Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some post from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do). The latest shared post is my reminiscence of watching rock 'n' roll on TV.
Yesterday's blog post about the TV series I've watched in their entirety mentioned that my all-time favorite TV shows are Jeopardy! and The Good Place. The Monkees and Batman would be right up there, and those two shows certainly had the most pervasive and prevailing on me over a span of decades.
And both are rock 'n' roll shows, at least to some degree. Batman was rock 'n' roll in spite of itself, a pop explosion created by people who had no intrinsic love of the rock or the roll. That dichotomy is explained in my Greatest Record Ever Made! chapter about "The Batman Theme." I've written elsewhere of how I discovered the show and the character, and my Batman's Degrees Of Separation series has occasionally linked the Caped Crusader to various rock 'n' rollers (as well as to other public figures, other fictional characters, and--of course!--to me). Those links are detailed here, here, here, and here.
On the other hand, The Monkees is and has always been a love letter to rock 'n' roll. Over the course of more than 35 years of putting my writing into the public eye, I believe I've written more about The Monkees than I've written about any other individual subject. Among the many, many Monkees pieces written for this blog, we can find my origin as a Monkees fan, my study of a Monkees song I knew from the TV show, some ideas about Batman meeting The Monkees, pieces reflecting the TV-to-real-life arcs of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" and "Porpoise Song (Theme From Head)," a review of the 3-LP compilation Monkeemania that's really about the experience of being a Monkees fan in the '70s and early '80s, my hypothetical speech inducting The Monkees into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, and the importance of seeing The Monkees in concert. Trust me: that's not even a serviceable partial list of stuff I've written about Micky, Davy, Peter, and Michael.
For additional links between TV and rockin' pop music, I refer you also to my Greatest Record Ever Made! piece about "The Transylvania Twist" (by Syracuse's local TV vampire Baron Daemon), and my introductions to The Isley Brothers and Suzi Quatro. As a bonus, we even have a fake This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio playlist devoted to rock 'n' roll on TV. Don't touch that dial.
So yeah, there's rock 'n' roll on my TV show. And that provides the subject for the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.
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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:
Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio: CD or download
I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl
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