A dose of a freaky ghost baby.
Back in Louisville, there was a radio station run out a local high school across the river in New Albany. During school hours and into the early evening, the kids would operate it, taking call-in requests and playing different types of teenage-oriented music. It was almost always a lot more interesting to listen to then any of the other local stations, because teenagers, for all their hormonal unpleasantness, are generally really inventive. They’d play Rage Against the Machine and then “What is Love” and then Weird Al and then something from Use Your Illusion II, all in a row, because that’s how teenagers are.
When the kids went home at night, though, the station became fully automated. Computers would cycle through the station’s enormous library, playing music uninterrupted except for station identifications. With no kind of curatorial hand, the selections were even more wildly unpredictable than the teenage DJs, because the music library comprehensively spanned the last five decades of pop music — they had everything from ’50s novelty hits to the sort of financially aspirational hip-hop that teenagers in the early ’00s loved. All sorts of weird juxtapositions would turn up.
There is still one juxtaposition in particular I think of to this day, two songs that you typically never hear back-to-back. But I did, and it completely transformed the way I think about both of them.
It was “Ode to Billy Joe,” by Bobbie Gentry, followed by “Ghostbusters,” by Ray Parker, Jr. The remarkable thing about playing these two back-to-back is that, in doing so, the high school computers made “Ghostbusters” a sequel to “Ode to Billy Joe.”
If you’re not familiar with “Ode,” it’s a beautiful, creepy bit of ’60s Southern Gothic country, a story about an illicit love affair and the resultant suicide. A girl comes home to dinner one night, and her parents break the news to her: “Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” And, it turns out, before he’d died, Billy Joe had earlier been seen throwing “something” off the bridge with a girl that “looked a lot like you.” What was that “something”? Well, the general consensus is that it was a baby.
So the song ends with the strings fading out, you reflect on it uneasily for a minute, but when I heard it in this context, one second later: more ghostly sounds, then some synthesized drums kick in and a familiar sax riff. It’s “Ghostbusters,” almost making a mockery of the song that came before it.
It’s more complex than that, however. Despite Ray Parker, Jr.’s good cheer, consider some of those bizarrely specific lyrics:
If you’ve had a dose of a
freaky ghost baby
Ya better call
GHOSTBUSTERSAn invisible man
sleeping in your bed
Who ya gonna call?
GHOSTBUSTERS
In this context: Billy Joe and his/your illegitimate child, that so-called “freaky ghost baby,” have returned in spectral form. That “invisible man sleeping in your bed” was once a visible man. A visible man that you loved, and who is the dead father of your dead child.
The air of dread in “Ode” infuses the pop trifle of “Ghostbusters” with an undercurrent of real terror, and the supernatural phenomenon described in ”Ghostbusters” soldifies the aura of menace in “Ode.” The insistence that ”I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” rings hollow. So, too, does the boast that “busting makes me feel good.” Busting makes you feel good temporarily, but it’s really just another way of not having to confront the messy, horrific past, which is what “Ode to Billy Joe” is all about. I’d have never realized it, until the high school computers spelled it out for me.
(October 16, 2009)
NOTES: Another perennial South 12th favorite that people still bring up once in awhile. The great Jim Norton, now of the Heavy Table, once told me this is the sort of piece that he would have been published in his late, great Flak magazine, which was another one of those occasional moments that made me wish I’d been born in 1974 instead of 1979.
