing his best friend, Alice Cooper and Deborah Harry playing themselves, Blondie fighting a group of midgets from a band known as Snow White and Don Cornelius playing a rock promoter and somehow having all of this work to make a very enjoyable movie. You're not going to have many laugh out loud moments while watching Roadie, but most of the time the movie should keep a smile on your face.

For some reason the dvd box cover has absolutely nothing to do with the movie, I guess some marketing genius thought that it would really make the movie sell. Must not have worked, since I got my copy at Big Lots for $3.00 and I see Amazon sells it for $3.98.

Some of my favorite things in Roadie were Roy Orbison giving his growl from "Pretty Woman" in a bar when (duh!) a pretty woman walks by; Roy and Hank Jr doing a duet; Blondie doing "Ring of Fire"; cameos by Merle Kilgore and Ramblin Jack Elliott (don't blink or you'll miss him) ; and musical performances by Alice Cooper, Asleep At The Wheel and Alvin Crow and The Pleasant Valley Boys.

There's a couple of lines in the movie that stayed stuck in my brain long after I had watched Roadie. One was Meatloaf working on equipment and telling someone "Get me 2 beers and a hubcap...I need a Ford" and when Meat tells Kiki he doesn't know who Alice Cooper is , she replys "Don't you read T-shirts?"