I always check out “This Day in Entertainment History” when preparing for Movie Music Mondays. I’ve had a song I’ve wanted to feature on here for some time. At first glance, I thought I had the perfect day to tie it in yesterday. One site read, “48 Hours released on this day in 1988.” My first thought was, “Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte!”
Now, count my mistakes with me. Then, (1) I realized that I was looking at the 19th of January and not the 20th. This made me sad because the song I wanted to feature is from this movie. But 1988? Something wasn’t right with the date. I thought on it more 1988 seemed “late.” (2) When I checked the facts, sure enough, the movie was actually released in 1982. This made more sense. So I went back to the original website and realized that I missed something else. (3) It was CBS TV’s “48 Hours” that was released on January 19th.
I chock it up to my lack of sleep and everything else going on. Whoops!
So here we are. I have absolutely no reason to feature this movie today or the song I want to play. But, I’m going to do it anyway and I hope that’s ok.
The standout song from the 48 Hours soundtrack for me was The BusBoys “The Boys Are Back In Town.” Not to long ago, I posted the ten songs that were scientifically proven to make you happy. This song is one of my “happy songs!” If I had to describe it, I’d say it is a little jump blues, a little rock and roll, and a little shuffle/boogie.
The BusBoys keyboard player Brian O’Neal wrote this song and he shared the story of it with songfacts.com:
“The BusBoys were signed to Arista Records. Our manager at the time was Michael Klenfner, who was best friends with John Belushi and well connected with our agency ICM.
One of the songs on {our sophomore album} was called ‘New Shoes.’ It was a unique blend of rock and soul, with a cool shuffle back beat. Well, there was this movie being made called 48 HRS. at Paramount Studios. The film was originally slated to star Richard Pryor, but the newest, hottest young comedian of Saturday Night Live fame ended up in the role. The director was Walter Hill, the producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver. Both Walter and Eddie Murphy were represented by my aforementioned agency, ICM.
I get a call from my agent, asks if I wanted to be in this movie. I said I was interested and he set up a meeting with Joel Silver. Joel explained the film had a bar scene that Eddie was supposed to go into and there was going to be a band playing. Joel and Walter wanted a Black band that had a rock and roll edge. We were and still are one of the primary roots, rock and soul bands that fit the bill.
They had already heard ‘New Shoes’ and wanted four more songs. My brother, Kevin O’Neal and I wrote some songs over the next couple of weeks. At the recording session for the demos to present to Joel we had finished three songs: ’48 Hours,’ ‘Love Songs Are For Crazies’ and ‘Monkey Mash.’ It was 2:00 AM and the band was tired and ready to go home when I say ‘Guys, I’ve got one more song.’ Groans. ‘It’s going to be an easy, blues type shuffle with a little gospel opening piano lick – and it’s going to be called – ‘ (me looking around) ‘- – The Boys Are Back – – In Town.’
We laid the track and I finished the lyrics and the vocal a few days later. When the tracks were all completed I thought we had three real songs and one ‘filler.’ As it turns out, ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ became our signature tune and was featured in the movie. It doesn’t have any connection with the Thin Lizzy song other than the title. I always liked their track, but wasn’t thinking anything about it when I composed ours. I’ve since come to think of theirs as an English approach and ours an expression of American rock, roll and soul. The movie and the song became wildly popular. For reasons only conspiracy theorists can explain, the song wasn’t released when the movie first came out. For almost twenty years it was probably the most famous song in the history of America that had never been officially released. We finally made the song available to the public on our CD by the same name in 2000.“
So if you woke up today with the “Monday blahs,” I hope this one puts you in a great mood!
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 
a bit of a coincidence, I’ve never seen the movie, but just on Saturday my sister-in-law and her husband were watching it while I was cleaning up in the kitchen, so I saw a little bit of it. You point out a good point about the On This Day site and others like it, they aren’t infallible. I’ve seen them put up the wrong dates for record releases fairly often and occasionally even for birthdays. Never hurts to double-check (that said they are remarkably accurate given how many tens of thousands of items they post)
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I used to have a celebrity birthday page on Facebook, but it got to be a lot to keep up with. But there were always discrepancies with dates.
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