How I Spent My Strummer Vacation
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"How I Spent My Strummer Vacation" is the second episode of The Simpsons' fourteenth season. The episode first aired on November 10, 2002. It was intended to be the season premiere, but "Treehouse of Horror XIII" was moved ahead for Halloween. This episode was heavily promoted due to its list of high-profile guest stars.
[edit] Plot
On a visit to Moe's, Homer has no money to pay for his beer and Moe will not give him any freebies. As a result, he goes around town doing alternate things to feel drunk, such as breathing thin air on top of a mountain, licking toads and giving blood. Moe feels guilty about earlier and gives Homer a free beer, but Homer is already heavily intoxicated. Moe, Lenny and Carl put Homer in a taxi to Homer's home. He is secretly being videotaped on a reality show called Taxicab Conversations, and what he says on tape are some unpleasant things about Marge and the kids, as well as his dream of being a rock star. His family is not impressed with him, but soon realise that they do somewhat burden him. To make up for this, the family takes Homer to a Rock 'n Roll Fantasy Camp, run by the Rolling Stones. At the camp, Homer and a bunch of other Springfield citizens learn about rock music, with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Elvis Costello, Lenny Kravitz, Tom Petty, and Brian Setzer (all of whom lend their own voices). Homer likes the camp very much and goes wild. He learns different "rock 'n' roll" techniques, like Mick's walk, and how to showboat with the guitar (something that does not please Mick Jagger very much, considering it flies into his office and messes up his paperwork). Finally, the wannabe-rockstars have a mock rock concert, with Homer as the lead guitarist and singer. Homer, really into the rock fantasy, even jumps into the crowd, except that the crowd only contains the six musicians, who nearly get flattened by Homer's mass.
However, it does not last long as the camp was actually a one-week only camp. Homer's dream is shattered and he does not want to leave. That is, until Mick Jagger offers Homer a chance to perform at a benefit gig, the "Concert for Planet Hollywood". Homer, excited to no end, gets passes for his friends so they can see him at the concert. But, Homer is shocked when he is asked to do the duties of a roadie. When he goes on stage to test the microphone, seeing his family and friends out there rooting for him, he sings a rock song and steals the show. This angers the rock stars, who attempt to run Homer off the stage with a big mobile fire-breathing devil's head. The devil's head goes out of control and plows into the audience.
The performers, feeling sorry about their actions, offer Homer an opportunity to perform at another benefit concert (for the victims of the recently messed-up gig), but he declines and prefers to perform at home instead. However, at the end of the episode he replaces his car with the big devil's head (given to him by the band) using it to take Bart and Lisa to school, much to the fascination of the kids there.
[edit] Cultural references
- The title is a pun on the name of Joe Strummer, the lead singer of The Clash, and the title of The Bouncing Souls album How I Spent My Summer Vacation. Strummer died a month after the episode originally aired.
- The couch gag is a visual pun of the slang term, jump the shark, which describes when a TV show has reached its creative peak and is now not as relevant as it once was or does something to cause it to decline in quality, such as kill off a character, reveal a big secret, have a clip show, replace cast and/or crew members, have many celebrity high-profile guest stars hired to appear on the show, show a character getting married or giving birth to children, have an episode with a lot of musical numbers, changing characters' personalities, or just start generating a string of bad episodes. In "The Simpsons"' long tenure on television, some fans have accused this show of committing these (and many other) so-called "crimes" that have presumably made the show decline in quality in such episodes as So It's Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show (the first clip show episode), Eight Misbehavin' (the birth of the octuplets), Trash of the Titans (Homer is mean to everyone for seemingly no reason), All Singing, All Dancing (featured many musical numbers and was a clip show episode), this episode (which has a lot of high-profile guest stars), The Principal and the Pauper (revealing that Principal Seymour Skinner was really a man named Armin Tamzarian and that the real Seymour Skinner was a man who was a prisoner of war thought to have died), and Alone Again, Natura-Diddly (the death of Maude Flanders).
- The cab videotaping Homer is a parody of Taxicab Confessions.
- The songs include "Rip This Joint", "Start Me Up", "It's Only Rock 'n Roll (But I Like It)", and "She's So Cold", all by the Rolling Stones, "Are You Gonna Go My Way" by Lenny Kravitz and "Pump It Up" by Elvis Costello.
- When Homer is driving Bart and Lisa to school in the end of the show, Tom Petty's song "The Last DJ" can be heard playing.
