The Real Jaws Theme

One recent Saturday morning, a little after 7, I was wandering up and down the beer aisle of the 24-hour grocery store in my neighborhood. I had just about everything else I needed?tv dinner, buns, dish soap. All I needed now was some beer. I had plenty at home, I suppose?I just like to be prepared. Various old pop songs had been playing over the store's p.a. since I'd arrived, and I'd paid attention to none of them?until that Wings song came on.

Now, normally, a grown man pauses to notice a Wings song?worse, even wanders the aisles pointlessly, listening until it's over?you'd think there was something wrong with him. It certainly wasn't anything I'd openly admit to doing. But I had my reasons.

Jaws was released in the United States on June 20, 1975. Like every other 10-year-old, I was sucked in by the hype?as well as the promise of carnage and extreme bloodshed up there on the screen. My parents, however, had been witness to all the same hype, and had heard the same promises concerning bloodshed and carnage, so they were a bit hesitant to send me off to the theater. Jaws was, after all?so far as I'm aware?the first film whose PG rating came with the added warning: "May Be Too Intense for Younger Viewers." With "Intense" underlined, even!

It didn't matter that all my friends (both of them) had seen it, and that all the other kids in school had seen it. It didn't matter that most of them simply didn't deserve to see it as much as I did. My parents held firm. I bought the soundtrack album, and began keeping a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine articles concerning the movie and sharks in general, while kids at school were spinning yarns about filmgoers screaming, fainting and vomiting in the aisles.

After a month of taking on extra chores around the house and, to be honest, doing an inordinate amount of whining, they finally relented?under the condition that my dad go with me. That was fine with me.

It turned out to be a warm, bright late-July day?the way every summer day is when you're 10. That morning, while my dad and I were walking home from the grocery store, we passed a neighbor kid, Eric. I didn't like him much, and said nothing as we passed. But a few yards later, I stopped, turned around, and yelled, "We're going to Jaws!" He looked back at me and shrugged. He'd already seen it five times. Everyone had by that point.

At about 12:30, my dad and I climbed into the olive green Galaxy 500, backed out of the recently poured driveway and headed for the theater. Jaws was playing at the Marc I, over by the ShopKo. These were the days long before cineplexes, when it was a big deal to have two screens in one building, the way the Marc Plaza did. I forgot what was playing at the Marc II that day. It really didn't matter. Nothing else did, at the time.

My dad turned on the air conditioning, and I rolled up my window to keep the cool air in. The sun still poured through the tinted glass, warming my legs. I remember looking down at my hands, as they rested on the blue denim in the sunbeam, thinking they looked old.

It was about a 20-minute drive from our house to the theater, so at the first stoplight I leaned over and turned on the radio. I didn't have any favorite stations as a kid?just rolled the dial back and forth until I hit something I liked. When I heard the opening whine to the "Theme from The Rockford Files," I stopped and sat back, and didn't touch the dial again.

Over the course of the next few miles?down Allouez Ave., then a left on Packerland Dr.?whatever radio station it was played "Love Will Keep Us Together"?which at the time was battling Wings' "Listen to What the Man Said" for the number-one spot on the charts. Then they actually played "Listen to What the Man Said," followed by Olivia Newton-John's "Have You Never Been Mellow?" and the "Theme to S.W.A.T." Lots of television themes were popular in 1975.

At the time, I thought nothing of any of this. I'd heard all those songs before?almost incessantly that summer, in fact?and was pretty sick of them. Dad and I went to the movie, had a swell time together (except when he tried to cover my eyes while Robert Shaw was being bitten in half), and over the course of the rest of the summer, I went back to see the movie another eight times.

As the years passed, however, I began to notice something strange. Whenever, by chance, I heard any one of those five songs?in a doctor's office, in a car, passing an open store front?or wandering a beer aisle?I would stop and listen. And as I listened, the sun would be warming my legs and hands again, as I sat in the front seat of that Galaxy 500, tooling down Packerland Dr. on my way to the theater. And when that one song was finished, those other four songs would play themselves out in their entirety in my head. In no particular order, maybe, but they'd all follow in quick succession, like a medley. There's no escaping it, and I can't say I mind all that much.

This phenomenon hasn't occurred with me in any other way that I'm aware of. I don't remember what I listened to on my way to see Star Wars for the first time, or on my way down to college, or driving cross-country. Just the five songs I heard on my way to see Jaws.

Which helps, I guess, explain why I spent so much time in the grocery store that Saturday morning.