Monday Music "On the Dark Side" from Eddie and the Cruisers"

This is the latest edition of my Wednesday Monday Music, I had this song loaded into the scheduler thingie but I forgot to hit "Publish"  , eh it happens.
  
     I heard this song and the movie in the early 1980's while I was in High School but never saw the movie, kinda like "Streets of Fire", I rented the movie while I was stationed in Germany and really liked it.  I bought the soundtrack at "Robinson Barracks" in Stuttgart at the big PX.   I liked the soundtrack, it had the "Old School" feel and I liked it.  I also bought the soundtrack sequel and it was a good album.  I am continuing my "Movie" theme thingie that I am running.


"On the Dark Side" is a song by American rock band John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band, though they were credited as Eddie & the Cruisers. The song was written and recorded for the 1983 film Eddie and the Cruisers, and appeared on the film's soundtrack album. The song originally was a minor hit when released in 1983, peaking at #64 on the Billboard Hot 100, though a 1984 re-release of the song helped it gain more fame. The song peaked at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100, #19 on the Canadian Hot 100, and spent five weeks at #1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks

Martin Davidson has said that the inspiration for the film came from a desire to "get all my feelings about the music of the last 30 years of rock music into it."He optioned P. F. Kluge's novel with his own money and at great financial risk. He wrote the screenplay with Arlene Davidson and decided to use a Citizen Kane-style story structure. He remembered, "That was in my head: the search."
Davidson made a deal with Time-Life, a company that was going into the movie-making business. However, it quickly left the business after making two films that were not financially successful. He was understandably upset and a couple of days later he went out to dinner and met a secretary who had worked on his first film. He told her what had happened to his film, and she gave his script for Eddie and the Cruisers to her business partners. In a relatively short time, a deal was struck with Aurora and Davidson was given a $6 million budget.

Vance asked Davidson to describe his fictitious band and their music. Initially, Davidson said that the Cruisers sounded like Dion and the Belmonts, but when they meet Frank, they have elements of Jim Morrison and The Doors. However, Davidson did not want to lose sight of the fact that the Cruisers were essentially a Jersey bar band, and he thought of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The filmmaker told Vance to find him someone that could produce music that contained elements of these three bands. Davidson was getting close to rehearsals when Vance called him and said that he had found the band--John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band from Providence, Rhode Island.
Davidson met the band and realized that they closely resembled the band as described in the script, right down to a Cape Verdean saxophone player, whom he cast in the film. Initially, Cafferty was only hired to write a few songs for the film, but he did such a good job of capturing the feeling of the 1960s and 1980s that Davidson asked him to score the entire film.

Eddie and the Cruisers was originally intended to open during the summer, but a scheduling error resulted in a September release, when its target audience - teenagers - were back in school. The film had its world premiere at Deauville. Embassy Pictures threw a promotional party for the film at a West Hollywood dance club in September, 1983 where Cafferty and his band played.
The film was a box office flop, receiving many negative to mixed reviews from critics (see below). The film was released in theaters on September 23, 1983 and grossed $1.4 million on its opening weekend. It would go on to make a paltry $4.7 million in North America. The film was pulled from theaters after three weeks and all of the promotional ads pulled after one week.
In the fall of 1984, the single "On the Dark Side" from the soundtrack album suddenly climbed the charts, as the film was rediscovered on cable television and home video, prompting the studio to briefly re-release the album.