“I’m speechless. I just don’t know what to say.”

At some point during the 1980s, it made sense that MTV would try do something to take advantage of the pop culture juggernaut that was the World Wrestling Federation and some perceived rock/wrestling crossover that probably just boiled down to Cyndi Lauper’s dad being played by Captain Lou Albano in her “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video and little else.

“The War to Settle the Score” was a series of WWF matches with a storyline that involved Albano, Lauper and her manager David Wolff (I won’t bother to explain it in detail, but Albano was a manager and Wolff and Lauper are trying to steal clients.) “Rowdy” Roddy Piper got pissed off about the whole MTV connection and this brought another “feud” into the storyline, but also in real life.

Piper was disqualified from the championship match against Hulk Hogan and a brawl erupted.  At one point, Cyndi Lauper, who had rushed the ring with Mr. T to support Hogan, was kicked in the head.

Since the event was live, MTV had cameras set up backstage to interview Hogan, Lauper, Mr T and Albano afterwards, but Andy Warhol apparently opened the wrong door and was pulled into an impromptu interview with “Mean Gene” Okerlund.

You’ll notice that Okerlund refers to the Pope of Pop as a “one of the greatest wrestling fans” at the end.
 

 
In this clip from Jim Henson’s short-lived 1989 series, The Ghost of Faffner Hall—about a music conservatory run by a man who hates music—Thomas Dolby tries explaining how a synthesizer works with the help of a matchbox and a very dizzy fly.
 

 
Longtime afternoon TV talkshow host Mike Douglas was so square—and seemingly so self-aware of his basic squareness—that he ended up being one of the most unlikely “hip” people on American television in the 60s and 70s. Mike Douglas didn’t try to be “down” with John and Yoko, Malcolm X, The Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, The Vanilla Fudge, Angela Davis, Moby Grape or any of the other counterculture types who occasionally came on his normally staid Philadelphia talk show, but he was unfailingly friendly and cordial to them all and genuinely interested in what they had to say. That Patti Smith made a couple of early appearances on his show (she brought her mother, a huge fan of his, to one of the tapings) says much about how agreeable and open to new things the guy was, but he never pretended to be anything that he wasn’t. (Fun fact: Mike Douglas provided the singing voice of Prince Charming in Walt Disney’s Cinderella.)

A great example of the often incongruous people a viewer could tune in and see randomly assembled on a given day on The Mike Douglas Show occurred when Frank Zappa appeared to promote his Zoot Allures album on November 9th, 1976. The “Dy-no-mite!” co-host that week was Jimmie “J.J.” Walker star of Good Times and the other guest that day was Kenny Rogers. There’s a brief interview before Zappa, performing with the unseen house band, does a scorching “Black Napkins” one of his signature mid-period compositions. Then there’s more conversation before Frank shows an excerpt from A Token of His Extreme featuring Bruce Bickford’s freaky claymation.

Imagine how strange seeing this on TV after school was. But it wasn’t so much that it was strange as that it was the Seventies…
 

 
Exactly how many episodes of Full House did YouTuber “Sourfest” have to watch in order to make this? God bless ‘em I guess ‘cause I will never see Bob Saget’s character “Danny Tanner” in the same light again. Never.

This is perhaps the single most twisted re-edit of a family friendly sitcom I’ve ever seen. Takes these meme-ish re-edits to whole new level of artistry and wrong.

Danny Tanner filming the footsies. What the hell were they thinking? Certainly not that it would be used like this, I suppose… That would have been hard to anticipate back then.

Look at how the experience affected poor DJ!
 

 
Via reddit

 
On Wednesday, February 5, 1969, ABC debuted one of the most forward-looking and controversial comedy sketch shows of all time—although viewers in much of the country never got to see even a single episode aired to completion. The show was Turn-On, George Schlatter and Ed Friendly’s more conceptually rigorous follow-up to their smash hit Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Today it is regarded as one of television’s most cringeworthy failures—just check on Google Books if you don’t believe me—but it’s not at all clear that it deserves such derision. It may not have worked entirely—it’s difficult to tell, as episodes are awfully hard to come by—but it was probably the closest thing the United States had to Monty Python’s Flying Circus during that whole era. But, of course, that show didn’t even exist yet.

The premise of Turn-On was that the show had been generated by a computer, at that time a heady concept indeed, as few people had ever had any real-life contact with such an object. Replacing the colorful and groovy sets of Laugh-In was a blank, featureless landscape taking place inside a large white orb—I grope to imagine it, and all I can come up with is Woody Allen’s 1973 movie Sleeper. The ostensible “host” was a young Tim Conway, who apparently spent the entire episode seeking to kill himself. Much of the audio track of the show was not a laugh track but was instead supplied by a Moog synthesizer, which was also quite a new sensory experience for audiences to deal with. I’ll let Wikipedia finish this paragraph: “Several of the jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end.” Bracing stuff, indeed.

The cancellation of Turn-On is the stuff of legend. Again, Wikipedia is the most efficient way to express this:
 

Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its only episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere as the show aired across the United States also marked its cancellation. Cleveland, Ohio’s WEWS-TV did not return to the show after the first commercial break (after “11 minutes”, according to Conway). The station sent ABC network management an angry telegram: “If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don’t use our walls. Turn-On is turned off, as far as WEWS is concerned.” Denver, Colorado’s KBTV did not air the episode, stating that after previewing it “We have decided, without hesitation, that it would be offensive to a major segment of the audience”; Portland, Oregon’s KATU and Seattle, Washington’s KOMO-TV also decided to not show the episode. Viewers of Little Rock, Arkansas’s KATV, which disliked the show but decided to air it, “jam[med] the station’s switchboard” with complaints.

 
If you watched “The Monolith,” the most recent episode of Mad Men, you probably failed to catch an exquisitely opaque reference to Turn-On—thing is, if you blinked, you missed it. The episode focuses on the installation of a large computer in the offices of Sterling Cooper & Partners, with all the doomy implications that implies. (In my sincere opinion, this does not qualify as much of a spoiler.) The computer thematically dominates the proceedings; in one scene two characters even discuss the device’s “metaphorical” implications. At a certain point, Harry Crane is seen through a smoky windowpane bellowing to an unseen character about how (this is a total paraphrase) “The writers of that show had clearly never seen an X-2000 in person”—and you can barely make out the words “Tim Conway” as well. I reckon that “The Monolith” takes place around April 18, 1969.
 

 
It’s hard to judge without access to the episodes themselves, but Turn-On may have been the boldest expression of “sick” humor, à la Lenny Bruce, on American television up to that point. (Hell, it quoted the renegade LSD advocate Timothy Leary in its very title.) It reminds me of nothing so much as another colossal misjudgment of mass satire that dates from the same period—the Monkees’ movie Head, which by a neat coincidence premiered almost precisely three months earlier, on November 6, 1968.

Schlatter is something of a legend in certain nostalgic TV circles. In addition to Laugh-In, he spent the 1970s and 1980s producing a number of expensive, garish, and kind of awesome celebrity TV galas, all of which have titles like Goldie and Liza Together and some of which will surely pop up on DM at some point, probably in posts authored by me. He also produced NBC’s Real People in the early 1980s. He’s clearly a little bitter about the Turn-On experience, which if nothing else killed his buzz after riding so high after the success of Laugh-In.

In any case, Schlatter is still among us, and fairly recently, judging from the clip posted below, has been defending Turn-On as a brilliant piece of television and writing off its quick cancellation as the whim of a misguided exec in Cleveland (and not, conveniently, a massive misjudgment of the audience’s appetite for odd satire).

I’m quoting a couple of snippets from the Schlatter interview embedded below because it’s important to get some of Turn-On‘s content into the record.
 

The original commitment was for 13 shows, we sold it to Bristol Meyers, who were a very, very conservative sponsor. And when they saw the pilot, with Tim Conway … trying to commit suicide all through the show, they increased the purchase from 13 to 16. It went on the air, and there was a guy in Cleveland who wanted to keep Peyton Place on the air, he hated the idea of losing Peyton Place, so he got on the phone—he’d never seen the show—and called all of the affiliates, and said, “This is terrible, we have to get rid of it, it’s gonna ruin your station and my station” … so they kept cancelling the show before anyone had seen it because of this one wingnut in Cleveland. … He was very effective, though. … It was just this one wacko in Cleveland.

One girl had a vending machine, and she put a quarter in, and you panned down and it said, “The Pill.” And she went crazy—it wouldn’t come out of the vending machine, and she went nuts, screaming. They thought, “Well, this is a woman. This is … sexually aggressive women.” And I said, “Yeah. That happens, you know. Where do you think all these babies come from?” But they resented that there was a sexually aggressive woman going crazy when she couldn’t get a pill. And then we had the Pope there, and the Pope would say, “Peace, baby.”

Here’s a curious, minute-long excerpt from the show (actually an un-aired episode), complete with intrusive voiceover:
 

 
And this is a wildly entertaining clip of Schlatter discussing the show, lasting about 6 minutes. My new home town of Cleveland comes in for its share of abuse, but whatevs.
 

 
(Top image via Showbiz Imagery and Chicanery, which helpfully figured out the Mad Men connection so I didn’t have to.)

 
Over the weekend, I re-read Loree Rackstraw’s tender memoir Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him. I’ve mentioned the book on this blog a few times, it’s an absolutely charming read and certainly a book that will be seen, in time, to be one of the most important works that has been, or will ever be written about the great novelist. The reason for this is simple: None of the rest of Vonnegut’s biographers have slept with him and none of them knew the man for 40 years

For now though, the book is unfairly unknown except by the most hardcore Vonnegut fans (you can buy it for a penny on Amazon). Rackstraw met Vonnegut in 1965. She was a divorced single mother and second year student and he was a married writer teaching at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop MFA program. Slaughterhouse-Five was still a few years away from publication, although his star had been rising for some time. They had an affair that turned into a lifelong friendship and Rackstraw’s book contains significant excerpts from Vonnegut’s deeply tender (and funny) letters covering the four decades of their relationship. “I realized I possessed quite a remarkable chronological story of his life,” Rackstraw said. “We were very close. It was a friendship unlike any I’ve had with anyone.”

Seriously, if you’re at all interested in what Kurt Vonnegut was like as a person, Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him is a book you’ll want to pick up. I’m happy to plug it on DM again.

But as I got to the book’s final pages, I noticed something interesting and that was a mention of one of Vonnegut’s last major television appearances, on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2005. Vonnegut was then 82 and promoting his then recent book, A Man Without a Country. Although the effects of advancing age are apparent on his body as he walks slowly to his chair, his mind was still quite sharp as he sits down to offer his wisdom on the topic of evolution. The great writer then proceeds to give George Bush a rather spectacular back-handed compliment…

Wunderbar stuff, but with these two meeting face to face, what else could it have been? After Vonnegut absolutely excoriates Donald Rumsfeld, Stewart quips “I’m very sorry to see you’ve lost your edge.”
 

 
I like teeny-tiny things. I especially like this handmade scale model of The Addams Family set by Los Angeles-based Etsy seller Everyday Miniatures. Paper, foam board, printed paper, time, glue and a lot of patience were used to make this wee set.

You can buy the finished model here or you can purchase the instuctions here to make your own.
 

 

 

 
Below, some rarely-seen color photographs of The Addams Family set from an old TV Guide. I would have never guessed their digs were so… vibrant?! Totally unexpected color choices. Gomez And Morticia Addams liked pink?! Who knew?
 

 

 

 
Via Boing Boing

 
There’s only so much hyperbole one can use when describing music (“rip-snorting,” “mind-blowing,” “tearing-up the house”) before the reader becomes inured and thinks, “Yeah, well, okay…” and moves on to something with more nouns and verbs and fewer adjectives (or just plays the music). However, this early Led Zeppelin concert recorded for Danish TV just six months after their first gig (where they were billed as “The Yardbirds”) deserves every hyperbolic phrase going, as it gives a powerful intimation of why Zeppelin were set to become the greatest live band of the 1970s.

Recorded at the Gladsaxe Teen Club, Denmark, for TV Byen/Danmarks Radio on March 17, 1969, Led Zeppelin perform “Communication Breakdown,” “Dazed and Confused,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and “How Many More Times.” Impressive and tight, it is a cracking showcase.
 

 
In 1967 CBS produced a half-hour program on the household of the 21st century that, from our vantage point, cannot fail to be fascinating. The passage of time inevitably makes fools of sages; it also confers on the people of the present tense a wholly unearned feeling of cocksure confidence, all because “we” know things that “they” cannot possibly know. So it’s important not to let that arrogance get the better of us.

Having said that, they didn’t do such a great job in predicting what we’d be doing in 2001, much less 2014. But they did nail a couple things almost exactly.
 

 
The show is obsessed with the activities of the nuclear family and so very worried about growing trends of urbanization. According to the program, by the year 2001, fully 90% of the world’s people will be living in urban environments. In the United States at least, the year 1967 was approximately the start of a massive wave of suburbanization—a nit-picker might claim that such people are living in urban systems, but either way modular systems of construction such as Israeli–Canadian architect Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, which debuted at the Montreal Expo in 1967, are not relevant to the average suburbanite. Meanwhile, Greek urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis suggests the miniaturized micro-environments of Japanese culture as a model for the West. The average suburban tract housing gets somewhat trashed, but to my perception that is still the main model for non-urban American life, whereas in cities, the good old apartment building still reigns supreme.

It’s once we get into the regular suburban home that things get more interesting. All of us have just lived through a remarkable technological revolution that was really impossible to foresee in 1967—its main artifacts are the personal computer, the smartphone, and the Internet generally. Host Walter Cronkite’s future home is stubbornly analog, as it must be, but he and his team still get a few major things right. Most intriguingly, Cronkite takes us through a futuristic den, where the “man” will do much of his office work: “Now this is where a man might spend most of his time in the home of the 21st century. This equipment here will allow him to carry on normal business activities without ever going to an office away from home. ... In the 21st century it may be that no home will be complete without a computerized communications console.” (That’s what the man does; the woman has to be content with a very dreary-looking printout of a recipe. Her liberation would require revolutions that were less technological in nature.)
 

 
This is of course, uncannily correct—many people (including myself) have forsaken office life and accomplish most of their work tasks at home. Whether or not most of those people work for companies is another question (I don’t).

Their office has three bulky screens and a paucity of keyboards, as well as a massive telex-style device that functions a bit like a ticker tape, furnishing a display of news articles that can be printed out. What the producers of the show couldn’t see is that most of the devices would get smaller, and that most of the devices would collapse into a single device connected to the world at large. Still, even if it’s a little rough around the edges, they definitely crept up to probably the single most transformative changes of the last 50 years, our ability to accomplish tasks using devices with TV screens.

Another thing they totally nail is the advent of the microwave oven, whose ubiquity would more or less become a reality in the 1980s—largely as they describe it. However, their sense of the kitchen of the future is a little bit too pointlessly automated; for example, they seem to think that we’d be likely (with the press of a button) to have our plateware generated for each meal, after which it would be cleaned and the plastic remolded for the next repast. The idea of pushing a button and summoning brand-new dishes was a little too powerful for them, apparently. 
 

Cronkite and the living room console, with which he has called up a rousing football game on the TV.
 
Cronkite sensibly spends a little time with a British robotics expert, but while robots are an indisputably important feature of modern life, their presence in the average household starts and ends, more or less, with the Roomba. Those changes may yet happen, but at the same time our resistance to the household being taken over by an army of automatons may be stronger than they realized in 1967.

Their living room features a TV set that is roughly the size of a garage door—hey, science, when are we getting that, huh? The living room’s main feature is a console about the size of an average canoe where we can control the music volume, the lighting, and so forth. Again, it was difficult for them to see that we might not want so much real estate and complexity dedicated to such a simple array of tasks. In the case of that woman and her recipe, the real win for the person charged with cooking meals in 2014 isn’t the ability to print out a recipe, it’s the wealth of crowd-sourced information at our disposal. If I want a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich, within seconds I can access thousands of variations on the recipe, many of them validated in a crucible of upvotes and downvotes with helpful user comments

In the end, they did an OK job, while woefully underestimating the varying uses that different family members might have for the new technology. Beyond that, their preference for larger automated systems over smaller, modular systems seems off the mark. (Maybe they should have let the Habitat 67 guy modularize the in-house technology.) And beyond that, the pervasive role of the corporations who would sell us these great devices is also hardly mentioned. Maybe that was just assumed?
 

 
Tony Wilson was a multi-media Renaissance man, a co-founder of Factory Records, a TV reporter, journalist and host, and the man who helped make Manchester a city of cultural and musical importance during the seventies, eighties and nineties with such bands as Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column and Happy Mondays. Wilson may have been Manchester’s “Mr. Music” but he was also known as the man who didn’t sign The Smiths.

Like all tales of regret and lost opportunity, there are multiple versions as to why Wilson didn’t sign “the ultimate Indie band,” and this is the one he gave to Ian Watson in 2003:

Watson: Did you ever try and sign The Smiths?

Wilson: “No. I was very close to The Smiths. I was very close to Morrissey. Morrissey was part of that little punk scene until 77 and there was a social whirl around a house called 35 Mayfield Road where Steven partially lived and where Linder lived, who was Howard Devoto’s girlfriend and also still today is Morrissey’s best friend. But I treated Steven, he was our genius writer. He was the speccy kid in the corner, the clever little swotty outsider boy, and very brilliant. My first contact with him was when he sent me as a schoolboy, a battered New York Dolls album sleeve and said ‘Dear Mr Wilson, why can’t there be more bands on television like this?’ so I knew him and I actually was encouraging his writing. He wrote a fantastic short play about eating toast and I think he gave it to me and I lost it.

“Then, at some point, whenever it was in 1980, he phoned me up and said would you come and see me. I drove out to King’s Road, Stretford, to his mum’s house, went to his bedroom upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed while he sat on the chair, surrounded by James Dean posters and he informed me that he’d decided to become a pop star. I sort of went ‘well Steven that’s very interesting’, and inside I was thinking ‘you must be fucking joking’. The least likely, you’re off your fucking head. Completely in my mind, absolutely, the least likely rock n roll star imaginable in the universe.

“So then obviously we were all part of a group of mutual friends and I can remember saying this same thing to Richard Boon, my mate who manages the Buzzcocks, and about four or five months later the two of us went to a gig in the Manhattan Club in Manchester. I think it was probably the Smiths’ first or second gig and as we walked out, I was blown away, it was fantastic, and he said ‘what do you think?’, and I said ‘I take it back completely, he’s amazing’.

“However, at that point in time Factory had gone through its wonder days of 78, 79 and we were now in late 1980 and into early 81. This is pre ‘Blue Monday’. We weren’t selling records, we were useless, we’d lost our plot and I was very depressed by the company. I had a band called Stockholm Monsters, I couldn’t sell Stockholm Monsters records and I thought fine and my honest approach was, I’m not going to saddle Steven with this pile of shit, with Factory when it’s shit. So I didn’t even pursue it. I said to him ‘I wouldn’t be any use to you’.

“That was my version of why I didn’t sign the Smiths. I know the Smiths have their version. Everyone has.”

Morrissey is not the kind of man to let a grievance go untended, and in his autobiography he relates how The Smiths had revenge on Wilson in 1986, when he asked the band to play on the bill of “Festival of the Tenth Summer” at the G-Mex in Manchester. This was a music festival to celebrate Manchester ten years after The Sex Pistols had played the city’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976. Having originally said “no” to playing the festival as the ticket prices were too high, Morrissey was swayed by a letter from Wilson urging The Smiths to take part, which they did.

In fact, the G-Mex event is a great day, and theatrician Wilson is at his best master of ceremonies scarf-flowing staginess. He calls everyone ‘dahling’, but it’s all a part of the public relations aspect of his showboat routine and not at all disingenuous. Before the Smiths go onstage, film-maker Derek Jarman is brought into the dressing room and is introduced. Johnny says ‘Hello,’ and then turns sideways to vomit. It is certainly a moment, but unfortunately it wasn’t caught on film.

Onstage, the Smiths are received as a life-giving source, and this begins to enrage Wilson so much that he flutters and fumes backstage, demanding to technicians that the Smiths’ power to be cut off. No backline crew will comply with Wilson, who is effectively gagged at his own festival. At the base of it all, general opinion assessed Wilson’s rage to be the blustering fury in realizing that the Smiths had meant more to the crowd than his nurtured proteges New Order. Suddenly Wilson’s divine right to be Mr. Manchester is scuppered, and he spends the remainder of his life with a Morrissey-Smiths wasting disease of the lower limbs, whilst oddly admitting that his big mistake in life was that he didn’t sign the Smiths to Factory.

Yes, well, there we go.

Back in the knife drawer, Miss Sharp.

Of course, history is always written by those who outlive their rivals, and Wilson sadly died in 2007, so we won’t hear his account of this supposed “blustering fury,” but so it goes.

Long before this, Wilson promoted as many bands as he was able through his show So It Goes and innumerable insert reports on Manchester’s evening news program. This then is Mr. Wilson dropping in on The Smiths as they rehearsed for a tour in 1985, during the week their second album Meat Is Murder went straight to number one in the UK album charts, and the band was voted “Group of the Year” in an NME poll. Wilson interviews drum & bass players Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke, before strumming a few questions with Johnny Marr, and then there’s a minor clash of egos with Morrissey, when Wilson asks him why he ever wanted to become a pop star in the first place?

Perhaps a similar question could have been asked of Mr. Wilson?