The Mighty Carson Blog Tribute

Hard to believe it was 20 years ago tonight, May 22, 1992, that Johnny Carson signed off from the “Tonight Show” for the final time, just five months shy of a full 30 years of ruling Late-Nite television.  Numerous competitors/imitators have come and gone since then, some successful (David Letterman, Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel) and others not-so-much (Chevy Chase, Magic Johnson, Dennis Miller, Joan Rivers, Alan Thicke), but none of them can match the majesty that Johnny (along with co-horts Ed McMahon and Doc Severinsen) gave us for three decades.

I first got into the “Tonight Show” when I was about 10 or so, when I was first able to stay up just late enough to catch Johnny’s nightly monologues. This would’ve been the summer of ’74 when I didn’t have a strict bedtime on non-school nights, and it was the height of the Watergate crisis, which provided Carson and comedians nationwide a seemingly endless supply of funny material. Johnny appealed to me not only because he was funny and personable, but because watching his show made me feel a bit more grown-up—this was my first venture into a more sophisticated adult world of entertainment (non-porn, that is).  Johnny was such a gentleman and made doing his show seem so effortless and there were times when I thought he had the coolest job in the world, thus I couldn’t quite understand his numerous contract disputes and conflicts with NBC and such over the years, or why he insisted on shortening the show from 90 to 60 minutes and only worked three days a week toward the end.  Of course, I didn’t realize then that doing a nightly show like could become a real grind over time.  Undoubtedly, the 60-90 minutes Johnny spent on camera was the fun part, but all the work that went along with it probably sucked.  Like the late Bon Scott of AC/DC once sang, “I tell ya, folks—it’s harder than it looks…”

I could spend the better part of an eternity highlighting my favorite “Tonight Show” moments, but here’s a sampling:

--Anyone remember those ‘70s commercials featuring British actress Rula Lenska hawking RCA TVs?  "My hair is a brilliant red, my eyes a dazzling green and if you're not seeing that, you're not watching on an RCA television".  Pretty redhead, this Rula was (although she sounded like a drag queen when she spoke), and these ads, along with her Alberto VO5 shampoo spots, puffed this woman up to be some big-time Liz Taylor-esque celebrity that everyone was supposed to automatically know and recognize, thus I’ll never forget the night Johnny Carson incredulously uttered, “Who the hell is Rula Lenska?!?”  I forget the context of the discussion, and it wasn’t mean-spirited or anything, but he totally echoed my thoughts at the time and that one always stuck with me.

--Like any superstar athlete, Johnny had his off-nights now and then, and I remember one particular night when Johnny was just bombing right and left during his monologue.  Every joke he told was met with lukewarm semi-laughter at best from the audience, to the point where Johnny finally just gave up and laid down on the studio floor and “died” while Doc Severinsen played taps on his trumpet.  I loved that totally spontaneous stuff Johnny and the gang would do at times—this is what made that show appear be so much fun to do.

--I’m not sure if this one was spontaneous or staged, but it was pretty funny anyway.  Comedian Don Rickles guested on the show while Johnny was on vacation one week in 1976, and upon his return, Carson noticed that the little wooden cigarette box he kept on his desk was damaged, and Doc Severinsen fingered “Mr. Warmth” as the guilty party who broke it.  So, Johnny had a cameraman follow him across the hall into the next studio where Rickles was taping “CPO Sharkey” at the time and interrupted the proceedings to take him to task for mangling his cigarette box.  Rickles almost seemed a bit rattled by it all too.

--Johnny again echoed my thoughts (and those of millions of American heterosexual men, for that matter) during singer Dolly Parton’s first “Tonight Show” appearance regarding her breasts when he said, “I would give about a year’s pay to peek under there…”  Only Johnny could get away with saying something sexist like that without incurring the wrath of feminists and conservative media hacks and such.  If Leno or Letterman made that kind of comment today, they’d be put in front of the firing squad.

--I always looked forward to actor Robert Blake’s appearances on the show. Before he became a murderer (yes, I think he whacked that gold-digging Bonny Lee Bakely woman) during his “Baretta” days, he always seemed to have funny stories to tell, and he showed no outward signs of what an asshole he truly was/is off-screen.  In spite of all that, I wish they would put the rest of “Baretta” out on DVD beyond just Season 1—it was a damn good show.

--You had to love the animal segments with Joan Embery from the San Diego Zoo and Jim Fowler from TV’s “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”.  Carson was often keen to point out that Fowler was the one who did all the heavy lifting on that show while host Marlin Perkins got all the glory, and would constantly mock Perkins:  “While Jim is down under the ship being swallowed whole by the Great White shark, I’ll be on deck mixing martinis for myself and the crew…”  (Or something like that.)  He always seemed so scared shitless of the bigger animals too, which made things all that much funnier.  And who could forget the night when the little critter called a Marmoset ascended to the top of Mount Carson and proceeded to take a whiz on Johnny’s head?  Classic stuff…

--The week after the Kansas City Royals won the World Series in 1985, pitcher Bret Saberhagen represented the team on the "Tonight Show".  Johnny introduced him as "Bert" Saberhagen.  Oops!  However, David Letterman had no trouble pronouncing Buddy Biancalana when he appeared on "Late Nite" the same week.

--Almost every time I see Ed McMahon, I think of George Carlin's bit:  "Just once, don't you wish somebody on the Johnny Carson panel would go, 'Whew!  Goddamn, Ed, MOVE DOWN, will ya!'"  Johnny often gave Ed grief about his drinking prowess, although he wasn't near as bad as say, Dean Martin or Nick Nolte.  One night, however, Ed was feeling no pain...

--And then there was my all-time favorite Carson recurring bit, Carnac The Magnificent.  About once a month, the legendary all-knowing seer/sage/soothsayer would grace the “Tonight Show” set in his ever-present turban and divine the answers to the questions from the envelopes that Ed McMahon handed him (that had been sitting in a hermetically-sealed mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnall’s porch since Noonn that day).  For example, Carnac would say the answer “Joe Namath, Big Ben, and a politician’s campaign promises”.  He would then open the envelope and read the question:  “Name a jock, a clock and a crock.”  Or another:  “Bjorn Borg”…“Describe the sound made by Orson Welles sitting on his hat.”  If the audience reacted negatively, Carnac would respond with, “May the Minnesota Vikings’ front four give your sister an illegal chuck!” or “May a carsick mongoose change the color of your seats!”  Or hell, check him out in action for yourself.  Here is a fairly comprehensive list of Carnac classics.  And here’s another.  Carson had other recurring characters and bits like Art Fern with his “Tea-Time Movies” (often aided and abetted by late buxom actress Carol Wayne), anal-retentive conservative reactionary Floyd R. Turbo (Bill O’Reilly with earflaps), Stump The Band and crabby Aunt Blabby, but Carnac was far and away the funniest of them all.

In later years on the nights when Johnny was on vacation, viewers were treated to “Tonight Show” reruns (re-titled “The Best Of Carson”), but during the heyday, guest hosts would sub for Carson, and this was a bit of a crapshoot sometimes.  Some guest hosts were very entertaining, like Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Richard Dawson, David Brenner, Tony Orlando, Orson Welles, George Carlin and McLean Stevenson.  Even Kermit The Frog and the Muppets held court on the show one night, and it was hilarious.  On the other hand, some guest hosts were grating like Joan Rivers and hack entertainer John Davidson (usually butchering Olivia Newton-John songs in the process).

I mentioned the Carson imitators earlier, and the most egregious of the bunch had to be Alan Thicke’s “Thicke Of The Night” in 1983-84.  And it was bad.  (How bad was it?)  Well, it was SO bad…all throughout the summer of ’83, TV viewers were harangued by an onslaught of TV ads promoting Thicke’s new show, proclaiming Big Al to be the cat’s ass and practically trash-talking that he was going to slay the dragon that was Johnny Carson.  Long about that same time, the United States Football League tried to take on the NFL, too—how’d that work out, hmmm?  (I’ll give you $3 to tell me!)  In his brilliant 2004 bad TV anthology book entitled What Were They Thinking?, TV/film scribe David Hofstede had some accurate observations about Thicke’s show:  “A couple things can happen when a performer is relentlessly shoved into the public consciousness, and it’s amazing those doing the shoving haven’t figured this out yet.  Some [viewers] will be so turned off by the disturbance that they’ll make a point to NOT watch out of spite.  Others will be curious enough to tune in with great expectations and little patience.  Woe to the host who demands your attention, and then wastes your time.”  Count me in the former group there—I wasn’t about to defect from Johnny’s camp in the first place, but I had no desire to watch Thicke’s crapfest based on the incessant way they hyped the hell out of it.  By extension, I refuse to eat at Sonic Drive-Ins for similar reasons—I am so sick of being force-fed those two dorks in the mini-van (the vaunted T.J. and Pete) in their lame-ass TV ads.  Predictably, “Thicke Of The Night” was an abysmal failure, and one of the big reasons for that, in my opinion, was Thicke himself—what a freakin’ dullard!  Hofstede sums up the Thicke fiasco quite succinctly:  “There were many other challengers to the ratings supremacy of ‘The Tonight Show’, but none entered the game with more arrogance and less ammunition.”

I don’t know of many people who hated Johnny Carson (Alan Thicke, maybe?), because he seemed to be so universally loved.  Hell, even my old man liked Johnny, and that’s saying something—Dad’s approval curve for entertainers was sky-high.  From what I’ve read and heard, though, Johnny was a bit of a contradiction because his personal life wasn’t nearly as rosy as his public persona indicated.  In front of the camera, he was totally at home and at ease gabbing with all manner of entertainers, politicians/statesmen, musicians, sports figures and just plain folks, but off-screen, he was actually shy and rather inept socially.  His numerous marriages weren’t all peaches and beans either, especially with the infamous Joanna Carson, who was the source of quite a bit of monologue material in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and toward the end of his run on the show in 1991, Johnny’s son Rick was killed in a car accident, so there was a fair amount of angst for Johnny off-camera.  Carson also had health issues late in life, thanks mostly to his smoking habit, and he died of emphysema in 2005.  Even though I knew all about that, when I heard the news of his death, I was still shocked by it, nonetheless.  My immediate reaction was, “Johnny Carson can’t die!  This just can’t happen.”  He was such an institution and part of the inner fabric of our lives and culture, it just seemed like he should live forever.  But, alas, he was indeed human just like the rest of us.

We didn’t hear much from Johnny in the years following his retirement, but that’s the way he wanted it.  Can’t say I blame him, really—he’d “done his time” for America, so to speak, and he earned the right to ride off into the sunset and do whatever he wanted.  I read recently that Carson had long foreseen the spectre that is “reality” television and like me, he was not a fan of it.  I certainly remember how he ripped “Survivor” (and other shows of its ilk) a good one in a rare interview with Esquire magazine in 2002.  I almost wanted to kiss Johnny on the lips (well, not really) when he said, "These people are in just about as much jeopardy as I am having dinner.  People forget that there's a crew there.  There's a catering service…It's not like they are going to die out there in the jungle.  These silly people will do anything the director suggests because they want to be on television!"  Preach, brother, preach!

I have to admit by the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that I had moved on a bit and hadn’t watched the “Tonight Show” as much in the years leading up to Johnny’s retirement.  Still, I was really hoping he would wait until October ’92 to step down, that way he could’ve made it an even 30 years of hosting the show, but it all came to an end on May 22, 1992.  Here in K.C., we viewers were forced to wait and wait and wait to see the finale thanks to our Kansas City Royals.  You would think, given the special occasion and all, that Channel 4 (our NBC affiliate at the time) would’ve tried to avoid a conflict, and not aired a Royals game that night, right?  YOU ARE WRONG, pitching change breath!  The 7:30 Royals game from Texas seemed to take forever to finish, thus we had to wait for the game to end, then sit through all 30 minutes of the 10:00 news before Johnny’s last show finally aired a good 45 minutes late.  I was not pleased.  And on top of that, the Royals lost!

There is allegedly a cave somewhere in western Kansas that houses the entire video archive of every Johnny Carson show that still exists on videotape from the ‘70s onward (sadly, most everything from the ‘60s was erased).  Several “best-of” video collections are available for public consumption now, of course, but one would hope that someday more and more of the archives will see the light of day again as well.  Hell, I say why not run “Tonight Show” reruns (even the ones Johnny Carson didn’t appear on) Monday thru Friday nights at 11:30/10:30 central on TV Land or some other cable outlet?  I’d be willing to bet they’d draw more viewers than some of the current late-night yack-fests (or at least give them a run for their money), and what a great way to time-travel it would be, too.  I think Johnny Carson should be required viewing for school kids too, just to prove to them that high-quality television entertainment did once exist.  I miss Johnny dearly, and today’s talk shows are just no substitute.

Travelblog: 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, Episode 7

Time to put a wrap on this road trip--there's another one coming up in just over three weeks...

"FOR GOODNESS SAKE...WELL, DO THE HIPPY-HIPPY SHAKE"
When I snapped this photo I was standing in the Texas Rangers dugout on the very spot where manager Ron Washington does his little booty-shake routine during games (see video) when his Rangers are excelling on the field.  I'd seen a game at Rangers ballpark about ten years before, but decided to do the stadium tour, just for fun.  Didn't get to see as much of the place as I would've liked, but I enjoyed standing at Washington's perch for a spell.  Was hoping to see the Nolan Ryan statue out in centerfield, but some renovations were being done and we couldn't access that area.

DEATH, I HEAR YOU CALLIN'...
I couldn't help but chuckle when I passed by this establishment near my hotel in Big D, where you can pick out your very own wooden overcoat.  As Fred Sanford once said, "That's a tough item to sell--sorta like selling Christmas trees the day after Christmas."  Two doors down to the left of it is a store called Boxes To Go. Not sure if they're affiliated with each other, but I guess they have us covered either way.  Too bad there wasn't a Kum & Go convenience store on the same block too...

OKEY-DOAK
Outside of Southern Methodist University's Gerald Ford Stadium (named after an SMU benefactor, not the ex-Prez) stands this statue of football legend Doak Walker.  The Doakster starred in the late '40s at SMU and for the Detroit Lions in the '50s and even has an award named after him given annually to the best college running back.  I've never heard of anyone named Doak outside of the realm of football, tho...

CAMELOT'S END...
...took place right here in 1963.  This is the Emergency Room entrance to Parkland Hospital in Dallas (well, the current Parkland ER, anyway) where President Kennedy was officially declared dead at 1:00 CST on 11-22-63, although he was dead for all intents and purposes the second that shot ripped through his skull.  I'm not sure if this is the exact same part of the hospital campus where JFK was taken or not, but it sure looks similar to the one I see in the old newsreels from the day.  It was rather interesting driving the exact same route the motorcade followed after Oswald's shots were fired.  According to then-Governor John Connally's wife, Nellie, there was a eerie silence in the limo during that five-minute ride from downtown to Parkland.

LOVELY TO SEE YOU AGAIN, MY FRIEND...
The Stadium Stalker claimed one last victim during the 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, FC Dallas Stadium in the town of Frisco, way the hell up north of the Metroplex (seemingly closer to Oklahoma than Dallas-Ft. Worth).  I wasn't expecting to encounter anyone I knew there when I saw Lamar Hunt's statue standing guard at the north end of the stadium.  We Kansas Citians tend to claim Mr. Hunt as one of our own, thus I'd forgotten that in addition to bringing the Chiefs (and later the Wizards) to KC, that the man also spearheaded the formation of the old North American Soccer League and Dallas Tornado franchise in the '70s.  I actually almost like this statue of him better than the one outside Arrowhead Stadium, too.  Nice little soccer facility they have in Frisco, which opened in 2005, but I can't believe it doesn't have a roof over its stands like the Wizards new joint does. If there was ever a place were sports venues desperately need shade, it's Texas, and this one was known tongue-in-cheek-ly as "The Oven" when it was called Pizza Hut Park.  Then again, they were shrewd enough to include a permanent stage with a roof (right behind Lamar) for concerts and other shows when there's no soccer.

"YOU KNOW THE NIGHT IS FALLING, AND THE MUSIC IS CALLING..."
...and we got to get down to--Stringtown?!?  Stringtown, OK is the home of Country music legend Reba McEntire, as well as former Royals shortstop/toothpick connoisseur U.L. Washington.  When my good friend Tom and I passed through Stringtown in 1984, a city limit sign alerted motorists to that very fact.  Now, it's no big shock that U.L. doesn't rate a city limit mention anymore since his career wasn't terribly memorable, but I was rather shocked that Reba ain't gettin' no love either these days.   

Travelblog: 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, Episode 6

JERRY WORLD EDITION

I kinda got off-track here and forgot to finish of my chronicle of my Texas adventure, but I figure I better get it done soon because I'm heading out of town again here in about three weeks...

WELCOME TO JERRY WORLD, BOYS AND GIRLS!
When I last left off, we were in Arlington, TX, which was once just a bump in the Turnpike between Fort Worth and Dallas until 40 years ago when the Washington Senators relocated to the Metroplex and became the Texas Rangers.  Now it's a bustling suburb that houses the Rangers Ballpark and Jerry Jones' multi-zillion dollar Cowboys Stadium, which is far and away the biggest damn sports venue of any kind I've ever seen in person.  Photos don't do the place justice--you really have to see it in person to grasp the enormity of it.  As I was driving in from Fort Worth, I caught my first glimpse of this behemoth from over SEVEN miles away!  In the words of Eddie Murphy: "The shit is big!"

HOW'S IT HANGIN'?
I had two choices for touring Cowboys Stadium, the guided "VIP Tour" or the cheaper self-guided tour and I chose the latter, quite wisely.  I enjoyed roaming the field and the locker room areas far more than I would have if I had to stick with the crowd just to see the press box, hoity-toity luxury suites and such.  The only real disappointment was not being able to see the massive video screen in action, but as you can see, the big black elephant in the middle of the room was down for maintenance, but it would normally be in operation during daily tours.  The damn thing is like ten times bigger than my house!  It's literally a six-story building in and of itself.

IN THE SUITE BUY AND BUY...
These are the field level suites that you can mortgage your home to obtain tickets for.  They look pretty worthless to me for watching the actual game--they're too low to the ground and all the people on the sidelines would block your view.  The floors in them (as well as the rest of the stadium, for that matter) looked clean enough to eat off of, and I actually saw several illegal aliens--er uh--Mexican cleaning ladies dusting and wiping the chairs in one of the suites, even though there were no events in the stadium that week.

"99 YARDS AND A HALF!"...
...as Dandy Don Meredith once exclaimed on that "Monday Night Fooball" telecast in 1982 when Tony Dorsett ran all the way across the Metrodome in Minneapolis to set the NFL record for longest run from scrimmage.  This gives you an idea of how far TD had to run--I'm standing at the goal line while snapping this pic.  Kinda cool to now be able to say I've strolled on the same field that a Super Bowl has been played on.  I'm generally a football purist and would prefer to see everyone play on real grass, but I have to admit that the fake FieldTurf is the next best thing.  It looks and feels like real grass, and doesn't look near as painful to get tackled on as AstroTurf did.  And if the players are okey-dokey with it, then I am too.

"TURN OUT THE LIGHTS...
...the Party's Over"  And you're blinding Coach Landry too!  More Dandy Don here, as he interviews the man in the fedora in a cool photo that hangs in the Cowboys press room where post-game interviews and news conferences are held.  The self-guided tour allows you access to not only this room, but the Cowboys locker room and even the Cheerleaders locker room (minus the cheerleaders, natch).  The tour staff was also quite friendly and fun to chat with along the way.

HOW'S THE WEATHER UP THERE?
To give you an idea of how tall this effing stadium is, there are points on the field near the corners and sidelines where you literally cannot see the seats in the upper deck!  You also now see why the big video screen is so necessary--it's the only way to see the damn game clearly from upstairs!  I've walked to the top row of Toronto's SkyDome, which was the previous tallest stadium I've ever been in, and the Cowboys' joint dwarfs it easily.  I can only imagine the vertigo in the upper reaches here--perhaps this one should be called "Mile High Stadium" instead of Denver's place...

LEAVE IT TO JERRY JONES...
...to include embossed Port-A-Pottys for his big playplen!  Like Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket said, "Even the Virgin Mary herself would be proud to go in there and take a dump!"  I still think Jerry Jones is a bit of a crap-weasel--he's good buds with Dubya Bush, after all--but If nothing else, the man spared NO expense in building this thing.  The dudes in the Cowboys locker room even told me that the wood paneling that frames the players' lockers is the same stuff they use for dashboards in Bentley cars.  As Wojo on "Barney Miller" would say, "Well, whoopity-doopity-doo!"  Then again, even though I hate the Dallas Cowboys with a passion and always have, even I have to give it up to Jones' largesse--this place in unreal, and totally worth the visit if you're down that way.   

Dick Clark 1929-2012

I’ll finish off the Worldwide Texas Tour stuff later, but for now I need to pause to salute the dearly departed…

We lost a true icon in the music and television world yesterday, one Richard Wagstaff Clark, better known as the “World’s Oldest Teenager”.  Hard to imagine what American music and pop culture would be like without this man.  He was a radio announcer, music personality/impresario, game show host, entertainer and TV producer, not to mention a shrewd businessman.  He was quite successful in pretty much everything he did, and he seemed to do it so effortlessly, even though it’s surely a lot harder than it looks to do.

I, personally, will be forever grateful to Dick Clark for giving two of my all-time favorite music acts, Paul Revere & The Raiders and Kiss, their first real national TV exposure and he was crucial to the long-term success of both bands.  The Raiders paid tribute to the man in their autobiographical 1966 song “The Legend Of Paul Revere”:  “And then Dick Clark approached them, he said, ‘I know a thing or two…I’ll put you on a TV show and make big stars of you.’”  And so he did, making PR&TR the virtual house band on “Where The Action Is” for a couple years.  I keep hoping someday soon we’ll see an official DVD release of those ancient PR&TR performances from “Action”.  Clark (pictured here sitting in on the skins with the late Mike "Smitty" Smith of the Raiders) also influenced Kisstory in big way by giving them their first national appearance on a Rock-related TV show in 1974 on ABC’s "In Concert" (the sadly-forgotten conterpart to NBC’s “Midnight Special”), which you can see in its entirety here.  [Note:  I (and probably the band itself) coulda done without the hippie-looking rainbow arch over the stage here, as well as the unnecessary fireworks footage the producers superimposed on screen at the end of “Black Diamond” but whaddya do?]

Clark’s legend is generally tied to “American Bandstand”, of course, which became a musical institution on TV in the ‘50s and ‘60s and served as a conduit between teens and parents and showed them that Rock ‘N’ Roll wasn’t the “devil’s music” and all that crap.  I didn’t watch AB much until the late ‘70s when the likes of John Travolta, Leif Garrett and Andy Gibb would get up and lip-synch their latest pop pabulum hits.  Even then, I watched it more to see the chicks on the dance floor in their tacky Disco clothes than for the performances.  I also remember one of the more infamous AB episodes in 1980 when former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten appeared with Public Image, Ltd. and proceeded to be the narcissistic arsehole that he is.  I’ve never confirmed this urban legend, but I read somewhere that Johnny actually hawked a loogie on Dick Clark (or someone) during that show.  Classy guy…tell me again, now—why am I’m supposed to impressed with him and why does belongs in the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall Of Fame?  But I digress…

I actually watched Dick Clark more on “$10,000/$25,000/$100,000/$Eleventy-million Pyramid” instead of “Bandstand”.  When I was a kid, I was a major game show fanatic, and I’d put “Pyramid” in my Top 10 of all-time, right up there with “Concentration”, “Hollywood Squares”, “Match Game”, “The Joker’s Wild”, “Family Feud” and "Jeopardy!".  Dick was a way better game show host than most people gave him credit for, and like Peter Marshall, he seemed genuine and glib, not phony and forced like Pat Sajak and his ilk.  The show was fun to play along with too, especially during the big money round when I would shout out suggestions at my TV.  And who could forget that lovely deep-piled orange shag carpeting, which was standard game show décor in the ‘70s.  Meanwhile, let's play along with the subject in this photograph:  Mirror balls, skanky women, Coke spoons, the Village People, Andy Warhol…

During my brief foray into the radio biz, I loved running Clark’s “Rock, Roll & Remember” show on Sunday afternoons at the “Mighty 1030”, KKJC in Blue Springs.  It was a weekly four-hour oldies anthology show that featured artist interviews, trivial tidbits from the past and such, and usually focused on a particular group each week—one week he’d spotlight the Beach Boys and another week The Temptations, and the next week Three Dog Night, etc.  We also aired DC’s “Countdown America” on Saturdays, which was Clark’s answer to Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40”, only it centered on the Adult Contemporary charts instead of Top 40.  These shows came on vinyl records with the commercials already built-in to them in segments that lasted roughly 20 minutes or so, but you had to be careful to get your album sides lined up correctly so as not to play the program out-of-sequence—I got burned on that at least twice!  When the “Mighty 1030” bit the dust in early 1988, I ended up bringing home a boatload of these Dick Clark shows from the station archives, and made a nice chunk of change a couple years later when I sold them to a collector.  Wish I’d kept one or two of them now, tho…

Dick Clark’s other TV ventures included the “American Music Awards” which was actually relevant once upon a time, but is virtually unwatchable today, given the freak-show quality of today’s posers—er uh, performers.  “TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes”, which he co-hosted with the late Ed McMahon, came along in the mid ‘80s and aired off-and-on for years.  The bloopers were usually pretty funny, but the practical jokes always seemed contrived and forced, not unlike on "Candid Camera".  One of Clark’s more notable TV failures was the short-lived “Dick Clark’s LIVE Wednesday” in 1978.  One show featured an all-star band fronted by Chuck Berry (check out the band intro in this video—what an eclectic mix of musicians!).  There’s also a blooper at the 26:31 mark—while Chuck’s wailing away on his guitar, he inadvertently bops trumpeter Doc Severinsen in the face with the headstock of his guitar.  The good Doctor is momentarily stunned, but he quickly recovers and plays on.  Clark also created a show in the early ‘00s which he co-hosted called “The Other Half” which was ostensibly the male alternative to ABC’s estrogen-laden squawk-fest “The View”.  Not a bad idea in theory, but it didn’t fare all that well in practice (let alone in the ratings), especially with a dolt like Danny “Mr. Sensitivity” Bonaduce as one of its co-hosts.

For some reason, whenever I think of Dick Clark, I often return to that awkward segment in Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine documentary where Moore ambushes Clark in a van in a parking lot and tries to interview him about his “American Bandstand” bar/restaurant chain.  According to MM’s convoluted logic, it was Dick’s fault that some welfare mother in Michigan was forced to work long hours at an AB location she had to commute a long way to, thus depriving her of having the proper time to devote to raising her young son, who had to stay at his uncle’s house while she worked.  Junior finds a gun in said uncle’s house, takes it to school one day and accidentally shoots a fellow first-grader to death, thus implicating Dick Clark in the murder.  Riiiiiiight.  Moore’s intentions may well have been all good, and I’m all for gun control, but come on, dude…

[NOTE:  My conservative friends will be pleased to hear that I’ve done a total 180 in regards to Michael Moore—I used to think he was legit and that there was a lot of substance to him, but the more I look at his body of work, the more I realize that he’s just as full of shit on the radical left as Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, et al., are on the radical right.  Just like the righties, Moore twists facts and presents them in certain ways just to suit his purposes rather than tell the whole truth.  To any of my liberal friends who might be disappointed with my renoucement of Moore, what can I say?  You’ll just have to carry on without me on this one, because frankly folks, I’m tired of being bullshitted...]

And of course, no discussion of Dick Clark is complete without “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve”, on which DC more or less supplanted Guy Lombardo as the Major Domo of NYE in the ‘70s.  The first time I ever stayed up past Midnight on a New Year’s Eve was around ’73 or ’74 when I was 9 or 10 and “NYRE” became a yearly tradition with me for a long time after that.  If my memory serves correctly, that first one I saw featured Olivia Newton-John, who I’d never seen on TV before.  I’d only heard her on the radio up to that point and didn’t even know what she looked like, but let’s just say she received an "exceeds expectations" on my personal evaluations of her.  Meanwhile, “NYRE” certainly found its niche in pop culture on shows like “Friends”, like when Chandler Bing bemoans another impending NYE without a date and declares, “…I’m sick of being a victim of this Dick Clark holiday!”  In a later episode, Monica and Ross actually appear as dancers on “Rockin’ Eve”, and they share the shocking revelation with everyone that the dance floor portions of the show are actually TAPED well in advance of New Year’s Eve!  I never quite got why “NYRE” always alternated between the live shots of Clark at the ball-drop in Times Square and the segments that were pre-recorded like in November or something with the faux-revelers dancing to Shalamar, Rick Astley and Sister Sledge and such—pretty hokey to me, but I always watched anyway, mostly because I didn’t have a life.  In fact, only once in my 47-plus years have I ever been with a woman on New Year’s Eve.  I’m not sure which fact is more depressing, that one or that we’re stuck with crap-weasel Ryan Seacrest on “Rockin’ Eve” from here on out.  Anyway, would you care to guess what that woman and I did on that one particular NYE, 1993-94?  Well, naturally we watched “Rockin’ Eve”!  It was cool, though, because Kiss appeared on the show that year, and we remained snuggled up together on her sofa all night, so I had no complaints…

For most of his life, Dick Clark was the embodiment of youthfulness and good health, but all that went south in a hurry when he was diagnosed with diabetes, then suffered a debilitating stroke in 2004, thus causing him to miss his first NYE on the air since 1972.  He made a valiant recovery and returned to “Rockin’ Eve” in 2005-06 in a limited role, but his speech was noticeably thick, breathy and slurred.  He struggled to keep up with the countdowns at times (even saying the numbers out of sequence one time), and one year when he went to kiss his wife at the stroke of Midnight, he inadvertently lost his balance and grabbed her boob!  Many people have hailed Clark for being a hero to post-stroke victims by continuing to appear on-air every year, but I have mixed feelings about that.  True, it probably was inspirational to lots of folks, but for me, when you’re used to the way someone speaks after listening to them for 30 some-odd years, I found it very sad to watch and listen to Dick struggling to get the words out.  I much prefer to remember him the way he was before the stroke.

It seems strangely ironic that two major music moguls, Dick Clark and “Soul Train”’s Don Cornelius (with the same initials, no less), who more or less produced white and black versions of the same TV show, respectively, both left us within less than three months of each other.  Someone on Facebook made the comment that Dick Clark is one of the most important non-performers in Rock history.  Another put him in the same lofty echelon with Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan for the impact he made in television.  Hard to argue with either of those sentiments.  As for me, again I owe a debt of gratitude to the man for giving those early-career early bounces to Paul Revere & The Raiders and Kiss—PR&TR were my first taste of Rock ‘N’ Roll when I was three years old and less than ten years later, Kiss became my favorite band of all-time, and they remain so to this day (in spite of Gene Simmons’ insatiable ego).  Rest in peace, Mr. Clark—ya done good!  To paraphrase your trademark sign-off, “For now, Dick—so long…”

Travelblog: 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, Episode 5

CSI: DALLAS
Here be the site of the world's original "Nightmare On Elm Street", outside the Texas Book Depository Building in Dallas (or "Suppository" as the dude in Full Metal Jacket called it).  I have an airtight alibi--I was in the womb when JKF was assassinated, but I have to say that Lee Harvey Oswald was one helluva shot to be able to nail a moving target from that distance (twice).  Hovever, I think he had a little help, as well.  Hard to believe next year will be the 50th anniversary too.

"LOOK THROUGH ANY WINDOW...WHAT DO YOU SEE?"
Here's a look at Oswald's perch in the Book Suppository Building.  I highly recommend a visit to the 6th Floor Museum thereof.  It starts you in the back of the building and you make your way through a labyrinth of photos and exhibits about the Kennedy Administration and the world in general of the early '60s.  You eventually are led to corner window where LHO did his dirty work, of course, but the only downside is they're real anal about taking photos inside the museum, for some reason.  Very educational, all the same.

X MARKS THE SPOT...
...literally, of where John F. Kennedy was shot, in the middle of Elm Street.  It's amazing how the Dealey Plaza area has remained pretty much unchanged in almost 50 years, although you may notice that the "grassy knoll" across the road ain't so grassy these days.  When I drove away from the area after my museum tour, it felt kinda creepy driving over that X in the road, and I won't deny I was looking over my right shoulder in case someone was taking aim at me and my Grand Marquis!

WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING WARREN COMMISSION...
...we got all the answers right here!  Never ceases to amaze me how these crackpots are able to con people into buying their leaflets and propaganda in regards to the Kennedy assassination.  Just another reminder that P.T. Barnum was right about the 60-second reproduction rate of suckers...

IT'S A BLOODY REUNION...
Fans of J.R. Ewing and the TV show Dallas are no doubt familiar with this sight, Reunion Tower and glass palace Hyatt Regency next door.  Once upon a time, the tower housed a radio station whose studios were visible to the public, which would've driven me nuts if I was deejay-ing there with people constantly gawking at me.  There was also a time when you could ride up to the observation deck and get some killer views of downtown, the Kennedy sites and about half of Texas, but that is no longer the case.  They closed off the deck in 2009 and never re-opened it, and the only way you can go up in the tower now is if you want to waste your hard-earned money on overpriced (and overrated) Wolfgang Puck food at his hoity-toity restaurant.  Give me Waffle House any day over that pigeon food...
 

"MAKE SURE THEY GET YOUR GOOD SIDE, GOOD SIDE..."
Is there not a more famous profile in football history?  This is the very accurate statue of legendary Dallas Cowboys head coach Tom Landry, which now stands guard outside of Cowboys Stadium in Arlington.  More about "Jerry World" forthcoming soon in Episode 6...

Travelblog: 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, Episode 4

UNFORGETTABLE...
I'd been there before, but I remembered to make it a point to stop by the Alamo in San Antonio again on the 2012 WWTT.  My trusty and ever-prescient iPod has a good memory too--as I approached the Alamo on foot, without any provocation from me, Mr. iPod kicked in with an Ozzy Osbourne song.  Long about 30 years ago, the Prince of Darkness got pissed as a newt while staying in San Antone, and summarily took a whiz on the famed landmark, which landed him in the pokey for the night.

"GIMME SOME OF YOUR FINE FAMOUS BAR-B-Q..."
I decided to dine al fresco (as opposed to Al Yankovic) along the San Antonio Riverwalk, and checked out some local BBQ fare at a joint called The County Line.  I enjoyed their sampler platter of meaty delights, and it was all quite tasty, especially that gi-normous beef rib, as well as the turkey and sausage.  Still not quite as good as K.C. barbecue, but not too shabby, Texas.

REMEMBER THE OTHER ALAMO
The Stadium Stalker struck again while in San Antonio, as he alertly spotted an open gate and snuck into Alamo Stadium, just north of downtown.  Built back during the Great Depression, it's home mostly to high school and small college football and track & field events now, but it was once upon a time home to professional football for very brief stints in the '70s and '80s with the short-lived San Antonio Wings of the World Football League and the San Antonio Gunslingers of the USFL.  Neat old stadium, but it loses a little something with the evil AstroTurf they haven't replaced with Field Turf yet.

AUSTIN CITY LIMITED
Not pictured here, mostly because I didn't take any photos there, is the city of Austin, which I spent one night in.  During my previous visit to Austin in 2000, I only got to see it late at night from I-35 because of poor planning on my part.  It was a Friday night, and I'd just come from San Antonio, and was planning to get a room in Austin, but there were none to be had because of something called the Texas Relays.  Even rooms in nearby towns like Round Rock were booked solid, so I wound up catching a cat-nap in the car at a rest area instead.  I actually had a room this time, but it wasn't really worth it for what little I did in the city.  The traffic on I-35 (both northbound and southbound) was a total clusterfuck (even after rush hour), and I was too tired and frustrated to get out and do the drinking and music district south of downtown, so I just cruised the U ot T campus a bit, and passed by the state capitol, where people were out protesting the Trayvon Martin thing. [Never mind that his murder took place in Florida, but when there's political football to be played, I guess the state doesn't matter.]  Anyway, Austin wound up being the big disappointment of the trip.

WHACKO IN WACO
Stadium Stalker struck again at the University of Baylor on a Wednesday morning, at Floyd Casey Stadium (not to be confused with Floyd Cramer Stadium).  That gaggle of people on the field was apparently the inquisition at one of these NFL "Pro Days".  Essentially, these exercises in overkill amount to an opportunity for budding young players like QB Robert Griffin III (that's him standing on the nearest goal line underneath the crossbar of the goal post) to show off for and/or impress the various scouts and media people.

NOT PICTURED HERE...
...but worthy of mention is the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, also located in Waco.  Lots of great displays and exhibits there for pretty much all sports, including an outstanding tribute to the old Southwest Conference (SMU, TCU, Rice, Houston, Texas, Texas Tech, Texas A&M and Arkansas) that was housed in a psuedo mock-up of the Cotton Bowl stadium.

THE NEW 1313 MOCKINGBIRD LANE
Lily and Herman weren't home, but I think I saw Grandpa flying about when I stopped by Waxahatchie, Texas' most famous homestead, the Munsters replica mansion, just a little ways south of the Dallas clusterfuck--er uh--Metroplex.  This isn't actually my photo--I stole it from the 'net because the house is located on a narrow country highway with no safe place to park my car.  Plus, this gate is shrouded by trees--I passed right by the place twice without seeing it because it was hidden so well.  The interior is also quite close in detail to the one on the TV show (I'd love to see Grandpa's dungeon!), apart from the coffin in the wall that served as a telephone booth--the wife of the house thought it was too creepy to replicate that.  One weekend per year prior to Halloween, the folks who built and own the house open it up for public viewing, often in conjunction with guest appearances by former cast members Butch Patrick (Eddie) and Pat Priest (Marilyn).  Ironically, my hotel in Dallas was located near a street called Mockingbird Lane.

STEAK-ING MY CLAIM...
This was my Wednesday lunch at a place west of downtown Ft. Worth called Fred's Texas Cafe, featured on "Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives".  I was a bit leery about eating at a place run by a cook who sports a very respectable Z.Z. Top beard, but Fred's claim to fame is his spicy 16-ounce ribeye steak, which I couldn't resist trying.  It was pretty damn good, once my eyes stopped bleeding from the jalapeno smoke and I could actually taste it, that is.  I'm not quite sure if it was worth what I paid for it, but I enjoyed it anyway.  Guy Fieri was 2-for-2 at this point on the trip... 
  

Travelblog: 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, Episode 3

"LOOK AT ME, I CAN BE CENTERFIELD..."
This would be the somewhat pointless centerfield slope at Astros Field in Houston (formerly known as Enron Field and currently known as Minute Maid Park, but I prefer to call it 'Astros Field').  The flagpole-in- play shtick is reminiscent of Tiger Stadium in Detroit, yet very few fair balls ever enter this area of the park, which I had the pleasure of touring last week.  Our tour guide was a spunky lady named Della, and she was was quite knowledgeable and passionate about the current Astros playground, which ironically I passed by on foot the very day it opened in 2000, but there were no tickets to be had that day.  The $9 tour took us up to the press box, and down to the Astros dugout, as well as the visitors bullpen in left center field (which is outfitted with actual Astrodome AstroTurf) and through the innerds of the hand-operated out-of-town scoreboard in left field.  I've never been INSIDE a scoreboard in my life before, so this was quite an honor.  This whole tour was a last-minute addition to my itinerary, and a very pleasant surprise, indeed.  Someday, I'll actually do a game there, especially since the Astros will be joining the American League next season...

HOUSTON, WE DO HAVE A PROBLEM...
Before doing my tour of Reliant Stadium, I couldn't help but notice how the "Eighth Wonder Of The World" next door ain't looking so wonder-ful anymore.  In fact, The Astrodome looks downright pathetic, with rust and fungus and who knows what growing on its exterior.  If this thing was an animal, it'd be euthanized by now.  The city of Houston honestly doesn't know what to the do with the place since the advent of the new stadium a decade ago--the preservationists want to save it, but no one's come up with a new practical (let alone feasible) use for the place.  In fact, a mere three days after my visit to "Reliant Park", a Houston TV station took an inside look at the decaying edifice and the results were semi-horrifying.  The Houston Chronicle also did a recent photo essay on-line that re-confirms the same sad state of affairs.  Come on, Houston, tear The Astrodome down already if you can't redevelop it--this is like looking at a sick relative dying...

THE MOST-RECENT ROUND-UP
Apparently the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is a pretty big deal, so much so that it ties up Reliant Stadium for like, two months after the Texans' football season ends.  The Reliant Stadium tour was one I was really looking forward to heading into this road trip, and it wound up being rather disappointing, overall.  First off, I was hoping to see the actual football field, but it was buried under mounds of dirt, but technically, I did set foot upon a field that the Super Bowl was contested on for the first time--technically, that is, and it wouldn't be the last one on this trip.  The other downer was the elderly lady who was our tour guide--I actually had to point out where the TV press box was located for her.  Something ain't quite right when I know more about the place than the tour guide does, but somewhere in the center of this photograph is where the world's most (in)famous wardrobe malfunction took place...

"RUMORS SPREADIN' 'ROUND, 'BOUT THAT TEXAS TOWN..."
Okay, so where were all them "nice girls" that Z.Z. Top sang about?  I didn't even see a damn shack in this place!  Truth be known, La Grange is a much bigger town than I was expecting--almost 5,000 folks, and of course, the famed "Chicken Ranch" closed down in 1973, long about the same time the song "La Grange" hit the charts.  Haw-haw-haw-haw, indeed...

"WHEN THE SUN COMES UP ON A SLEEPY LITTLE TOWN..."
...down around San Antone."  The sun did indeed come up over said sleepy little town that morning, but no one saw it because it was overcast all day.  I didn't see any preachers, teachers or Samurai swords, either.  Pretty uninspiring place, really--how Tom Johnston of the Doobies milked a timeless classic song out of it, I haven't got a clue...

Travelblog: 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, Episode 2

Houston, we have no problem...

EVERYTHING'S BIGGER IN TEXAS...
This was my lunch on Monday at a place called Langford's Groceries, just off downtown Houston, which was profiled on Food Network's "Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives".  It's not actually a grocery store, but an eatery housed in what used to be a gas station garage once upon a time.  I placed the Diet Coke can there to give this thing some scale--that's 1.5 pounds of freakin' beef!  I ate every last ounce of it in one sitting, too, and it was outstanding.  This thing makes a Hardee's "Monster Burger" look positively bite-size in comparison.  Guy Fieri got this one right...

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE...
I was tickled to death to see that this Texas institution still exists, the mighty Spec's Liquors.  It was here at their location near downtown Houston that I legally purchased alky-hol for the first time back in 1984.  I was only 19 at the time, but this was back before Texas raised the legal drinking age to 21.  Even their signage hasn't changed in 28 years...

"WE'LL KICK TO THE CLOCK"
In the 1962 American Football League Championship Game, Dallas Texans' RB Abner Haynes uttered this rather infamous gaffe during the coin flip before overtime (he should've told the ref that the Texans wanted the ball) at the 50-yard line of this venue, Jeppesen (now Robertson) Stadium at the University of Houston and orginal home of the Houston Oilers.  That's not the clock the Texans kicked to, of course, but it is the direction that Haynes chose to kick it.  Turned out his FUBAR didn't matter anyway, as the Texans won that day, in their final game before becoming the Kansas City Chiefs. 

TICKLE ME, ELMO...
Apart from Otis Taylor and Jan Stenerud, Elmo Wright was my favorite Chiefs player from back in their glory days, thanks mostly to his silly TD celebration dance he'd do in the end zone (at the 4:45 mark of this video).  Elmo is also honored in the end zone of Jeppesen/Robertson Stadium as one of the standout "Coogs" of the U. of Houston.  The stadium, which has also served in recent years as the home of Major League Soccer's Houston Dynamo, will be demolished after the 2012 football season and replaced by a brand new stadium.

Travelblog: 2012 Worldwide Texas Tour, Episode 1

I hit the highway last week and spent seven days in the land of Tejas.  Good trip, overall, but I could've done without the warm and sticky weather (which arrived a month earlier than it should have), as well as the more-than-abundant number of dead bugs coating my windshield and front bumper.  As per my usual, here be a pictorial chronicle of my travels...

A LONG WAY TO GO, YET...
Instead of taking the conventional route to Texas via I-35 through Oklahoma City, I decided to take U.S. 71 down through Missouri and Arkansas.  My first stop was Joplin, MO, where I got my firsthand look at the devastation from last year's tragic tornado there.  The rebuilding process has been gradual, but very slow, given the massive scope of the damage inflicted on this town, including Mercy Medical Center, which suffered a direct hit during the storm.  It remains largely unchanged in almost a year (the storm struck on May 22, last year) as the staff continues to operate out of temporary facilities and mobile CT and MR units.  However, it's about the only structure that even remained upright within about a two-mile radius.  I wish these folks well in their on-going recovery efforts...
 

WHERE THE EVIL EMPIRE BEGAN
This would be Sam Walton's first retail store in downtown Bentonville, AR.  It now houses a Walmart museum (which, surprisingly, they don't charge any money to enter), and the company's rather unimpressive corporate headquarters is located about a mile away.  Rather ironic that the original store is festooned in Target's colors.  [NOTE: I've been dying to use the word 'festooned' for a while now...

PIG SCREEN TV
This is the video board at Razorbacks Stadium at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.  I'm not real crazy about MU moving to the SEC, but Missouri fans do have a nice new road trip option when the Tigers play down yonder--probably about a three-and-a-half hour drive from Columbia.  I've been lobbying for years for Arkansas to join the Big 12, but ain't no way that's going to happen...

"THEY'RE THIRSTY IN ATLANTA, AND THERE'S BEER IN TEXARKANA..."
Just like Kansas CIty, Texarkana has a State Line Road dividing it.  That's Arkansas on the left and Texas on the right, and the courthouse smack dab in the middle in this photo. [Note the bug crap already accumulating on my windshield, after just six hours on the road]  Fortunately, I didn't encounter Sheriff Buford T. Justice lurking around town whilst I passed thru...

Concert #111

The Rainmakers (Saturday, March 10, 2012—Farris Theater, Richmond, MO) Ticket price: $10.00

Kansas City’s Rainmakers have now landed in my personal Pantheon of bands that I’ve seen five or more times in concert, along with the likes of Kiss (17 times), Ted Nugent (9 times), Z.Z. Top and Van Halen (7 times each) and The Who (5 times).  As per their usual, they did not disappoint on Saturday night, despite playing for what was easily the strangest audience for a Rock show I’ve ever been a member of and in what I’m pretty sure is the oldest venue at which I’ve ever attended a concert.

Richmond, MO is a town of about 6,000 folks located 30 miles east of K.C. in Ray County.  Perhaps its most famous citizen is the late John Testrake, the airline pilot who was involved in and helped to thwart the June, 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet in the Middle East.  Richmond is also home to the Farris Theater, a turn-of-the-century opera and movie house that has undergone extensive renovations in recent years and is in immaculate condition today.  Just a few miles to the east of Richmond lies the town of Norborne, where Rainmakers lead singer Bob Walkenhorst hails from, hence why the band chose to play a gig in his old stomping grounds, so to speak.  Gotta give it up to these guys—they’ll play anywhere.  Throughout their history, The Rainmakers have played in everything form classy theaters like the Farris, Liberty Hall in Lawrence, KS (where I first saw them in 1997) and the Uptown Theater in K.C. (where they filmed their "Downstream" video) to dives like Knuckleheads and the Beaumont Club (soooo-weee!) and even Kemper Arena, where they opened for Rush in April, 1988 on their Hold Your Fire tour.  And who knows what kind of oddball venues they play whenever they visit Norway, where they have a rabid following, the reasons for which I have yet to figure out.  I wonder if I could get them to play in my living room sometime…

Thank goodness I didn’t plan on imbibing before or during this show, because they don’t serve drinks of a liquor-ous nature at the Farris.  It’s not a dry town, mind you—we passed at least three bars on the way in—but the theater doesn’t sell adult beverages.  I was driving anyway, so it’s just as well, but I’m pretty sure this is the first Rock show I’ve even attended that was both alcohol-free and smoke-free, which made it seem rather surreal.  There was no opening act for this show, thus we got a bit longer set from the headliners, who even took an intermission break in the middle.  In recent years, The Rainmakers have taken a page out of the Paul Revere & The Raiders playbook by wearing matching outfits on-stage.  At last year’s Knuckleheads gig, they each sported all-white t-shirts and jeans, and this time they went with all-green t-shirts (although St. Pat’s ain’t till next weekend).  Next time, try the Raiders’ tri-cornered hats, fellas!  Anyway, the band opened with “Snakedance” (which we didn’t hear last time) and the sound was pretty iffy and not nearly loud enough for my liking.  I think this had more to do with the venue’s sound system limitations than the band, and it actually did improve a bit as the show wore on.

This gig was sponsored in part by a local rehabilitation and retirement home as part of a 4-show concert series at the Farris featuring local music acts.  Many people bought the ticket package for all four of them, which would account for the shockingly large number of elderly people and folks in wheelchairs in attendance.  To wit, I’d say at least half the audience (or more) attended merely because they’d already bought the ticket anyway, even though they were totally unfamiliar with the band’s music.  This made for awkward moments like when it was just me and about half a dozen other people in the crowd shouting out “Hoo-Dee-Hoo!” on cue during the song of the same name.  I don’t know about the folks upstairs in the balcony, but hardly anyone in the orchestra section where we sat was rocking or even bobbing their heads to the music at all—they just all sat on their hands as if they were watching a movie, and I felt like I was at a Sunday church revival meeting instead of a Rock concert.  The third song in the set list was “Long Gone Long”, which includes the lyric “Goodbye to the Rinky-Dinks…”  I think maybe the Rinky-Dinks might have gone over better with this crowd than The Rainmakers did!  Thankfully, the band’s repertoire doesn’t include Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “You Got That Right” and the line, “You won’t find me in an old folks’ home…”

Last year at Knuckeheads, the band treated us to their entire self-titled debut album in sequence to celebrate the 25th anniversary of it.  This time, we still got a heapin’ helpin’ from it (only “The One That Got Away”, “Doomsville” and “Drinkin’ On The Job” were omitted) and the lead track “Rockin’ At The T-Dance” was a highlight of the set. They also played a couple other songs from their latest album 25 On that we didn’t hear last time as well, including my favorite track, “Kansas City Times”, which featured drummer Pat Tomek (rhymes with ‘comic’) pounding out the rhythm on his new revolutionary piece of percussion equipment, the almighty cardboard box!  Apparently PT used this innovation (not pictured here) when they recorded the song in the studio too, and it sounded great.  Take that, Tama, Slingerland, Ludwig, Pearl, Sonor, et al—all you drum makers will be dinosaurs soon, and any day now, I expect Neil Peart of Rush to employ one of these during his 10-minute in-concert drum solos!  “KCT” is a fond remembrance of Walkenhorst’s morning paper route in rural north central Missouri in his younger days, and it’s the only Rock song I know of that mentions baseball’s Campy Campaneris (let alone singer Marilyn Maye) in its lyrics.  Bob also sprinkled in a few humorous stories from that period of his life in his neck of the woods between songs, which the audience who didn't know the band's music seemed to enjoy more than songs themselves.

The band also threw in a couple songs I heretofore hadn’t heard them play live, including “The Other Side Of The World” from the second album Tornado and “Johnny Reb” from their third LP The Good News And The Bad News.  This kinda almost made up for the omission of my two faves, “Reckoning Day” and “Tornado Of Love”.  However, they did perform another favorite of mine, a very funky version of “The Wages Of Sin”, which I was really surprised to hear that night in front of this predominately conservative (and probably) Christian audience.  Walkenhorst did alter a few lyrics to the song (half-jokingly), changing “hell” to “heck” and “son-of-a-bitch” to “son-of-a gun” (shades of Charlie Daniels vis-à-vis “The Devil Went Down To Georgia”) to suit the crowd, but I have no doubt they just loved the line regarding Mary Magdalene: “Your boyfriend’s dead…the word is you’re a whore,” assuming they could make out what he was singing anyway.  Then again, the atheist in me is quite partial to the lyric “If heaven is guilt, no sex and no show, then I’m not sure I that really wanna go…”

By the way, a note to all those people on the ‘Net and especially Facebook who keep hatin’ on new guitarist Jeff Porter—you’re all full of shit!  Yes, I miss Steve Phillips and his distinctive slide work too, but JP doesn’t suck, and Phillips is off doing other things now.  For some reason, these people think Steve is a sacred cow and Porter has to be another Stevie Ray Vaughan in replacing him.  Porter’s style isn’t any better or worse than Phillips’—it’s just different, that’s all.  Get over it.

Since “Drinkin’ On The Job” missed the set list this time, we didn’t get the usual Golden Oldies that The Rainmakers usually throw in with it medley-style (like Chuck Berry’s “Memphis”, Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”, etc.), although BW had a little fun between songs showing off some old-school dance moves like The Swim while “channeling his inner-Davy Jones” in an ersatz tribute to the recently departed.  The show wrapped up with a rather flat rendition of the band’s most famous song, “Let My People Go-Go”—for some reason, Porter and bassist Rich Ruth sang the backing vocals in a way-lower key than they should have—but they made up for that by closing out the night in the encore with their classic “Big Fat Blonde”.  I can only imagine how the lyrics to that one gave the old duffers in the crowd a few skidmarks in their drawers…

Rumor has it the band is doing yet another KC area gig in another couple months. I’m all in.

SET LIST:  Snakedance/Downstream/Long Gone Long/Given Time/My Own Bed/The Wages Of Sin/Missouri Girl/Information/Kansas City Times/Small Circles/Lakeview Man/Shiny Shiny [intermission] One More Summer/These Hills/The Other Side Of The World/Nobody Knows/Government Cheese/Spend It On Love/Rockin’ At The T-Dance/Width Of A Line/Hoo-Dee-Hoo/Let My People Go-Go  ENCORES:  Johnny Reb/Turpentine/Big Fat Blonde