Famous Grouse or Johnny Reb?

Corbett | December 6, 2004 1:31 AM

SL called me up a week ago to play some funky sax on a track he was trying to finish for the Famous Grouse Whisky folks (you've seen the commercial...the one with the bird that steps onto the red carpet, and the big band plays...)

Anyways, he had mentioned that it was for Jin Ma Jiang (The Golden Horse Festival), but I didn't really think about it, until I turned on the TV to see all these famous movie people trying sorrily to emulate the Oscars, strutting down the red carpet (with giant Famous Grouse signs behind them), stopping, waving, soaking up the attention, all to the beat of my funky JB sax blasting over the PA. That was better than being there.

If you know the commercial, you might also realize that the melody is remarkably close to the last few phrases of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," the famous Civil War rebel song of the South.

This would of course never had occurred to me if I hadn't graduated from Denver South High School, and our mascot wasn't Johnny Reb, and we hadn't had to play that horrid song over and over at every football game we lost.

Who could ever forget: "...And we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home."

Category: Music

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