VHS REWIND

 

I still own a working VCR. True, my intrepid old Proscan hasn't had much work to do the past few years (or past couple of decades), but it remains functional. I've kept it hooked up to my TV, just in case I ever want to play an old tape, or copy an old tape to DVD-R.  Neither prospect occurs all that often. Nonetheless, my VCR stands poised, ready to answer the call if needed.

The VCR isn't the only piece of outdated tech I own, of course. I have an eight-track player (stored in the garage), a cassette player (connected to the stereo, very rarely used), an 8mm camcorder (retained for the library of home videos of my daughter when she was little), and a mini disc deck and a few portable MD players (the portables plopped in a desk drawer, but the deck an integral part of my stereo, and in frequent use for prepping tracks for the radio show until the pandemic changed all of that). I guess the CD and DVD players are now considered antiquated (as the turntable was considered passé for a very long time); it's true that I'm now more likely to play CDs on my computer (via an external drive) and DVDs in my blu-ray player, but CDs and DVDs (and blu-ray) are themselves still current tech to me.

It's funny that I seem to have a slightly more nostalgic attachment to VCRs than I have to cassettes, even though cassettes played a much, much larger role in my life. But I have no specific current interest in the act of listening to cassettes.  In contrast, I had a random notion about a month ago of pulling out some old VHS tapes, just to see if the Proscan could still play them.

That said, I didn't pursue the notion until my wife did some housecleaning and uncovered some old tapes made at her preschool job in the late '80s, when she was a new teacher there. She was curious to see the tapes. 

My intrepid Proscan to the rescue!

I discovered that I'd discarded the VCR's remote control somewhere along the way. We operated the player manually for that night's viewing, and I bought a new universal remote the next day.

Now, finally set to follow through with my original whim to watch some old VHS tapes, I pulled out a couple of homemade rock video compilations I slapped together...well, a very long time ago. These tapes consist of individual videos I recorded off cable, primarily from MTV, and then dubbed onto a fresh tape. Video quality? Not my primary concern. I just wanted to preserve some stuff for my viewing, minus the extraneous distractions of other videos that didn't interest me.

So far, I've watched two of these tapes, neither in its entirety, just fast-forwarding (thanks to my new remote) and checking out the contents. The tapes include a home video of me lip-syncing and guitar-miming to my karaoke performance of "Johnny B. Goode," the Monkees explaining the rules for tabulating results of voting on The American Music Awards, and various artifacts from MTV, Late Night With David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, Nashville Now, and The Pat Sajak Show. 

Who's on these tapes? Well! We have the Ramones, Ben E. King, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with Axl Rose, Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers (an American Music Awards clip that includes an audience shot of a visibly bored and/or annoyed Whitney Houston), the Long Ryders, the Moody Blues, the Buddy System (great, forgotten MTV Basement Tapes winner "Go Back To Hollywood"), Iggy Pop, Dumptruck, the Easybeats, Marshall Crenshaw, the Turtles, John Lennon, the Beatles, Deep Purple, Chubby Checker, Felix Cavaliere (frolicking with the cast of St. Elsewhere while lip-syncing his hit recording [with the Young Rascals] of "Good Lovin'"), Bruce Springsteen, Dave Edmunds, Don Dixon, Too Much Joy, Soul Asylum, the Bangles, Johnny Rivers, the Cynics, Syd Straw, the Way Moves, Dion, Hindu Love Gods, the Smithereens, Indigo Girls, Roachford, Living Colour, R.E.M., Toni Basil, Lou Reed and John Cale, XTC, Lilac Time, the Darling Buds, the Georgia Satellites, Graham Parker, Lords of the New Church, Midnight Oil, and Tommy James and the Shondells, among others. 

Oh, and one of the tapes opens with the Monkees' "Christmas Medley" from 1986, reuniting Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, and Peter Tork with their erstwhile prime mate Michael Nesmith. 

SPOILER ALERT: Father Christmas secretly wears a wool hat!

Yeah, I could have probably found most or all of this stuff on YouTube, sure. But it was a more satisfying experience in the moment to dive into these videos I slapped together for myself those decades ago. I think I'll watch a few more of these. I may even delve deeper into my VHS archives, and investigate further. All thanks to my intrepid Proscan. Time to rewind. You rock, dear old Proscan. You rock.

(And, back in '88, I rocked, too. I have video to prove it.)

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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.

I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl

POP-A-LOOZA: MTV's Remote Control

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares a post from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) library. This week's shared post is my look back at MTV's game show Remote Control, and the time I attempted to be a contestant on the show.

I like game shows. I don't like all of them, but Jeopardy! would be on the short list of candidates for my all-time favorite TV show of any kind, right there with The Good Place, The Monkees, Batman, Shindig!, et al. Before writing the above-linked piece about Remote Control, I wrote about trying out for Jeopardy! in the '80s. Trying and failing, sure, but, y'know...trying. I still take the Jeopardy! online test every year, and it remains amazing how much better I do when I'm shouting at the TV from my couch versus when I'm taking an actual test. I wish stuff like this could be decided by an essay question.  And I wish there were more comic book and power pop questions, fercryinoutloud.



As a faithful fan of Jeopardy! and rock 'n' roll music, I thrilled when Jackie Fuchs (aka former Runaways bassist Jackie Fox) made a run on Jeopardy! in late 2018. I made two notes of her stint on Jeopardy!: first to accompany the playlist for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio # 954, and again in a separate post recalling The Runaways. 




Getting away from just game shows, I've written about TV many times here, even about some shows that weren't Batman or The Monkees. There was a general appreciation of TV shows I've loved, short essays about superheroes on TV and rock 'n' roll music on TV, and pieces about The Green Hornet, Veronica Mars, Nancy Drew, and The Powerpuff Girls, among others.






But today, it's all about the game shows. Specifically, it's about that time I tried to be part of a game show on MTV. REMOTE CONTROL! Time for this week's Boppin' Pop-A-Looza: MTV's Remote Control.



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You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

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

Hey, Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 124 essays about 124 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).

10 SONGS: 1/28/2020

10 Songs is a weekly list of ten songs that happen to be on my mind at the moment. Given my intention to usually write these on Mondays, the lists are often dominated by songs played on the previous night's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl. The idea was inspired by Don Valentine of the essential blog I Don't Hear A Single.



This week's edition of 10 Songs draws exclusively from the playlist for This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio # 1010.

THE ANIMALS: It's My Life


I became a big fan of The Animals about 10-11 years after the fact, when my mid-'70s embrace of all things British Invasion made me the only teenager in North Syracuse who preferred The Dave Clark Five to Led Zeppelin. I loved "House Of The Rising Sun" and "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place," but "It's My Life" was the one that always struck me as something extra special. This track is perfect; I remember listening to it intently a few years later, as a college student alone in my dorm room, playing my unfashionable rockin' pop music amidst the white noise of Southern rock and Grateful Dead that my peers chose as their soundtrack. I was out of step with the times. I didn't care, and I still don't. It's my life.

THE BAY CITY ROLLERS: Who'll Be My Keeper



Technically this is by "The Rollers," the group's name truncated for the release of 1979's Elevator album in a doomed bid for acceptance beyond its vanishing teenybopper base. But the CD reissues of three albums (Elevator, Voxx, and Ricochet) originally credited to the just-plain Rollers restored the "Bay City" billing, so we'll go with that. This is a fantastic track, with Duncan Faure's Lennonesque vocals soaring above a chuggin', rockin' Rollers sound that deserved the wider audience it was denied. All three of those albums are well worth checking out (if you can find them), and I'm all for reissues of the two other Rollers albums, the cassette-only Burning Rubber soundtrack, and the...well, awful synth mistake Breakout. I'm an unapologetic fan of a lot of The Bay City Rollers' hit-era material, especially "Rock And Roll Love Letter" and "Wouldn't You Like It," and I even wanted to write a Bay City Rollers movie when I was a teen.  But I tell ya, I betcha Elevator, Voxx, and Ricochet would have garnered more appreciation in power pop circles if not for the unwarranted stigma of The Bay City Rollers' Tartan-clad teen-idol image.

ROSANNE CASH: Pink Bedroom



Rosanne Cash's album Rhythm & Romance got a lot of in-store play when I was workin' for a downtown Buffalo record retailer in the spring and summer of '85. I was 25 years old, married, holding down that full-time record-store job plus a part-time position as a burger-flipper under the Golden Arches, and finally starting to make a few freelance writing sales (a tale I've already told elsewhere). In this time frame, Cash's magnificent and definitive take of John Hiatt's "Pink Bedroom" was as much a joyous part of my everyday sonic milieu as The Del Fuegos, The Ramones, Prince, and Katrina & the Waves. The Neil Diamond vibe of the song immediately put me in mind of The Monkees, and made me dream the impossible dream of a Monkees reunion. Sure, The Monkees (three-quarters of them, anyway) did reunite a year later, but they never got around to recording any John Hiatt songs. They should have.

ANNY CELSI: Sideways Rain



I first heard the music of Anny Celsi in 2003, when her album Little Black Dress & Other Stories was released. A copy of that CD found its way to Dana, and he played the track "Empty Hangers" on TIRnRR; for me, it was love at first spin. Anny's been a TIRnRR Fave Rave ever since, and "Empty Hangers" has secured a permanent berth on my all-time Hot 100. "Sideways Rain" is a previously-unreleased track that appeared on Anny's 2019 best-of LP Kaleidoscope Heart--12 Golden Greats, and my God, it rivals the seemingly nonpareil greatness of "Empty Hangers." Love at first spin? That love endures.

THE CLICK BEETLES: If Not Now Then When



The Click Beetles' Dan Pavelich has been a friend of TIRnRR for many years, and his new pop culture blog Pop-A-Looza carries a weekly dose of Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do). Huzzah! "If Not Now Then When" is my top pick among the many fine tracks that Dan has done over the years, and we were delighted to hear it as part of the 2019 compilation Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio. Now, it's poised to enter Click Beetles canon on the group's forthcoming new album Pop Fossil. Please budget your CD-buyin' plans accordingly.

THE ISLEY BROTHERS: You Walk Your Way



This 1975 Isley Brothers B-side of "For The Love Of You [Part 1 & 2]" should have been an A-side. I didn't even realize it had gotten a single release at all; I thought it was just an album track on the group's 3 + 3 LP, the album that also contains their transcendent version of Seals & Crofts' "Summer Breeze" and their own timeless hit "Who's That Lady." The sad sway of "You Walk Your Way" presents a heartbreaking tale of paths diverging at love's end, a soulful shrug as former partners go their separate ways. 

CAROLYNE MAS: In The Rain



Gotta credit singer/songwriter/aficionado Dean Landew for pointing us in the direction of this fine track, which made its first (and thus far only) appearance on the 2003 Carloyne Mas retrospective Beyond Mercury. Prior to that, my go-to Carolyne Mas track was the fabulous, driving "Quote Goodbye Quote" from 1979, but I think I dig the beguiling pleasure of "In The Rain" just as much. Her Carolyne Mas, Hold On, and Modern Dreams albums are scheduled for CD reissue in February; alas, Beyond Mercury is now out of print, but one hopes "In The Rain" will regain its rightful place at retail...somewhere!

MIDNIGHT OIL: The Dead Heart



After graduating from college and moving into an apartment in 1980, I didn't have cable TV until the late '80s. I saw MTV on occasional visits back home to North Syracuse, and in 1986 my upstairs neighbor Cheryl let me watch MTV's afternoon reruns of The Monkees every now and again. I finally did get cable at the end of '86, right before I moved out of Buffalo and back to Syracuse in the spring of 1987. I got cable for my new Syracuse apartment immediately, and again when I bought a house in 1989. I've had MTV ever since.

I don't watch it anymore, of course, but I do have it. 

Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" was a huge MTV hit in '87, but I was more taken with their subsequent vid-hits "The Dead Heart" and "Dreamworld." All three of those cuts came from the group's Diesel And Dust album, which I dutifully purchased some time in the late '80s. 

THE RARE BREED: Beg, Borrow And Steal



I've told the strange saga of "Beg, Borrow And Steal" as a chapter in my forthcoming book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). Released versions of the song credited variously to The Rare Breed and The Ohio Express are both the exact same master, with only a little remixing to differentiate the Breed from the Express. Released by the Attack Records label in 1966, The Rare Breed's original single of "Beg, Borrow And Steal" missed the Hot 100, so its producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz turned around and re-sold it to Neil Bogart at Cameo Records, where it became the first chart hit for The Ohio Express. Again, same record as The Rare Breed's release, just with its mix tweaked and its credit altered.

The Cameo Records catalog came into the possession of Allen Klein, who had a reputation as being something of a schmuck. In the '90s, when labels like Rhino and Varese Sarabande wanted to include "Beg, Borrow And Steal" on '60s compilations, they bypassed the notoriously hardassed Klein, licensed the track directly from Kasenetz and Katz, and credited it to The Rare Breed. BUT! Both labels used the punchier Ohio Express mix rather than the original, comparatively tentative-sounding Rare Breed mix. Call it a shell game or call it musical chairs, but what we know as a Rare Breed track on CD reissues is really an Ohio Express track in disguise. The intrigue! The drama! The...all right, the fact that few beside me care about this at all. Listen: get your own blog. 

Anyway. To my knowledge, only two CD reissues of "Beg, Borrow And Steal" correctly match the mix used with the artist named on the package. Real Gone Music reissued the debut Ohio Express album as Beg, Borrow And Steal: The Complete Cameo Recordings, which I believe is the sole authorized reissue of "Beg, Borrow And Steal" by The Ohio Express. The budget label Collectables issued a Rare Breed compilation called The Super K Kollection, which I think--I think--is the only place you can hear the Rare Breed mix of "Beg, Borrow And Steal" outside of a vintage 45. We played the version from The Super K Kollection on this week's TIRnRR: the first time we've ever played "Beg, Borrow And Steal" by The Rare Breed...even though we've already been playing "Beg, Borrow And Steal" by The Rare Breed for decades. 

That was complicated. I need a drink.

RONNIE SPECTOR & THE E STREET BAND: Say Goodbye To Hollywood



Billy Joel wrote "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" as a tribute to Phil Spector's wall-of-sound production, and specifically to Spector's work with The Ronettes. Presuming Joel is the die-hard music fan I'm sure he is, I can't even imagine how thrilled he must have been when Ronettes lead singer Ronnie Spector covered "Say Goodbye To Hollywood" in 1977. It's like if The Beatles had covered The Knickerbockers' "Lies," or Creedence Clearwater Revival had covered The Hollies' "Long Cool Woman In A Black Dress." GO, Billy! I used to think that the E Street Band's backing on this record slathered things on a little too thick for my taste, but I've come to embrace that over-the-top kitchen-sink approach as absolutely appropriate for the task at hand. The wall of lawsuits Bruce Springsteen had to navigate between Born To Run and Darkness Of The Edge Of Town prevented his name from appearing on Spector's record, but he's sure the boss of all he surveys here. Ronnie Spector's voice conveys frailty and strength in paradoxically equal measure, and there are days when I believe this is even greater than The Ronettes' "Be My Baby." 

TIP THE BLOGGER: CC's Tip Jar!

You can support this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon: Fund me, baby! 

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

Hey, Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) will contain 100 essays (and then some) about 100 tracks, plus two bonus instrumentals, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).

GAME SHOWS, Part 2: MTV's Remote Control

This was originally distributed privately to paid patrons of Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) on February 9th, 2018. You can become a paid patron for just $2 a month.



I no longer want my MTV.

I didn't have MTV in the early '80s. When I graduated college and moved into my first apartment in 1980, I couldn't afford cable, and didn't even own a working TV for a year or so somewhere in the early part of that time frame. But I saw MTV when I visited my parents in Syracuse, and I was in favor of the concept. All rock videos all the time? Yeah! Sure, I wished there was greater (or, y'know, some) representation of The Ramones or British Invasion or The Monkees instead of so much Billy Squier and Pat Benatar, but I would nonetheless watch MTV into the wee hours on the rare opportunities I had to do so.

Plus Martha Quinn was just as cute as a button, man.



I missed a chance to see my Syracuse pop heroes Screen Test compete on MTV's Basement Tapes in 1983; my fiancée Brenda and I wandered from bar to bar in our Buffalo neighborhood, trying to find a drinking (or any) establishment willing to let us watch a half-hour's worth of MTV, but to no avail. In 1986, MTV started playing reruns of The Monkees. That was, in a way, the network's first step away from its original raison d'être, although The Monkees' romps were at least still music-related. No MTV for me yet, but my upstairs neighbor Cheryl invited me to join her for occasional Monkees viewings, so I got my random Micky-Davy-Peter-Michael fix that way. By the the time I could finally budget cable into my monthly expenditures in late '86, The Monkees were nearing the end of their MTV honeymoon; an unpleasant divorce from the network followed in 1987, as The Monkees were banished from MTV and relegated to the kids' network Nicklolodeon instead.



With or without The Monkees, though: I wanted my MTV.

It took a long time for MTV to evolve (if that's the word) from music programming. Most would trace the beginning of that path away from music videos to the 1992 debut of the reality series The Real World, and run through subsequent programs like Beavis And Butthead and the current plethora of trash-TV that's as palatable to me as Kryptonite is to Kal-El. But I have to admit that MTV's very first venture into non-music programming was, in fact, a show I enjoyed quite a bit. It was a game show called MTV's Remote Control, which debuted in December of 1987. Somewhere around 1989 or '90, I tried to become a contestant on Remote Control.



Do you remember Remote Control? I tell ya, the show was kind of a hoot, a too-cool-for-school game show that didn't allow its own self-awareness to succumb to detachment or to (hardly) ever get in the way of its sense of goofy fun. Its high-concept foundation was that host Ken Ober had always wanted to be a TV game show host when he was (theoretically) growing up. Now, he'd made his dream come true by setting up his own game show in the basement of his parents' house at 72 Whooping Cough Lane. Let hijinks ensue! The show's theme song laid it out:

Kenny wasn't like the other kids
REMOTE CONTROL!
TV mattered, nothing else did
REMOTE CONTROL!
Girls said yes, but he said no
REMOTE CONTROL!
Now he's got his own game show
REMOTE CONTROL!

With images from classic game shows--George Fenneman and Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life, the logo from Truth Or Consequences, Monty Hall on Let's Make A Deal--flickering on a TV screen as Ken grows from boy to man, the intro gives way to the show's announcer, comic Colin Quinn:

And now it's his basement, it's his rules, it's his game show. The quizmaster of 72 Whooping Cough Lane, KEN OBER!

Ober was a stand-up comic, so Remote Control's vibe was willfully snarky. Three young contestants were strapped into La-Z-Boy chairs, given TV remotes, and directed to compete in TV trivia. Each channel on Ken's old Zenith offered a different TV trivia category. Six Feet Under. Celebrity Flesh. Babes And Assassins. Private Dicks. Brady Physics. Dead Or Canadian. Ober asked the questions, and his on-screen comrades--Quinn, musician Steve Treccase, and a hostess (originally Marisol Massey)--participated when appropriate. Channels such as Shakespeare TV required Colin Quinn to ask the question in the form of a comic performance; similar channels called for recurring characters played by Adam Sandler, Denis Leary, and John Ten Eyck. After the first two rounds, the contestant with the lowest score was eliminated, with his/her recliner physically ejected from the set, the luckless player still strapped to it.





Goofy. And fun. I wanted to be a part of this!

I've been trying to remember precisely when I auditioned for Remote Control. I was just this side of too-old to compete; the show's rules said all contestants had to be under 30, or maybe under 31. If the latter, my try-out was in 1990, some time after my thirtieth birthday. It's a young man's (or woman's) game, sure. But I was gonna try my hand nonetheless. I spied a notice that an open audition would take place on campus at Syracuse University. I arranged for a day off from work, and I was there. REMOTE CONTROL!

Brenda had zero interest in appearing in a game show, but she accompanied me to offer moral support and for the experience itself. I wish I could remember exactly where on campus the audition took place. Both Brenda and I recall it as a lecture hall, though I don't think it was a particularly large room. Upon arrival, we were informed that there could be no guests, that only potential contestants would be allowed entry. Brenda shrugged and agreed to try out.


There was, I'm sure, some disappointment among the assembled hopefuls that none of the show's on-air talent was present at the audition. Orange Nation did not have the chance to welcome Ken Ober, Colin Quinn, or Steve Treccase to the 'Cuse. Nor did we get to see Kari Wuhrer, the pretty young actress who had replaced Marisol as Remote Control hostess. My pesky memory insists that the woman in charge that day was Shannon Fitzgerald, who would go on to become a pretty big-deal producer and executive; I can't find anything online to specifically connect Fitzgerald with Remote Control, so I can't state for the record that my pesky memory hasn't been drinking. But Fitzgerald's name sticks in my recollection, right or wrong.



(Kari Wuhrer, with whom much of the male portion of Remote Control's fanbase was duly smitten, left the show following its third season. Whenever my audition was, we did not yet know that Kari was gone, or if in fact she was gone at the time. Fitzgerald--and let's presume it was Shannon Fitzgerald runnin' the show at SU that day--made some kind of comment about Wuhrer, but I can't pinpoint the specifics in my mind.)

The auditions were held in three parts. The first part was a written test, a series of TV trivia questions, with no multiple choice. I wish I could remember some of the questions, but I do remember that they seemed easy enough. I aced the written. Brenda didn't, but no one was asked to leave. The folks in charge needed an audience for phase two: the live audition.

The live audition was crucial, a test to see if Shannon and company felt we were sufficiently bubbly and effervescent to appear on TV. No, not just TV--MTV!! I want my MTV! Can't just fold up like a dyin' Pac-Man here. You want a TV personality, an MTV personality? Awright. I could do that.

No, really. I could.

I can be shy in real life. I don't always know what to say, or how to act. But on stage, or in front of a microphone? Yeah, not a problem. Years later, I would often tell my daughter that you need never be afraid of an audience; the audience should be afraid of you. This mundane planet is one thing. Performing is quite another. Show business! With the few minutes before my name was called for my live audition, my mind worked out what I had to do.

Carl Cafarelli!

Hey, that's me! I strolled to the front of the little lecture hall, smiling and waiving at the assembled hopefuls. Yep, I was definitely the oldest guy there. I could work that. I was given, I think, two minutes to dazzle and impress. I wouldn't need that long. I don't remember exactly what I said, but here's a reasonable approximation:

Hey, how's everyone doin'? Good? My name's Carl Cafarelli, I'm from right here in Syracuse, NY, the town so nice they named it. A giggle from somewhere. Good. And I tell ya--this thing today is my LAST SHOT. Really! That's it, man. I'm 30 years old. I am just shy of bein' put out to pasture. MTV don't want no thirty-one-year olds. MTV looks at 31 like it's in dog years. "Jeez, this guy's like two hundred and ten years old? Can't we just get him some moss for his north side?" A couple more laughs. But I wanted to quit while I was ahead. I get it. It's a young person's world. I'll go coffin shopping tomorrow. I'm just glad I had this chance to see you all here. I wanted to close by singing, like, my all-time favorite TV show theme song, "The Batman Theme." Yeah! But I can't remember the words. Can you help me out?



Quietly but immediately, a few kids in the small crowd began to sing, Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na.... I whooped my own approval, That's it! More joined in, and the whole damned crowd was singing, Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na BATMAN! I pumped my fist in the air, That's it! Thanks! Thanks so much everyone! I walked back to my seat to the sound of applause. Like The Beatles before me, I had passed the audition.

The third and final part of the try-out was a practice game of Remote Control. The remaining hopefuls were divided into groups of three to compete with each other in abbreviated Remote Control contests. I had a buzz of confidence, anticipation...

...And that's where I crashed.

In that long-ago, prehistoric, low-tech world, back when future Vice President Al Gore was still workin' the kinks out of that Internet thing he'd invented, mock game shows in Syracuse University lecture halls didn't have a Remote Control set with La-Z-Boys and remote controls to play with. No, we had classroom desk-and-chair combos; if we wanted to be the first to try to answer a question, we were instructed to slap the tops of our desks to ring in (as it were) in the absence of actuals buzzers to use. Surely this ain't how Ken Jennings started!

It wouldn't have mattered anyway; at 30, I was the oldest guy in the game. Regardless of whether I was armed with a buzzer to buzz in or a hand to slap on a desk, my reflexes were already slower than those of my college-age competitors. When I couldn't slap fast enough to answer a Monkees question--A MONKEES QUESTION!--I knew I was toast. (Oh, for the record, the question was: "The Monkees gave good movie in this, their only feature film." The Monkees' Head is one of my favorite movies, and I'm still kicking myself for being too slow to answer that one.)

I swallowed my disappointment and went home with Brenda. It's a young person's game.

So I never got to be on MTV. I've never appeared on a game show, and I likely never will. I continued to watch MTV's Remote Control. Kari Wuhrer was replaced by Alicia Coppola, who was herself replaced by Susan Ashley. The show ran for a total of five seasons, and Al Gore's brainchild informs me there was also a syndicated version. The final original episode aired in late 1990 (calling into question the timeline I've detailed for my audition. Maybe I was only 29? Jeez, you'd think my reflexes woulda been faster at 29...!)




Colin Quinn went on to join the cast of Saturday Night Live, and so did Adam Sandler. Still, the only time I ever liked Sandler was...well, no, I didn't like him on Remote Control either, but his movie The Wedding Singer was surprisingly charming. Denis Leary also found fame, and Kari Wuhrer actually had a ton of acting roles, many of which called for her to remove her shirt. Alicia Coppola also has a long string of TV acting credits, but neither Marisol Massey nor Susan Ashley managed to score more than a handful of roles (at least according to IMdB). Ken Ober, the heart of MTV's Remote Control, had a few more hosting gigs (on MTV, USA, ESPN, and Comedy Central), some radio, and worked as a producer on the CBS sitcom The New Adventures Of Old Christine. Ober passed away in 2009. He was 52 years old.



MTV continued to show rock videos for much of the '90s. As time passed, it became clear that non-music programming was where the network's fortunes would lead. Today, our short attention spans have replaced the old MTV with videos we select and click on YouTube. There is no longer any need for the MTV we used to know.

There are a few episodes of MTV's Remote Control on YouTube. I watched a little bit of those the other day, curious to discover if Remote Control was as much fun as I remembered, or if it was an embarrassment given a false glow by mere nostalgia.

But it was fun. It was goofy, it was smirking, it was all kinds of things that should have been all kinds of wrong. It was...sweet? No, that's not quite it, nor was it really innocent. It was unassuming. It was comfortable. It was fun. That's enough to pass my audition.



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