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1985: The Year In Top 40 Hits (Week 20: May 18, 1984)
Tom Petty goes psychedelic, Billy Ocean finds his audience, Julian Lennon doesn’t, and The Time finally act up on record
I haven’t written about “We are the World,” mostly because I think that while it’s well-meaning and sincere, it’s also an absolutely terrible song. However, it does give me an excuse to talk about Joe Bob Briggs.
Back in the 1980s, Dallas was a two-newspaper town. There was the Dallas Morning News, the staid broadsheet, and the Dallas Times Herald, the scrappy afternoon competitor. Having a much smaller circulation, the Times Herald had a somewhat more freewheeling attitude that led them to try new things. So when a reporter named John Bloom took a leave of absence from his regular job to co-author a book about a local murder he’d covered (which later was adapted into a really good TV movie called A Killing In A Small Town), he had an idea. He started writing a weekly column for the Times Herald reviewing the low-budget exploitation movies he loved under the assumed name Joe Bob Briggs.
It wasn’t an entirely new idea — John Candy and Joe Flaherty had been doing a recurring sketch on SCTV called Farm Film Report, in which rural cinephiles Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok reviewed movies solely on the…
