Follow Your Dreams. Even If You Suck.

American rock band Van Halen, formed in 1972, has sold almost 100 million records in its forty-some years of existence. Fifty-six million of those sales are of the albums released between 1978 and 1985, during the first tenure of lead singer David Lee Roth: Van Halen, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down, and 1984.

Roth was replaced in 1985 by Sammy Hagar, who in 1996 was almost replaced by David Lee Roth. Neither Roth nor Hagar were in the band in 1996, so technically neither one was replaced as lead vocalist by Extreme’s Gary Cherone, who was with the band until 1999 and then replaced in 2003 by Sammy Hagar . . . who was replaced in 2008 by David Lee Roth.

The band’s latest release, 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth, has sold one million copies, far lower than the usual for their other albums but still several hundred thousand copies per lead singer.

What’s more interesting than the band’s legendary inability to get along is, frankly, that David Lee Roth has been able to make a lifelong—and very lucrative—career as a singer:

The moral of the story here is that America is, even today, still the land of opportunity. If you work hard and find something you’re good at, you can be a great success . . . but even if you’re no good, no big deal. Follow your dreams, even if you kind of suck at them.

Today in Rock History, 1981: Radio Star Dies; Video Beats Murder Rap

MTV: active 1981 to, well, 1998 or so.

At 12:01 on August 1, 1981, Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes—who insisted on referring to themselves as “The Buggles,” for some appalling reason—announced, to the dismay of the cable-television-viewing world, that the radio star had been killed. Even more shocking was their claim that the death was, in fact, murder—and that the guilty party was none other than Video, the radio star’s longtime collaborator and sometime rival.

In more recent years, murder and music have intertwined often enough to leave the public jaded and desensitized—Marvin Gaye was shot by his own father in 1984; Tejano singer Selena was murdered by the former president of her own fan club in 1995; rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were killed less than six months apart in 1996 and 1997; famed “Wall of Sound” record producer Phil Spector killed actress Lana Clarkson in 2003; and, of course, the Flaming Lips famously butchered Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in 2005.

In 1981, however, a more innocent world still reeled from the death of John Lennon (apparently a moderately well-established musician in his own right), and was captivated by the simple fact that The Buggles, for all their dense and timeless lyrical artistry, failed to mention the name of the murdered radio star—so it could have been practically anybody.

. . . well, not anybody. They distinctly used the phrase “radio star” at least a dozen times, which suggests that the victim could not have been, for example, Donnie Iris, Joey Scarbury, The Vapors, or anyone from the Sugarhill Gang or Lipps, Inc. But practically anybody else.

News of Video’s supposed guilt spread rapidly, especially among insomniacs, the jobless, and teenage malcontents watching TV without proper supervision. The accusation caught fire in part because of video’s well-established (and perhaps deserved) reputation as a corrupting influence on the young, a useless degenerate, and a crass defiler of all that used to be good, pure, and right about the world.¹ The radio star, who was heard back on the wireless as early as 1952, had already had its heart broken “by pictures” [that is, “moving pictures,” one of Video’s many aliases], so it was no great leap to conclude that Video was guilty of murder.

Video: Tried and convicted by the media, which is kind of ironic,
when you think about it. Unless it’s not—irony is a tough concept
and we’re not sure we get it. Thankfully, we know you don’t either.

The prosecution’s case, however, could not withstand its star witnesses’ inexplicable assault on their own credibility. They personally urged the jury to “put the blame on VTR [Video Tape Recorders],” and displayed a bizarre and confusing distrust of “machines and technology,” going to far as to demolish the court recorder’s stenotype machine and swallow several of the pieces before being restrained by bailiffs.

The accusers. And yes, we all
dressed just like this in 1981.

Most bizarre, though, was Trevor Horn’s obvious mental unraveling on the stand. Asked to describe the scene of the murder, Horn, confused or possibly deranged, claimed that it took place “In my mind . . . and in my car,” thus either implicating himself in the crime or inadvertently suggesting that it was all a product of his troubled imagination.

Charges against Video were eventually dismissed. The long-awaited coroner’s report stated that the radio star died when its motorcycle crashed into a helicopter, having lost control after suffering from a heart attack induced by choking on vomit. The coroner's toxicology screen showed that the radio star’s blood contained fatal levels of alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin, paint thinner,² dihydrogenous oxide, hydrochlorothiozide, and perhaps the most unpredictable and concentrated drug of the middle decades of the twentieth century—half a pint of Ozzy Osbourne’s blood.

The death was ruled an accident.

The radio star was 27.

One small step for [a] man (right), one giant waste of man’s time (left).

NOTES

1. Opinions expressed at Bowling in the Dark do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the staff at Bowling in the Dark.

2. Or possibly Everclear. Chemically speaking, they’re essentially the same thing, although it’s possible that drinking paint thinner is less dangerous.

Rest in Peace, Ken Ober

In keeping with our recent but solidifying tendency to report news items long after they’ve been beaten into the ground by more timely and better-staffed news outlets, we would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and mourn the passing of Ken Ober, who died in his home in Santa Monica, California, on November 15, 2009, at the age of fifty-two.

A comedian, television producer, and radio personality, the affable Ober was probably best known for his late-1980s stint as the host of MTV’s game show Remote Control. On the air from 1987 to 1990, Remote Control was a goofy and irreverent homage to (and, later, a component of) pop culture, specifically television. Its oddball categories and characters—Sing Along with Colin, Dead or Canadian, Stickpin the Trivia Delinquent, the Fairy Pixie, Stud Boy, and Beat the Bishop—were funny and entertaining enough to be remembered by plenty of MTV viewers with a thirteen-year-old's mentality, which, of course, made up the bulk of its viewership.¹

It’d be more than a little over-the-top to suggest that Remote Control was a cultural landmark—even in comparison to the formidably low standards of MTV, game shows, or television overall—but it was fun, unusual, and entertaining. However, the show also deserves a certain amount of dishonor for its role in bringing to life one of modern television’s most dismal plagues:

The reality show.

At the time Remote Control originally aired, MTV broadcast little to no original programming. They aired plenty of music videos,² sometimes more or less randomly, sometimes grouped together thematically in shows like Yo! MTV Raps and Headbanger’s Ball,³ but their non–music video content consisted, according to my very hazy memories from twenty years ago, primarily of reruns of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which I for one watched almost religiously.⁴

Remote Control may have lasted only a handful of seasons, but its success was enough to get MTV thinking that if a more or less first-rate game show could get good ratings, there had to be a cheap ways to get second-rate entertainment out to its mostly undiscerning audience. Eventually somebody came up with the morally dubious but financially brilliant notion of grouping together a handful of young, self-absorbed, questionably mature, personally incompatible, unpaid and untrained strangers, shoving them under a microscope and poking them with a stick⁵ until they pissed each other off—and then filming the resulting explosions, editing out the parts that didn’t involve real or perceived racism and sexism, destruction and/or reinforcement of broad stereotypes (sometimes at the same time), booze, sex, aggression, narcissism, and confrontation. And The Real World was born.

Teenaged MTV viewers, with their underdeveloped ability to tell the difference between shit and Shinola—it’s science—moved enthusiastically from Remote Control to The Real World, which, after a few years, was followed by MTV’s Road Rules, a groundbreaking, never-been-seen-before all-new kind of reality television best described as “The Real World in a camper.”

Since then, the reality TV phenomenon has exploded like a
gremlin in a microwave, its roster of shows including but not limited to

American Gladiator; Big Brother; The Apprentice; Celebrity Apprentice; I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here; Survivor; Fear Factor; The Mole; The Simple Life; American Gladiator again, for some reason; America’s Next Top Model; America’s Got Talent; American Idol; American Chopper; American Hot Rod; The Bachelor; The Bachelorette; The Biggest Loser; The Amazing Race; Wife Swap; Who Wants to be a Millionaire; Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire; Who Wants to Desecrate a Corpse; Who Wants to Desecrate a Celebrity’s Corpse; The Anna Nicole Show; and The Running Man.

I’m not about to tell you that any of the above shows⁶ destroyed Western culture as we know it, crapped on the Constitution, or made Jesus cry—although I’d like to think that Wife Swap, just because of the title, came close—but I’ll be damned if I can find anything in that list that didn’t lower television’s already dreadfully low standards for what passes as quality entertainment.

It’s not fair, though, to pin all of the blame—maybe not any of it—on Ken Ober. Granted, his game show did give exposure to Kari Wuhrer, Colin Quinn, and Adam Sandler, and if Ober were still alive and this thought had occurred to me, I’d probably want to give him some good-natured grief about it. But nobody—and I mean nobody—watching an goofy MTV game show in 1987 could have predicted that it would have led to Little Nicky or Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time, much less to the unholy spawn of reality shows that have been torpedoing IQs and TV standards for the last twenty years.

I’m not about to say that Ken Ober was a towering figure in my childhood, but he seemed like a friendly, funny guy, he hosted a fun show that is and deserves to be remembered warmly, and fifty-two is far too young to go. So a heartfelt goodbye to the quizmaster of 72 Whooping Cough Lane, Ken Ober; we’ll miss you. Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.

NOTES

1. I have a legitimate excuse: I was thirteen at the time.
2. That’s right, younguns, I’m old enough to remember when MTV actually played music videos. Gather ’round, I’ll tell you stories of the golden video days of yesteryear.
3. Which featured VJ Adam Curry, who fit into the heavy metal scene only slightly less comfortably than Downtown Julie Brown or, say, Elton John.
4. I would have had good odds of turning out to be a high school dork no matter what, but memorizing sketch after sketch of Monty Python’s Flying Circus pretty much made it a dead lock. But it was so, so worth it.
5. Apologies for the mixed metaphor here. It’s late.
6. The ones I didn’t make up, anyway.