Ice cream truck music box movie#

“In fact, I had to drive them in my old Pontiac station wagon - I had three kids and a dog at the time - to get them to Ottawa. “I had to beg borrow and steal to get those singles up there,” he says. Mills drove back to Toronto to plead with the record company to get it onto the shelves. The problem was now getting the single into Ottawa stores. Dave said ‘I think you have a hit on your hands.’” “The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree,” Mills says “I couldn’t believe it. The DJ, Dave (50,000) Watts, didn’t like The Poet And I, so he tried Music Box Dancer. On day in September, 1978, Mills was visiting an Ottawa rock radio station, trying to push his single on to the airways. It made the B-side of a slow ballad called The Poet And I.

Even the hired studio musicians on the record were loath to play it. Everyone at the record company loathed it. He wrote it in 1974, as the 11th song on an instrumental album that was only intended to have 10 tracks. The truth of the matter, Mills says, is that Music Box Dancer is one of the most unlikeliest hits of all time. “I never did call it Music Box Dancer, I called it Maybe Seven. “I called it Maybe Seven because when we first tried to get Music Box Dancer going, I said to one of the guys at Polydor Records, ‘I’m broke, my family is eating sardines and Kraft Dinner, how many albums do you think we’ll sell?’ And he said ‘maybe 5,000, maybe seven’ and that became the name of the boat. There’s a well-timed pause on the other side of the line and then Mills continues. “I bought my first little runabout, a Mako 20-feet long with a 75 horsepower on it, and I called it” … wait for it … “Maybe Seven.” “I used to do a lot of fishing and diving,” says Mills. I think Mills has turned his head away from the mouthpiece, but it still comes through like a cannon blast. So, Frank, when you bought your first boat down there in the Bahamas, did you name it Music Box Dancer? There’s a loud laugh on the other side of the phone. The band had a breathy international hit called Stay Awhile. Music Box Dancer can be heard playing from an ice cream truck as Uma Thurman arrives at “The Bells’” house for her first kill in Kill Bill Part One (The Bells was also the name of the Montreal rock band in which Mills played before he wrote Music Box Dancer.

Ice cream truck music box movie#

At one point, Music Box Dancer was acknowledged as the second-best selling piece of sheet music in the world, second only to White Christmas, probably still is.Īnd don’t forget the movie rights. The royalty cheques, from all the radio plays, ice cream trucks and mechanical music boxes, still keep rolling in. It’s the sound track for ice cream trucks, weather forecasts and fake falling snowflakes.īack in the days of vinyl, Music Box Dancer sold in the millions. If you’ve ever bought a girl one of those music box with a little ballerina inside, it probably plays it. Dah-da-da-dah dah-da-da-dah-dum-de-dum, dah-dum-de-dum … that infernal piece of piano plunking gets in your head and doesn’t leave.

Music Box Dancer is like the Chop Sticks of the modern pop music world. And if he bought a boat, he probably named it - you guessed it - Music Box Dancer. I’m thinking that if he moved to the Bahamas with all that royalty money from Music Box Dancer flowing, he probably bought a boat. Why stay in wintery Canada, if you can afford to write music under a palm tree? That’s where the Montreal native initially moved in 1981 after his instrumental, Music Box Dancer, became a top 10 hit around the world. It sits on 40 acres, with some trout ponds, a wood lot and sugar-shack, a meadow that gets overgrown with hay every year, and a garden with a stand of apple trees. That’s in the back of my mind when I call up Frank Mills at his picturesque farmhouse near the resort town of Stowe, Vermont. So when they get that big hit - the one that provides their ticket to paradise - they tend to name things after it, things like yachts, private jets, race horses and ski chalets.