Great 2/3 of a movie

Not a far as the story, I understand that this movie was like dazed in that aspect of where we just watch a group of friends roaming the streets for a few days before class starts.

Dazed and Confused isn't quite as aimless, and it's mostly a character thing, I reckon: you have Mitch grounding things up, with Pink as an extension (and possible lead) and Sabrina as a counterpoint. Freeform as the film is, it doesn't feel aimless because you can sense the build-up undernearth.

Not so with EWS, essentially because Jake becomes one of them overnight and the best he can hope for in the days that follow is to have fun. So you could say Dazed expands and actually leads somewhere special, whereas EWS is all over the place quite literally and defiantly - and that's partly why I didn't like it as much.

There were several characters where they seemed line they were building something up for them...

Kind of like Benny, Pickford, maybe Mel (if you ever expect him to be that relevant) in Dazed then, where their absence is kind of bothersome at first but then you come to accept it because the ensemble is intended as something of an organic being with some characters walking in as others fizzle out.

That said, it's not like we were denied a payoff of any sort - the star pitcher got his comeuppance very much the same way O'Bannion did, and Jake did go back for the auburn haired girl. I'm not sure anything else needed to be done with country guy or high school friend without exhausting said characters and plot lines.

As far as my biggest problem with the overall movie, was how it tried to jumble in too many time piece references. We see this group of guys listen to classic rock, rap, punk, and disco.

They're just trying to get laid, no? You can tell their resistance level to some music genres is way up until they allow themselves to revel in the fun and just go for it. It's not like they were openly embracing everything without reticence. That said, I'm not sure eclecticism is/was all that rare in the first place...

I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.

We see this group of guys listen to classic rock, rap, punk, and disco. People then were usually just one. If they were a classic rock guy, they hated disco with a passion.

(Don't forget the scene in the country bar too!)

I would disagree with that. I'm slightly younger than the characters in this move, started college fall 1983. Suburban kid, NY state. Jake's record collection in the movie, the variety, was cracking me up because I had all those albums... Devo, Neil Young, Pink Floyd. The people I hung out with in high school and early on in college, yeah we listened to classic rock, which at that point was more "current rock" if you're talking Foreigner, Van Halen, ZZ Top, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, but we also listened to some disco (at parties), punk/new wave, and early rap. The "disco sucks" crowd was earlier, like 1978ish, by 1980 nobody I was around had any fervor to hate disco music that had faded away. As for rap, we didn't really know it by that name yet (and I was a big music head as well as a jock) but I remember when I started hearing Rapper's Delight out roller skating we were all pretty jazzed by what we were hearing. And then a couple years later Grandmaster Flash, the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, we listened to all that stuff.

Punk too, I didn't know any guys into stuff like the Sex Pistols or a lot of the other seminal punk bands but we listened to The Clash and The Ramones. And early in college I was introduced to The Stooges, MC5, the NY Dolls and got into that stuff too.