“You have so much crap here,” Mother said into the telephone. “You need to come and figure out what you’re keeping and what’s garbage.”

“Fine,” I casually replied. “Send me 400 bucks and I’ll fly down there already.”

And so it came to pass. Last week, I journeyed to the suburban Florida compound my parents own so I could sort through seven boxes of “crap” they wanted nothing to do with while soaking in an overwhelming amount of sepia-toned high school memories. I was lured, not by the notion of being a “good son”—freeing up x amount of floor space so the birth-givers had a place to put their curio cabinet full of Gone With the Wind collector’s plates from the Franklin Mint—but by the prospect of excavating untold musical riches. Indeed, I could no longer remember what gems I had left behind when I high-tailed it out of the Sunshine State oh so many years ago.

The CD and cassette stacks at Shady Pines proved plentiful. I imagine Howard Carter experienced the same rapturous feeling coming upon Tut’s tomb as I did when I unearthed such treasures as famed grunge sampler Sub Pop 200, Elastica’s spunky 1995 self-titled debut, the Green Goblyn Project’s Fluke. (boasting epic Giant Squid vs. Statue of Liberty artwork), Sewing with Nancie’s Take a Look at Yourself (boasting a phenomenal cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”), and the immortal Larry Shannon Hargrove record Leave Bill Clinton Alone. The titular track on that last one features my favorite Ken Starr-era lyric: “All this investigatin’ ain’t nothin’ but playa hatin’!” Preach on, Brother Larry. They don’t call him the Texas Songbird for nothing.

By far, though, the greatest discovery on this music retrieval mission was that of the Less Than Zero soundtrack. Bret Easton Ellis may hate the famous 1987 film adaptation of his debut novel, but I squealed with delight when I saw Andrew McCarthy’s blank visage and electric blue suit staring out at me from the CD cover.

The Less Than Zero soundtrack is one of those rare, utterly sublime genre melting pots, a pop compilation album that collects a smattering of artists who’d normally never give each other the time of day and forces them to vie for your attention (honestly, do you think Kerry King would recognize any member of the Black Flames if he ran into them at Kmart tomorrow?). I can’t even begin to contemplate what it would be like for a person ignorant of Less Than Zero to happen upon a copy of this CD with no case or track listing. It would almost be like some kind of demon mix tape dubbed by an 11-year-old in 1988 who didn’t make it to 12.

Aerosmith kicks things off on Zero with a cover of Huey “Piano” Smith’s “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu” that can be described as serviceable at best. This is not the same confident, brazen Aerosmith that released Permanent Vacation the same year as LTZ. There’s nary a horn or brass instrument for punctuation! Methinks Aerosmith recorded this version of “Pneumonia” sometime in the late ’70s and just sat on it, thinking, “One day, a Rob Lowe movie will come along that needs a grimy blues cover.” That or they were just really, really, really tired when they cut this bastard.

Roy Orbison classes things up after Lips Tyler and his scruffy pals by busting out “Life Fades Away”, a song he co-wrote with Glenn Danzig (no, for real!). As usual, Orbison sells it so hard you can’t really judge the song’s quality. That guy could have turned “Disco Duck” into gold. Yeah, that’s right—I’m dumping on Rick Dees. Who’s gonna come at me for that? Come on, you hosers, I’m ready!

What I am never ready for is Poison’s cover of the Kiss classic “Rock & Roll All Nite.” That shit is a crime against humanity. It starts with Bret Michaels asking Rikki Rockett to start the song; the drummer does so, Bret thanks him, and then the whole band launches into a painfully unnecessary ascending “Whoa!” that shoots us into their gross lite beer version of the 1970s party anthem we all know and love. CC DeVille’s solo here is actually kind of alright, if you’re the kind of person who likes to sit around at Guitar Center all day and listen to jerk-offs go nuts on guitars they could never hope to afford. There’s so much improvised hootin’ and hollerin’ from Poison on “Rock & Roll All Nite”, you’d think it was recorded on the set of Hee Haw.

The dreck of Poison is wiped away quickly by the powerful Sham-Wow known as vintage, sextastic LL Cool J. The record scratches on “Going Back to Cali” are so deep they clear my sinuses every time. And for once, a saxophone doesn’t make me want to kill someone. Amazing. LL Cool J holds 20 times his weight in liquid. Lookitthis. It just does the work! Born in Queens—you know Queens always makes good stuff. Olympic divers, they use “Going Back to Cali” as a towel. It acts like a vacuum. Virtually dry on the bottom. LL Cool J. You’ll be sayin’ wow every time.

Oh, and here’s Glenn Danzig, backed up by the “Power & Fury Orchestra” (LOL), reminding you he helped birth that earlier Orbison tune with a super-dramatic ballad called “You & Me (Less Than Zero)” that sounds directly cribbed from Roy’s famous playbook. This was the first post-Samhain Danzig song, i.e. the first Danzig the band song, and probably the first song where America got a true idea of Glenn’s guttural, canine-like vocal ability. The D Man really goes for broke on “You & Me.” He must have been hedging all his bets on fulfilling Rick Rubin’s demented vision of a heavy metal Elvis. Dig those groovy backup singers! If Glenn had died immediately after this song was recorded, Val Kilmer would have been playing him and not Jim Morrison in that trippy Oliver Stone flick that came a few years later. Hyperbole—it’s what’s for dinner.

Just when you think melody and harmony are going to rule Less Than Zero, Slayer comes roaring in with their cover of Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”—proof positive the producers of this album just got really high and started throwing darts around to make all their decisions. Slayer’s performance here is somewhere between eight barrels of awesome and a giant cosmic joke (actually, that statement could be applied to the entire soundtrack). I’m never sold entirely until that first wild solo. It feels like they’re strangling the entire hippie nation with their bare, blood-stained hands. Fuck the Summer of Love. Fuck it in its stupid ass.

After years of listening to the Anthrax remake, hearing the original rendition of Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” is almost like sensory deprivation. Where are the guitars? Where’s Scott Ian’s stupid white rapping? All the original sweeps and blips and skronks are like some kind of forgotten eight-bit video game music. Did Terminator X work for Atari? I wouldn’t be surprised. At any rate, PE injects some much-needed street cred into Less Than Zero’s thin parade of heavy metal wiener boys going nutso on cover tunes.

You know that feeling when you’re eating a delicious banana and all of sudden you sink your teeth into one of those nasty brown spots? That’s kind of what the penultimate three songs on Less Than Zero are like (an area of the album I like to refer to as “The Funky Reagan-Style Keyboard R&B Plus Joan Jett” section). The tune Joan and her Blackhearts serve up is devastatingly mediocre and decidedly non-rockin’. Oran “Juice” Jones’s “How to Love Again” does nothing but merely exist (it taught me nothing about how to love again!), and I have no idea what’s going on with the synth gospel of Black Flames. That one just sounds like the 1980s farted in church.

Less Than Zero ain’t no punk bitch, though, and it refuses to go out like that. Tacked on the end of this album is that kick-ass Bangles version of Simon & Garfunkel’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” that everybody loves, remembers, and would go to war over. Leave it to Susanna Hoffs to swoop down from the heavens for an epic win. I can almost taste the cloud of Aquanet surrounding her and her cohorts. I know I was alive before this song was recorded, but I never really started living until after I heard it. It begs the question, though: How does Paul Simon feel every time he hears this song at the mall when he’s shopping for shoes? Is he bitter that his own rendition didn’t strike it as big? Ah, who am I kidding? Paul Simon never goes to the mall. He buys all his shoes on the internet.

For a collection of music from a movie about preppie collegiate drug addiction, Less Than Zero is goofier than that Muppet who throws fish all over the place (Lew Zealand—I know his name, I was just making it easy on you). I wouldn’t say this album captures any specific aspect of what it was like to be alive in 1987; to be honest, I’m not even sure this album captures any specific aspect of real life. It is, however, a boat-load of fun and a great collection to have with you on a long, interminable car ride. Next time you find yourself cruising through Kansas with absolutely nothing to say to your son’s mother (who is also your former lover and current lawyer), throw on Less Than Zero, crank the Slayer track, look your partner dead in the eye, and award her 6,000 cool points if she refrains from meeting your gaze with a scowl and exclaiming, “What the hell is this?”

Listen: Slayer, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Less Than Zero, Rick Rubin, Slayer, The Bangles, Aerosmith

Read past installments of Over a Beer:

This Just In: Old People Hate New Music

Communist Puppets & Riverboat Gamblers at 75 MPH

An Open Letter to Chuck Biscuits