Bruce Springsteen Just Made ‘Ghostbusters’ Fun Again
While his New Jersey home was presumably being egged and toilet-papered by empty-handed trick-or-treaters, Bruce Springsteen spent Halloween night on the road, performing a sold out show with the E-Street Band in Montreal. While the Boss couldn’t be bothered to dress up as, say, a pirate, or a giant, freakishly lifelike E.T., he did get into the Halloween spirit by playing a seasonal track.
In fact, Springsteen opened the show with his Halloween tribute: Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” – which, as we’ve discussed before, isn’t so much about scientists fighting ghosts with nuclear accelerators as it is about horny poltergeists being total pervs.
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Springsteen certainly didn’t half-ass the performance, he and the band played the “Ghostbusters” song as if it were one of their trademark hits, even enlisting the crowd to sing along in response to the line “Who you gonna call?” The only way it could have been better is if Springsteen had brought Slimer onto the stage to dance with him à la Courteney Cox.
This isn’t the first time that Springsteen worked a Halloween-themed cover into a show either. When he played in Rochester, New York back on October 31, 2012, he played the classic “Monster Mash.”
But the “Ghostbuters” cover is especially notable because it was pretty good — and good covers of the Ghostbusters theme song are something of a rarity.
When the franchise was rebooted (the first time) back in 2016, the soundtrack was full of multiple covers of the song. And they sure weren’t great. Like, for some reason, there was one by the Christian a cappella group Pentatonix:
Far worse was the weirdly-rushed take on the song by Fall Out Boy featuring Missy Elliott, which is best described as “unrelentingly excruciating.” I’d rather have Dan Aykroyd try to sell me his skull vodka for three and a half minutes than listen to that version again.
Springsteen’s random cover just might be the best Ghostbusters-based content we’ve gotten all year (sorry, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire). And, of course, he’s no stranger to recording songs for movies. He won an Academy Award for Best Original song for “Streets of Philadelphia” from Philadelphia. He also wrote and recorded the title track for the Mickey Rourke drama The Wrestler, which is far less danceable than “Ghostbusters.”
Weirdly enough, Springsteen also came very close to recording a song for the Harry Potter franchise, even though there are no good rhymes for “horcrux.” Reportedly, he read the first book to his kids and was inspired to write the song “I’ll Stand by You Always.”
Springsteen then offered the song to Warner Bros. during the making of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but they rejected it.
In retrospect, he really dodged a bullet on that one.
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