“I’ve been to one basketball game in my entire life,” Alan Parsons said in an interview this week. “It was a Lakers game probably 20 years ago. I don’t actually remember who it was against.”There was nothing to suggest that “Sirius” would be one of the most famous arena tracks ever when it was released in 1982 by the British rock band The Alan Parsons Project. “I wasn’t considering sports whatsoever,” Parsons said. As soon as it was associated with the Bulls, however, “Sirius” became an inescapable stadium earworm. Parsons was an audio engineer on The Beatles album “Abbey Road” and the Pink Floyd album “The Dark Side of the Moon,” but it’s possible that more people know this short instrumental composition with only a synthesizer and echoing clavinet than anything else he has ever produced or performed.
How that happened was even more unexpected. The Bulls were still using the theme from “Miami Vice” and the opening from “Thriller” when Jordan came to Chicago. (It was the 1980s.) But it became clear to public-address announcer Tommy Edwards that Jordan’s teams demanded something more distinctive. He happened to be in a Chicago theater waiting for a movie to begin when he heard “Sirius” playing in the background. Edwards called Bulls management not long afterward. “I think I’ve got it,” he said.
Edwards was right. By the early 1990s, even before the Bulls were taking a blowtorch to NBA records on their way to the 1996 title, the tune that had been background music in a movie theater was suddenly a cultural phenomenon to the point that even newly married couples in Chicago were using it for their wedding introductions.
There was such pageantry in the Bulls’ starting-lineup introductions—lights out, “Sirius” on, Edwards uttering: “And now…”—that it has endured as a touchstone. The Warriors don’t have a song that has reached such iconic status. The music that accompanies their starting lineups is a remix of Tupac Shakur’s “California Love” they have used for years. This season, they have been coming out to the court to a D.R.A.M. song called “Cha Cha,” as requested by Curry. “If Steph wants it,” said DJ D Sharp, the team’s in-house DJ, “we play it.”
― ulysses, Friday, 15 April 2016 16:22 (eight years ago) link