Most people were introduced to John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band through that film.
I, on the other hand, first heard of Beaver Brown (as the band was originally known) while listening to Scott Muni on WNEW-FM in New York back in 1980.
Beaver Brown was basically a bar band from Rhode Island, and they had just released a single titled Wild Summer Nights.
That was definitely a good tune, so I bought it, but I actually liked the B side of the single more, for that was Tender Years.
I got to see Beaver Brown in concert at The Bottom Line in NYC's Greenwich Village four times before I moved to Miami in February 1982.
I liked their shows a lot, and it did not bother me that John's voice was very similar to Bruce Springsteen's.
Granted, no one could top Bruce & The E Street Band live, but Beaver Brown was nonetheless a fun show.
I was quite pleased the following year when Eddie and The Cruisers was released and found that the band's music was used as the music that the Cruisers played in the film. I had previously heard a lot of the songs in the film at the Beaver Brown concerts I had attended a few years before, but On the Dark Side was a new one that had been written and recorded for the film. Since I was a fan of the band, I most definitely became a fan of the film. Furthermore, like JuanMaddox, I liked the premise of the film a lot.
I also became a fan of the sequel, Eddie and The Cruisers II: Eddie Lives!, which was released six years later in 1989.
Part of my appreciation of the sequel was because it contained new songs from John Cafferty and The Beaver Brown Band, songs that I had not heard before.
I own both films on a dual-sided DVD; the original is on one side of the disc and the sequel is on the other.
I also own another "rock n' roll film" with Michael Pare (who played Eddie), and that is Streets of Fire, which I own on Blu-ray.
While SoF is a more visually entertaining film (it had great production values, not to mention a stunning Diane Lane), I like the music in the two Eddie and the Cruisers films more.
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