Ernie straightening up behind the bar. Carrie Ann lighting a cigarette. Hank sipping his coffee. Whatsername the German schoolgirl–looking waitress wiping down a table. And Dalton, smoke in his mouth, fresh from a day working out and helping Emmett and a night of love with Dr. Elizabeth Clay, doffing his jacket as he arrives for a night’s work, greeted with a “Hey, doll!” and a “There he is!” from his admiring underlings. This is the Double Deuce as it was always meant to be: safe, familial, professional, with a lot of matching reds.

But it is not yet the Double Deuce at its absolute finest. That will require the arrival of another cooler, older, slyer, more powerful, subtle and not quick to anger. It will require us, at long last, to walk the Way of Wade Garrett. Between now and then Dalton will receive very bad news and a very bad beating. It is as if the universe itself cries out, “Not yet, Dalton. Not yet.”

In the scene that follows Brad Wesley’s R-Rated Rear Window Spectacular, Dalton helps his landlord Emmett lug some farm equipment out of his pickup truck. During the course of this conversation Emmett asks if Dalton had a woman over and then asks where she went when Dalton confirms her initial presence. This implies that he became aware of that presence the night before, which means that at least two weird old men enjoyed the pleasure of her and Dalton’s company so to speak. He tells Dalton “If you’re smart, you’d pitch your tent,” a statement ostensibly about romantic commitment but jesus christ what am I made of stone, he said “pitch your tent.” Finally he does that Emmett thing where he ends the scene with a quippy aphorism followed by a hard cut, in this case assuring Dalton that even if he isn’t that smart, “You never know, son—maybe she’ll be smart enough for the both of you.” Add another fake Dalton dad to the pile of men who call him “boy” or “son.” I wonder if he gives him The Talk afterwards.

All of this has so dominated my consciousness during prior viewings of Road House that it was not until about five minutes ago that I noticed there’s another Emmett line in this scene. After Dalton says yes, he did have a woman up there with him, Emmett raises his eyes to the sky and says “Don’t give me no lip, Lord.”

Emmett’s view of organized religion is already well documented. Here we’re offered a glimpse of his feelings on the Man Upstairs himself, and wouldn’t you know it, He’s a land-Lord. There’s some stuff a fella has got to get away with, and for the sake of all involved parties it’d be best if YHWH just keeps His feelings on the matter to Himself. Victimless crimes like nailing a beautiful woman who graduated don’t affect the rent getting paid on time, metaphorically speaking. Accept Jesus as your personal savior by the first of every month and then tell the Big Guy to butt out.

Dr. Elizabeth Clay isn’t the only person who registers the significance of the location of Dalton’s apartment on this fateful night. Across the water, her ex-husband Brad Wesley watches intently, liquor at the ready, as Doc slithers out from under her makeshift sheet-robe and mounts Dalton for a second bout of lovemaking. He rocks back and forth in his rocking chair, stops—perhaps to avoid any unpleasant mimesis of the movements of the people upon whom he’s spying—and reaches for a cigar, because even a broken Freud gives the right time twice a day.

The question that interests me here isn’t why Brad Wesley is watching his nemesis fuck his ex-wife, but when he started watching. Unless he snuck out onto his balcony or lanai or whatever it is in a big hurry after the Doc looked across the water and saw his house before she and Dalton did their standup routine, it’s doubtful he caught round one. This means Wesley started peeping at some point between then and now, a time period during which Dalton was awake and alone and bare-ass naked on the roof while Elizabeth slept the sleep of the peacefully post-coital in Dalton’s bed. It means he was watching Dalton all by himself.

This tracks with Wesley’s dialogue in the remainder of the film, for what it’s worth. At no point during his many interactions with Dalton during the rest of the movie does he bring up the man’s relationship with Elizabeth, not even at times when it would be natural to do so—when he playfully upbraids Dalton for “taking all my boys” following the cooler’s murder spree through Wesley’s goon army. “Hell, you took my girl, too”—easiest thing in the world to say, but he doesn’t say it.

The closest he comes to admitting any jealousy whatsoever is when he tells Elizabeth how much he hates to see her wind up with a no-account drifter like Dalton. As I’ve written before, this isn’t the “if I can’t have you no one can” speech you’d expect at all. It’s not hard to imagine Wesley wishing he could have her again, but that’s just it: You have to imagine him wishing it. The focus is on Dalton, and whether or not he’s a worthy successor to Wesley in Elizabeth’s love life.

Which brings us back to Peeping Brad here. By now he’s gotten himself quite an eyeful of Dalton—Does he find the man lacking as a lover and thus unworthy of Elizabeth’s love? Or is it the opposite? Is Dalton so toned and hung and prodigiously talented in the sack that Wesley worries his ex has been dickmatized by someone with little else going for him? Or is this masochism—a case of Wesley rubbing his own face in the happiness of his former lover and his current arch-enemy because some part of him is addicted to misery?

Then there’s this tantalizing possibility: The Elizabeth stuff is a smokescreen for sexualized resentment of and desire for Dalton himself. In this reading, when Wesley tells Dalton that the only thing missing from his trophy room is his ass, Wesley really wishes he could get Dalton’s ass stuffed and mounted the old-fashioned way. To be honest Wesley strikes me as a drearily heterosexual figure, double-entendre action-movie homoeroticism notwithstanding. But this leaves open the possibility of simple envy, of Wesley covetously devouring Dalton’s body and beauty with his eyes.

Wesley spying on Dalton and Doc having sex on the roof of a barn is a crime of opportunity, that much seems certain. But it is difficult to say with any certainty at all why Wesley seized the opportunity. Grab a cigar and ponder this imponderable with me.

Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay are on an awkward pillow-talk hot streak, and they’re not about to let the temporary cessation of their lovemaking put that fire out. When the Doc stirs an unspecified amount of time after what I can only assume were simultaneous and earth-shaking climaxes (Dalton’s jimmy runs deep, so deep, so deep, put her ass to sleep) she finds herself alone in bed and finds Dalton sitting nude on the rooftop of the barn just outside his window. Wielding the bedsheet as an ersatz open-in-the-back hospital gown, she comes to join him, sitting down on a beautifully constructed rug that is now going to require some spot cleaning.

What do they talk about, these two lovebirds? Doc speaks first, and Dalton follows, and on it goes.

Doc: “You’re gonna have a lot of pain when you grow older. You could be crippled if you don’t slow down.”

Dalton: “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

“You already know that?”

“No, I just said ‘That’s what they say.'”

<pause for shared laughter and mild horseplay in the form of a loving face-mush>

“Where are you gonna go from here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could stay, Dalton. If you wanted to.”

“I don’t think so.”

Then they fuck again, her on top this time, because if you thought chatting about the uncle who cared for you after your parents died when you were a kid and the collapse of your marriage to the insane guy across the way was arousing, I’ll see that bet and raise you “you are going to suffer horribly” and “I don’t like you enough to not skip town.”

Strange as it sounds, though, isn’t the ol’ Eros/Thanatos two-step the oldest dance in the world? If you can’t talk about your gravest regrets and fears, up to and including mortality, before you have sex, an activity designed to wipe rational thought clean, then when can you talk about them?

Never underestimate your opponent, Dalton once said. Expect the unexpected. I don’t know about “opponent,” but the sexual liaison between Dalton and his opposite number the Doc contains a whole lot of stuff I don’t think anyone saw coming.

It was the best of bars, it was the worst of bars, it was the age of being nice, it was the age of not being nice, it was the epoch of balls big enough to come in a dump truck, it was the epoch of opinions varying, it was the season of Wade, it was the season of Wesley, it was the auto dealership of hope, it was the separate and unrelated auto dealership of despair, we had Wagon Days before us, we had Wagon Days underneath us, we were all going direct to Jasper, we were all going direct the other way.

Critiquing the facial expressions a person makes during sex is…well, it’s like critiquing the facial expressions a person makes during a sneeze. How you react to what’s happening to your body is largely involuntary, and at any rate unselfconciousness is a valuable trait for sex since it’s easier to get where you want to go if you’re not fretting about the right way to get there. But hey, this is acting, right? So I don’t feel as churlish as I otherwise would to draw a distinction between these two Dr. Elizabeth Clay sex-face moments.

The pout, I find funny. It’s like “Ooh, this is sexy, I’m sexy, he’s sexy, this feels sexy, look at me being sexy.” Imagine Dalton doing it—he’d look even goofier than he does when he’s got his getting-down-to-business face on while stalking her around the room like a literal sex panther waiting to strike. I don’t fault her for it! Sometimes people sincerely feel this way during sex, and make “sexy” faces to show both themselves and their partner that what’s going on is hot stuff. It’s not like she’s wrong if that’s what she’s doing. It’s just a little pose-y, a little Whitesnake video-y, a little Playboy Channel-y. In those respects it’s of its time.

The laugh, though? Hooo boy. That’s the good shit right there. If you’re laughing out of sheer delight during sex, something has gone very very right for you, that’s one thing. The other thing is that this allows us to perceive the Doc, and Dalton too once he starts grinning in response, as being in on the joke. She knows it’s kind of ridiculous to go to a dude’s barnpartment, look at your psychotic ex-husband’s mansion across the way, talk about your uncle raising you and your parents dying and your marriage collapsing, go for a guy’s junk before so much as kissing, get hoisted in the air to mount him while he stands up, get slammed up against the wall, and get slammed up agains the wall. Ya gotta laugh, folks!

So she does, and the moment is beautifully, erotically unselfconscious. It opens up the path to the scene’s climax (though not the participants’), in which Dalton holds her up and shuffles them both over to the bed with his pants half-down and a licensed medical practitioner around his waist, a move they both know is equal parts silly and cool. It’s an echo, in its way, of the way Carrie Ann gazes with slackjawed lust upon Dalton’s behind. That was her private moment; this is a moment Elizabeth is experiencing with Dalton, and it’s so much fun she’s got to share it with him. She can’t help it. It just bubbles up inside her, until release.

The setup of the sex scene from Road House is both unique and appropriate. Making a stand is what Dalton does, after all: against the forty-year old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry; against Brad Wesley and the goons with whom he runs this town; against bouncing without rules; against shirts. Extending this policy to sex simply demonstrates the consistency of the Dalton Path. When you’re a cooler, there’s no such thing as time off.

For Doc, the scenario is a bit different. She is a healer by trade, a woman who ensures her patients are able to stand on their own two feet. Here, she is the patient. Their pre-sex chat about her family and her failed marriage is her giving her personal history the professional who’s there to treat her. After that she literally puts herself in his hands, allowing him to operate as he sees fit.

The whole scene can be viewed as a reversal of the time he came to her, wound open, and she sealed that wound. Here, they open themselves to each other. The operating theater is standing room only.

You wanna know how I could miss straight-up nudity during the sex scene from Road House? Watch those hands, oh honey watch those hands, and tell me the rest of the sex scene is even necessary. Hands are underrated in sex scenes. In context, they are effectively sex organs, but you’re allowed to show them in action. They’re sensory intake mechanisms. They soothe and caress, grasp and squeeze and hold. They’re our guide to the bodies of the participants as they uncover, expose, explore, clasp, connect. They’re beautiful in themselves, too—angles that tense and release, curves that stiffen and contract, skin that shows age and use, little microcosms of the sexual body. They’re doing nearly all the work in this scene even before Dalton uses his hands to lift Elizabeth up and bring her close. They’re the stars of the show. There’s a reason Patrick Swayze’s most famous sex scene of all, with Demi Moore in Ghost, revolves around pottery, an activity and art form actualized through the hands. And of course it’s not the first time his hands have worked clay.

A friend—one of the friends with whom I first saw Road House, now that I think of it—once told me back in my comics-critic days that I was effectively three critics in one. There was, he said, the guy who loves horror, the guy who cares a lot about properly staged action sequences, and (the briefest abashed pause here, if I recall correctly) the horndog. This felt pretty fair to me at the time. Add long takes to the mix and you’ve pretty much nailed my interests as a critic of film and television as well. Which is why it may surprise you (and him!) to learn that until two days ago, I had no idea that Kelly Lynch got her tits out during the sex scene from Road House.

Afterwards? Sure. I mean, they’re pretty hard to miss. As is her butt, and Patrick Swayze’s butt before it, and Sam Elliott’s pubic bush after it, and the topless dancers, and Denise’s strip tease, and Horny Steve and His Regular Saturday Night Thing, and (if we’re simply counting sexy bodies prominently displayed, not nudity specifically) Swayze’s glistening torso, and even Well-Endowed Wife’s pair of attitudes. This is not a film that wants to hide its horniness as a general rule.

But here’s how I know this is an effective sex scene: For a decade and a half I never gave Doc’s breasts so much as a glance. I was riveted by her face, limned by the moonlight; by Dalton’s face, gazing into hers; by her hands, exploring Dalton’s muscular chest through his, uh, beige sweater vest over white t-shirt combo; by his hands, covering hers, guiding hers, lowering them downward. It wasn’t until my partner pointed them out that I noticed them at all, and even then I wasn’t sure I’d caught what she’d said until I reviewed the footage.

But the sex scene from Road House casts a weird spell that way. Until three days ago, I believed that the initial penetration occurred before the pair kissed. The abruptness and intensity of the coupling and the tension of that near-miss kiss simply overwrote my memory of the real thing, which is that they prepare themselves for penetration before kissing but actually do exchange a short hard kiss before going through with it.

Go ahead, try to come up with another sex scene you can think of where its suggestive power outstrips its reality on screen this completely. It’s hard, right?

By now they have put on the mood music, talked their weird talk, stalked or been stalked anxiously around the room. They have looked into each other’s eyes. He has touched her face, her hair. He has unbuttoned her blouse, exposed her breasts. He has rested his forehead against hers. She has put her hands on his shoulders, his chest. But no kiss, no, not yet. Just the promise of one, the suggestion of one, a feint in the direction of one. Lips a fraction of an inch apart, passing like ships in the night that will soon reroute and collide, though not before other vessels well to their south come together first.

So here’s the game Dalton lays down in the run-up to sexual intercourse with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. He speaks first.

<switches on “These Arms of Mine” by Otis Redding>

<takes off jacket while stalking Doc backwards around the room>

“So I saw your picture in Red Webster’s place.”

“He’s my uncle.”

“Nice old guy.”

“He raised me after my parents died. It’s why I came back here. Now we take care of each other.”

“So how come you never got married?”

“I did.”

“What happened?”

“Didn’t work.”

“Why?”

“Guess I picked the wrong guy.”

The next thing you know, and I mean the next thing you know, both Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay have exposed their genitals to one another.

You think I’m fucking around here? Watch the damn sex scene. He puts on the song, he starts backing her up around the room while taking off his jacket, he brings up an old man, she talks about how he raised her after the death of her parents and how she moved back to town to take care of him, he asks her why she never got married, she says she did but it didn’t work out, and bam, they whip out each other’s junk before they so much as kiss.

Excepting actual real-world atrocities I think you’d be hard pressed to find topics of conversation less erotic than what Dalton goes with while he’s clearly mustering up an erection he intends to insert into his willing partner. “Why does a crusty old fart have your picture on his wall” and “Why are you a spinster.” Guaranteed panty-droppers, huh?

But let’s not discount her replies. “My parents died when I was just a kid” and “I have elder-care responsibilities” and “I’m divorced,” says the woman who showed up at his work and went back to his place with the express intention of banging him. That’ll get a fella’s engine revving!

People focus on the Otis Redding, the accessing each other’s engorged genitals without kissing first, and the stand-up sex against a wall made of large rocks. It’s hard to blame them for that. And it’s not as if their body language and facial expressions track with what they’re saying in any way, so if you’re focused on that, which, look at them, why wouldn’t you be, then it’s understandable that you’d miss the chatter. But foreplay conversation that could fell a tree and reduce a swamp to a dust bowl should be included in any connoisseur’s discussion of the sex scene from Road House. After they say what they say it’s a miracle of the Dalton Path that they’re able to have sex at all.

Or rather, Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay do not sell their collective soul to rock ‘n’ roll. As Dalton flips on the radio to find some mood music, they get as far as one complete recitation of the titular phrase from the song by German heavy metal band Bullet before wrinkling their noses, nodding “no,” and changing the channel. It’s 1989, and a quick listen of that high, multi-tracked vocal chorus reads “hair metal.” It reads inauthenticity, pretty boys, heshers, idiots, poseurs, L.A.—you could just as well say “40-year-old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry.”

My pop-cultural awareness began in 1988, when my grandmother got me Appetite for Destruction for Easter. It blossomed fully, to the point where I consider it the dawn of my life as a thinking consumer of popular culture, the very summer Road House came out, in the form of Tim Burton’s Batman. In between there somewhere, I started watching MTV. As such I can assure you that didn’t need to have Nirvana in the zeitgeist to figure that there was something suspect about hair metal at the time. You didn’t even turn your nose up at metal entirely. Metallica were gigantic already, thanks to the video for “One.” Living Colour and Faith No More had absolutely massive alternative-inflected hits with “Cult of Personality” and “Epic,” emphasizing groove rather than shimmy and slink. And though no one appreciates this now, Guns n’ Roses’ oppositional relationship to the poodle-haired likes of Poison, Slaughter, Winger, and their close personal enemies Mötley Crüe genuinely made Axl Rose the John the Baptist to Kurt Cobain’s Jesus Christ. It was that distinct.

Of course I doubt any of this would be relevant to Dalton and Doc. When we first hop into his Benz as he departs the parking garage back in New York (the “what do I look like, a valet?” scene), the station on the radio is 102.7. That’s WNEW, New York’s storied home for classic rock. You weren’t getting anything flashier than “Rebel Rebel” or Thin Lizzy on that. As we see from his friendship with Cody, roots rock—white blues, blue-eyed soul, and most likely the original African-American article as well—are Dalton’s specialty. Sure enough, the moment he stumbles across the opening “These…arms…of…miiiiiiiiine” from Otis Redding’s torch song of the same name, Dalton does not touch that dial.

The interesting thing here is that Bullet are not hair metal, not really. Here, have a look and a listen:

Mustaches? In my hair metal act? Not bloody likely. This is just straight-up party metal, its fast-paced rockin’ boogie part of a transitional sound that combined the increased punk-inspired ripped-denim sneer of the genre as displayed by New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands with the sweaty good-time glam of Slade, the New York Dolls, Thin Lizzy to a certain extent, and the like. This was a popular move at the time—ask Quiet Riot or Twisted Sister, to say nothing of the Brits themselves—and there’s no reason Germans couldn’t do it too. (One look at the album cover will have you thinking of Spinal Tap’s faster-paced parodies, like “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight”; that movie also came out in 1984.)

But Road House needed something that signified all that bad shit I listed above, and whether because it was cheaper or because music supervisor and future Interscope head/Beats by Dre billionaire Jimmy Iovine didn’t want to alienate his Sunset Strip contacts, Bullet got the nod. And insofar as the song sounds like the soundtrack to a barfight, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad choice. Dalton just does to the song what he’d do to its physical equivalent: end it quick.

“It’s quiet,” Dalton says. “The horses let me know if anybody comes around.”

“I love it,” Elizabeth replies, her smile and voice as warm and sincere as if she had just gotten her first glimpse of her new dream home, which she has.

She doesn’t know that yet, of course, but why wouldn’t she fall in love with Dalton’s barn loft apartment. She met up with him earlier that night with the expectation of having sex with him provided nothing goes egregiously wrong, and so far so good. She’s into this guy. And this apartment could not be more this guy if he’d designed it himself.

Think of it this way. Dalton lives in a structure created to house the comforts that animals require. The closest neighbors are horses. The room is open to the outside world, allowing him free egress. It’s a place for a domesticated but still half-wild thoroughbred animal to rest, relax, and refuel before charging back out into the world unimpeded. This is Dalton’s stable, and the barn door is perpetually wide open. This horse can get loose anytime he wants. In the meantime, of course, he’s available for rides.

It looks uncomfortable, like it would strain his back and abrade hers. It looks lackadaisical, like two grown adults couldn’t be bothered doffing the oceans of loose-fitting fabric in which they’re garbed before starting. It sounds awkward, since the verbal foreplay in which the participants engage consists solely of the woman discussing her ex-husband and her uncle. It sounds incongruous, with all of the above soundtracked by the platonic-ideal lust and soul and yearning of Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.” It feels abrupt, as their hands move to each other’s belt buckle and underwear before their lips meet, when a kiss has only been teased. It feels brazen, as she takes him inside herself/he puts himself inside her after the briefest gesture in a kiss’s direction. It’s intimate, this decision to make love while deliberately eschewing certain forms of intimacy as if superfluous to the intimacy already established. It’s silly, so much so that first she and then he laugh in the middle of it from the sheer sexy ridiculousness of it all. It’s hot, watching this process unfold from zero, seeing two beautiful people get horny, knowing what’s happening to his body and to her body as a result, watching them do what bodies in those conditions are designed to do. It’s right there in front of us, the camera bringing us up close against their faces, their hips, their hair, their hands, his undulating body, her grasping legs. It’s Patrick Swayze and Kelly Lynch having sex standing up against a wall made of huge rocks. It’s the sex scene from Road House. It stands alone.

Dalton is in a Western whether he wants it or not. That’s the message sent to him by Dr. Elizabeth Clay, who greets him as they meet up for a late-night rendezvous by saying “I hear you’re the new marshal in town.” “You heard wrong,” he response perfunctorily; he’s said “Opinions vary” with more force. I think that after the decision to not be nice to Brad Wesley, to treat it as personal rather than a job with Brad Wesley, Dalton is still struggling with that decision. The enormity of it pains him, as life changes forced upon us by circumstance often do. He can live with threats, obviously; that’s the nature of his job. But the meaning of the threats, the rationale behind them, his culpability in soliciting them by doing what he’s doing regarding Wesley—all of that is new, and hard to swallow. As late as their post-coital pillow talk several minutes or hours or whatever later he’s still talking about moving on, getting out of Jasper, finding a new adventure. He’s talking about it to Elizabeth, no less, whom he’s just bedded down (or rather bedded up). She’s the one who asks then, just like she’s the one who brings up the idea that he’s a lawman taming the Wild West, thwarting outlaws and bandits one barfight at a time, now. She additionally notes that his body will give out early at the rate he’s going through injuries, inflicted and sustained. She recognizes the tension at work in Dalton: His instinctual pursuit of justice and order and his determination to be a man bound by no law or order stand at odds. She, like he, is content to fuck away the difference for the time being. It’s amazing, the balm that a little pleasure can be in a life that’s fundamentally unsustainable.

What you’re seeing here is the look on Dalton’s face just after he staggers out of the smoky Double Deuce and finds Dr. Elizabeth Clay waiting for him, and the look on Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s face as she looks back at him while leaning back against her car one frame later. I don’t think you need to be an expert analyst of body language or facial expressions or human mating rituals to figure out what’s going on here, and what will be going on shortly hereafter. The Doc is about to get lucky, and Dalton feels lucky about it. That’s predictable enough: They’re both right, as it happens. But how it happens—ah, friends and neighbors, there’s the rub. (The rub against a rock wall, specifically.) It will be absurd, romantic, laughable, red hot, impersonal, extremely personal, erotic, uncomfortable, uncomfortably erotic, erotically uncomfortable, giddy, bold, slightly impractical, intensely physical, eminently watchable. It will be, in short, the Road House of sex scenes. It could be nothing else.

At the end of a long, close to perfect night, the Double Deuce is smokin’. Literally. After the evening represented by the “Roadhouse Blues” scene winds to a close, Dalton stumbles through the big red double doors of the Double Deuce in a cloud of smoke. He rubs his eyes, as if they’re dry and irritated. He breathes out a plume of smoke himself. “Cigarettes and exhaustion” is surely what director Rowdy Herrington and company were going for; “Raindrop, drop top, smokin’ on cookie in the hotbox” is what many a viewer receives. If you’d slapped some designer sunglasses on him, replaced his shapeless beige sport jacket with a fur coat, and shot this in slow motion it’d look like an old Snoop Dogg video. That image and vibe is certainly preferable to the alternative, which is that to get rid of the smell of cigarettes he’d probably need a Silkwood shower. But he’s not one to get rid of the fragrances of nature, to use Emmett’s memorable phrase, and in Dalton’s world the constant presence of lit ciggies is as natural as it gets. More than once we see him light up without even bothering to put a shirt on first. The man has his priorities. And you know what they say about where there’s smoke.

The Doors are good. They’re a good band, I’m sorry. Break On Through, Light My Fire, Touch Me, L.A. Woman, People Are Strange, Alabama Song, The End, Riders on the Storm, Love Me Two Times, Hello I Love You, Roadhouse Blues—guess what, that’s a good band! That’s more bangers in four years than Eric Clapton has across all of his projects in a decades-long career combined (for the record: Layla, Bell Bottom Blues, White Room, Tales of Brave Ulysses, Crossroads, Sunshine of Your Love, I Feel Free, Badge, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Cocaine, and most of those were written by people not Eric Clapton), and I’m not even digging particularly deep. It’s not a Creedence Clearwater Revival’s contemporaneous California run of absolutely miraculous hitmaking, but it’s up there. The insistence that the Doors are a gigantic joke, a dorm-room poster posing as a band, a faux-poetic wet fart—it’s childish, tbh. It’s jejune. It’s “except rap and country,” it’s “Ringo was a bad drummer,” it’s a YouTube comment complaining that today’s music just can’t compare. It’s so, so freeing to leave it behind and fucking bellow YOU KNOW THAT IT WOULD BE UNTRUE! in that final verse as you sing along in the car or just shred BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE! at karaoke or whatever. Godfathers of goth along with the Velvet Underground as well. If the Doors were good enough for David Bowie, who loved them, they’re good enough for you too. We have Kiss and Bon Jovi and the Eagles (excepting the song Hotel California and the solo stuff) to kick around. Leave Mr. Mojo Risin’ alone!

I say all that to say this: The Jeff Healey Band really kill it on “Roadhouse Blues.” It’s the most natural fit possible for the movie (duh), for Healey’s more high-energy Stevie Ray Vaughn thing, and for a solo so hot you can all but smell smoke rising from the guitar he holds on his lap. It also loses the scat-singing portion of the song, which is probably one of the reasons you hate the Doors if you hate the Doors. They do it well enough that you could actually conceive of a full nightclub dancing to “Roadhouse Blues” by the Jeff Healey Band, and I mean dancing their asses off, or their gaucho hats, whichever comes first, which they do. LET IT ROLL, BABY, ROLL! LET IT ROLL….ALL NIGHT LONG!