So I have a roommate who, contrary to any interest I’ve ever been aware of, got obsessed with seeing This Is It, the movie that took 1,000 hours of editing in order to make Michael Jackson look like he wasn’t a total weirdo pain-in-the-ass to work with – and an additional 1,000 hours to make it look like he wasn’t going to die the following evening. So, interested in being part of some sort of moment in history (even though I was on Hollywood Boulevard for the Jackson Memorial), I decided to accompany him to the movie. But that’s not what this post is about.
26 Years prior to this experience I couldn’t drive, drink, and wasn’t sure how to chase women, so I had a lot of sleepovers with my buddies. Most of these nights would involve making radio dramas with my big red Realistic Brand Tape recorder. One night my friend and I decided to record a radio show where we played music and pretended we were DJ’s. One of us would talk the next hit up into the tape recorder while the other changed the records.
We did not have any advanced technology so we pushed the tape recorder next to a speaker to accomplish all of this. So the tape recorder recorded everything, including everything that happened in the room despite desperate “shhhh’s” from a couple of ten-year-olds that were “on the air.”
I had forgotten about this until I saw This Is It and realized something about the song “Thriller.” When WXYZ (yep) spun the 1983 hit song; in the background, playing Atari Hockey was Fred (Dad 2.0) and a family friend who came over every Friday night to play Atari Hockey, Dave (though Mom used to call him “Scroaty” – it’s true). At the beginning of “Thriller”, right when when the wolf howls, Fred lost a close game of Atari Hockey with Scroaty and screamed “AH SHIT!!!” Which went out “live” on the “air.”
I did not realize until I saw This Is It, that ever since then, I have never heard that song and not heard “AH SHIT!” in my head after the wolf howls.
Good story. Allright, back to your day.
