July 8, 2011 |
FROM THE VAULT (SPRING SUMMER 2011)
Because its many tall buildings interfered with regular television reception through the air, New York City was the perfect market for cable TV, and in 1971 the mass wiring of Manhattan began. Federal Government regulators had decreed that cable companies granted charters that gave them virtual monopolies should provide “public access”in addition to commercial programming. Basically this mean that anyone in New York City could transmit programming over the cable system on one of three channels created for that purpose. Anybody could be a TV star.
In 1973 Anton Perich, a Croatian born photographer and artist who was a fixture at Max’s Kansas City, the famous artists hangout, created Anton Perich Presents, an anarchic public access soap opera that featured many of the personalities who haunted Max’s back room—including Taylor Mead, the Warhol superstar; Danny Fields, legendary editor and A & R man (he had signed Iggy Pop, PR’ed for the Doors, and later managed the Ramones); model Jerry Hall; and Susan Blonde, a nutty chick who worked for me selling ads at Interview magazine. It was the first underground television show, and the wildest thing ever on the tube anywhere. Cable wasn’t big yet and so audiences were small. But cable continued to spread.
In 1978 I was working for High Times Magazine as Editor-at-Large, a title I took ironically, because I had resigned there as editor-in-chief because I was afraid of surveillance. I didn’t work in the office. At High Times I met a left-wing marijuana enthusiast named Coca Crystal who had started a public access show of her own called “If I Can’t Dance You Can Keep Your Revoluton.” Coca had people from the Yipees (Youth International Party) on her show, the next generation of radical stoners after Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and people smoked joints on the air. Coca asked me to be a guest on her show and I agreed to go on. It was a wacky show and I had fun but didn’t think much of it. Until the next day when two separate strangers stopped me on the subway and told me they had seen me on TV. I heard from more people for the next few days and I realized that people were actually watching cable TV and the total amateurs it enabled.
You have to consider that while today cable offers literally hundreds of programming choices, back then cable in Manhattan offered only seven commercial broadcast channels, and three public access channels, meaning that there was a one in ten chance that channel surfers would hit on your channel and discover you…
I called my best friend, Chris Stein, the guitar player of Blondie whose hobby was smoking pot and watching TV and said, “Let’s start a TV show.” He agreed immediately. Chris was a very underrated wit and intellect and he wanted to do more than play guitar. I wanted him to be my sidekick, like Ed McMahon to Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. Chris also had the same sort of metaphysical anarchist political outlook as me.
A few years before I had a band of my own called Konelrad. It was named after the old Civil Defense radio network. In case of a nuclear attack, all American radio stations would broadcast on the frequencies 640 and 1240 so bombers from the Soviet Union couldn’t home in on particular stations. Konelrad was “the first socialist realist rock band.” We started out wearing black pajamas like the Viet Cong and we didn’t have songs about love, we had songs like “Industrial Accident,” and “Seize the Means of Production.”
“We’re gonna seize the means of production/with a little guitar and a lot of percussion…”
TV Party would take that kind of politics of absurdity to the next level. I had always thought that television was the real government, so the logical next step was “TV Party, the show that’s a cocktail party but could be a political party.” We aimed to do a show that was about television and hidden politics and what was going on in our downtown culture.
The basic concept was a sort of underground version of the Tonight Show. The Tonight Show had been the mainstay of American late night TV since 1954. It was started by Steve Allen, a semi-hipster comedian, and in 1957 it was taken over by Jack Paar, who developed it as a forum for brilliant conversation with a great cast of characters. Johnny Carson hosted the show for thirty years turning it into the most important show in America.
We were also influenced by the shows created by Hugh Hefner—Playboy Penthouse (1959-1961) and Playboy After Dark (1969-1970). Hef’s shows were really like cocktail parties on television. Wearing a tux and in a groovy modernist setting, Hef hosted great jazz musicians, including Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, movie stars and comics like Jack E. Leonard and Lennie Bruce. People smoked cigarettes (Hef smoked his pipe) and drank liquor and performed and chatted. But Hef wasn’t afraid of politics and he gave a forum to outsiders like Pete Seeger to express anti-establishment views. Hef’s shows were also the most racially integrated in the history of television.
On his first appearance Lenny Bruce said to Hef: “This is a kind of an interesting party. You know, I first figured it would be like, sort of a TV typical fake party. But it’s got a good party feeling to it, with some pretty chicks, which is a good composite.”
Hef made sure that there were plenty of chicks, including one on each of his arms. And I tried to emulate that swinging atmosphere, which is why I started on episode of TV party by kissing five girls, one after another, to the tune of Henry Mancini’s “Dreamsville.”
I was also influenced by my boss Andy Warhol—I had been the editor of Interview working closely with Andy and had recently rejoined the magazine covering the music scene in my column Glenn O’Brien’s BEAT. Through that column I met all sorts of musicians, and I would invite them to come on the show as guests.
The TV Party Orchestra was led by another Warhol employee, Walter “Doc” Steding. I called him Doc because Doc Severinson was the leader of the famed Tonight Show band, and Walter also had a sort of professorial bent. He worked at the Factory as a painting assistant to Andy and he was also a painter in his own right, and he and had opened for Blondie and the Ramones as a one man band, playing electric violin and a home made synthesizer belt. Walter was well educated in history and politics, and knew more about American history than most professors.
Walter had recently started his own bad, the Dragon People, and he brought in his drummer, Lenny Ferrari, and bass player Catherine Ruby to play on the show. Lenny also performed a magic act on the show regularly. Since the studio where we broadcast live didn’t allow drums, Lenny created a percussion set incorporating a music stand, a small cymbal, brushes and the New Yorker magazine. Chris Stein also usually played with the TV Party Orchestra, and musician friends like Robert Fripp, Tim Wright of DNA, John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards, and Ernie Brooks of the Modern Lovers, often sat in with the band. Other guest musicians included saxophonist Robert Palmer, Arthur Russell, Tav Falco, Alex Chilton, Arto Lindsay, and Jeffrey Lee Pierce of Gun Club.
We had our share of very famous guests. Nile Rog ers of Chic was a regular, and on one show he did a rap, performing Rapper’s Delight (which sampled his Good Times) in Flemish with a ventriloquist’s dummy. David Byrne was special guest star on the All American Show where he performed Tumblin’ Along With the Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds. Iggy Pop was an interview guest, as was James White and his girlfriend Anya Phillips. Mick Jones dropped by a few times, as did August Darnell, his brother Stony Browder of the Savannah Band, and Andy “Coati Mundi” Hernandez. Guest bands included Tuxedo Moon, the Screamers, Eliot Murphy, Panther Burns, DNA. We were never quite sure who would show up. Sometimes the audience was more glamorous than the guests who appeared on the show.
The show was more improvised than planned. If there was a theme that suggested a costume, like Primitive or Crusade or All America, phone calls would go out ahead of time, but usually we just met up at the Blarney Stone, an economical Irish bar across the street from the studio, and after we saw who showed up, we’d make a few plans.
Amos Poe, who had a pretty high profile as a downtown filmmaker, having made Blank Generation, the Foreigner, and Unmade Beds, was a good friend and usually he directed the show, which basically consisted of wearing a headset and talking to the camera people, then punching buttons mixing the three cameras together. Amos was often under the influence of one thing or another and he tended to play the mixing board as if it were a musical instrument. It was okay, we weren’t going for a professional look. The camera operators were usually Edo Bertoglio, the photographer who took pictures for my Interview column and who would direct Downtown 81, Fab Five Freddy, and Lisa Rosen, a fashion model and downtown “it girl”, who was smart as a whip and would join in on the coversation if she felt like it.
Jean-Michel Basquiat came on TV Party as a guest, shortly after we met, and he never left. By 1979 he was part of the crew, running the character generator—typing out words that basically doing graffiti on the screen.
TV Party’s politics was satirical but we had plenty of points to make. We pretended to be socialists becaue it was shocking. We had tapestries from China purchased from the communist bookstore featuring Marx, Engels, Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung. Later, for balance, we added portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Mussolini and the Marx Brothers to the set. We said that for us “Socialism means going out every night.”
When TV Party started Jimmy Carter was president, and the economy was in bad shape. In February 1979 the Iranian revolution occurred, with Ayatollah Khomeni ousting the Shah, in early November militants took over the United States Embassy in Iran, holding Americans hostage for 444 days. TV Party was against the Shah but we couldn’t get behind the Ayatollah who banned all Western music in 1979. We did a middle Eastern Special urging Iran to accept our music and called for the creation of a Funkatollah. That show featured a special edition of the TV Party orchestra with Tim Wright sitting in on bass and guitar and John Lurie on alto sax where we performed the song “Funkatollah.”
TV Party did admire, however, the radical style of Moammar Qadaffi. We didn’t agree with everything he did, but we liked his clothes, makeup and that he lived in a tent. He understood the relationship between government and show business—sort of a cross between Mao and Michael Jackson.
In April 1979 Carter was fishing when it was reported that a beserk rabbit swam to his boat and attempted to board, while the president repelled him with a paddle. Chris and I put together an expose of this famous incident by demonstrating with Debbie Harry how the rabbit was in fact a hypnotized attack rabbit attempting to assassinate Carter. Things got weirder when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
Walter Steding and I were recording a new TV Party theme song on March 30, 1981, the day Reagan was shot, sixty nine days into his presidency. It was hard to get the job done while praying for him to take a turn for the worse.
One of Andy Warhol’s most interesting qualities was his ability to be jealous of people who had far less than he did. Andy was jealous of TV Party and I’m sure we inspired him to start his own cable show, Andy Warhol’s TV. We may have even influence David Letterman because twice during his early years he declared on the air that TV Party was the greatest TV show ever. Apparently his producer Robert Morton never missed our show.
Today people say that TV Party was the first reality show. It don’t consider it a reality show—we were far too stoned. TV Party had some ambitions, and for the last few years we moved on up to Channel J, the commercial public access station where we could sell ads. Sometimes I managed to get enough sponsors to pay the hundred dollars or so that it cost to produce the show in color. But looking back TV Party really looked better in black and white, and by the time we were broadcast in color, some of us were starting to turn green or blue from our lifestyles.
Chris Stein got thinner and thinner and our shows became farther and farther apart as we went into reruns. I got married and started thinking about getting a job. I got a call from Joan Rivers who wanted me to write for her talk show, but the next week she got fired. I tried to get a job writing for Saturday Night Live but I don’t think the producer and I were on the same humour wavelength. We weren’t into skits, we didn’t pretend to be weird, we were. I can prove it. I got in on tape.
by Glenn O’Brien
