Last night, I was in the mood for the Rocky IV soundtrack. It’s music to contemplate life by.
I love the song “No Easy Way Out” on that album by Robert Tepper. And of course, “Eye of the Tiger,” and “Burning Heart” by by Survivor. Great stuff. Technically, “Eye of the Tiger” first appeared on the Rocky III soundtrack, but I’m starting to sound like a geek now, so I’ll stop.
Anyway, I haven’t heard the Rocky IV soundtrack in ions. I searched my iPod frantically and it’s not there. In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve heard it that I was pretty sure I don’t even own it on CD. I was right. I own the cassette tape version and it is so worn out that it’s really not worth transferring over to MP3. I just need to bite the bullet and download the album from iTunes.
All of this thinking about the Rocky soundtracks prompted a memory I haven’t thought about in a long, long time.
When I was probably 19 years old or so, I bought a cassette deck and I wanted to install it in my car. I didn’t have a clue how to do it and I didn’t have a lot of money. A couple of my friends said they could figure it out, so one Saturday morning we pulled my dash off and dove in.
One of the guys said we needed to match the color of the wires on the back of the cassette deck to the wires that were attached to my previous radio. Sounded easy enough . . . until we realized that not all of the colors matched. But that wasn’t a problem. We’d just match the orphan wires up with similar colors and surely it wouldn’t be a problem.
Wrong.
When I tried turning on the radio the windshield wipers came on instead. And then I hit another button and the heat came on. We had a real mess on our hands, but even then, it was a comical mess. Eventually, I think we tracked down someone who actually knew what he was doing and we got the cassette deck working.
As I pulled out onto the main road with my two buddies in the car, I popped in my Rocky III soundtrack (I don’t have that on CD or MP3 either, but I so need to get it) and cranked it up. I had the windows down and a sense of freedom washed all over me while “Eye of the Tiger” rattled our teeth because it was so loud.
If you ever need a shot of adrenaline, just pop this song into your stereo and turn it up.
We “cruised” (that’s what we called it back then) by our place of employment with the song blaring and then looped our way back to where I dropped the guys off.
It was one of those days you never forget. Did you ever have one of those?
