Between 1984 and 1989, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, as "Sonny" and "Rico," respectively, were the coolest motherfuckers on television, eliminating highly dramatized drug crime 'round South Beach in pimp Armani blazers over pastel t-shirts on NBC's Miami Vice every Friday night. And just like show itself, music featured in the TV action-drama was often sexy as hell.
So naturally, when Mike Muir received a phone call asking if Suicidal Tendencies wanted to appear in an episode, the hardcore punk group's frontman dismissed it as a friendly hoax.
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"I was like, 'Pfft, yeah. All right," Muir recently said in an interview with New Times' sister paper Denver Westword. "Our friends were joking all the time."
But not that time.
And shortly after receiving a separate phone call from the Miami Vice production manager, Muir says a delivery person showed up at his house with airline tickets.
"'What the fuck?' I look and go, 'Either someone's got fucking deep pockets to do an elaborate trick and they're really trying to get us,'" Muir recalls. "'Or wait, this might be legit.' The tickets were in there. You couldn't really go on the Internet and check things out back then. So I went, 'Hey you know what? I think this is real!'"
The group flew to Miami and made an uncredited appearance in an episode entitled "Free Verse" during the second season, performing critically acclaimed song "Institutionalized."
That was nearly 30 years ago.
Now, the group is headed back to promote its latest record, 13. Whether Muir will don a white blazer, however, remains a mystery.
Suicidal Tendencies. With Sick of it All and Waking the Dead. Thursday, May 2. Grand Central, 697 N. Miami Ave., Miami. The show starts at at 7 p.m. and tickets cost $25 plus fees via ticketfly.com. Call 305-377-2277 or visit grandcentralmiami.com.
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