Woodstock Legend Melanie and Performance in the Digital Age

Melanie’s new album is not available on iTunes, Pandora, Sirius/XM right now, and I feel lucky to have a copy of the singer-songwriter’s latest work, “Ever Since You Never Heard of Me.” Melanie, who is one of my mother’s favorite singers, has had a limited number of copies produced, and has not sought to distribute it widely, following her husband-producer Peter’s death in 2010. She and Peter started the second independent, artist-owned label in rock music (the first being the Beatles’ Apple Records); she has long been committed to artists’ creative independence and self-publication. So now, after decades in the music industry, the Woodstock legend of pop-folk is learning herself all there is to know about making a living as a musician in the twenty-first century, including our new paradigms of music distribution. Last year, a group in Australia posted a rough mix of her new album to iTunes, and collected all of the profits for themselves. She spent most of last year tracking those people down and getting them to remove her original content, the last production work of her material by her late husband. Successful, she has copies to distribute while on her sporadic tours this year and last—in Arizona, in the Northeast, at the 2012 International Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis, and across two nights at the Tupelo Music Halls in New Hampshire and Vermont. Melanie’s career has come full circle; she began amongst others, as a Greenwich Village folk troubadour in the mid-1960s, and the value of her live performances have returned to being her ultimate experience.

Melanie’s career has included over thirty albums (two of them gold), an Emmy for lyrics penned for a 1989 television adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, a stint as a UNICEF ambassador in 1972; she has had a long and close family experience with her husband Peter, her partner and producer, raising her three children, Leilah, Jeordie, and Beau-Jarred. Peter and Melanie were married in 1968, and her first few hits appeared in Europe came around the same time: “Bobo’s Party,” on the Buddah label went number one in France, and “Beautiful People” was a hit in the Netherlands. In mid-August of 1969, after substantial press coverage of her live performances overseas, as well as a television appearance in the UK, Melanie found herself in a helicopter above the American masses gathered at Woodstock in upstate New York, a defining moment, and terrifying experience, in her life. In a recent interview, Melanie told this writer that at Woodstock, she waited in a small tent to perform, and that all day, she was told by the event producers that she’d be on stage next, only to be suddenly told, ‘oh, wait, nevermind.’

Melanie described herself as an introvert, one who will find a quiet corner at any party; it was her husband Peter who always did all of the schmoozing that helped maintain her presence in the public sphere. “I like people. I like people sitting down in front of me,” she said, as we talked of aspects of creative introversion and live performance. In the year following Woodstock, Melanie wrote and released “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” to widespread acclaim, a lasting pop favorite; the lyrics described the moment during her Woodstock performance when Hog Farm distributed candles to concertgoers, and the rain-soaked audience became aglow in soft light. The first few minutes of her performance was a spiritual experience, one in which she saw herself outside of herself: “I was faced with a massive humanity,” she said. It was from this moment during her performance at Woodstock, the practice of an audience illuminating a theater during a concert via lighters or cell-phone apps was developed; Melanie was contacted by MTV a few years ago for a documentary on concert behavior, as this illumination is part of her legacy: “I wish I had a penny for every time someone used one of those apps,” she said.

Even if she did, I think Melanie would still feel the need to get herself across in song. Her new album, “Ever Since You Never Heard of Me,” is the home production work of her late husband and her son, Beau-Jarred, and is a strikingly honest compilation of their work: Beau sought the “pristine, totally musical” recording, while Peter was “old school,” and sought to have sessions with many instrumentalists present at the same session. Melanie talked of the advent of home recording as something that supports one’s need to “live with your creative source energy, and that’s not babble.” From the first track’s multi-tracked Melanie melody-voices across various reverb stages, her new album shimmers with a digital gloss of production and equalization: soft guitars, pianos, quiet guitar licks. Some of the production choices augmented the stellar songwriting; very few choices, in whole, detracted or distracted me. “Tried to Die Young” is a striking ballad that sounds seems to improve upon an early (good) Indigo Girls tender verse-chorus-bridge structure; I’d want to hear Amy and Emily cover this song, electric fiddle solo and all. I realized Melanie had been making records and strumming away in her own rhapsodic trance to audiences for twenty years before the Indigo Girls produced their own first album in 1987; she was a contemporary of Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, and other women’s voices in pop and rock that crackled through AM and FM radios in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her career was important to the development of the genre that today supports Natalie Merchant, Alanis Morrisette, and Jewel. Some of the songwriting on “Ever Since You Never Heard of Me” is a fine reflection on her lifelong commitment to her craft. 

On Melanie’s latest release, there are lyrics of rains in Nashville, compromised dams and floods that hover above nylon-string, electric, and acoustic guitars, subtly-brushed snare drums, and a variety of digitally-apparent keyboards. In fairness, the home production value of the recording reveals a growing edge in Beau-Jarred and Melanie’s collaboration: the bass, when present, is sometimes soft and synthetic, and the middle-ground of the equalization sometimes left something to be desired: on my Auratones, the drum set nearly disappeared on “He Died for Love,” a shuffling country song about Johnny Cash, featuring brash pasting of sound clips of his introduction of Melanie, from her appearance on his show long ago. Melanie’s voice is up-front present in the mix throughout, and bears little digital effect; some of the musical genre-hopping in the setting and production surrounding her chord changes and melodies makes this album an inventive endeavor in the face of loss. Some of the material on “Ever Since You Never Heard of Me” represents Melanie’s husband Peter’s last production efforts; this album represents her “picking up the pieces” following his passing. I was interested by the song that follows the Cash tribute, for it sounded like, and was as good as, any Peter Gabriel studio effort, with choruses of repeated syllabic chants and sweeping electronic drum programming, including a dramatic large cymbal break, the whole thing bearing a likable Lion King soundtrack vibe. Besides one crude virtual fader-rise at the song’s close, this track was an interesting work in itself. I didn’t expect to be brought to tears by any of this album, but “Hush-a-bye” was such a suddenly simple song of leaving and departure, and sought to imbue love upon sad leaving just hit me, like a ton of bricks, in its lilting and continuing: by the time Melanie had gotten through the tender verses (“life will take over/no won will have won/hush-a-bye, baby, bye bye”), and was simply repeating the song’s chorus against a small-volume band of electric keys, drums and such, the song had become anthemic, and had gained my emotion; I was hearing my own experience being described. I didn’t expect to be so moved.

And, the instrumental that followed this emotional song was perhaps one of the best choices in production, though the flamenco-guitar riffs across the hip-hop beat could have been avoided, or could have come on faster. Instead, the track evolved into something even larger, involving a vocal counter harmony, a synthetic marimba, and a closing featuring some sort of hiss. There were tracks I preferred less for their production, but these sins of overproduction might be overlooked for the album’s songwriting: there wasn’t much keeping this Melanie album from being a female counterpart to Paul Simon’s Brian Eno collaboration album Surprise (with lyrics like “if everyone smiles we’ll have a hometown all over the world”), complete with interesting Eurotrash-commentary bridge-drum-breaks—though Simon, unlike Melanie, might refrain from the Beatlesque waltz-based sing-along coda. “Every Breath of the Way” sounds like a Steve Forbert song, in production and drive—and some sort of electric mandolin riffs are massive and entertaining, huge and bearing over the mix in a funny and unprofessional way. A bluesy electric number closes the album, and sounds something like Bonnie Raitt or Grace Potter.

On the basis of “Hush-a-bye” and the album’s first four tracks, I was glad to have gotten a copy of this album, and am excited to see Melanie live—because the creative artist might be actually formed and reformed by their interaction with their audience, however dark the theater. It is in that relationship that the spirit of creative human expression may best flourish, however tricky and slick our studios may become. Melanie’s favorite venue of all time is not Woodstock or any outdoor festival, but the Stables, a 400-seat venue in Milton-Keynes, UK, under the direction of Dame Cleo Laine [www.stables.org], and supported by the Arts Council of England. And if she could perform onstage with anyone, Melanie named Nat King Cole—because, she said, she’d be too in awe of Billy Holliday. She mentioned Cat Stevens (now Yusef Islam) as someone she’d like to collaborate with; I told her that was a fantastic new project for her to pursue. For now, besides completion of her touring in 2012, her next project is the production of a work of musical theater, a memoir of her life with her husband, with production, arrangements, and musical direction by her son, Beau Jarred. Melanie and the Record Man, with Nicolette Hart playing the role of Melanie, debuts at the Blackfriars Theater in Rochester, New York in October of 2012. Reviewing her discography—with many titles out of print or unavailable—I am most interested to hear her 1999 release Recorded Live @ Borders as much as I am her 1972 at Carnegie Hall release. I most look forward to seeing her live.

For more from Melanie: http://www.melaniesafka.com/home.cfm

Catch Melanie at Tupelo Music Hall

March 9—White River Junction, Vermont

March 10—Londonderry, New Hampshire

http://www.tupelohall.com/

Boogie On American Woman: Commander Cody and the Death of Whitney Houston

Commander Cody is George Frayne, and was nineteen years old on the day Whitney Houston was born, in north Jersey; the two were within 100 miles of each other. Frayne was living in the New York metro area, working through his summers as a lifeguard, among the millions of bathers at Jones Beach. Houston’s family moved from Newark to North Orange in the summer of 1967, the same summer that Frayne moved on to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to pursue on a masters in Sculpture and Painting. The Houston family—entertainment exec John and performer mother Cissy—taught Whitney piano and voice at home. George Frayne graduated in 1968, and accepted a job teaching art at Wisconsin State University in Oshkosh, but couldn’t sustain both his work in his art and his day job. By June of 1969, the monikered band and its leader—Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen-- arrived in San Francisco with their gear loaded in a truck Frayne had just bought; they were ready and willing to join the psychedelic disarray taking place. Two months later, the Airmen would have risen suddenly, to be the opening act for the Grateful Dead. Frayne would still be jamming with Jerry two decades later.

Whitney Houston was eleven years old when she first took a solo, at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark; Frayne’s major-label success came the same year, with Lost in the Ozone, a work of Byrds-inflected country-rock too electric for the Grand Ol’ Opry. Allegedly, Warner Brothers wanted the band to sound more like the Eagles; the band, in its rockabilly and Texas swing sensibility, declined. Tracks were recorded both in Ann Arbor and in Berkeley, California, and the album’s single, “Hot Rod Lincoln,” went #9 on the Billboard country/western charts. The next year, the Cody and the Airmen produced Hot Licks, Cold Steel & Truckers Favorites, and achieved generally an album-a-year through the 1970s. By the time Whitney Houston was singing background vocals on Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” in 1978, Frayne and his Airmen had released seven albums, including a 1975 live recording Rolling Stone noted as one of the finest live recordings of all time (Live from Deep in the Heart of Texas). By the early 1980s, Whitney Houston had been spotted performing at one of her mother’s shows, by an Arista Records A&R rep, and Frayne’s band had morphed enough that he declared himself The Commander Cody Band; since its inception, Frayne’s group has included John Tichy, Billy C. Farlow, Bill Kirchen, Andy Stein, Baulf “Buffalo” Bruce Barlow, Lance Dickerson, and Bobby Black.

In 1986, Commander Cody released Let’s Rock on Blind Pig Records, after a six-year hiatus from recording; the same year, Whitney Houston had risen to an established stardom following her debut album. In 1988, Houston sang for Nelson Mandela, the Summer Olympics, and on the Grammys, and won one, for Best Female Pop Vocal; in 1988 while Commander Cody amassed a huge band for a well-produced eight minutes of “Beat Me Daddy 8 to the Bar” on that year’s Jerry Lewis Telethon, and released Sleazy Roadside Stories on the Relix label. Through the 1990s, Frayne would pursue his visual art, producing a feature film, a series of oversized canvases of photorealism, and sculpture, while the music and touring continued. Whitney Houston sang the National Anthem at the Super Bowl in 1991; I remember watching in awe at what it might have meant to all of us, as many watching at home as were in the stadium, a place larger than I could imagine. Whitney Houston went on to quadruple-platinum status; she was probably on The Bodyguard World Tour when I discovered my father’s cassette of Lost in the Ozone: faster country than I had ever known. I remember I went to a prom in the mid-1990s whose theme was Whitney Houston’s triumphant “I Will Always Love You,” and I took the Commander Cody tape with me to college, and have never lost it. I don’t own any recordings of Whitney Houston, but can hear the haunting strains of that pop song even now in my memory. Cody kept up with his touring, his recordings, and his art; in 2009, alongside another new recording (his twenty-first, Dopers, Drunks and Everyday Losers), Commander Cody released a coffee-table book of his stories, including fun tales of hotel mania with Hunter S. Thompson involving fireworks in the hallway. Relix Magazine said Frayne’s new recording still, after over forty years, “bridge[s] the gap between twanged-out country sagas and sing-along hippie anthems.”

I didn’t know that Whitney Houston had been found dead in at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills on Saturday afternoon. Houston was found dead at the Beverly Hills; the news had been first reported by a Twitter user at 4:15 PM, forty-five minutes before any mainstream media, and four hours before the Commander Cody Band took the stage of the Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction, Vermont. I won’t proport to know what the connection is between the death of a starlet—one of America’s beauties, who serenaded us through proms and the Star Spangled Banner, through films and cassettes, the Grammys and the Olympics—and the crowd on the other coast, that gathered within a converted freight house, to witness the historical, and the epic work of George Frayne, Commander Cody, on a cold night in New England, interpret slices of our American musical heritage. There is something unique and patriotic that spans these events, these lives, from musical coast to coast; boogie-woogie piano, conceived deep in the heart of Texas and elsewhere, echoed across the heartland, in unwitting American memoriam.

***

"It’s really simple what’s happening out there now," Commander Cody, explained in an interview with J. Eric Smith. "Ever since the ’90s came on there’s been this whole generation of people who actually thought that Janet Jackson and Madonna and all of them were singing and dancing at the same time when they saw them on stage. But now they’re realizing ‘Oh my god, that was on tape!’ and they’re looking for something real. So when they go to some bar and hear what a real live band is all about and grasp the concept of people making it up as they go along, they’re like ‘Whoa, we’ve been missing something all these years!’ That means that people who can do what I do are in business these days."

I cannot confirm the validity of the quote above, taken from an alleged interview with J. Eric Smith (no relation). The excerpt is taken from
http://www.answers.com/topic/commander-cody-and-his-lost-planet-airmen#ixzz1mEkZbAxJ

***

George Frayne, with “vertigo and two torn rotators and a fractured hip,” as he described to an interviewer in 2009, emerged to center stage at the Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction, Vermont on a cold Saturday night in February, and stood behind his stickered Yamaha keyboard on a stand (“Ancient Alien on Board”). He wore a suit jacket and t-shirt, dress pants, ball cap with an airman-style emblem. To his left stood bassist Randy Bramwell, before two bass cabinets; behind him, Steve Barbuto on a shiny red Yamaha kit (two toms, three rides); to his right, the maniacal electric guitar master Mark Emerick. Commander Cody carried a Heineken and a cane, appearing as a poor man’s Joe Cocker, or a abstractionist’s Kinky Friedman—he has never had Too Much Fun, he declared, as the band kicked off the first of two sets. “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” “Smoke Smoke Smoke that Cigarette,” a reworked Elvis tune (“Don’t Let Go”), a story-song about “sin and degradation in the old west: ‘Thanks a Fucking Lot Lone Ranger,” rasped the Commander. How many other musicians through the bright green hue of a Heineken bottle, call out categories of rockabilly, country and western, Texas swing, and blues, and move between these distinctions with ease, grace, and humor?

Frayne’s piano playing was not riotous, but reserved—tender, almost delicate—honky-tonk arpeggios waddling through eighth-notes down the board. There were staccato upper-octave cadences like Jerry Lee Lewis, but only when Cody deemed them not only appropriate, but necessary. In a fictional duel, Commander Cody’s piano chops wouldn’t come close to matching those of his closest contemporary (in antiquity and pop music genre-bending), the psuedonym’d Dr. John (Mac Rebennack). But Cody’s presence at the electric keys, his laughter and drama from beneath his set-one ballcap and past-the-ears not-gray mop of hair in set two, was enchanting, personable: faster and shorter than some of the aimless storytelling I’ve heard from folks like Leo Kottke or Richie Havens, but anecdotes more akin to the gravely humor of Tom Waits, self-effacing and not mystical. Commander Cody rejoined his band mates for the second set, carrying a cardboard twelve-pack: “I came to Vermont to party!” he cheered.

Unlike Tom Waits, Dr. John, Leo Kottke, and other still-alive-and-touring gravel-voiced legends of pop, the Commander Cody Show can bomb: Frayne told the crowd it had, on the night previous to this show, in White Plains, New York. Guitarist Mark Emerick, from beneath his black cowboy hat, said during the set break that less than one hundred people had come out for the show, and the highbrow crowd didn’t dig the swing. Over the coming spring, The Commander Cody Band is booked in the Sportsman’s Tavern in Buffalo, the Bamboo Room in Florida, and the Stanhope House in Stanhope, New Jersey, which bills itself as an authentic roadhouse: music, food, drink. The Commander Cody Band is also slated to perform at a VFW hall in Herkimer, New York, to benefit a local Humane Society, before leaping onto the bills of selected summer festivals.

It was a special night for guitarist Mark Emerick: unlike other legs of the band’s eternal bus-based travelling tour, he had driven himself and his gear up to White River Junction from the Albany area, and had brought with him a beautiful 1968 Fender amplifier (with reverb; I believe he said it was a Bandmaster) and matching cabinet—whose tubes, even after multiple repairs, still overheat enough that he can’t fully trust it. His the usual standby, a smaller one-piece Fender, sat unused, as he pushed the amp—an expressive and fluent instrument in itself-- to its glorious harmonic limits. Cody introduced Emerick as hailing from Coxsackie, New York, “the shopping capital of the Capital District.” Mark Emerick was not with the Airmen when, in the mid-1970s, the band was booed offstage at a country music convention in Nashville (“go find a rock concert”), but he did embody that spirit, of hard rock expressiveness and manic choices in 2012, across licks that ranged from the laughable to the technical, with an impassioned discipline, espousing that he knows what an expert is: solos worthy of the signature that adorns his Les Paul gold-top (Dickey Betts), mostly played on his teal green Telecaster. He slammed hard on the pickup-selector switch, often, getting different tones for solos, choruses, and verses across the band’s two sets; he has been with Cody for fourteen years; he has played with the Marshall Tucker Band, Allman-Brother iterations, and no doubt a host of session musicians. He could sit in with Tom Petty, John Mayall (booked for weeks hence on the same stage), or Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra, and his chops would not fail him, or the audience. Halfway through the first set, Mark Emerick ripped through half a solo before grabbing his open Budweiser bottle, and held the mostly-full bottle against the strings, creating not gentle slide-guitar effects all the way up past the frets; truly crazy stuff. Without losing his cowboy hat, after his solo he stopped playing, tipped his head far back and slammed his beer, relishing his own end-zone. During the set break, a bearded fan gushed to Emerick, calling his licks the best he had heard live since seeing Stevie Ray Vaughn in the 1980s. Answering this high praise in the second set, Emerick had some fun with facing his amplifier’s massive speaker, gaining those genuine vacuum-tube sustained feedback notes, that hovered in and around the tight rhythm section. Was Mark Emerick’s playing as good as any overcrowded and jam-inflected summer eve at Saratoga Performing Arts Center; was it better than the din of psychedelic jam-noodling that echoes its way out of Higher Ground, where undergraduate heads bob and young bodies bump around to simpler and more repetitious stuff than Commander Cody?

That Burlington crowd would pay to see Emerick, Bramwell, and Barbuto complete their tease of Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” that was used as a dividing rally between the second set and the encore: more reckless than calculated, and emotive as the swinging country wail of Bob Wills. One tune that was part of the Commander Cody Show (Frayne had a small handwritten list in his pocket), “Good Morning Judge,” seemed like a Sam and Dave song I’ve never heard, and Emerick did a fine emulation of Steve Cropper’s unique patterns. Was it the fastest version ever played, of Cody’s famous remake of “Hot Rod Lincoln?” The Commander told the crowd that Red Bull had asked to use the song as part of their sponsorship of a soap box derby (to which George Frayne said, “send me a fuckin’ check”). Emerick knew too well how to play like Bill Kirchen, the Lost Planet Airman who played the characteristic electric riff in the original studio recording (Kirchen named his style “dieselbilly”); I imagine the foursome, including Frayne’s well-delivered narrative vocals, were clipping along well past 150 beats per minute. Also in the second set, the band made earnest fun of a song too real to be included on any movie soundtracks, but should have been, by now: “Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues” . Frayne changed the lyrics of the verse about the perils of home ownership and foreclosure, to “the man from Bank of America stopped by the other day...”

Through it all, and the suddenly frigid night: boogie-woogie, Texas Swing a la Bob Wills, country, original guitarist Bill Kirchen’s “dieselbilly” style, a rock with Credence and revival—an electrified Mumford and Sons, led by an artist who might as well have been a college professor or member of the Firesign Theater (“Wine Wine Wine, Do Yer Stuff”). Without Cody, the trio would excel in its own purist rock paradigm, but might risk appearing to be engrossed in a battle of the bands where nobody wins: a live show built of technical accuracy and the most classic of pop rock licks played well. But the presence of George Frayne, perhaps not unlike the presence of Whitney Houston, made the performance a marvel of mirth and music: at the encore, the country pioneer Cody shuffled offstage, and back behind his keys, to close the show with a song that was something about China, whose music sounded like a new variation on the earlier “Beat Me Daddy, 8 to the Bar” riff Frayne’s left hand had been holding down well since the late 1960s; the lyrics were tough to make out, but feeling of a patriotic boogie shone through triumphantly.

Howard Stern on David Letterman's 30th Anniversary

The thirtieth anniversary of the Late Show with David Letterman came on February 1^st, 2012, and the atmosphere inside the Ed Sullivan Theater was the same pale vibe, enlivened only by the choice booking of Howard Stern, now a fifty-eight-year-old relic and legend of the trade. Letterman’s opening monologue was followed by a traditional and grand skit of self-effacement, through a top-10 list delivered by longtime Late Show staffers: “we have never met,” pronounced a female writer, straight-faced, to the camera, as Dave and the audience, and the laugh track, laughed, made bright by the glitz, the lights, and the production of what a politician called the “lamestream” media.

“It’s like a morgue in here,” Howard Stern declared, as he took a seat on the ultra-modern upholstery that is the set, kicking off the show’s third segment. Dave had already drawn attention to, and tried to make fun of, his network’s lack of celebration of the show’s good standing after three decades, but the presence of the self-proclaimed “King of All Media” (a title Letterman left out of his introduction of Stern) helped make Dave’s anniversary night uniquely personal. Howard, wearing what appeared to be the same outfit he wore one year ago on the same show, leapt straight for the jugular vein of the show’s interpersonal relationships: the lanky radio host wasn’t on the set ninety seconds before he challenged the band’s choice of his intro theme-song-riff, and asked Letterman if he could name CBS Orchestra leader Paul Shaffer’s wife and children. They had, after all, shared the same stage nightly, since 1982. (Two minutes later, Dave did.)

It’s been a weird road for Howard Stern, and no cakewalk for Letterman, either: Letterman survived a scandal and media frenzy regarding his relationships with some of his interns, and after allusions to the 2009 incident, admitted to Stern he is still in therapy. Stern didn’t have a problem admitting to Dave that he’s in therapy four times each week—more days than he broadcasts live on Sirius/XM. “I’m all about honesty in broadcasting; meanwhile, I’m a big phony,” Stern quipped. Last March, Stern appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, appearing more introspective, pleadingly honest about his failed marriage (and 2001 divorce) and his fear of taking for granted his second wife, model Beth Ostrosky: “I’m awfully narcissistic, and I have to keep that in check. I can’t be like King Tut sitting there and expect to be taken care of,” Stern said in that interview. On the Late Show, Stern asked Dave, “whoever thought I could get a woman that beautiful?,” after the host showed a few of Howard’s photographs of Beth O, his second (and much younger) bride. A few surprised gasps but no laughter from the audience; “Yes, very beautiful. We had her on the program,” Dave muttered back. Those who enjoin Howard on his Monday-Wednesday (most weeks) schedule become all too familiar of how conflicted he feels, about his own pursuits, self-image, and ethic: “In a way, I’m in as weird a place as Charlie Sheen,” he said in his interview in Rolling Stone. The audience at the Late Show had no response, and no laugh track was imposed, when Stern cited the name of the on-air game show that first got the FCC’s attention: Bestiality Dial-A-Date. Was the audience silent because it was offensive, because the government had once rendered it so, or because nobody understood the antique concept of ‘dial-a-date’?

The “King of All Media” will be appearing outside of his realm again soon, as well: as a judge on America’s Got Talent. Do American television audiences want, or expect, to see Howard Stern make people cry, in his new gig as a judge? Stern’s abilities have always extended not far beyond the reach of the forms of his own creation: the autonomy of his radio program and now his two channels on Sirius/XM, his legendary television series for Channel 9, his production work on Son of the Beach. Stern, whose own interior conflicts and psychological struggles have been a major source of his humor, may find himself squirming uncomfortably in his seat, part of someone else’s game. “I gotta get out of here,” Howard pronounced, following a silly “Is This Anything?” segment on the Late Show, in which a mime bounced around inside of a giant balloon. Days later, Howard described the moment on his Sirius/XM morning show: a guy came out and moved around, and I kept waiting for him to do something, he told his co-host, Robin Quivers. Whether or not David Letterman’s Late Show does anything more than bounce around in a metaphorical mime costume, and set a low bar for public discourse and comedy, both Stern and Letterman agreed that late night rival Jay Leno was worth their ridicule: in the show’s final segments, Dave descended into a squeaky and ignoble impression of Jay, to Stern’s bemusement.

Letterman and Stern laughed effacingly through a series of photographs of Stern’s previous appearances, from broadcasting days of yore: Howard in women’s clothing, promoting his second book, Miss America; a wild-haired rock-video styled Stern from 1988, in a purple jacket; and the oldest image, of both Stern and Letterman on the crudest-looking set, decked out in the fashion of the 1980s, with Stern donning a thick black mustache, far from his pale, bony face of the present (he revealed to his audience after transitioning to Sirius/XM that he had, in fact, lied to his listeners about his nose job). In a strange moment of valor, the lanky Stern stood to receive an envelope containing six twenty dollar bills—financial bait for Brad Pitt, who was taping something nearby. Howard torn open the envelope and swung his arm widely, letting the money fly: “to the audience,” he declared. Stern said goodbye on the air to Dave by stating, “I think longevity in this business is impossible… I am honored to be here with you.”

Chaney, J. (2012). “Howard Stern, celebrating 30 years of David Letterman in late night by denouncing Jay Leno.” The Washington Post Entertainment. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/celebritology/post/howard-stern-celebrating-30-years-of-david-letterman-in-late-night-by-denouncing-jay-leno/2012/02/02/gIQAvZAYkQ_blog.html

Oldenburg, A. (2011). “Howard Stern: Divorce ‘felt like such a failure.’ USAToday. Retrieved from http://content.usatoday.com/communities/entertainment/post/2011/03/howard-stern-divorce-felt-like-such-a-failure/1