The most important thing the opening sequence of Road House wants to convey to you is not to throw stones. “Don’t throw stones,” says the man on stage at the Bandstand. “You don’t know,” he continues. “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do,” he elaborates. He then repeats for emphasis “Don’t throw stones” to conclude his statement.

Why this happens is…ah, one of the great mysteries of Road House, right up there with beginning the film in a bar that is not the titular road house, or even a road house at all.

It’s not like the man singing “Don’t Throw Stones” is Jeff Healey, lead singer of the Jeff Healey Band, who provide the live music in every subsequent scene with live music. He’s Tito Larriva, lead singer of Cruzados, the band playing here, and he’s a pretty interesting cat in and of himself, a human Wikipedia k-hole. He started his musical career as lead singer of the Plugz, an LA punk band from the general Decline of Western Civilization/Love and Rockets milieu who did the original score for Repo Man. Much of the band subsequently morphed into Cruzados, which played up their Latino roots and made a kind of Eighties coke-bloat blooz-rock thing out of it. After their breakup, Larriva eventually formed Tito & Tarantula, who provided the musical accompaniment to the Salma Hayek snake dance in From Dusk Till Dawn. Various members of the Plugz/Cruzados continuum also played with Bob Dylan on Letterman in ’84, the drummer played for Izzy Stradlin & the JuJu Hounds, Social Distortion, and Mike Ness’s solo band, and the bassist has worked with Matthew Sweet for years as well as doing various things with sundry rock and roll legends. How they wound up here has, I assume, something to do with the golden ears of music-industry macher Jimmy Iovine, founder of Interscope, co-founder of Beats by Dre, dater of Stevie Nicks, partial inspiration for “Edge of Seventeen” via his intense grief over the murder of his friend John Lennon, and billionaire, married to Liberty Ross, who’s the sister of Atticus Ross, who’s the songwriting partner of and second-ever official member of Nine Inch Nails with Trent Reznor, who once opened for Izzy Stradlin’s other band Guns n’ Roses and who co-starred with Repo Man‘s Harry Dean Stanton in Twin Peaks: The Return and spent years recording for Iovine’s label Interscope before eventually being named chief creative officer of Beats Music, which became Apple Music after Iovine and Dr. Dre sold it to Apple and became billionaires. It’s a small world after all.

<Al Swearengen voice> Anyways, </> Larriva’s face is the second face you see in close-up in Road House, beaten to the punch only by Kevin Tighe. This is an interesting first foot to put forward, not only because Tighe and Larriva’s looks are <Fifty Shades of Grey meme voice> unconventional </a>, but because Larriva isn’t even in the movie after this first scene. But Road House is a film that plays its cards close to its chest in the early going, primarily because despite the skill of the team of action-movie aces employed to make it look good, it’s written (in part by Academy Award nominee Hilary Henkin) as if the writers were randomly but repeatedly struck on the head during the process, resulting in wild miscalculations of the relative weight of what is shown on screen. The Four Car Salesmen of Jasper, Missouri are one result. Using Frank Tilghman as our entry-point character even though he’s a grinning ghoul in a bolo tie who could only read as more villainous if huffed fumes and said “baby wants to fuck” is another. Centering the whole opening sequence on a band that you’ll never see again is another.

And there is simply no way to overlook or underplay the presence of the band in this sequence, no. They won’t let you. Our first good look at Larriva, in a vest and pirate-look shirt that are striking even given the Road House fashion baseline, involves him screeching, and I mean it sounds like someone just low-blowed him, “IF YOU LOVE ME BUY ME A BIG TEE VEEEEEE” at the top of his lungs and the top of his register. He goes so hard and so high on this he literally stands on tiptoes and sings down into the mic. He coils his face back into his neck like a snake whose strike is sonic rather than physical. This requires effort, and it does not look like a pleasant effort either. So you know, kudos to Larriva and Cruzados. They left it all out on the stage, a stage they were placed on for some reason.

Now when you first watch Road House you may not realize it, but the message espoused by this song will get under your skin. I’ve found myself singing “Don’t throw stones” around the house. I’ve heard my partner doing the same. We’ve used it as shorthand for watching Road House at all, the way couples text “COAT” at each other to find out if they’re going to get laid if they come home instead of staying out with their friends.

What I’m getting at as this: This sequence is superfluous, its content is a non sequitur (not throwing stones is part of neither the Dalton Path nor the Wade Garret Way), the time spent with it is unpleasant, and the lingering impression is endearing. And here’s the thing about that as it applies to Road House, according to J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings:

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed dominion of the author.”

This is not a Road House. This is a woman’s ass. Other than a few moments that are so comically over-the-top they seem custom-built for people who use words like “bazongas” Road House does not really go in for random gratuitous objectification of women as a rule. In most instances where a man leers at a woman, that’s as sure a sign that bad shit is about to go down as the “DUNNNNNNN DUNN” string hit in John Williams’s score for Jaws. But this is where the title card devised by R/Greenberg Associates—the same company that designed the all-timer titles for Alien and Altered States—winds up.

This is normally the part where I come up with some deep-dive close-read no-prize explanation for the weird thing Road House just did. I’m hard pressed, however, to argue anything other than “they thought it would be fun to rile up the rubes by slapping the movie’s title across a woman’s butt.” I’ve seen this movie with enough people to know it usually succeeds in this aim. Not to mix the psycho-surrealist metaphor around which this post is constructed or anything, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

How then, to explain the following?

This is not Patrick Swayze. This is the same woman who will subsequently be labeled Road House. Her feet, anyway.

This is not Ben Gazzara. Not a single one of these guys is. This is Cruzados, the band that plays the opening song of the film. (Which is not the band that plays all of the other songs in the film.)

This is not Kelly Lynch. This is Kevin Tighe.

This is n—okay this is Kevin Tighe. CO-CO-CO-CO-COMBO BREAKER! Still, every rule needs an exception to prove it, as Dalton could no doubt tell us.

This is not Keith David. This is Kevin Tighe again. Moreover, Keith David is not an actor who has more than one line in this film.

This is not Kathleen Wilhoite. You know who it is.

While the three people here conceivably could be “Sunshine” Parker, Red West, and Julie Michaels—the names fit—they are not. They’re two extras and, wait, what was his name again?

This, as the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences could tell you this year, is not Sam Elliott. It’s Tito Larriva, lead singer of Cruzados. Interesting fella in his own right, but not a future Achiever.

While this could, and in fact should, be the Jeff Healey Band, it is not. It is still Cruzados.

The centered positioning of the credits, the lack of attention-demanding dialogue (it’s just the song and some bar chatter), the anomalous presence of one of the lead actors in the film who is himself usually centered in the frame: All of these factors make the viewer want to connect the name they’re reading to the person they’re seeing. No such luck.

Even the exception, Kevin Tighe, is less of one than he looks. When he appears, you are about to spend five minutes watching one of the most skin-crawlingly unctuous performances of the decade, and you will most likely spend much of your first viewing of the film believing him to be the villain of the piece. Naturally he’s the only actor billed in straightforward WYSIWYG fashion.

Again, I’ve seen this movie with enough people to know that in the right mindset these credits are disorienting, in a goofy, tipsy way. It makes people a bit rambunctious. “Wow, Kelly Lynch looks different!” “This is clearly not Sam Elliott.” That kind of thing. It’s like receiving an invitation to start talking back to the movie, written in purple Palatino. Stick that in your pipe and don’t smoke it.