Oh, those Internet rabbit holes...
Do you love long blog posts about discovering high-curiosity, low-stakes nominal trivia? Do you thrill in meandering stories about small details that eventually end with new tidbits for your useless font of information? If so, read on, my beautiful nerds!
To begin, our old Samsung TV was so old it couldn't get new digital channels. We could only cast to it. By "old" I mean it somehow gave us a whopping 17 years of service!
The new TV came preloaded with all sorts of streaming services, which are perfect for long Canadian winters ;D One of the services is Plex, which delights me to no end. Sometimes you just want to unwind at night with a classic 80s Stephen J. Cannell 80s cop drama... aka Hunter.
Ours was not a Hunter-watching household. Apparently, it was too adult and violent, but the real reason might be Mom preferred Magnum PI. I mean, we watched plenty of violent things on TV in the 80s like The A-Team and the nightly network news.
For some reason, Plex suggested Hunter to me and after a few episodes, I was chuckling at Fred Dryer’s small screen Dirty Harry. The stories are simple, the action is high and it still has a lot of appeal. No wonder, growing up on the Prairies, I developed such a weird mental pastiche of California--a place of beaches, glamour, thugs and exploding cars. Still, I miss those days when all it took to entertain us was an old car flying off a ramp and exploding into a ball of flame!
One thing I didn't realize, however: Hunter was originally broadcast with popular songs of the day. Now, music licencing absolutely kills or delays any kind of further release of a show. WKRP in Cincinnati was one of our favourite shows growing up, but my brother and I watched it in syndication. We never watched it when it originally aired with the original music-we grew up with the sound-a-like music. Music licencing is so problematic that even the classic PBS civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize had trouble being re-released in 2005.
Lacking this bit of vital nostalgia, I didn’t think anything of the show’s music until Season 1, Episode 10, "The Shooter". The music was way too contemporary and it jolted me right out of the show. Google recognized the song as Red Sky by The Big Heavy and I thought it was a cover of Status Quo's Red Sky. All I could find was a YouTube video.
I decided then and there that I desperately needed to own a copy of this song and began searching for the band. After deciding this band was not the same one from Hamilton, Ontario, I discovered they were once a college band from Boston. There was barely an internet breadcrumb trail for the band, so off to the Wayback Machine...where their domain pointed to a MySpace page!
The band disbanded but they put out a 4 song EP called Bombs Away which is still on iTunes. But what of the band? Are they still rocking? Three of the members have common names which didn't Google very well, but two did not. The drummer is a photographer and one of the guitarists still plays in a band when he's not fighting fires. I bought their EP so they know someone's still listening in 2023.
Now, the Internet is where all the beautiful nerds sometimes converge. Someone on IMDb remembered the original music was the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil. While Red Sky is a banger, it's unaligned lyrically; it's a song about overwhelming depression, not being the harbinger of evil.
But, the Internet delivers in many, many ways. Here's the original opening with the original music--quite a difference!
Bonus trivia: The bike in the show is a Honda Nighthawk...and one of Honda's longest running taglines was "You meet the nicest people on a Honda". I gotta wonder if that was a deliberate choice...
Since then, I've been screencapping Google's results for the replacement music in subsequent episodes. Perhaps it's a roundabout way of finding new music, like Shecky and the Pimp Monkeys.
And, I discovered as well you can also watch a number of shows in the FilmRise catalogue for free on YouTube, including Hunter, so have at 'er, wherever your nostalgia takes you...keeping in mind that nostalgia has limits :-)
How Red Sky was licenced when it had probably a limited release is another question for another time.
And if don't want to read all that, perhaps you can still appreciate the lengths X-Files fans have gone to identify a background song and this epic Twitter thread about the search for the song :-)
just had the weirdest experience
was watching an X-files episode & there’s this country song playing in the background of the bar they’re in
& it’s so good it jars me out of my idle multitasking to Shazam it
except
- auntie cistamine (@laurenancona) December 5, 2023
To begin, our old Samsung TV was so old it couldn't get new digital channels. We could only cast to it. By "old" I mean it somehow gave us a whopping 17 years of service!
The new TV came preloaded with all sorts of streaming services, which are perfect for long Canadian winters ;D One of the services is Plex, which delights me to no end. Sometimes you just want to unwind at night with a classic 80s Stephen J. Cannell 80s cop drama... aka Hunter.
Ours was not a Hunter-watching household. Apparently, it was too adult and violent, but the real reason might be Mom preferred Magnum PI. I mean, we watched plenty of violent things on TV in the 80s like The A-Team and the nightly network news.
For some reason, Plex suggested Hunter to me and after a few episodes, I was chuckling at Fred Dryer’s small screen Dirty Harry. The stories are simple, the action is high and it still has a lot of appeal. No wonder, growing up on the Prairies, I developed such a weird mental pastiche of California--a place of beaches, glamour, thugs and exploding cars. Still, I miss those days when all it took to entertain us was an old car flying off a ramp and exploding into a ball of flame!
One thing I didn't realize, however: Hunter was originally broadcast with popular songs of the day. Now, music licencing absolutely kills or delays any kind of further release of a show. WKRP in Cincinnati was one of our favourite shows growing up, but my brother and I watched it in syndication. We never watched it when it originally aired with the original music-we grew up with the sound-a-like music. Music licencing is so problematic that even the classic PBS civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize had trouble being re-released in 2005.
Lacking this bit of vital nostalgia, I didn’t think anything of the show’s music until Season 1, Episode 10, "The Shooter". The music was way too contemporary and it jolted me right out of the show. Google recognized the song as Red Sky by The Big Heavy and I thought it was a cover of Status Quo's Red Sky. All I could find was a YouTube video.
Click to viewI decided then and there that I desperately needed to own a copy of this song and began searching for the band. After deciding this band was not the same one from Hamilton, Ontario, I discovered they were once a college band from Boston. There was barely an internet breadcrumb trail for the band, so off to the Wayback Machine...where their domain pointed to a MySpace page!
The band disbanded but they put out a 4 song EP called Bombs Away which is still on iTunes. But what of the band? Are they still rocking? Three of the members have common names which didn't Google very well, but two did not. The drummer is a photographer and one of the guitarists still plays in a band when he's not fighting fires. I bought their EP so they know someone's still listening in 2023.
Now, the Internet is where all the beautiful nerds sometimes converge. Someone on IMDb remembered the original music was the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil. While Red Sky is a banger, it's unaligned lyrically; it's a song about overwhelming depression, not being the harbinger of evil.
But, the Internet delivers in many, many ways. Here's the original opening with the original music--quite a difference!
Bonus trivia: The bike in the show is a Honda Nighthawk...and one of Honda's longest running taglines was "You meet the nicest people on a Honda". I gotta wonder if that was a deliberate choice...
Since then, I've been screencapping Google's results for the replacement music in subsequent episodes. Perhaps it's a roundabout way of finding new music, like Shecky and the Pimp Monkeys.
And, I discovered as well you can also watch a number of shows in the FilmRise catalogue for free on YouTube, including Hunter, so have at 'er, wherever your nostalgia takes you...keeping in mind that nostalgia has limits :-)
How Red Sky was licenced when it had probably a limited release is another question for another time.
And if don't want to read all that, perhaps you can still appreciate the lengths X-Files fans have gone to identify a background song and this epic Twitter thread about the search for the song :-)
just had the weirdest experience
was watching an X-files episode & there’s this country song playing in the background of the bar they’re in
& it’s so good it jars me out of my idle multitasking to Shazam it
except
- auntie cistamine (@laurenancona) December 5, 2023