April Fools

Well it's a little late, but here it is anyway.

I work as an A1 (sound tech) for a company that does audio visual support for corporate events. It's like being a roadie for Corporate America but hey, the money's good.

Anyway, sometimes these companies create parodies of popular songs with lyrics about themselves, and play them at sales meetings, training seminars, etc. These two examples were created in the 1980s for a company that owned several restaurant chains. For some unknown reason, an executive for one of these chains loved these songs so much, he thought it'd be a great idea to dust them off 20 years later and play them at a meeting. There were at least 10 of these songs, here are my favorite two. "Ghostbusters" was actually played at the meeting, with the instruction to drop out the volume during the "executive shout-out" section, as none of the executives named in the song were still with the company.

I talked to the guy who produced these gems last week- when I told him I'd played his "Ghostbusters" track at a gig a couple of years ago, he looked at me like I'd just told him I liked to dip my head in boiling oil for fun. "Why?" he asked, "half the people in that room weren't even BORN when 'Ghostbusters' came out!"

Note- "Ghostbusters" cuts out 2/3 of the way through- that's because the tape broke while I was transferring it. I think my cassette deck rebelled. You get all the "best" (if that's really the right word) parts of the song, though.

Super Service Man.mp3
Ghostbusters.mp3

I'm going to have to fix the casette at some point, because there's a techno version of "Rocky Top" on there that you wouldn't believe.