As a note – I am changing my post order this week. I’m doing a song today, I’ll have a different post on Wednesday, and I’ll do the album of the week on Friday to mark the exact 30^th anniversary of that album. The change is simply to accommodate that and things will go back to normal next week.

There was so much music released in 1984 that it’s tough to nail down a song that really defines the year. But one possible candidate is this monster of a theme song for a movie soundtrack, a song so catchy attached to a movie so popular that the song was literally everywhere.

Ray Parker Jr. had formed the R&B group Raydio through the late ’70’s and into 1981. They landed several top ten hits on the singles chart, then Parker went solo and had continued success. But no matter his other accomplishments, his calling card is the Ghostbusters theme song.

This song has quite a story, involving other artists, lawsuits and the whole rigmarole. The movie heads approached Lindsey Buckingham about doing the song – he turned it down, not wanting to be typecast as a soundtrack artist. Glenn Hughes and Pat Thrall submitted a song for consideration, but were rejected. Huey Lewis and the News were offered the song but also declined, and that part will be important here in a bit.

In the end Parker was offered the song with very little time to compose it. He came up with the idea of the song being a faux commercial jingle and was off to the races, it was an easy way to create a good song while also incorporating the odd name of the movie.

The song fit the movie like a glove, and both song and movie would see blockbuster success. Ghostbusters would bring in over $200 million dollars, making it the second-best grossing movie of 1984. The movie went on to become a billion dollar franchise with licensing, toys, cartoons and sequels and that money train is still rolling 40 years later.

As for the song, it wound up on a lot of charts and its position was at or near the top of many of them. The song was number one on the charts of seven countries and top ten in at least eleven others. It would remain the number one hit in the US for three weeks and it stayed on the Hot 100 chart for four months. It sold in excess of one million copies in the US, the UK and France. In short -this song was a massive hit.

And the song is about as effective as it could possibly be. Parker worked in a load of supernatural problems one could have and offered up the catchy jingle “who you gonna call?” The refrain of Ghostbusters! Rang through to make a sing-along that everyone could get into, including kids who would want anything Ghostbusters-related. I would know as I was one of those kids – the movie came out just before I turned seven and that’s all we cared about during the summer and well beyond.

The song was aided in popularity by its music video. The clip features shots of the movie and also features an assortment of guest shots from notable actors including John Candy and George Wendt, all of whom agreed to film for free as a favor to movie and video director Ivan Reitman. The video clip was super popular across MTV and became the model for how to market a blockbuster movie in the 1980’s.

All of this success came with the usual trappings, one of those being lawsuits. And one lawsuit was especially compelling – Huey Lewis filed a plagiarism suit, alleging that Parker had used the melody from the song I Want A New Drug, mostly involving the bass line. The lawsuit was settled out of court, with the terms being under lock and key. That would come back to haunt Lewis in the 2000’s, as he discussed the case on VH1. Parker filed suit over that and won, getting back at least a bit of the money he’d lost in the original suit.

And we’d learn that Lewis had one hell of a case – when the film was being put together, I Want A New Drug was used as a placeholder song in many scenes, as the film heads were still hoping to have Lewis do the theme. Parker was given footage to watch that had Lewis’ song in it.

Lawsuits aside, the song was a massive haul for Parker and anyone involved with the movie. Parker had no chance of recapturing that kind of success, but has gone on with a recording and performing career, as well as songwriting and studio ownership. And for us in 1984, the Ghostbusters theme was one hell of a time as we were going nuts in the summer. This was a mark on the culture like no other.