September 17, 2019: Halloween for the Ears



I didn’t do much seasonal stuff today. I was in Boston for work most of the day and then spent a huge chunk of the rest of the day commuting to and from said city and said work.

But that latter bit meant that I got a lot of listening done.

First, I listened to an interview with Dan Aykroyd on the Joe Rogan podcast. Aykroyd is fascinating. Get this. He’s been in the entertainment industry for a lifetime, was involved in some of the best comedy movies of all time, and has a friend roster that looks like an Oscar party. That means he has a lot of Hollywood stories. Great ones, I assume. And I have to assume, because in two hours of casual gabbing, he didn’t tell a single one. He spent the whole time talking about aliens and ghosts. Also vodka. Gotta love him for that. A man with interests.

He also has an encyclopedic (well, maybe Wikipedian) memory for paranormal event details, and I think mentioned every highlight of UFO lore and most of ghost lore over the course of the conversation. He’s also completely credulous. Bought in on everything without shame. And he bases that on the fact that he enjoys the stories wholeheartedly and believes the witnesses and investigators. I mean, I don’t think the guy has a cynical cell in him. In Rogan’s words, “I’m glad you believe. I’m glad there are intelligent people who believe goofy things.”

Actually, you only have to listen to the first hour of the interview. The rest gets rambling and disjointed—I assume because of the Crystal drivers they’re drinking (orange juice and Crystal Skull vodka, which is a business venture of Aykroyd’s). They also spend a chunk of time looking at cars on the internet together. Like I said, first-hour only.

My favorite anecdote, which admittedly happened toward the end of the podcast, was Aykroyd describing the time (he thinks while he was filming Dragnet) that he slept with a ghost. Not quite like that scene from Ghostbusters, but not too far off.

I met Aykroyd once, in the way that doesn’t count as meeting him (standing in line for an autograph). But it wasn’t at a convention, it was at my local liquor store here in New Hampshire (a place Joe Rogan also called goofy in the podcast), back when he first started hocking booze in skull bottles. The first photo in this post was from that moment, and I wrote about it here.


After that, I listened to this wild little Halloween album that just came out that’s basically an alternate-universe Halloween playlist. All the bands on it are fictional, and they perform original songs in various nostalgic styles, interspersed with fake horror movie trailers and other such vignettes. It’s a lot of fun. It’s called The Killer Sounds of Halloween, and it’s by Sean Keller. I mean, just look at that great cheesy-spooky cover art.

This kind of stuff is great. After all, there’s only so many times we can listen to Thriller on repeat (although I haven’t reach the limits yet in decades of Halloweens).

I did have a few surprises from Sleepy Hollow today, where I’ll be in a few weeks. My friend Jim Logan, who runs Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, sent me a photo of a costumed Headless Horseman (on a real horse!) holding a copy of Twelve Nights at Rotter House, which he did as a lark during a publicity photo shoot for the village. Way cool. And then I arrived home to find a book from him, too, called Chronicles of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow by Edgar Mayhew Bacon. It was originally published in 1897. Looking forward to digging into this one.

So not too bad a Halloween day after all, I guess.