Was driving to pick up lunch when Dramarama’s Anything Anything came on the shuffle. Gave me a couple minutes to reminisce about what I went through to get that song.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who first heard the song in Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. It’s playing in the scene where the character Rick is doing his karate moves.
That flick was released in 1988 and the song had already been out for a couple of years. According to Wikipedia it’s one of the most requested songs in the history of KROQ.
But it wasn’t playing on any radio stations in Rochester, New York, and I didn’t get Nightmare 4 on video until 1991, so I was way behind.
Any Freddy fan will tell you Nightmare 4 has the best soundtrack (even better than Dream Warriors), but those fans will also tell you how frustrated they are that about five or six of the film’s best songs aren’t on the album.
Anything, Anything is one of those songs. Then there's the Sinead O'Connor song and the Fat Boys rapping with Freddy and the opening credits song by Tuesday Knight, my lord!
In a world where they can put out three Hackers soundtracks can someone please give Freddy fans a break? Full disclosure: I own two of those Hackers albums.
Anyway, so I’m loving this Anything, Anything song but I have no idea who sings it.
My copy of Nightmare 4 is recorded off of WGN and the end credits were really blurry. It looks like the song is called Anything, Anything but the artist name looks like a bunch of jumbled letters stuck together.
For months I went into every record store in western New York looking for that song, but no one could help me.
Most of the people I asked were confused and just thought the name of the song was Anything and they pointed me in some other direction.
I don’t know why I didn’t just go to the House of Guitars because surely they would have known. But I think at some point I just gave up or forgot about the song when my musical tastes turned to things like Snow’s Informer.
Then one day, in the spring of 1995, I’m walking by a music store in Greece Ridge Center and it hits me: “Whatever happened to that song from Nightmare 4?”
I run in there and find an employee and I ask, “Who sang that song Anything, Anything?”
The guy had no idea. But he pointed me to this electronic catalog, one of those real early machines that looked like an ATM.
So I type in Anything, Anything in the song search, and up pops Dramarama. And I’m like, “That’s got to be it, because all the letters are stuck together just like in the Nightmare 4 credits!”
The only Dramarama CD they had in the entire store was this live album, Dramarama: Live at the China Club. It had six tracks, and cost some insane amount, $18 or something.
But Anything, Anything was the first song on the disc, so I had to have it.
If this story sounds familiar, it’s because I’m literally going through what Al Bundy went through in that Married... with Children episode where he’s trying to remember the song that goes “Hmmm Hmmm Him.”
I played that Dramarama CD over and over and over. Actually, I just played Anything, Anything. I never listened to the rest of the songs on that disc and I don’t even care.
Sometime later I found Dramarama’s Cinéma Vérité in a store and picked that up, so now I have the live version and studio version of Anything, Anything.
And then, just now, the song showed up on shuffle while I was driving to get lunch.
So, that’s the Anything, Anything story.
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