“Siri, show my the coolest fucking picture ever” – Mary Woronov and Lou Reed
“It’s the last arcade on the street / it’s the end of the 1980s / and somehow you’re alive” is one hell of a lyric from a band that’s had more than their fair share. As a latchkey kid from the ’80s lucky enough to have cable, the title “Night of the Comet” means something to me. Night of the Comet was a seminal ’80s b-movie mixing sci-fi, horror, and teen romance about a mass extinction event starring, among other actors, Mary Woronov of Warhol Factory (she danced with whips while Velvet Underground played gigs!) and Eating Raoul semi-fame. Night of the Comet was on heavy rotation when I was a kid, alongside the likes of The Last Starfighter, Cherry 2000, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I feel like the below trailer really underplays the creepy, anxious tone of the movie but I guess more of a “girls just wanna have fun” vibe helped sell tickets to kids in 1984:
Culture has certainly preserved and exalted the likes of The Terminator, Back to the Future, and Aliens – big tent blockbusters teed up by the success of Star Wars and Spielberg’s run of hits that linger in the visual and textual landmarks of today (see: Stranger Things). So those were the hits – what about the misses? What about the knock-offs, flops and left-field castoffs likely funded to be huge blockbusters but that instead ended up filling out the afternoon time slots on HBO and long-forgotten channels like PRISM. I’m not sure where lead Foghorn Bart Cameron first came across Night of the Comet (some local video store in Racine,Wisconsin? an edited-for-TV version?), but I imagine that the garish, moody red sky in the film works as much as a Proustian Madeleine for him as it does for me.
Getting back to the song, “Night of the Comet” is another entry in Cameron’s emerging song cycle about the end of the world. The Omega Man from “And Omega Man / has a drunkard’s conviction” is likely Charlton Heston from 1971’s The Omega Man, reinforcing the desperate, apocalyptic backdrop. Musically, like much of the Foghorns’ catalog, “Night of the Comet” draws from traditional folk and blues changes and form – simple, but confidently played. The lyrics and the singing contain the whole weird world of the song – forming a sort of snow globe of nostalgia, dread, and the kind of generous fatalism we’ve come to love from the Foghorns. Are you listening to it yet? Why are you still reading this?
The Foghorns will play this song and more at the Ball of Wax 57 release show on Saturday the 14th – and who knows, maybe Night of the Comet will be playing on the TV over the bar