There's Something About Harry

Back in 1989 (yeah I know this is dated 1990), I was staying with a friend of mine is his new house. He’d just moved in with 2 or 3 room mates. There was a party that night, got drunk and crashed on the living room floor.

Around 2 or 3 in the morning, one of his room mates named Scott that hadn’t been to social that night with everybody and had not lucked out with the girls (he was famous for trying to ply young girls with boons farm and try and talk them into bed, usually didn’t work. There just wasn’t enough Boons Farm in the world to get this guy laid.)

Well he got up and kicked everybody out of the house that wasn’t a room mate. Yours truly didn’t have anywhere to crash that night, so I drove to the parking lot of a shopping center and fell asleep in the backseet of my car.

I woke in the morning around 5 or so. Sun was just coming up and music was just barely audible. I was hearing the song ‘Spirit in the Sky’. I’m not religious so it doesn’t have much meaning for me that way, but I do love the song. Back then I didn’t know who sang it or anything, I had mistakenly been told that it was an off beat track by Deep Purple. There was no internet and I didn’t care that much to figure out if it was right or wrong.

Anyway, I’m in my car and my ignition is off, and the radio is not on, but I can here this song, in my groggy mind, I’m wondering what the hell is going on. There are no cars around in the parking lot. I try to go back to sleep but the song is still playing.

I get out of my car and here the music coming from the sky. This is getting a little weird, I’ve now realized the song has played at least 3 times on some sort of repeat or loop or something (its the 80’s no CD’s).

I track down the source of the sound and realize that this parking lot has a speaker on every other light post for no apparent reason and the music is coming from the speakers on the lights in the Sky.

I’m still half drunk, love the song, and loved to dance, so I seized the moment and started dancing in the parking lot to this song.

Check it out sometime if you get a chance, you can listen to the track spirit in the sky at a neighboring blog My God.

Now these days I know that Norman GreenBaum made the song and that Deep Purple was one of the early Metal Bands and not prone to this type of feel good fluffy stuff. But when you are a teenager things are relative and somethings just aren’t that important, whether its crashing at a friends house, in your car, or dancing in a parking lot.