Either I'm on a path toward more prolonged happiness, or I'm just too fed-up to waste otherwise positive energy ruminating on the operations of the body politic, and media coverage of same.
In days gone past, I would have attributed this to the deep, abiding cynicism that invaded my psyche as a young man. Not now. I look at things too clearly. Instead of the accusatory and judgemental "They," I use the inclusive "we," because every human being is capable of the same lapses and foibles. Not everybody has the fondness for, or sense of history I posses. That's just a personal idiosyncrasy. Just about everyone, however, tends to view politics pejoratively, now...but not for the same reasons.
In my case, it's a realization that the benign civics lessons we try and teach children combine fact and apocryphal. Ours is a republic, with candidates elected to represent our interests, etc. Lifelong immersion in the machinations of government, governing and campaigning for said, reveal a filthy process. Millions remain blissfully ignorant of the dirt, and how the manipulation and exploitation are used to make ordinarily decent people vote against their own interests and the interests of the nation on a whole.
The individuals most susceptible to this are my age--the guy at the half-century mark, frustrated because life hasn't been all he'd hoped it would be. As disappointment, the rigors of child-rearing, divorce, job loss, aging, et al, build up, the interest in politics and the rants begin--against taxes, government, races, genders...issues that they'd never given a living shit about start to make their bile bubble up.
Decent people, by and large. Good human beings who still believe that a candidate or a party embody what they stand for: God, Country, and Family Values, dammit! The salt of the earth, who faithfully absorb the opinion that passes for news or fact, not knowing their inner fears and fires are being cynically stoked, and their religious fervor is being whipped up in a revival tent larger than the Caribbean Sea.
I'm not that guy. At 5-0 plus 1, now, I'm fatigued with having my buttons pushed. I was interested in politics at 13, when at the same age, many of these other fellows were smoking dope and sneaking out of their bedroom windows late at night (there'd have been hell to pay had I tried either). I read Time or Newsweek, watch some of the talking-head shows, and realize the agitation is not worth it. And there is continual agitation. Thirty years of being involved in broadcasting teaches one that all reporting is not intended to be informative. Much is written to churn up a maelstrom. The panel shows are there to pit two ideologues against one another, not to come to a resolution, but to bang heads, cause sparks, and create ratings.
Politics. Inflame and assail. Foment hate and derision. Governing? Stop the other guy by any means necessary. Party loyalty? Republicans found the power of the pulpit 30 years ago. Somehow, in a world of all-too-human hypocrisy, fundamentalism cohabitates with cold ambition and lock-step uniformity. Democrats, liberal, progressive, willing to fight for issues concerning something other than personal gain, show human weakness of their own: They lack the desire to piss off the guys who are being whipped into a frenzy by the Republicans. And the G.O.P. plays offense much better than Democrats play defense. The hostility chip that seems to operate in conservative ideology is not present in liberals, not where politics is concerned. Thus the difference in approaches, and results.
Me? I have watched and read and written of the political world, and have seen a man with actual intelligence elected overwhelmingly to the Presidency. How often can you say that? JFK had those smarts, that charisma. You have to be over 55 to remember his brief years in office, and his assassination obscures the fact that he was cautious about much, stymied by congress, and loathed by crackpots. Imagine if they'd know what he was hiding (poor health, probably sex addiction)?
Does that all sound familiar? JFK had major newspapers and (essentially) two and a half television networks to contend with. President Obama has millions of internet bloggers, and a channel that masquerades as a news organization, while decimating the complete agenda of his opposition (Fox). On cable, at least, objectivity (CNN) means playing devil's advocate. The so-called lefties (MSNBC, after sunset) give Obama grief as well. A cerebral President who uses his scholarly resolve is not popular among the hot-headed motormouths who need a constant vortex whirling to provide content.
The problem is, fellows my age still look at TV and Radio as the voice of official fact and reason. They're neither. They are hell-bent on creating conflict that equals ratings, that equal money. Period. Otherwise, how could broadcasters with a modicum of intelligence take Sarah Palin seriously? The history of popular culture in our country is riddled with characters like her, whose glibness hides an insidious, venal, covetousness. The kind we're told is sinful. How many parents tell their kids to finish what they started? How many of these same parents now worship at the feet of this person who resigned elective office to go make money, then (I'll bet) run for yet a higher office. Do our like minded opinions spin us into denial, as far as politicians are concerned? Do people need a leader to believe in so badly they'll inhale whatever hot air is blown in their direction?
Apparently so. And in a world where ex-Disc Jockeys evolve into talk-show hosts, sometimes appropriating political talking points they don't believe, getting riled up is no longer worth it. I take verapmil and atenlol to control blood pressure. My own radio career is held in limbo, and essentially I'm alone. Is the current body politic (with only the new media making it different from what's gone on in politics since the Roman senate) worth the agitation.
I say no. And look toward a little more happiness in life.
HEY LAAAAAAAAAAADY!!!
Many of you will read this once the holiday is over. You may or may not have seen 84-year old Jerry Lewis cry and drop his pants once more, in his honorable, never-ending, herculean effort to raise funds for the MDA, and find a cure for these dreaded diseases. I no longer watch. Besides getting sick of politics, I've gotten sick of telethons, and would rather send a donation than suffer the maudlin proceedings. Telethons used to be entertaining. Now they use the same marketing techniques as any other business that wants to attack your emotions and separate you from money. I'll send my check (If I don't, Jerry will send envelopes all year, anyway), but will take a pass on the pathos.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
JULY WAS GREAT IN '88
One of the advantages of being born in July is that it's summer...at least in the northern hemisphere. The July's have piled up thick and strong, now, and each has its special place in my memory. Coming across an ancient TV commercial on YouTube can take me back to being a 7 year-old, in 1966. Affairs of the heart, and the occasional flare of youthfulness can conjure up 1976. It's when the month is unusually mild, as this one has been, that I recall July 1988.
Something as simple as a sea breeze can do it. For a few reflective seconds, I'm 29, leaving San Diego as if with a knapsack on a stick. Fleeing the repressive formatics, inane lack of leadership, and the hideous overnight shift at what was then Y-95-FM. I landed in Oxnard, at Top 40,
Q-105. One of the questions I was asked when interviewing for the night job was, "Why in the world are you leaving San Diego to come here?"
The question was valid. San Diego was beautiful, its beaches breath-taking, a small town/big city. I had left the nation's 18th largest radio market for number 88, or something lower on the list. It took an entire weekend to make my decision to go. I'd be leaving friends, a nice apartment in a great neighborhood, with reasonable rent, and I wouldn't be paid any more...in fact, for the first few weeks, it would be less.
I left to get off the overnight shift, yes, but also to play the hits, and bring my natural humor to the air. The suffocating atmosphere at KWLT (which became KKYY, Y-95) was more than I could bear. Along with production man John Nixon (who's reading this, I'm sure), more fun was had in the halls, and the studio making amusing spots than any time spent on air with the listening public. Adult Contemporary radio, as its called, makes money, but it's wall paper. Background noise. It stifles talented people. And it's no place for someone as young a 29 as I was.
When I got to Q-105, regardless of the dilapidated shack we broadcast from, and the fact the place was permeated with the scent of the cow, pig and chicken manure used to fertilize the surrounding strawberry fields, I was ecstatic. To be able to display my innate enthusiasm, to embrace the vibrancy and freshness of Top 40 music, and to crack wise over the air...at will? A hefty burden had been lifted from my shoulders.
The 70 degree summer temperatures and soft Oxnard breeze immediately brings back the positive vibe, and the energy of July 1988--and the music. Whether it can be considered good music or not, only a musicologist can say. I can't be critical about it. It reminds me of feeling free on the air for the first time, even though a review of recordings from that summer reveal a jock trying desperately to break free of the repression that was lingering in his head. I was horrible. But I felt good!
These are some of the song titles you'll never hear, you'll never see on a list of 1988's major hits, but they are songs that immediately bring forth the rush of excitement I felt playing them for the first time, that summer:
Rush Hour - Jane Weidlin
Summer Girls - Dino
Spring Love - Stevie B.
Simply Irresistible - Robert Palmer
Another Part of Me - Michael Jackson
Jackie - Blue Zone
The Twist - The Fat Boys, with Chubby Checker
Shake Your Thang - Salt and Pepper
Parents Just Don't Understand - D.J. Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince
The latter was number one on the Top 8 at 8 (brought to you by Saturday's Fashion store in The Oaks Mall) the night my U-Haul rental rolled into Port Hueneme, where I'd live for two years.
The pay would improve a little, my talent would develop, especially by summer, 1989, and I would never leave Ventura County (although I miss the sea breeze). All that mattered in July of 1988, was that, after 7 years being suppressed in both San Diego, and earlier in Public Radio, I was playing the hits...being young, and ready to burst with enthusiasm for what I was doing. I flush with moments of that feeling when a zephyr brings back a song--I'd love to feel that all the time, just once more in my career.
PUSHING BUTTONS THROUGH THE YEARS
While I'm thinking about all this, I'm reminded that I hardly listen to music at all while I'm in the car. Call it maturing, call it getting older, call it not associating positive memories with what I'm hearing. I think we can all, however, recall what the buttons on our car radios were set to as life rolled along. I certainly do.
On the buttons of my first car in 1977, equipped with a factory, Philco, AM radio, I punched up, from left to right, KABC (Dodger games) KRLA (I could never resist the oldies..and in '77 they had a current play list. It was Art Laboe, Johnny Hayes, the music, and that's it), KTNQ, The new Ten-Q (new home of the Real Don Steele, but they sped their music up 3 to 4 percent...sounded like the Chipmunks sang every song), KHJ (coming to the end of it's long run as THE Top 40 station in L.A.), KGFJ (the heritage "soul" station), and 1580, KDAY (the preeminent "soul" station). If you didn't have FM in your ride, you missed KMET, K-EARTH, KLOS, KUTE, the new "Disco" station, and jazz on KKGO.
Flash ahead ten years, as I settled in at Q-105, and my '83 Corolla has six AM and three FM buttons. On the AM: KMPC (not for the big band music, but for the remarkable, funny sports reporter Jim Healy, who's daily 5:30pm, 30 minute, drop-in filled shows could not be missed); KABC (Dodgers, as always), and KNX for news. FM: K-EARTH (who knew I'd wind up working there, someday?), Q-105 (where I worked, then) and KIIS (the leading Top 40 in the '80's).
The state or radio and car radios themselves have changed. Not having Sirius/XM, my six AM presets, today, are occupied by sports talk--710 KSPN, 1090 out of San Diego, KNX for news, KFWB, for my friend Maggie McKay (Phil Hulett's on too early for me to catch while driving) and KABC (Dodgers...back home again, although surrounded by some fairly hostile right-wing hosts, and weekend infomercials). I have 18 FM presets I used for no more than four stations: The Sound, KLOS, KIIS, and K-Earth, though I rarely listen when I'm not in the building.
Enjoy the summer, enjoy listening to what you dig, whether the radio delivers it or not. And if you surf the net for what radio used to offer, enjoy my friend Kevin Poore's "Nights at The Sound Table" Wednesday nights at 7:30, PDT, at www.ustream.com. A panel determine what music sucks and what doesn't. It's a lot of fun.
Something as simple as a sea breeze can do it. For a few reflective seconds, I'm 29, leaving San Diego as if with a knapsack on a stick. Fleeing the repressive formatics, inane lack of leadership, and the hideous overnight shift at what was then Y-95-FM. I landed in Oxnard, at Top 40,
Q-105. One of the questions I was asked when interviewing for the night job was, "Why in the world are you leaving San Diego to come here?"
The question was valid. San Diego was beautiful, its beaches breath-taking, a small town/big city. I had left the nation's 18th largest radio market for number 88, or something lower on the list. It took an entire weekend to make my decision to go. I'd be leaving friends, a nice apartment in a great neighborhood, with reasonable rent, and I wouldn't be paid any more...in fact, for the first few weeks, it would be less.
I left to get off the overnight shift, yes, but also to play the hits, and bring my natural humor to the air. The suffocating atmosphere at KWLT (which became KKYY, Y-95) was more than I could bear. Along with production man John Nixon (who's reading this, I'm sure), more fun was had in the halls, and the studio making amusing spots than any time spent on air with the listening public. Adult Contemporary radio, as its called, makes money, but it's wall paper. Background noise. It stifles talented people. And it's no place for someone as young a 29 as I was.
When I got to Q-105, regardless of the dilapidated shack we broadcast from, and the fact the place was permeated with the scent of the cow, pig and chicken manure used to fertilize the surrounding strawberry fields, I was ecstatic. To be able to display my innate enthusiasm, to embrace the vibrancy and freshness of Top 40 music, and to crack wise over the air...at will? A hefty burden had been lifted from my shoulders.
The 70 degree summer temperatures and soft Oxnard breeze immediately brings back the positive vibe, and the energy of July 1988--and the music. Whether it can be considered good music or not, only a musicologist can say. I can't be critical about it. It reminds me of feeling free on the air for the first time, even though a review of recordings from that summer reveal a jock trying desperately to break free of the repression that was lingering in his head. I was horrible. But I felt good!
These are some of the song titles you'll never hear, you'll never see on a list of 1988's major hits, but they are songs that immediately bring forth the rush of excitement I felt playing them for the first time, that summer:
Rush Hour - Jane Weidlin
Summer Girls - Dino
Spring Love - Stevie B.
Simply Irresistible - Robert Palmer
Another Part of Me - Michael Jackson
Jackie - Blue Zone
The Twist - The Fat Boys, with Chubby Checker
Shake Your Thang - Salt and Pepper
Parents Just Don't Understand - D.J. Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince
The latter was number one on the Top 8 at 8 (brought to you by Saturday's Fashion store in The Oaks Mall) the night my U-Haul rental rolled into Port Hueneme, where I'd live for two years.
The pay would improve a little, my talent would develop, especially by summer, 1989, and I would never leave Ventura County (although I miss the sea breeze). All that mattered in July of 1988, was that, after 7 years being suppressed in both San Diego, and earlier in Public Radio, I was playing the hits...being young, and ready to burst with enthusiasm for what I was doing. I flush with moments of that feeling when a zephyr brings back a song--I'd love to feel that all the time, just once more in my career.
PUSHING BUTTONS THROUGH THE YEARS
While I'm thinking about all this, I'm reminded that I hardly listen to music at all while I'm in the car. Call it maturing, call it getting older, call it not associating positive memories with what I'm hearing. I think we can all, however, recall what the buttons on our car radios were set to as life rolled along. I certainly do.
On the buttons of my first car in 1977, equipped with a factory, Philco, AM radio, I punched up, from left to right, KABC (Dodger games) KRLA (I could never resist the oldies..and in '77 they had a current play list. It was Art Laboe, Johnny Hayes, the music, and that's it), KTNQ, The new Ten-Q (new home of the Real Don Steele, but they sped their music up 3 to 4 percent...sounded like the Chipmunks sang every song), KHJ (coming to the end of it's long run as THE Top 40 station in L.A.), KGFJ (the heritage "soul" station), and 1580, KDAY (the preeminent "soul" station). If you didn't have FM in your ride, you missed KMET, K-EARTH, KLOS, KUTE, the new "Disco" station, and jazz on KKGO.
Flash ahead ten years, as I settled in at Q-105, and my '83 Corolla has six AM and three FM buttons. On the AM: KMPC (not for the big band music, but for the remarkable, funny sports reporter Jim Healy, who's daily 5:30pm, 30 minute, drop-in filled shows could not be missed); KABC (Dodgers, as always), and KNX for news. FM: K-EARTH (who knew I'd wind up working there, someday?), Q-105 (where I worked, then) and KIIS (the leading Top 40 in the '80's).
The state or radio and car radios themselves have changed. Not having Sirius/XM, my six AM presets, today, are occupied by sports talk--710 KSPN, 1090 out of San Diego, KNX for news, KFWB, for my friend Maggie McKay (Phil Hulett's on too early for me to catch while driving) and KABC (Dodgers...back home again, although surrounded by some fairly hostile right-wing hosts, and weekend infomercials). I have 18 FM presets I used for no more than four stations: The Sound, KLOS, KIIS, and K-Earth, though I rarely listen when I'm not in the building.
Enjoy the summer, enjoy listening to what you dig, whether the radio delivers it or not. And if you surf the net for what radio used to offer, enjoy my friend Kevin Poore's "Nights at The Sound Table" Wednesday nights at 7:30, PDT, at www.ustream.com. A panel determine what music sucks and what doesn't. It's a lot of fun.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
UP NEXT: GOOD LOOKING PEOPLE RULE! FIRST, HERE'S JACKIE WITH THE WEATHER...
After I jotted down the notes for this month's ramblings, I came across an article of note in Newsweek magaizne. The writer, Dahlia Lithwick, was obviously pondering the same notion that I was: that Good Looking people, apparently, rule.
For those who have not read or do not intend to read the article, Dahlia observed that "...the less attractive you are, the more likely you are to receive a longer prison sentence, a lower damage award, a lower salary." She pointed to a new book written by Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, that proposes laws be enacted to halt "looks discrimination." "The Beauty Bias," is its title. In it, all kinds of low, vile, and shallow employer practices are cited, like those at Abercrombie and Fitch. Evidently, these yo-yos hold Sorority-type management meetings in which they review photos of their sales kids, and fire them for acne breakouts, weight-gain, and (as Dahlia Lithwick writes), "...unacceptable quantities of ethnicity."
Ms. Lithwick's article illuminates exactly what was running through my mind, though my thoughts are more in line with the root cause of this kind of discrimination: Innate human nature, and repetitive exposure to our national addiction...TV.
Look--as humans, we've always been drawn to beautiful things: flowers, cloud formations, and other people. First paintings, then photos, movies and celebrity, via television, simply compounded the allure. I figured it might be a great idea for those of you with young children if, one evening during a power outage, you regale the kids with tales from days of yore--not about a era before plastic surgery and dental veneers, but more recent times. For example, when ugly people delivered TV news.
'Tis true. Especially in Los Angeles. A sign has been posted and fully accepted: No uglies allowed, especially when it comes to delivering the WEATHER! Oh, sure, they let a bald guy with brains cover politics, or a heavy-set woman in horn-rimmed glasses report from the Pentagon. When it comes to Highs and lows and the marine layer, staggering good looks are a necessity.
Though attractive lead actors and actresses have always dominated soaps and prime-time TV, it's taken time for the prerequisite for what I call "beyond telegenic" looks to completely overtake the news. In TV's first 25 years, broadcast journalism was more sacrosanct. What we would now consider ridiculous looking human beings (that is, every day folks) would bring you the daily forecast.
On KNBC, Channel 4, in the late 60's-early 70's, there was a gentleman named Bob Hale, who illustrated his weather reports with a huge, magic marker. He'd draw cute little seals, puppies and kitties next to the southland's predicted highs and lows. A bespectacled man who looked like an insurance agent, Bob disappeared from the air one summer, never to return. Former KNBC Anchor Tom Snyder told his late night audience (years after Bob had passed on) that in between drawing cuddly characters, the weather artist pounded the sauce with a vengeance, and swerved his way out of TV.
Also on Channel 4, around the same era, was a genuine meteorologist named Gordon Weir. With looks a bit like an aging James Mason, he took a professorial approach to assessing the next day's weather, using a pointer and science instructor's monotone. His forecasts were so deadly dull, you could almost hear the director yelling "WAKE UP" through the cameraman's headset. Old Gordon may well have nodded off, himself, between the overnight low in the valley, and the high in Manhattan Beach. You couldn't tell. When he drifted from TV, around the middle of the 70's, I imagined he went back to his perch in some ivory tower, to be dusted, occasionally, by a bored, university scrub woman. In truth, he passed in 1987 after a long illness.
Over on then-highly rated KNXT Channel 2 (now CBS2), Bill Keene held forth. A weather fixture with the visage of a basset hound, under his very perceptible rug, Bill left TV for KNX, the radio station upstairs at Columbia Square in Hollywood, where he'd spend the rest of his professional life as the area's preeminent traffic reporter and punster.
Who could forget Dr. George Fishbeck on KABC Channel 7's Eyewitness News? The pixie-like Dr. George was the very image of fatherly befuddlement, as amusing as he was sincere. He often held his right hand over the "7 in a Circle" crest, just above the heart on his Eyewitness News Blazer. As late as 2008, he was still doing forecasts in his living room for his wife. He's what they like to call a "spry" 88 years old.
This era of pallid, old weathermen with limp, damaged hair started crumbling while they were at their height, when KNBC hired the comely Kelly Lange to do weekend forecasts. With the recent retirement of CBS2 Weather clown Johnny Mountain, who'd been on the air in Los Angeles for 32 years, the crypt is nearly sealed. Comics like Fritz Coleman on KNBC4, and dimpled, leading men-types like Dallas Raines on KABC7 are the last of their ilk.
Turn on most TV news in L.A., today, and you realize why no one makes time to watch the Miss America Pageant, anymore. Why should you when you can watch someone just as stunning do the weather on TV?
Cases in point: Jackie Johnson, CBS2. Just try and mentally process weather information and remember tomorrow's high while being exposed to those curves for two or three minutes. I regularly go to the internet for the weather, but watch Jackie just for the diversion. What's worse, I easily admit my shallowness, and I'm not alone.
Early in the morning on KNBC4, a voluptuous distraction named Elita Loresca is gainfully employed. They must spend a fortune on her wardrobe, what with those cashmere sweaters being stretched beyond capacity. A lot of coffee must get spilled with Elita on display. Those who don't get up early can see her layout in FHM. there's wet clothing involved.
Turn to KTLA, Channel 5, and there's Vera Jimenez, who once did morning traffic on CBS2. Thinking back, I have to say she's soooooooooo much cuter and cuddlier than Bob Hale's drawings of kitties and seals, especially when she did traffic. Something, however, is amiss at Channel 5. KTLA lights her differently than CBS2 did. A petite young woman, her look is diminished by Channel 5's inability to light her correctly. Even in HD, you half-way expect a screeching cackle, a broom and smoking cauldron to accompany the graphics. And this is a seriously good looking woman. TV has never known how to properly light performers with brown skin, I suppose.
Finally, I submit to you, the strapping Indra Petersens, on KABC7, every Saturday and Sunday morning. A Swedish Beauty. She may well have been on Tiger's short list, but she's obviously too smart for anything like that. If you're up early on the weekend or just falling asleep, it does you good to know there's someone who looks like that on TV.
My point: The latter sentence says it all. Even I, as immersed in the history of broadcast journalism as I am, as acutely aware of discrimination as I am, have to concede that it's a treat seeing women so beautiful present news. It's sexist, yes, and unabashedly superficial, but evidently, we love it--at least according to focus groups, galvanic skin response tests, and the almighty Nielson ratings.
The author of "The Beauty Bias" may well be correct. Of all the forms of discrimination, though, this would be the most difficult to adjust or to legislate against. It's a deeply ingrained part of our flawed human nature. Besides, is beauty not, as they say, in the eye of the beholder?
***
A final observation: I hope at some point in time that, as day must follow night, AUTO-TUNE will go the way of the WAH-WAH PEDAL. For an example of autotune at work, think of Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls." The robotic computer program is used to keep him on key and in tune. After while, it's like finger nails on a chalk board.
For memories of the equally hideous wah-wah pedal, think back to the old Cheech and Chong bit where, in a fit of wah-wah induced rage, Cheech snatches the offending pedal out of its power supply. It's on Cheech and Chong's Wedding Album. Still funny, after all these years.
For those who have not read or do not intend to read the article, Dahlia observed that "...the less attractive you are, the more likely you are to receive a longer prison sentence, a lower damage award, a lower salary." She pointed to a new book written by Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode, that proposes laws be enacted to halt "looks discrimination." "The Beauty Bias," is its title. In it, all kinds of low, vile, and shallow employer practices are cited, like those at Abercrombie and Fitch. Evidently, these yo-yos hold Sorority-type management meetings in which they review photos of their sales kids, and fire them for acne breakouts, weight-gain, and (as Dahlia Lithwick writes), "...unacceptable quantities of ethnicity."
Ms. Lithwick's article illuminates exactly what was running through my mind, though my thoughts are more in line with the root cause of this kind of discrimination: Innate human nature, and repetitive exposure to our national addiction...TV.
Look--as humans, we've always been drawn to beautiful things: flowers, cloud formations, and other people. First paintings, then photos, movies and celebrity, via television, simply compounded the allure. I figured it might be a great idea for those of you with young children if, one evening during a power outage, you regale the kids with tales from days of yore--not about a era before plastic surgery and dental veneers, but more recent times. For example, when ugly people delivered TV news.
'Tis true. Especially in Los Angeles. A sign has been posted and fully accepted: No uglies allowed, especially when it comes to delivering the WEATHER! Oh, sure, they let a bald guy with brains cover politics, or a heavy-set woman in horn-rimmed glasses report from the Pentagon. When it comes to Highs and lows and the marine layer, staggering good looks are a necessity.
Though attractive lead actors and actresses have always dominated soaps and prime-time TV, it's taken time for the prerequisite for what I call "beyond telegenic" looks to completely overtake the news. In TV's first 25 years, broadcast journalism was more sacrosanct. What we would now consider ridiculous looking human beings (that is, every day folks) would bring you the daily forecast.
On KNBC, Channel 4, in the late 60's-early 70's, there was a gentleman named Bob Hale, who illustrated his weather reports with a huge, magic marker. He'd draw cute little seals, puppies and kitties next to the southland's predicted highs and lows. A bespectacled man who looked like an insurance agent, Bob disappeared from the air one summer, never to return. Former KNBC Anchor Tom Snyder told his late night audience (years after Bob had passed on) that in between drawing cuddly characters, the weather artist pounded the sauce with a vengeance, and swerved his way out of TV.
Also on Channel 4, around the same era, was a genuine meteorologist named Gordon Weir. With looks a bit like an aging James Mason, he took a professorial approach to assessing the next day's weather, using a pointer and science instructor's monotone. His forecasts were so deadly dull, you could almost hear the director yelling "WAKE UP" through the cameraman's headset. Old Gordon may well have nodded off, himself, between the overnight low in the valley, and the high in Manhattan Beach. You couldn't tell. When he drifted from TV, around the middle of the 70's, I imagined he went back to his perch in some ivory tower, to be dusted, occasionally, by a bored, university scrub woman. In truth, he passed in 1987 after a long illness.
Over on then-highly rated KNXT Channel 2 (now CBS2), Bill Keene held forth. A weather fixture with the visage of a basset hound, under his very perceptible rug, Bill left TV for KNX, the radio station upstairs at Columbia Square in Hollywood, where he'd spend the rest of his professional life as the area's preeminent traffic reporter and punster.
Who could forget Dr. George Fishbeck on KABC Channel 7's Eyewitness News? The pixie-like Dr. George was the very image of fatherly befuddlement, as amusing as he was sincere. He often held his right hand over the "7 in a Circle" crest, just above the heart on his Eyewitness News Blazer. As late as 2008, he was still doing forecasts in his living room for his wife. He's what they like to call a "spry" 88 years old.
This era of pallid, old weathermen with limp, damaged hair started crumbling while they were at their height, when KNBC hired the comely Kelly Lange to do weekend forecasts. With the recent retirement of CBS2 Weather clown Johnny Mountain, who'd been on the air in Los Angeles for 32 years, the crypt is nearly sealed. Comics like Fritz Coleman on KNBC4, and dimpled, leading men-types like Dallas Raines on KABC7 are the last of their ilk.
Turn on most TV news in L.A., today, and you realize why no one makes time to watch the Miss America Pageant, anymore. Why should you when you can watch someone just as stunning do the weather on TV?
Cases in point: Jackie Johnson, CBS2. Just try and mentally process weather information and remember tomorrow's high while being exposed to those curves for two or three minutes. I regularly go to the internet for the weather, but watch Jackie just for the diversion. What's worse, I easily admit my shallowness, and I'm not alone.
Early in the morning on KNBC4, a voluptuous distraction named Elita Loresca is gainfully employed. They must spend a fortune on her wardrobe, what with those cashmere sweaters being stretched beyond capacity. A lot of coffee must get spilled with Elita on display. Those who don't get up early can see her layout in FHM. there's wet clothing involved.
Turn to KTLA, Channel 5, and there's Vera Jimenez, who once did morning traffic on CBS2. Thinking back, I have to say she's soooooooooo much cuter and cuddlier than Bob Hale's drawings of kitties and seals, especially when she did traffic. Something, however, is amiss at Channel 5. KTLA lights her differently than CBS2 did. A petite young woman, her look is diminished by Channel 5's inability to light her correctly. Even in HD, you half-way expect a screeching cackle, a broom and smoking cauldron to accompany the graphics. And this is a seriously good looking woman. TV has never known how to properly light performers with brown skin, I suppose.
Finally, I submit to you, the strapping Indra Petersens, on KABC7, every Saturday and Sunday morning. A Swedish Beauty. She may well have been on Tiger's short list, but she's obviously too smart for anything like that. If you're up early on the weekend or just falling asleep, it does you good to know there's someone who looks like that on TV.
My point: The latter sentence says it all. Even I, as immersed in the history of broadcast journalism as I am, as acutely aware of discrimination as I am, have to concede that it's a treat seeing women so beautiful present news. It's sexist, yes, and unabashedly superficial, but evidently, we love it--at least according to focus groups, galvanic skin response tests, and the almighty Nielson ratings.
The author of "The Beauty Bias" may well be correct. Of all the forms of discrimination, though, this would be the most difficult to adjust or to legislate against. It's a deeply ingrained part of our flawed human nature. Besides, is beauty not, as they say, in the eye of the beholder?
***
A final observation: I hope at some point in time that, as day must follow night, AUTO-TUNE will go the way of the WAH-WAH PEDAL. For an example of autotune at work, think of Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls." The robotic computer program is used to keep him on key and in tune. After while, it's like finger nails on a chalk board.
For memories of the equally hideous wah-wah pedal, think back to the old Cheech and Chong bit where, in a fit of wah-wah induced rage, Cheech snatches the offending pedal out of its power supply. It's on Cheech and Chong's Wedding Album. Still funny, after all these years.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
IT HAPPENED AT THE TAMI SHOW
I'm probably going to provoke a lot of opinionated discussion here, because when it comes to music, especially rock and roll, nothing (save politics and religion) stimulates more passionate positions. So steady yourself for agreement, or a reaction that makes you pace the room with restrained aggression.
In this, the 55th year since Bill Haley and The Comets topped the Billboard charts with "Rock Around the Clock," we have the luxury of looking back on over a half century of rock and roll recorded on film or video tape. I believe there are five performances that galvanized, charged, or struck viewers with awe, and altered the lens through which popular music was examined. In no particular order, they are:
Elvis Presley performing Hound Dog on the Milton Berle Show, June 5, 1956
It wasn't his first TV appearance, of course. It was, however, the one during which he bumped and humped and grinded like nothing the country had seen outside of a stag film. The Big E's evocative, interpretative, unselfconscious gyrations at the old NBC Studios on Sunset and Vine in the heart of Hollywood, beamed live across a country and shocked an older generation to its conservative, repressed toes. For his subsequent TV appearances, including his celebrated shots on The Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis was photographed from the waist up...to both simmer the surging hormones of teenage girls, and the blood pressure of the sexually stifled parents, network TV affiliates and their sponsors. Regardless, Elvis rocked their world, and opened the door for expression via spontaneous hip-swiveling. The generation that sat watching with mouths agape as he stole the show from Uncle Miltie, would be doing The Twist at parties, four years later.
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, February 9, 1964
Before a huge Sunday night viewing audience, the Fab Four shook America from its moorings, and its mourning. Two and a half months after President Kennedy's assassination, The Beatles filled a gaping hole in the heart of our popular culture. Four young men and their instruments, introduced by the stiff-as-a-board-impresario...an image now indelible to all fans of rock and roll, whether they'd been born by '64 or not.
Jimi Hendrix Lights his Guitar, Monterrey Pop Festival, 1967
The rock and roll worm had turned by the Summer of Love, and when Hendrix lit his ax for the crowd at Monterrey, cameras recorded a seminal moment in stage-craft. You didn't dance to this-- you watched in awe, whether it was at the festival itself, or a movie theatre the following year. Sure, he plucked his strings with his teeth, and played the National Anthem as it had never been rendered before. But it was setting flame to his fretboard that was unforgettable. Pyrotechnics and rock music forged a union for better and (tragically) worse.
Michael Jackson Moonwalks, Motown 25th Anniversary Show, 1983
We'll forget for a moment the wacky eccentricities and disturbing details of the life. For sheer spellbinding TV, you have to point to M.J.'s performance on a TV special celebrating Motown's past. Though he'd left the label years before, it was Michael's 1983 "present" that rocked the house. There's no doubting the talent or the influence. People who couldn't trot and chew gum, were moon-walking after this show. In an age when cable was just wobbling to its feet, and viewers were not yet separated like vegetables from entrees on a cafeteria tray, it stirred a huge audience over NBC.
And, last but not least, James Brown, at The TAMI Show, Santa Monica Civic, 1964
An unparalleled performance for all-time. To watch it is to witness exhilaration personified. J.B. had, by then, been called, "the hardest working man in show business." His engagements at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem were seen only by almost exclusively Black audiences, but released as an album that stayed on the charts for a year. What's lost in the story of this electrifying celebration at The TAMI Show, is the fact that Brown was next to last on stage. Now that it is, at long last, available on DVD, it's background, and why I think J.B.'s performance was the most extraordinary history, bears some explaining.
I was 14 years old in November of 1973. Saturday nights usually meant playing cards with a family member or watching the CBS-TV trifecta of Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and Carol Burnett. For some reason, on this particular night, perhaps it was Thanksgiving weekend, I was clicking around the TV set and landed on Channel 28, the Public station in Los Angeles. There, in black and white, was a film that started with what were then 9-year-old-rock acts readying themselves for a show. Jan and Dean, The Miracles, The Supreme,s The Stones, and James Brown were all shown in various states of preparation. Then the opening titles flashed: The TAMI Show, teenage music international. Having an affection for the music of my much older siblings, who'd come of age between '64-to-'68, I lay on my stomach, propped myself up by the elbows, and watched the show.
What stood out on that night was James Brown. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My inner monologue was riddled with questions. "Is he having a nervous breakdown? Those guys are trying to take him off stage...what? He's running back? Are guys in white coats gonna strap him to a gurney and haul him away?" By the time he strutted, exhausted, off the stage, I was laughing, having seen the most remarkable act of my tween-aged life.
The next Monday, back in my 9th grade, fourth period class, I was listening to a guy we actually called "James Brown" because of he worshipped The Godfather of Soul. In his stammering way, he tried to describe J.B.'s show at the L.A. Sports Arena. Coincidentally, he'd appeared in L.A. the same night the public TV station ran the Tami Show. I joined the discussion and added how Brown's minions would drape the emotionally drained singer with a cape...to no avail. Brown would whip off the cape, leap back to the microphone, and fall to his knees with a wail of soul-searing anguish.
Crestfallen, the kid who worshipped the Godfather of Soul looked at me with baleful eyes. "Were you at the Sports Arena, Saturday?"
"No," I told him. "I saw a 9 year old show on Channel 28." I don't know which answer would have hurt him more--that I'd perhaps had seen the show, or that I saw something on TV that he'd missed because he may or may not have been out stealing a car.
I never forgot The Tami Show. As the years went by, bits and pieces, a performance here, a performance there, various clips of some of the acts, but not all, would find their way to TV, movie screens, and bootlegged video. In 1974, Dick Clark dedicated 90 minutes of ABC late night time to a ten-year retrospective, where he forewarned girls who'd been in the audience, "Don't look now ladies, you're nearing 30." Later, he described Lesley Gore's 1964 hairstyle as having "...been sprayed on with gunnite."
Now that The TAMI Show is on DVD, it can be seen in its entirety. A two-hour film, released over the holidays as 1964 ended, The TAMI Show was shot by television cameras, recorded on high-speed video tape. They called the process Electronovision. It would allow for a higher resolution, once transferred to a 35 millimeter print for theatres.
The acts hit the stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for shows on Friday October 28th and Saturday October 29th, 1964, before an audience of teens. Producers asked local schools to distribute the 2500 tickets. It was the Saturday show that made it to the screen.
In alphabetical order, screaming kids from Santa Monica watched The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, the aforementioned Godfather or Soul, The Barbarians (a Massachusetts group that we'd now call a garage band) Marvin Gaye, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, The Supremes, The Rolling Stones, and hosts Jan and Dean.
Uncredited were a slew of dancers who frugged, monkyed and jerked through the whole show. Among them was a teen-aged Antonia Basilerro, who later danced her way to the charts as Toni Basil, and a tall, leggy, alluring blonde who was workin' herself into a frenzy. She would later "roll in the hay" as a damsel in "Young Frankenstein," and gain an Oscar nomination for her 1983 role in "Tootsie." When you watch The TAMI Show, keep an eye peeled for her: 20-year-old Teri Garr. At one point, the dancers boogie right through The Supremes act, and there are two future Oscar nominees as young women, facing each other--Teri Garr and Diana Ross.
In fact, the entire show's a black and white snapshot of some of our greatest artists on the verge of super stardom. The exception would be Chuck Berry, who starts the show. He was already a legend. The DVD notes point out it was Berry's penchant for demanding his pay in cash, just prior to performing, that ate up the show's petty cash on hand. The Four Seasons had asked for too much money, otherwise (save The Beatles) even more stars would have shaken the auditorium to its rafters. What an evening. One of rock and roll's tender years frozen in amber, all captured on film. You should watch it, then view Monterrey Pop to understand just how music and the world would change between 1964 and 1967. The contrast will give you whiplash.
There's so much to see. The unbridled joy on the face of Gerry Marsden of Gerry and The Pacemakers, his guitar poised just under his chin. You'll never see an artist smile so much while singing. Even though it was 45 years ago, you can feel the verve of youth surge from the screen.
The Beach Boys harmonies and surf guitars are as flawless on stage as they are on record, astounding when you consider how many of today's acts must lipsync. It was, however, these very songs that caused the Beach Boys management to snip their set from future theatrical releases of The TAMI Show. By the time "Pet Sounds" was being recorded, they no longer wanted to be typed as the "surf and hot rod" band. It's only on this DVD that their entire TAMI performance is seen once more.
The Motown acts on the bill had just come off the road. Smokey told Dick Clark on that ABC-TV retrospective in 1974, "...I was hoarse." That's an understatement. The Miracles demonstration of The Monkey makes up for it. For that matter, a shot of Teri Garr doing The Monkey in tight jeans is worth it, too, bless her heart. Lauren Bacall was right: film is forever. Thus, so is beauty.
Marvin Gaye was backed up by Darlene Love and the Blossoms, and actually danced. Long after his passing, Motown associates would reveal how difficult that was, because, "Marvin...could NOT dance." The Supremes were resplendent in evening wear, two hits into a string of ten number ones in a row over 1964-65. Lesley Gore was the queen of the hop with a six song set. From a historical perspective, she was the leading female artist of the time.
Gerry and The Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas were overseen by the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, so they came as a package deal. The Pacemakers opened the show and traded songs with Chuck Berry, quite an honor, as British bands revered early rock and roll and R & B performers.
Then there was James Brown. Forget the dated portions of this film--the big hair, the quaint, harmless frugging and twisting, and the distorted monaural sound. J.B. superseded all of that. He's a study in showmanship that's almost vaudevillian. I cannot emphasise too strongly the impact of this performance. When James died, clips of this night were shown in tribute, everywhere. Years before, another generation of singer-dancers paid homage to his TAMI Show set. Prince had it run on a continuous loop in the lobby of his Paisley Park offices in Minneapolis. Hammer danced along to it in a 1990 music video.
And who had the thankless job of following this tour de force on stage at The TAMI Show? The Rolling Stones. Producers had insisted that The Stones be last on the bill. Relative newbies from across the pond, they were faced with the unenviable task of coming on after J.B. . As the years passed, they would, of course, perfect their stage act as "the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band." But on The TAMI Show, Mick Jagger's Brown-inspired, improvised moves look like those of a child who needs to pee--arms flailing, knees wobbling, hopping, jumping, generally having a fit. Their musician ship ruled...the choreography would get better. Not that the kids cared, that night. The screaming didn't stop.
Until The TAMI Show, rock and rollers were seen almost exclusively lipsyncing on dance shows like American Bandstand, or doing a live song or two as a guest on Ed Sullivan, or one of the many other variety shows of the era. This film set the standard for concert and concert films.
And the only thing today that comes close to the long-lost American myth of innocence, all that could come close to the good-time teen groove of The TAMI Show, would be something from the Disney Channel roster of acts. If you don't believe me, connect the dots. Hannah Montana, The Jonas Brothers, screaming tweens and harmlessness.
And if you're over 45, watch the TAMI Show, experience a world we once knew, and know that when you see James Brown, you will have seen nothing like it, before or since.
CLUSTER UPDATE, KARMA, AND CAREY MULLIGAN
My thanks to all who wrote or called. This cluster is over. New pain relief has been prescribed. Let's hope another four years passed before it strikes again.
Also, good friend Craig Gross's daughter Karma is now two and a half months old. Born on February 15th. Man, time passes fast!
And finally, lest you think my eye for the alluring is lost in '64, admiring Teri Garr in her youth:
Carey Mulligan of "An Education," is half my age. So what? That dimple knocks me out! So does her smooth British purring. Ya gotta call 'em like you see 'em.
In this, the 55th year since Bill Haley and The Comets topped the Billboard charts with "Rock Around the Clock," we have the luxury of looking back on over a half century of rock and roll recorded on film or video tape. I believe there are five performances that galvanized, charged, or struck viewers with awe, and altered the lens through which popular music was examined. In no particular order, they are:
Elvis Presley performing Hound Dog on the Milton Berle Show, June 5, 1956
It wasn't his first TV appearance, of course. It was, however, the one during which he bumped and humped and grinded like nothing the country had seen outside of a stag film. The Big E's evocative, interpretative, unselfconscious gyrations at the old NBC Studios on Sunset and Vine in the heart of Hollywood, beamed live across a country and shocked an older generation to its conservative, repressed toes. For his subsequent TV appearances, including his celebrated shots on The Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis was photographed from the waist up...to both simmer the surging hormones of teenage girls, and the blood pressure of the sexually stifled parents, network TV affiliates and their sponsors. Regardless, Elvis rocked their world, and opened the door for expression via spontaneous hip-swiveling. The generation that sat watching with mouths agape as he stole the show from Uncle Miltie, would be doing The Twist at parties, four years later.
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, February 9, 1964
Before a huge Sunday night viewing audience, the Fab Four shook America from its moorings, and its mourning. Two and a half months after President Kennedy's assassination, The Beatles filled a gaping hole in the heart of our popular culture. Four young men and their instruments, introduced by the stiff-as-a-board-impresario...an image now indelible to all fans of rock and roll, whether they'd been born by '64 or not.
Jimi Hendrix Lights his Guitar, Monterrey Pop Festival, 1967
The rock and roll worm had turned by the Summer of Love, and when Hendrix lit his ax for the crowd at Monterrey, cameras recorded a seminal moment in stage-craft. You didn't dance to this-- you watched in awe, whether it was at the festival itself, or a movie theatre the following year. Sure, he plucked his strings with his teeth, and played the National Anthem as it had never been rendered before. But it was setting flame to his fretboard that was unforgettable. Pyrotechnics and rock music forged a union for better and (tragically) worse.
Michael Jackson Moonwalks, Motown 25th Anniversary Show, 1983
We'll forget for a moment the wacky eccentricities and disturbing details of the life. For sheer spellbinding TV, you have to point to M.J.'s performance on a TV special celebrating Motown's past. Though he'd left the label years before, it was Michael's 1983 "present" that rocked the house. There's no doubting the talent or the influence. People who couldn't trot and chew gum, were moon-walking after this show. In an age when cable was just wobbling to its feet, and viewers were not yet separated like vegetables from entrees on a cafeteria tray, it stirred a huge audience over NBC.
And, last but not least, James Brown, at The TAMI Show, Santa Monica Civic, 1964
An unparalleled performance for all-time. To watch it is to witness exhilaration personified. J.B. had, by then, been called, "the hardest working man in show business." His engagements at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem were seen only by almost exclusively Black audiences, but released as an album that stayed on the charts for a year. What's lost in the story of this electrifying celebration at The TAMI Show, is the fact that Brown was next to last on stage. Now that it is, at long last, available on DVD, it's background, and why I think J.B.'s performance was the most extraordinary history, bears some explaining.
I was 14 years old in November of 1973. Saturday nights usually meant playing cards with a family member or watching the CBS-TV trifecta of Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and Carol Burnett. For some reason, on this particular night, perhaps it was Thanksgiving weekend, I was clicking around the TV set and landed on Channel 28, the Public station in Los Angeles. There, in black and white, was a film that started with what were then 9-year-old-rock acts readying themselves for a show. Jan and Dean, The Miracles, The Supreme,s The Stones, and James Brown were all shown in various states of preparation. Then the opening titles flashed: The TAMI Show, teenage music international. Having an affection for the music of my much older siblings, who'd come of age between '64-to-'68, I lay on my stomach, propped myself up by the elbows, and watched the show.
What stood out on that night was James Brown. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My inner monologue was riddled with questions. "Is he having a nervous breakdown? Those guys are trying to take him off stage...what? He's running back? Are guys in white coats gonna strap him to a gurney and haul him away?" By the time he strutted, exhausted, off the stage, I was laughing, having seen the most remarkable act of my tween-aged life.
The next Monday, back in my 9th grade, fourth period class, I was listening to a guy we actually called "James Brown" because of he worshipped The Godfather of Soul. In his stammering way, he tried to describe J.B.'s show at the L.A. Sports Arena. Coincidentally, he'd appeared in L.A. the same night the public TV station ran the Tami Show. I joined the discussion and added how Brown's minions would drape the emotionally drained singer with a cape...to no avail. Brown would whip off the cape, leap back to the microphone, and fall to his knees with a wail of soul-searing anguish.
Crestfallen, the kid who worshipped the Godfather of Soul looked at me with baleful eyes. "Were you at the Sports Arena, Saturday?"
"No," I told him. "I saw a 9 year old show on Channel 28." I don't know which answer would have hurt him more--that I'd perhaps had seen the show, or that I saw something on TV that he'd missed because he may or may not have been out stealing a car.
I never forgot The Tami Show. As the years went by, bits and pieces, a performance here, a performance there, various clips of some of the acts, but not all, would find their way to TV, movie screens, and bootlegged video. In 1974, Dick Clark dedicated 90 minutes of ABC late night time to a ten-year retrospective, where he forewarned girls who'd been in the audience, "Don't look now ladies, you're nearing 30." Later, he described Lesley Gore's 1964 hairstyle as having "...been sprayed on with gunnite."
Now that The TAMI Show is on DVD, it can be seen in its entirety. A two-hour film, released over the holidays as 1964 ended, The TAMI Show was shot by television cameras, recorded on high-speed video tape. They called the process Electronovision. It would allow for a higher resolution, once transferred to a 35 millimeter print for theatres.
The acts hit the stage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for shows on Friday October 28th and Saturday October 29th, 1964, before an audience of teens. Producers asked local schools to distribute the 2500 tickets. It was the Saturday show that made it to the screen.
In alphabetical order, screaming kids from Santa Monica watched The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, the aforementioned Godfather or Soul, The Barbarians (a Massachusetts group that we'd now call a garage band) Marvin Gaye, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas, Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, The Supremes, The Rolling Stones, and hosts Jan and Dean.
Uncredited were a slew of dancers who frugged, monkyed and jerked through the whole show. Among them was a teen-aged Antonia Basilerro, who later danced her way to the charts as Toni Basil, and a tall, leggy, alluring blonde who was workin' herself into a frenzy. She would later "roll in the hay" as a damsel in "Young Frankenstein," and gain an Oscar nomination for her 1983 role in "Tootsie." When you watch The TAMI Show, keep an eye peeled for her: 20-year-old Teri Garr. At one point, the dancers boogie right through The Supremes act, and there are two future Oscar nominees as young women, facing each other--Teri Garr and Diana Ross.
In fact, the entire show's a black and white snapshot of some of our greatest artists on the verge of super stardom. The exception would be Chuck Berry, who starts the show. He was already a legend. The DVD notes point out it was Berry's penchant for demanding his pay in cash, just prior to performing, that ate up the show's petty cash on hand. The Four Seasons had asked for too much money, otherwise (save The Beatles) even more stars would have shaken the auditorium to its rafters. What an evening. One of rock and roll's tender years frozen in amber, all captured on film. You should watch it, then view Monterrey Pop to understand just how music and the world would change between 1964 and 1967. The contrast will give you whiplash.
There's so much to see. The unbridled joy on the face of Gerry Marsden of Gerry and The Pacemakers, his guitar poised just under his chin. You'll never see an artist smile so much while singing. Even though it was 45 years ago, you can feel the verve of youth surge from the screen.
The Beach Boys harmonies and surf guitars are as flawless on stage as they are on record, astounding when you consider how many of today's acts must lipsync. It was, however, these very songs that caused the Beach Boys management to snip their set from future theatrical releases of The TAMI Show. By the time "Pet Sounds" was being recorded, they no longer wanted to be typed as the "surf and hot rod" band. It's only on this DVD that their entire TAMI performance is seen once more.
The Motown acts on the bill had just come off the road. Smokey told Dick Clark on that ABC-TV retrospective in 1974, "...I was hoarse." That's an understatement. The Miracles demonstration of The Monkey makes up for it. For that matter, a shot of Teri Garr doing The Monkey in tight jeans is worth it, too, bless her heart. Lauren Bacall was right: film is forever. Thus, so is beauty.
Marvin Gaye was backed up by Darlene Love and the Blossoms, and actually danced. Long after his passing, Motown associates would reveal how difficult that was, because, "Marvin...could NOT dance." The Supremes were resplendent in evening wear, two hits into a string of ten number ones in a row over 1964-65. Lesley Gore was the queen of the hop with a six song set. From a historical perspective, she was the leading female artist of the time.
Gerry and The Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas were overseen by the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein, so they came as a package deal. The Pacemakers opened the show and traded songs with Chuck Berry, quite an honor, as British bands revered early rock and roll and R & B performers.
Then there was James Brown. Forget the dated portions of this film--the big hair, the quaint, harmless frugging and twisting, and the distorted monaural sound. J.B. superseded all of that. He's a study in showmanship that's almost vaudevillian. I cannot emphasise too strongly the impact of this performance. When James died, clips of this night were shown in tribute, everywhere. Years before, another generation of singer-dancers paid homage to his TAMI Show set. Prince had it run on a continuous loop in the lobby of his Paisley Park offices in Minneapolis. Hammer danced along to it in a 1990 music video.
And who had the thankless job of following this tour de force on stage at The TAMI Show? The Rolling Stones. Producers had insisted that The Stones be last on the bill. Relative newbies from across the pond, they were faced with the unenviable task of coming on after J.B. . As the years passed, they would, of course, perfect their stage act as "the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band." But on The TAMI Show, Mick Jagger's Brown-inspired, improvised moves look like those of a child who needs to pee--arms flailing, knees wobbling, hopping, jumping, generally having a fit. Their musician ship ruled...the choreography would get better. Not that the kids cared, that night. The screaming didn't stop.
Until The TAMI Show, rock and rollers were seen almost exclusively lipsyncing on dance shows like American Bandstand, or doing a live song or two as a guest on Ed Sullivan, or one of the many other variety shows of the era. This film set the standard for concert and concert films.
And the only thing today that comes close to the long-lost American myth of innocence, all that could come close to the good-time teen groove of The TAMI Show, would be something from the Disney Channel roster of acts. If you don't believe me, connect the dots. Hannah Montana, The Jonas Brothers, screaming tweens and harmlessness.
And if you're over 45, watch the TAMI Show, experience a world we once knew, and know that when you see James Brown, you will have seen nothing like it, before or since.
CLUSTER UPDATE, KARMA, AND CAREY MULLIGAN
My thanks to all who wrote or called. This cluster is over. New pain relief has been prescribed. Let's hope another four years passed before it strikes again.
Also, good friend Craig Gross's daughter Karma is now two and a half months old. Born on February 15th. Man, time passes fast!
And finally, lest you think my eye for the alluring is lost in '64, admiring Teri Garr in her youth:
Carey Mulligan of "An Education," is half my age. So what? That dimple knocks me out! So does her smooth British purring. Ya gotta call 'em like you see 'em.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
THE CLUSTER AND I
Today, I'm hale and hearty. A little cranky from catching up on the massive sleep loss of the last month, but feeling good. This has not been the case for the month of March, and as much as I hate to talk about infirmity, it's probably time to shed some light on a health malady that's been part of my life since I turned 17.
The name of this affliction is ridiculous: Cluster Headache. In no way can what it is called convey the excruciating, debilitating pain involved. Most people assume any headache not designated as migraine can be easily taken care of with over-the-counter remedies advertised on TV and radio, ad nauseum for 70 years. Excederin, Bufferin, Anacin, Tylenol, Advil, good old Bayer Aspirin are all like an umbrella in the teeth of a hurricane when going up against the cluster headache that one out of five thousand human beings suffer from.
The "cluster" represents the rapidity of flare-ups that occur during a cycle, or period of time the sufferer will have these attacks. For example, the intense headaches will start in one's sleep, last an hour at the rate of maybe one or two flare-ups a day, everyday, or as isolated as once a week, for up to a month or eight weeks, annually, every two years. In my case, every three or four years. Some poor souls suffer year round.
To describe the pain is difficult. Stab wounds and gunshots show visible results. Headaches cannot be seen neither by human eye or x-ray. Legitimate headaches hit everyone, some as vicious, vascular headaches in the relm of the migraine. Sadly, an ache of the head is often used by goldbricks, fakers and manipulators as an excuse to be absent. Because of the location of the pain, a "headache" is what is used to reference what cluster sufferers feel. Doctors will tell you, medical websites will back it up: a cluster is the most intense pain a human can withstand that won't kill you--it just makes you want to die.
I'd just turned 17 in August of 1976, when I woke up one morning with this horrible pain on the left side of my head. It lasted an hour, then eased up. After a week, the episodes stopped. I had no idea what had happened, since I'd never suffered head pain before.
A little more than a year later, the same thing happened, except the headaches went on daily for a month, waking me in the night, centering behind the eye, around the cheek, behind the ear, and thrashing through the temple. Tears fall, not from crying (although that's what you want to do), and the eye itself shuts. "It's sinus," said family members. I took Sinutab and Tylenol Sinus...popping them like M & M's. One relative told me to "Go outside and eat some ice cream."
I did, one afternoon at Long Beach State, while enduring vicious pain as a professor lectured on the history of the blues.
During a cluster in early 1980, I was advised to see an eye doctor. I made an appointment. I needed glasses, yet another cluster occurred that summer.
Stress. Tension. Sinus. Self-diagnosis, misdiagnosis. I endured, gritting my teeth through truly medieval , excruciating pain. Following the removal of a growth in the perotoid gland in 1981, my late Mother remarked, "I'll bet those headaches stop, now." Nope. A short cluster followed the surgery by a week.
In 1983, I was attacked by a cluster so awful, I wondered if I had been chosen for some Biblical test of faith, and I became a lot more Catholic than I had previously been. For naught, as it turned out. I went to a doctor , still thinking my sinuses were to blame, and was prescribed a nasal mist and antihistamines. I would wake up in pain and shoot this mist into my nostrils. It succeeded in making mortal anguish worse. So, more cluster cycles came in 1985, 86, and 87.
You get the idea. In 1988, I missed an evening of work just based on how I looked after a day long siege. 1989, 1990. Nobody knew, really, because it was impossible to convey the nature of these attacks, as opposed to the head pain most humans feel.
It was a doctor named Barbara Leigh, now practicing in the upper reaches of northern California, who first suggested that what was happening to me had nothing to do with anything known to most people. It was the first I'd heard of Cluster headache, and I was given a mist called "Staydol." It was a pain killer mist. It knocked my out, but did nothing to stop the grinding, drilling flares of punishment.
Darvocet. Vicodin. Narcotics could not stop this thing once the pain started. On Thanksgiving 1992, I made Herculean effort to finish my laundry while it felt like there was a hatchet going through the left side of my head. It eased and I went to dinner at my boss' house. No one was the wiser. By 1998, another Doctor, William Davis, also understood the nature of what I was going through. He gave me some material to read (in an age before webMD.com) that described to a T what was had been happening to me all those years. Much research had been done by a Doctor Kudrow in the field of headaches. If you were a fan of the TV show Friends, you recognize the name. He's the father of actress Lisa Kudrow.
Through this reading, I felt some relief that there were people who knew the depth of the agony. It occurs usually in young men with the onset of tobacco and alcohol use. Sleep deprivation and stress are also named as probable causes. This may be the case with some patients, but not all. With me, starting smoking and drinking in the summer of '76 probably was a root cause. Yet cigarettes and booze haven't been a part of my life for years. Even my current Doctor, Paul Reisser, cannot be a hundred percent sure as to why I'm one out of five thousand who suffer cluster cycles, why they start or last as long and with as much intensity as they do. I am aware of one phenomenon: I have had month long episodes in 2003, 2006, and the month that ends this day. Dr. Reisser surmises that the blood pressure medicine atenolol has contributed to the cycles being less frequent than they were in my youth. For that I'm grateful.
I have at my disposal relatively new pain relievers, mainly used for migraines. I'm at the tail end of a cycle, so the next time this should happen, I'll be using the most effective means of halting the pain: a tank of pure oxygen, taken at a furious pace, from a mask. As far as any medical professional knows, it's the only sure-fire way of stopping cluster pain once it's at it's horrible zenith.
Writing this is cathartic. Perhaps people will understand what happens to me every few years. Maybe it will make me talk about it more, because once a cycle is over, I'm so relieved, I push it from my mind. Monday the 22nd, I was still suffering the after effects from a flare-up the previous day, when my employers called, asking me to fill-in for someone. I could have explained that I, too, was ill, but didn't. Subsequently they started calling someone else. Maybe I'll explain it all better, and at long last people realize this is nothing like the fakery of someone who wants the day off to go to a concert, or recover from a bender.
R. I. P. KELLY ROBINSON
In my previous blog, I referenced the old TV show "I Spy," and the relative cool of Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson, and Bill Cosby as Alexander "Scotty" Scott, who traipsed about the globe protecting freedom. On the morning of Wednesday March 24th, Bob Culp was walking, not far from his Hollywood Hills home. He fell, hit his head, and died, months short of his 80th birthday. Cosby, of course, reacted with sadness and great words of kindness for his old pal. That on- camera chemistry was not fake. That's what made the show so special in its time.
It was while I read about his passing that I recalled how, in the '80's, when it was retro, I tried to channel Culp's "I Spy" look--the white denim trousers, white sneakers, and pull-over V-neck sweaters with no undershirt. I didn't try to look like Cos, because, frankly, I didn't have the ass width. One of those genetic things.
It shows the impact of TV characters on young viewers. If, at my age, I remember "I Spy," will kids today wax nostalgic about Keifer Sutherland in "24," and waterboard a friend just for kicks?
Hopefully they'll just channel Jack Bauer's steely resolve, maybe his choice of trouser, and leave it at that.
Rest in Peace, Bob Culp.
The name of this affliction is ridiculous: Cluster Headache. In no way can what it is called convey the excruciating, debilitating pain involved. Most people assume any headache not designated as migraine can be easily taken care of with over-the-counter remedies advertised on TV and radio, ad nauseum for 70 years. Excederin, Bufferin, Anacin, Tylenol, Advil, good old Bayer Aspirin are all like an umbrella in the teeth of a hurricane when going up against the cluster headache that one out of five thousand human beings suffer from.
The "cluster" represents the rapidity of flare-ups that occur during a cycle, or period of time the sufferer will have these attacks. For example, the intense headaches will start in one's sleep, last an hour at the rate of maybe one or two flare-ups a day, everyday, or as isolated as once a week, for up to a month or eight weeks, annually, every two years. In my case, every three or four years. Some poor souls suffer year round.
To describe the pain is difficult. Stab wounds and gunshots show visible results. Headaches cannot be seen neither by human eye or x-ray. Legitimate headaches hit everyone, some as vicious, vascular headaches in the relm of the migraine. Sadly, an ache of the head is often used by goldbricks, fakers and manipulators as an excuse to be absent. Because of the location of the pain, a "headache" is what is used to reference what cluster sufferers feel. Doctors will tell you, medical websites will back it up: a cluster is the most intense pain a human can withstand that won't kill you--it just makes you want to die.
I'd just turned 17 in August of 1976, when I woke up one morning with this horrible pain on the left side of my head. It lasted an hour, then eased up. After a week, the episodes stopped. I had no idea what had happened, since I'd never suffered head pain before.
A little more than a year later, the same thing happened, except the headaches went on daily for a month, waking me in the night, centering behind the eye, around the cheek, behind the ear, and thrashing through the temple. Tears fall, not from crying (although that's what you want to do), and the eye itself shuts. "It's sinus," said family members. I took Sinutab and Tylenol Sinus...popping them like M & M's. One relative told me to "Go outside and eat some ice cream."
I did, one afternoon at Long Beach State, while enduring vicious pain as a professor lectured on the history of the blues.
During a cluster in early 1980, I was advised to see an eye doctor. I made an appointment. I needed glasses, yet another cluster occurred that summer.
Stress. Tension. Sinus. Self-diagnosis, misdiagnosis. I endured, gritting my teeth through truly medieval , excruciating pain. Following the removal of a growth in the perotoid gland in 1981, my late Mother remarked, "I'll bet those headaches stop, now." Nope. A short cluster followed the surgery by a week.
In 1983, I was attacked by a cluster so awful, I wondered if I had been chosen for some Biblical test of faith, and I became a lot more Catholic than I had previously been. For naught, as it turned out. I went to a doctor , still thinking my sinuses were to blame, and was prescribed a nasal mist and antihistamines. I would wake up in pain and shoot this mist into my nostrils. It succeeded in making mortal anguish worse. So, more cluster cycles came in 1985, 86, and 87.
You get the idea. In 1988, I missed an evening of work just based on how I looked after a day long siege. 1989, 1990. Nobody knew, really, because it was impossible to convey the nature of these attacks, as opposed to the head pain most humans feel.
It was a doctor named Barbara Leigh, now practicing in the upper reaches of northern California, who first suggested that what was happening to me had nothing to do with anything known to most people. It was the first I'd heard of Cluster headache, and I was given a mist called "Staydol." It was a pain killer mist. It knocked my out, but did nothing to stop the grinding, drilling flares of punishment.
Darvocet. Vicodin. Narcotics could not stop this thing once the pain started. On Thanksgiving 1992, I made Herculean effort to finish my laundry while it felt like there was a hatchet going through the left side of my head. It eased and I went to dinner at my boss' house. No one was the wiser. By 1998, another Doctor, William Davis, also understood the nature of what I was going through. He gave me some material to read (in an age before webMD.com) that described to a T what was had been happening to me all those years. Much research had been done by a Doctor Kudrow in the field of headaches. If you were a fan of the TV show Friends, you recognize the name. He's the father of actress Lisa Kudrow.
Through this reading, I felt some relief that there were people who knew the depth of the agony. It occurs usually in young men with the onset of tobacco and alcohol use. Sleep deprivation and stress are also named as probable causes. This may be the case with some patients, but not all. With me, starting smoking and drinking in the summer of '76 probably was a root cause. Yet cigarettes and booze haven't been a part of my life for years. Even my current Doctor, Paul Reisser, cannot be a hundred percent sure as to why I'm one out of five thousand who suffer cluster cycles, why they start or last as long and with as much intensity as they do. I am aware of one phenomenon: I have had month long episodes in 2003, 2006, and the month that ends this day. Dr. Reisser surmises that the blood pressure medicine atenolol has contributed to the cycles being less frequent than they were in my youth. For that I'm grateful.
I have at my disposal relatively new pain relievers, mainly used for migraines. I'm at the tail end of a cycle, so the next time this should happen, I'll be using the most effective means of halting the pain: a tank of pure oxygen, taken at a furious pace, from a mask. As far as any medical professional knows, it's the only sure-fire way of stopping cluster pain once it's at it's horrible zenith.
Writing this is cathartic. Perhaps people will understand what happens to me every few years. Maybe it will make me talk about it more, because once a cycle is over, I'm so relieved, I push it from my mind. Monday the 22nd, I was still suffering the after effects from a flare-up the previous day, when my employers called, asking me to fill-in for someone. I could have explained that I, too, was ill, but didn't. Subsequently they started calling someone else. Maybe I'll explain it all better, and at long last people realize this is nothing like the fakery of someone who wants the day off to go to a concert, or recover from a bender.
R. I. P. KELLY ROBINSON
In my previous blog, I referenced the old TV show "I Spy," and the relative cool of Robert Culp as Kelly Robinson, and Bill Cosby as Alexander "Scotty" Scott, who traipsed about the globe protecting freedom. On the morning of Wednesday March 24th, Bob Culp was walking, not far from his Hollywood Hills home. He fell, hit his head, and died, months short of his 80th birthday. Cosby, of course, reacted with sadness and great words of kindness for his old pal. That on- camera chemistry was not fake. That's what made the show so special in its time.
It was while I read about his passing that I recalled how, in the '80's, when it was retro, I tried to channel Culp's "I Spy" look--the white denim trousers, white sneakers, and pull-over V-neck sweaters with no undershirt. I didn't try to look like Cos, because, frankly, I didn't have the ass width. One of those genetic things.
It shows the impact of TV characters on young viewers. If, at my age, I remember "I Spy," will kids today wax nostalgic about Keifer Sutherland in "24," and waterboard a friend just for kicks?
Hopefully they'll just channel Jack Bauer's steely resolve, maybe his choice of trouser, and leave it at that.
Rest in Peace, Bob Culp.
Monday, February 22, 2010
FILTER, FLAVOR, PACK OR BOX
There are at least a couple of things I've seen or read over the last few weeks that reminded me of my personal history with cigarettes. Not that the memories aren't firmly embedded and recalled in savant-like fashion (as are most of my recollections). Two things in particular have caused me to shake my head in amazement, grateful that my days as a smoker were short-lived, and 30 years ago.
First, there's that voyeur's delight, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. I've run into that one while channel surfing, and have been rendered spellbound by the efforts of Dr. Drew Pinsky and staff to help a handful of addicted, C-List celebs, some of them having gone through Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, as well. It dawned on me while observing this reality show, that while these semi-well-known folks were trying to kick drugs, they were sucking on Marlboros and Newports like pixie sticks. Drugs do more harm, but ciggies will always get you in the end.
The second piece of information that slammed cigarettes back into my consciousness was this small fact: Prior to 1930, lung cancer was a rare occurrence in the United States. 13 words, no more, no less, but with the impact of a sledge hammer. 80 years ago, in 48 states, with half the population there is today, lung cancer wasn't near the killer tuberculosis was...or influenza. Today, there aren't too many of us who haven't known, worked with, loved or cared about at least four to five people who've been felled by this form of cancer. How did this happen?
Well, a brief history of advertising in America would be boring, but bear in mind that 1929-30 marked the true beginning of coast to coast network radio, as well as the birth of the talking motion picture. While the American Tobacco Company began sponsoring radio shows and hawking Lucky Strikes to men and women alike, movies focused on alluring couples, their romance smoldering like the cigarettes between their fingers, smoke curling above their heads as passion flamed in their eyes.
And so, a nation smoked. Through World War II, when soldiers C-ration kits always contained a pack of Camels. Through the early television years, when cigs were ubiquitous. Even during the 60's, after the landmark 1964 Surgeon General's report that concluded cigarette smoking could be hazardous to your health.
That's about where I came in. I was born into a household of smoke. My mother puffed Parliaments, my father championed Dual-Filter Tareytons. On Saturday mornings when we were little, my sister Lisa and I would open the door to our parents room to watch cartoons on TV. The smoke in that room hung in the air like the London fog Charles Dickens wrote about: floating, creeping, undulating like a poltergeist. It didn't stop us enjoying the black and white images of Alvin and The Chipmunks , but it's probably responsible for Lisa's life long battles with bronchitis, and my own desire to take up cigarettes full time, as soon as I was able to buy them without being asked when I was born.
Vin Scully once described the era better than I could. Setting up an anecdote about World Series games played in the afternoon, he said, simply, "...in those days, EVERYBODY smoked." When I was a boy, that was certainly true. Everybody in my house smoked, whether they were old enough, or not. Save Lisa, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends. Everybody had a butt lit. The brands stand out in my mind because of the television advertising. To me, at that age, its as if the packs leapt off the screen. Uncle Henry smoked Pall Mall, "...longer, long lasting...and they are mild." His wife smoked Viceroy. Salems were apparently country fresh, otherwise, why would my Aunt Barbara puff on them? Winstons surely must taste good, like a cigarette should, lest my mother's friend Gladys be proven foolish. My first brother in law showed us his Larks, when asked (like The Beatles! They smoked Larks!), and my brothers' neighborhood friends took drag after drag off KOOLs...to be cool. Right?
On the TV, Garry Moore greeted guests with a lit Winston in hand, the habit having been formed when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco sponsored his shows. I'm not sure what brand was Johnny Carson's favorite, but he always had a cig going as he sat behind the Tonight Show desk. Hadn't this always been the way? In the 40's, long before my time, an announcer named Del Sharbutt would assure Jack Benny's Sunday night radio listeners that nine out of ten doctors agreed: "Smoke a Lucky (Strike)...to feel your level best!!"
Not just the ads, but the actors on TV cultivated the look you needed to become, undoubtedly, the coolest son of a bitch on two feet. That's why I always felt it was Robert Culp, not Bill Cosby who was coolest on I Spy. Culp would open the title sequence lighting up a Pall Mall Gold 100, then put his Ronson to the fuse of a bomb, which would explode and show us highlights of that evening's episode. Cos was the "Rhodes Scholar" and ground-breaking first Black leading actor on television, but let's face it: Culp got all the groovy chicks, man.*
And so, I smoked, legally, from age 18 to a month before I turned 20. I also read. I knew what cigarettes did. It seems like my teenage brain was hell bent on ignoring the fact that these things impaired your health and hooked you like a deep water marlin, flailing and wriggling, but eventually mounted on the wall of some pompous-ass.
There are few known photos of me smoking. One was with a date at a dance in 1978. She was snuggled into my right shoulder, while I sat in my disco-velvet vest, Windsor knotted tie, left elbow on the table, a Benson and Hedges Light 100 between my fingers, it's smoke coiling into a halo above us--although I can assure you nothing saintly happened that night. The girl got custody of the photo, and I'm glad it's gone.
On I went, through my first two years of college, puffing away. Getting ready for school meant showering, dressing, hopping into the car, then negating all that grooming by lighting up as soon as I turned the ignition.
How did I stop, you ask? When did it dawn on a teenager that I could be launching a life time of health maladies? It was the 70's, after all. Congress, to its everlasting credit, had banned cigarette ads on radio and TV, and since January of 1971, "...you could take Salem out of the country, but..." you couldn't advertise them over the air.
Regardless, the nicotine addicted militantly continued, sometimes imparting half-truths learned over years and years of exposure to those commercials.
"Cigarettes help your digestion after you eat," said a woman I worked with at the mall.
"If I couldn't smoke afterward, I wouldn't F--- , " said a friend's older brother, his nic-addiction having gone waaaay too far.
"Oh, I only smoke when I drink," many would say, like social smoking was something that could be done with no risk at all. The way we once thought passive smoke was harmless.
Three things happened that finally got me past growing up in a house full of smoke, and being mesmerized by slick advertising (it was Dick Gregory who said about Marlboro commercials, "Kids know they're not gonna get that horse...so they might as well do like the Cowboy"). A Long Beach State Professor named Peter Carr warned about our cultural addictions in his Folklore and Mythology lectures. He talked about lighting up a Lucky when he was a youngster (that had to have been a long time before--by 1978, he sported a Ben Franklin look). He said he coughed like crazy, got sick, and threw the pack away. He also cautioned about liquor, and urged us to unplug our TV's. He made sense, but he was talking to college sophomores. Somewhere in my 19-year-old brain, I equated giving up all that to being under the parents thumb, again. No smokes, no booze? NO TV??
It took the other two events to get me off the ciggies. One was a girl named Wilma, who, I was told, dug me, but not the smokes. No one in her family smoked. How could this be, I thought, raised as I was, and taught by TV that "Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch." That Frank and Sammy and Dean got plenty of "broads" with a song in their hearts, and a Chesterfield dangling from their lips. Wilma's cuteness factor became a huge part of my decision to stop, but what really sealed the deal was a Friday night with an old high school friend and his wife at their apartment. It was sparsely furnished, as the apartments of teen newlyweds often are, so I sat on the floor until 4 in the morning, puffing a full pack of Silva Thins, and a half pint of Seagrams 7. The next day, rising like only the youthful can after that kind of night, I went to my Alma mater to run a mile on the track. After coughing and sputtering through four laps like a '61 Volkswagen. I leaned forward, put my hands on my knees and wondered aloud, "what the hell am I doing?" I felt awful. And that was that. It was June 1, 1979. That's the day I quit smoking.
There were lapses. I tried a pipe later that year, but looked ridiculous and felt downright stupid. At one point, I would dangle an unlit ciggie from my lips, a la Baretta (Jesus! Some role model!). It worked, but drove college classmates nuts. "Why don't you just light that thing?" they'd ask. But I never did. After while,l I didn't even need that.
Addiction specialists will tell you of nicotine's power, and how it penetrates the brain. You wonder why smokers arch their back when non-smokers get on their case? That's the need for nicotine. When he was in his 20's, one of my brothers had a rough financial time between stints in the army. Not being able to buy his customary carton of KOOL Milds, he picked several of my mother's Parliament butts out of an ashtray, one afternoon, and snuck off to a spot under the elm tree in our back yard. He sat there in the shade, sucking on those lipstick-stained recessed filters like his life depended on it. 37 years later, a tank of oxygen and a length of tubing follows him every where he goes.
It's a different world, today. We are all well acquainted with the ills. Even without access to the airwaves, tobacco companies find way to hook teenagers, just like the old days. Make it cool, and they will follow. Don't be fooled. If the tobacco lobby could somehow get the advertising ban repealed, even in the face of the all too dangerous facts, TV and radio would belly-up to the money trough with no remorse. Joe Camel and his like would find fertile ground amongst those who weren't implored to "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country" the first time around.
I didn't write this to wring hands, admonish friends to quit, or otherwise heckle smokers. It's simply my own story, belched forth like a puff, stirred by the sight of Heidi Fleiss and company in their televised struggle to clean up, while depending on another drug, with cork-tipped filters. The irony was too much to just sit by and watch.
BEFORE WE CONCLUDE...
* Regarding I Spy: Culp got all the chicks, and Cosby was essentially celibate--unless Nancy Wilson or Barbara McNair was the guest star. Such were the times. The sight of Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark holding hands on her 1968 NBC special sent at least one sponsor into a "white hot" rage, shall we say. As far as I Spy was concerned, I wondered what Cos would have done if Moms Mabley had been signed for a guest appearance? I'm sure Cos would rather have taken a crack at Joey Heatherton. I was only 8 at the time, but I sure as hell wanted to!!
First, there's that voyeur's delight, Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. I've run into that one while channel surfing, and have been rendered spellbound by the efforts of Dr. Drew Pinsky and staff to help a handful of addicted, C-List celebs, some of them having gone through Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, as well. It dawned on me while observing this reality show, that while these semi-well-known folks were trying to kick drugs, they were sucking on Marlboros and Newports like pixie sticks. Drugs do more harm, but ciggies will always get you in the end.
The second piece of information that slammed cigarettes back into my consciousness was this small fact: Prior to 1930, lung cancer was a rare occurrence in the United States. 13 words, no more, no less, but with the impact of a sledge hammer. 80 years ago, in 48 states, with half the population there is today, lung cancer wasn't near the killer tuberculosis was...or influenza. Today, there aren't too many of us who haven't known, worked with, loved or cared about at least four to five people who've been felled by this form of cancer. How did this happen?
Well, a brief history of advertising in America would be boring, but bear in mind that 1929-30 marked the true beginning of coast to coast network radio, as well as the birth of the talking motion picture. While the American Tobacco Company began sponsoring radio shows and hawking Lucky Strikes to men and women alike, movies focused on alluring couples, their romance smoldering like the cigarettes between their fingers, smoke curling above their heads as passion flamed in their eyes.
And so, a nation smoked. Through World War II, when soldiers C-ration kits always contained a pack of Camels. Through the early television years, when cigs were ubiquitous. Even during the 60's, after the landmark 1964 Surgeon General's report that concluded cigarette smoking could be hazardous to your health.
That's about where I came in. I was born into a household of smoke. My mother puffed Parliaments, my father championed Dual-Filter Tareytons. On Saturday mornings when we were little, my sister Lisa and I would open the door to our parents room to watch cartoons on TV. The smoke in that room hung in the air like the London fog Charles Dickens wrote about: floating, creeping, undulating like a poltergeist. It didn't stop us enjoying the black and white images of Alvin and The Chipmunks , but it's probably responsible for Lisa's life long battles with bronchitis, and my own desire to take up cigarettes full time, as soon as I was able to buy them without being asked when I was born.
Vin Scully once described the era better than I could. Setting up an anecdote about World Series games played in the afternoon, he said, simply, "...in those days, EVERYBODY smoked." When I was a boy, that was certainly true. Everybody in my house smoked, whether they were old enough, or not. Save Lisa, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, family friends. Everybody had a butt lit. The brands stand out in my mind because of the television advertising. To me, at that age, its as if the packs leapt off the screen. Uncle Henry smoked Pall Mall, "...longer, long lasting...and they are mild." His wife smoked Viceroy. Salems were apparently country fresh, otherwise, why would my Aunt Barbara puff on them? Winstons surely must taste good, like a cigarette should, lest my mother's friend Gladys be proven foolish. My first brother in law showed us his Larks, when asked (like The Beatles! They smoked Larks!), and my brothers' neighborhood friends took drag after drag off KOOLs...to be cool. Right?
On the TV, Garry Moore greeted guests with a lit Winston in hand, the habit having been formed when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco sponsored his shows. I'm not sure what brand was Johnny Carson's favorite, but he always had a cig going as he sat behind the Tonight Show desk. Hadn't this always been the way? In the 40's, long before my time, an announcer named Del Sharbutt would assure Jack Benny's Sunday night radio listeners that nine out of ten doctors agreed: "Smoke a Lucky (Strike)...to feel your level best!!"
Not just the ads, but the actors on TV cultivated the look you needed to become, undoubtedly, the coolest son of a bitch on two feet. That's why I always felt it was Robert Culp, not Bill Cosby who was coolest on I Spy. Culp would open the title sequence lighting up a Pall Mall Gold 100, then put his Ronson to the fuse of a bomb, which would explode and show us highlights of that evening's episode. Cos was the "Rhodes Scholar" and ground-breaking first Black leading actor on television, but let's face it: Culp got all the groovy chicks, man.*
And so, I smoked, legally, from age 18 to a month before I turned 20. I also read. I knew what cigarettes did. It seems like my teenage brain was hell bent on ignoring the fact that these things impaired your health and hooked you like a deep water marlin, flailing and wriggling, but eventually mounted on the wall of some pompous-ass.
There are few known photos of me smoking. One was with a date at a dance in 1978. She was snuggled into my right shoulder, while I sat in my disco-velvet vest, Windsor knotted tie, left elbow on the table, a Benson and Hedges Light 100 between my fingers, it's smoke coiling into a halo above us--although I can assure you nothing saintly happened that night. The girl got custody of the photo, and I'm glad it's gone.
On I went, through my first two years of college, puffing away. Getting ready for school meant showering, dressing, hopping into the car, then negating all that grooming by lighting up as soon as I turned the ignition.
How did I stop, you ask? When did it dawn on a teenager that I could be launching a life time of health maladies? It was the 70's, after all. Congress, to its everlasting credit, had banned cigarette ads on radio and TV, and since January of 1971, "...you could take Salem out of the country, but..." you couldn't advertise them over the air.
Regardless, the nicotine addicted militantly continued, sometimes imparting half-truths learned over years and years of exposure to those commercials.
"Cigarettes help your digestion after you eat," said a woman I worked with at the mall.
"If I couldn't smoke afterward, I wouldn't F--- , " said a friend's older brother, his nic-addiction having gone waaaay too far.
"Oh, I only smoke when I drink," many would say, like social smoking was something that could be done with no risk at all. The way we once thought passive smoke was harmless.
Three things happened that finally got me past growing up in a house full of smoke, and being mesmerized by slick advertising (it was Dick Gregory who said about Marlboro commercials, "Kids know they're not gonna get that horse...so they might as well do like the Cowboy"). A Long Beach State Professor named Peter Carr warned about our cultural addictions in his Folklore and Mythology lectures. He talked about lighting up a Lucky when he was a youngster (that had to have been a long time before--by 1978, he sported a Ben Franklin look). He said he coughed like crazy, got sick, and threw the pack away. He also cautioned about liquor, and urged us to unplug our TV's. He made sense, but he was talking to college sophomores. Somewhere in my 19-year-old brain, I equated giving up all that to being under the parents thumb, again. No smokes, no booze? NO TV??
It took the other two events to get me off the ciggies. One was a girl named Wilma, who, I was told, dug me, but not the smokes. No one in her family smoked. How could this be, I thought, raised as I was, and taught by TV that "Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch." That Frank and Sammy and Dean got plenty of "broads" with a song in their hearts, and a Chesterfield dangling from their lips. Wilma's cuteness factor became a huge part of my decision to stop, but what really sealed the deal was a Friday night with an old high school friend and his wife at their apartment. It was sparsely furnished, as the apartments of teen newlyweds often are, so I sat on the floor until 4 in the morning, puffing a full pack of Silva Thins, and a half pint of Seagrams 7. The next day, rising like only the youthful can after that kind of night, I went to my Alma mater to run a mile on the track. After coughing and sputtering through four laps like a '61 Volkswagen. I leaned forward, put my hands on my knees and wondered aloud, "what the hell am I doing?" I felt awful. And that was that. It was June 1, 1979. That's the day I quit smoking.
There were lapses. I tried a pipe later that year, but looked ridiculous and felt downright stupid. At one point, I would dangle an unlit ciggie from my lips, a la Baretta (Jesus! Some role model!). It worked, but drove college classmates nuts. "Why don't you just light that thing?" they'd ask. But I never did. After while,l I didn't even need that.
Addiction specialists will tell you of nicotine's power, and how it penetrates the brain. You wonder why smokers arch their back when non-smokers get on their case? That's the need for nicotine. When he was in his 20's, one of my brothers had a rough financial time between stints in the army. Not being able to buy his customary carton of KOOL Milds, he picked several of my mother's Parliament butts out of an ashtray, one afternoon, and snuck off to a spot under the elm tree in our back yard. He sat there in the shade, sucking on those lipstick-stained recessed filters like his life depended on it. 37 years later, a tank of oxygen and a length of tubing follows him every where he goes.
It's a different world, today. We are all well acquainted with the ills. Even without access to the airwaves, tobacco companies find way to hook teenagers, just like the old days. Make it cool, and they will follow. Don't be fooled. If the tobacco lobby could somehow get the advertising ban repealed, even in the face of the all too dangerous facts, TV and radio would belly-up to the money trough with no remorse. Joe Camel and his like would find fertile ground amongst those who weren't implored to "Come to where the flavor is. Come to Marlboro Country" the first time around.
I didn't write this to wring hands, admonish friends to quit, or otherwise heckle smokers. It's simply my own story, belched forth like a puff, stirred by the sight of Heidi Fleiss and company in their televised struggle to clean up, while depending on another drug, with cork-tipped filters. The irony was too much to just sit by and watch.
BEFORE WE CONCLUDE...
* Regarding I Spy: Culp got all the chicks, and Cosby was essentially celibate--unless Nancy Wilson or Barbara McNair was the guest star. Such were the times. The sight of Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark holding hands on her 1968 NBC special sent at least one sponsor into a "white hot" rage, shall we say. As far as I Spy was concerned, I wondered what Cos would have done if Moms Mabley had been signed for a guest appearance? I'm sure Cos would rather have taken a crack at Joey Heatherton. I was only 8 at the time, but I sure as hell wanted to!!
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
WE'VE DONE THIS DANCE BEFORE...
Understanding the world of entertainment, specifically Television, is a lot like trying to get a grasp on the reason Hummingbirds can fly. As I once heard it put, "the properties of physics say the hummingbird should not be able to sustain flight. Not knowing this, it flies." You could say pretty much the same for TV executives: With the often ridiculous decisions they make, they shouldn't hold such lofty, well paid positions. Not knowing this, they continue to work.
You'd have to factor in the human aspect: money, power, favoritism, and the nagging truth that looking indecisive could have a disastrous result. This doesn't stop the messes from being made over, and over, and over again. Take, for example, NBC's current late night melt down.
Yes, we've been to this dance before. It's hard to believe it will soon be 18 years since Johnny Carson abdicated his throne as King of Late Night TV. A generation of legal adults have no idea who he was or what he did for close to 30 years. They also have no knowledge of what a catastrophe NBC made of deciding upon a successor.
The story is well told by New York Times TV Critic Bill Carter, in his book, "The Late Shift." HBO made a movie based on it. Johnny Carson's audience was growing as old as Johnny himself (66 when he stepped down from the Tonight Show, May 22, 1992). Arsenio Hall's nightly syndicated party had drawn away enough younger viewers to make NBC execs shiver in their boots. No competitor, from Joey Bishop to Pat Sajak, had ever put a dent in the armor of Carson's ratings. Those who viewed Arsenio were not enough to do any damage, but young enough to convince NBC execs to try and ease Johnny out the door. Carson, long aware of his power and what he meant to NBC's bottom line, hit the network with a pre-emptive strike, announcing his retirement date at a function for affiliated stations, almost exactly a year in advance. Then the race was on.
In one corner, David Letterman, host of Late Night, who's program was one of the first VCR favorites. Those who couldn't stay up until 12:30 to watch him, taped the snarky, hilarious, nightly antics for viewing at a later time.
In the other corner, Jay Leno, Johnny's permanent Guest Host for Tuesday nights, holidays and vacations. Carter's book, and the film, zeroed-in on the behind-the-scenes backbiting, treachery and egomania that resulted in NBC choosing Leno over Letterman. As a viewer, I enjoyed Leno's monologues, but Letterman was so much more. Dave, of course, bolted for CBS. This was after NBC made a slap-in-the face offer: They'd give him the reigns of The Tonight Show after two years of Jay as host. Letterman, who seriously wanted The Tonight Show (and Johnny Carson wanted him to have it) had to think hard about it. Looking back, his decision was a no brainer--he created his own show at CBS, rather than give NBC the chance to shaft him again in two years.
Today, January 12, 2010, Conan O'Brien said no to an NBC plan that would have pushed his current Tonight Show to 12:05 AM. Have we done this dance before? How could NBC believe Conan, regardless of the millions and millions he'd continue to make, would accept being pushed back a half-hour later? It was NBC executives who created this untenable situation when they thought they'd lose Conan, so they hatched a plan to retire Leno in 2009, and have O'Brien leave his !2:35 show, then ascend to the Tonight hosting duties. What well-paid individual in a butter-brickle suit with paisley suspenders and alligator shoes didn't think that Leno, having lead the late night ratings race since 1995, would not have a change of heart and want to continue his career?
What data-spewing, demon seed of a diletante truly believed that, regardless of network TV's shrinking audience, five nights of Jay bantering with Kevin Eubanks, and a wafer thin alteration of his Tonight Show format, would be better television than the dramas on CBS at 10pm? Now that they have admitted the failure publicly (thanks to near revolt by affiliated stations that have seen ratings for 11PM news plummet across the country), their plan was to give Jay back a half hour of his old time slot, then hose Conan by starting Tonight at 12:05. Conan's capitol is less, now that, after 7 months, Letterman has dominated on CBS.
Like so many in life, they'll never learn. Leno now has his show back, and no doubt his audience will slowly return, as he's the nice guy in the battle, and Letterman the smart-ass. Conan will more than likely wind up on Fox. They'll all make money. Their comfort is not the issue, here. It's the stupidity of the decision-makers. It's that we all watch and care. That's the issue. We watch these shows, and relate to the shitty way people get treated, whether they are wealthy performers or not. And we definitely relate to being force-fed moronic decisions by people who know better, but just aren't wired to do the right thing by ANYONE, even themselves.
A TIGER IN YOUR TANK
I have to repeat what I've written a few posts back--my opinion of Letterman remains unchanged, regardless of his office dalliances. I've seen worse in the work place. As long as there was consent, who cares? I've seen legitimate quid pro quo, and it's sickening. Perhaps my view would be different if I'd worked for Letterman and lost an opportunity to someone he was seeing. But since I don't and didn't, I say why it's his business. He made some moves that were morally unwise, but he's still funny.
If Tiger Woods had been honest and upfront, he would have weathered his storm a little better. Who really knows? The bottom line is that it's not our business. BUT--when an athlete so meticulously cultivates a commercial brand, so painstakingly creates a public persona to better snag huge endorsements, he should be ready for the scrutiny that comes when fame takes its eventual downturn.
My question is, who knew?? Who gave two minutes of thought to the possibility that the greatest golfer of this era (maybe ANY era) had the libido of a West Texas bull? And who thought he could be silly enough to tomcat around and actually trust his many paramours to keep quiet?
It makes all the sense in the world that a man with that kind of talent, that kind of competitive fire, would surely be capable of chasing the proverbial "p---- on the side." But, wow! It would have taken exceptional powers of perception to divine that this man's hormones were surging in such a way as to wash a testasterone tsunami over cocktail waitresses and party hostesses from here to East Jesus!
All too human, and in hindsight, all to understandable. However, it's between he and his wife. Judge, lest we be judged. We're not perfect, regardless of what ads for Nike may have implied about Tiger, and discounting his millions, he's just a guy with problems...like the rest of us.
FINAL TAKE: LATE NIGHT TV
The true loser in this latest late night bruhaha would be Carson Daly. I've asked this question for the last several years, and still haven't gotten a satisfactory answer: Who believes Carson Daly has talent? Teenaged girls did. Did any one NOT in a frenzy over seeing recording artists on MTV think this once pudgy fellow had the slightest ounce of charisma? Bland and non-challenging, he's had a pretty good career over the last twelve years. From MTV's last music based show Total Request Live, to Bob Costas and Greg Kinnear's old Later show on NBC, and that network's New Year's Eve specials, to engagements to hotties like Jennifer Love Hewitt and this month's Playboy cover girl Tara Reid, the guy has done damned well for not having any perceptible personality.
It doesn't matter. When you make the right connections, you don't dig for gold, the gold comes to you. Carson Daly is the new morning guy at 97.1 AMP-FM in L.A. "Music will drive the show," he said. I should hope so!
###
You'd have to factor in the human aspect: money, power, favoritism, and the nagging truth that looking indecisive could have a disastrous result. This doesn't stop the messes from being made over, and over, and over again. Take, for example, NBC's current late night melt down.
Yes, we've been to this dance before. It's hard to believe it will soon be 18 years since Johnny Carson abdicated his throne as King of Late Night TV. A generation of legal adults have no idea who he was or what he did for close to 30 years. They also have no knowledge of what a catastrophe NBC made of deciding upon a successor.
The story is well told by New York Times TV Critic Bill Carter, in his book, "The Late Shift." HBO made a movie based on it. Johnny Carson's audience was growing as old as Johnny himself (66 when he stepped down from the Tonight Show, May 22, 1992). Arsenio Hall's nightly syndicated party had drawn away enough younger viewers to make NBC execs shiver in their boots. No competitor, from Joey Bishop to Pat Sajak, had ever put a dent in the armor of Carson's ratings. Those who viewed Arsenio were not enough to do any damage, but young enough to convince NBC execs to try and ease Johnny out the door. Carson, long aware of his power and what he meant to NBC's bottom line, hit the network with a pre-emptive strike, announcing his retirement date at a function for affiliated stations, almost exactly a year in advance. Then the race was on.
In one corner, David Letterman, host of Late Night, who's program was one of the first VCR favorites. Those who couldn't stay up until 12:30 to watch him, taped the snarky, hilarious, nightly antics for viewing at a later time.
In the other corner, Jay Leno, Johnny's permanent Guest Host for Tuesday nights, holidays and vacations. Carter's book, and the film, zeroed-in on the behind-the-scenes backbiting, treachery and egomania that resulted in NBC choosing Leno over Letterman. As a viewer, I enjoyed Leno's monologues, but Letterman was so much more. Dave, of course, bolted for CBS. This was after NBC made a slap-in-the face offer: They'd give him the reigns of The Tonight Show after two years of Jay as host. Letterman, who seriously wanted The Tonight Show (and Johnny Carson wanted him to have it) had to think hard about it. Looking back, his decision was a no brainer--he created his own show at CBS, rather than give NBC the chance to shaft him again in two years.
Today, January 12, 2010, Conan O'Brien said no to an NBC plan that would have pushed his current Tonight Show to 12:05 AM. Have we done this dance before? How could NBC believe Conan, regardless of the millions and millions he'd continue to make, would accept being pushed back a half-hour later? It was NBC executives who created this untenable situation when they thought they'd lose Conan, so they hatched a plan to retire Leno in 2009, and have O'Brien leave his !2:35 show, then ascend to the Tonight hosting duties. What well-paid individual in a butter-brickle suit with paisley suspenders and alligator shoes didn't think that Leno, having lead the late night ratings race since 1995, would not have a change of heart and want to continue his career?
What data-spewing, demon seed of a diletante truly believed that, regardless of network TV's shrinking audience, five nights of Jay bantering with Kevin Eubanks, and a wafer thin alteration of his Tonight Show format, would be better television than the dramas on CBS at 10pm? Now that they have admitted the failure publicly (thanks to near revolt by affiliated stations that have seen ratings for 11PM news plummet across the country), their plan was to give Jay back a half hour of his old time slot, then hose Conan by starting Tonight at 12:05. Conan's capitol is less, now that, after 7 months, Letterman has dominated on CBS.
Like so many in life, they'll never learn. Leno now has his show back, and no doubt his audience will slowly return, as he's the nice guy in the battle, and Letterman the smart-ass. Conan will more than likely wind up on Fox. They'll all make money. Their comfort is not the issue, here. It's the stupidity of the decision-makers. It's that we all watch and care. That's the issue. We watch these shows, and relate to the shitty way people get treated, whether they are wealthy performers or not. And we definitely relate to being force-fed moronic decisions by people who know better, but just aren't wired to do the right thing by ANYONE, even themselves.
A TIGER IN YOUR TANK
I have to repeat what I've written a few posts back--my opinion of Letterman remains unchanged, regardless of his office dalliances. I've seen worse in the work place. As long as there was consent, who cares? I've seen legitimate quid pro quo, and it's sickening. Perhaps my view would be different if I'd worked for Letterman and lost an opportunity to someone he was seeing. But since I don't and didn't, I say why it's his business. He made some moves that were morally unwise, but he's still funny.
If Tiger Woods had been honest and upfront, he would have weathered his storm a little better. Who really knows? The bottom line is that it's not our business. BUT--when an athlete so meticulously cultivates a commercial brand, so painstakingly creates a public persona to better snag huge endorsements, he should be ready for the scrutiny that comes when fame takes its eventual downturn.
My question is, who knew?? Who gave two minutes of thought to the possibility that the greatest golfer of this era (maybe ANY era) had the libido of a West Texas bull? And who thought he could be silly enough to tomcat around and actually trust his many paramours to keep quiet?
It makes all the sense in the world that a man with that kind of talent, that kind of competitive fire, would surely be capable of chasing the proverbial "p---- on the side." But, wow! It would have taken exceptional powers of perception to divine that this man's hormones were surging in such a way as to wash a testasterone tsunami over cocktail waitresses and party hostesses from here to East Jesus!
All too human, and in hindsight, all to understandable. However, it's between he and his wife. Judge, lest we be judged. We're not perfect, regardless of what ads for Nike may have implied about Tiger, and discounting his millions, he's just a guy with problems...like the rest of us.
FINAL TAKE: LATE NIGHT TV
The true loser in this latest late night bruhaha would be Carson Daly. I've asked this question for the last several years, and still haven't gotten a satisfactory answer: Who believes Carson Daly has talent? Teenaged girls did. Did any one NOT in a frenzy over seeing recording artists on MTV think this once pudgy fellow had the slightest ounce of charisma? Bland and non-challenging, he's had a pretty good career over the last twelve years. From MTV's last music based show Total Request Live, to Bob Costas and Greg Kinnear's old Later show on NBC, and that network's New Year's Eve specials, to engagements to hotties like Jennifer Love Hewitt and this month's Playboy cover girl Tara Reid, the guy has done damned well for not having any perceptible personality.
It doesn't matter. When you make the right connections, you don't dig for gold, the gold comes to you. Carson Daly is the new morning guy at 97.1 AMP-FM in L.A. "Music will drive the show," he said. I should hope so!
###
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)