My wife and I watched Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, this evening. The movie is pretty fun though nostalgia really held it up more than story and logic. I guess that was the quality we were used to, back in ’88. I still love the movie for its fun and exuberance, but I really don’t know if I’d like it as much were I to see it for the first time, today.

Anyway, that’s not really my point. I just wanted to remind you that this movie was released in 1988 — and to ask you: do you remember how incredibly difficult it was to find music back in the 80s?

For example, if you were 11 years old and you saw a movie with a wicked song you liked, in order to find the name of it you had to sit through the credits and try to read the small print stating the artist or song. Or maybe you could rent it and pause the VHS cassette at just the right point in the credits (so it wouldn’t freeze through half a frame) in order to see the song and band name. If you had a VHS deck. You might have to rent one. And you’re guessing based on the small snip of song that was actually played, hoping they stated the title.

This is all you got


Failing that, you could ask your friends at school, or you could ask a music store clerk. But they were basically in the same boat as you — hoping for word of mouth, hoping to catch a song name through some strange connection that stretches from whoever green-lit the soundtrack in Hollywood to your hometown. The last resort was calling up a radio station and asking a radio personality. Actually, scratch that. The last resort was asking the DJ at the roller rink. The slightly dangerous-looking highschool kid who wore long hair, sunglasses indoors, and lots of florescent accessories. The one who gave an approving nod when you requested R.E.M. for all-skate.

Then you gave up, because no one knew the name of the band Big Pig, and Musicland didn’t carry soundtracks, and soundtracks weren’t really promoted anyway. In any event you misheard “I can’t break away” as something else, consistently. Furthermore they probably didn’t stock that band.

All you could do was wait for 11 years until 1999, when Napster let you happen across a file with a funny band name that happened to be the opening song from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

And then you rocked out. And it was excellent, because you lived in the future.

That’s what it was like.

—


As a postscript I also want to say this:

We live in a blessed time, friends. It took me more time to edit and revise this post than it did to find a youtube video of Break Away by Big Pig, an album I can instantly purchase containing that song or the soundtrack, and the life history of the band in question.

Party on, dudes.