This show is a departure from the usual recent garage rock and paychedelic releases because this episode is entirely made up of parodies done in character. The title of this episode is “These Go To 11” and that, of course, comes from the mock documentary This Is Spinal Tap, a parody heavy metal band. Some of the parodies in this episode are genre parodies, but most are parodies of artists doing unexpected covers.
Bruce Springstone – (Meet The) Flintstones – Bruce Springsteen sings the theme song of the Flintstones
Gary Panter & Jay Cotton – God Save The Queen – Alvin & The Chipmunks sing the Sex Pistols
Dylan Hears a Who – Green Eggs and Ham – Bob Dylan sings Dr. Suess
Mac Sabbath – Pair-a-Buns – Ronald McDonald and the McDonaldland characters sing Black Sabbath
Dread Zeppelin – Black Dog – Reggae Led Zeppelin sung by Elvis
The Beatnix – Stairway To Heaven – “Stairway to Heaven” as sung by Beatlemania-era Beatles
Peter Sellers – She Loves You – Dr. Strangelove sings the Beatles
Beatallica – Ktulu (He’s So Heavy) – Metallica sings the Beatles
The Zombeatles – Brain – Zombies sing the Beatles
The Rutles – Cheese and Onions – A Rutles song so close to the Beatles that it was credited to the Beatles on a bootleg
The Barron Knights – Call Up The Groups – The Barron Knights Parody the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Searchers, Freddie and the Dreamers and the Dave Clark Five in 1964
Flight of the Conchords – Bowie – The Flight of the Conchords pay homage to David Bowie
Richard Cheese – Another Brick in the Wall – Another Brick in the Wall done as a lounge song
MC Hawking – The Mighty Stephen Hawking – Stephen Hawking as a gangsta rapper
Okilly Dokilly – White Wine Spritzer – Death metal performed by (several) Ned Flanders
The Jimi Homeless Experience – Are You Homeless? – Jimi Hendrix advocates for the homeless
Spinal Tap – (Listen to the) Flower People – Spinal Tap as a 1960s folk rock band
Robin Williams – Elmer Fudd Sings Bruce Springsteen
When you bring up “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult, it doesn’t take long before someone interjects “More Cowbell!” because of the Saturday Night Live sketch. I’ll get to that a little later but first I want to look at a different aspect of this song: the demography of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”. The lyrics of the song include an estimate of 40,000 deaths per day.
40,000 men and women every day
(Like Romeo and Juliet)
40,000 men and women every day
(Redefine Happiness)
Another 40,000 coming every day
(We can be like they are)
So just how accurate is this estimate? The Census Bureau provides an estimated number of “vital events” (births and deaths) per day worldwide, and the current estimate is 156,676 deaths per day. They calculated this number by dividing the estimated population of the world, which is about 7.3 billion people, by the crude death rate, which is about 7.8 deaths per 1,000 population per year. But of course Blue Oyster Cult recorded “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” in 1976. Using the UNdata, the estimated crude death rate worldwide was 10.6 per 1,000 population from 1975 to 1980, and the population of the world stood at 4,160,185,010 in 1976. Using these numbers there were about 44.1 million deaths that year, or about 120,486 deaths per day. So 40,000 deaths per day wasn’t a particularly reliable estimate, but to be fair, it was at least within an order of magnitude, not to mention that “40,000 men and women every day” flows more smoothly than “120,486 men and women every day”.
By the way, just in case you think songwriter Buck Dharma might have been referring only to the United States, the estimated population of the United States in 1976 was 218,035,164 and the crude death rate for the United States was 8.6 per 1,000 population, which meant 1,875,102 deaths that year or about 5,137 deaths per day. Once again within an order of magnitude, but still way off.
Because of its references to Romeo and Juliet, it’s possible “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” addresses suicide, but the figure “40,000 men and women every day” isn’t even close to the daily number of suicides. According to the World Health Organization, there were 804,000 suicide deaths in 2012, or about 2,203 each day. That number would have been far lower in 1976 not only because the total population was so much less then but also because according to Wikipedia, the worldwide suicide rate has increased by 60 percent in the last 50 years. The suicide rate in 2012, which was the year the world’s population exceeded 7 billion, was about 11.5 per 100,000 population, so the suicide rate would have been something like 8 per 100,000 population in 1976. Using this rate with the 1976 world population (4.16 billion) means something like 333,000 people committed suicide that year, or about 910 people per day. That number is, of course, far below “40,000 men and women every day.”
A book of career advice called The Cowbell Principle: Career Advice On How To Get Your Dream Job And Make More Money got a “thumbs up” from Blue Oyster Cult guitarist Buck Dharma. The phrase has an entry not only in the Urban Dictionary but also in the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, defined as, “an extra quality that will make something or someone better”. Mississippi State set a record for most people playing cowbells simultaneously (5,748), and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have embraced the cowbell, encouraging their fans to, “Ring your cowbells when the following occurs: A Rays pitcher has two strikes against a batter. A Rays player reaches base or scores a run. Prompted by our RaysVision scoreboard.” Rules that are strictly enforced, apparently.
The cowbell sketch has had a definite impact on Blue Oyster Cult‘s career, as Eric Bloom explains in this interview:
The band members are fans of the cowbell sketch. Buck Dharma has made his own “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” Behind the Music parody on his internet reality show, The Dharmas at Home.
You can also download this and subsequent episodes from “The Funhouse” on Buck Dharma’s website.
This is an updated version of a piece I wrote for the old Turn Me On, Dead Man blog in 2010.
Outspoken stand-up comedian Bill Hicks was invited to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman on October 1, 1993. Though he had often felt constrained by the limited amount of time he had to work with in his appearances on David Letterman’s show, he typically used his strongest material for these segments. And Bill Hicks was particularly looking forward to this appearance, his first on David Letterman’s 11:30 show on CBS, which had only been on the air for just over a month. Just a few months earlier Bill Hicks had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and knew he had little time left.
Rather than wear his customary black attire, Bill Hicks chose “bright fall colors–‘an outfit bought just for the show and reflective of my bright and cheerful mood.'” He was happy with the way his segment had gone and left the studio feeling like it had been a success. Later in his hotel room, however, Bill Hicks received a call from producer Robert Morton telling him that the entire segment was going to be cut from the show.
Bill Hicks had appeared 11 times on David Letterman’s NBC show. Though Late Night with David Letterman had aired at 12:30, Bill Hicks had had his share of problems with the censor on that program. But this was different–his entire segment was cut from the show and Bill Hicks was understandably upset. His routine had been “approved and re-approved” by the segment producer, Mary Connelly. Robert Morton told Bill Hicks that the culprit was CBS Standards and Practices, and that Dave was furious about it. They had fought “tooth and nail” to keep Hicks’s segment in the show but to no avail. Hicks asked for a tape of his segment, but he never got one. He was so incensed that he wrote a 39-page letter to John Lahr of the New Yorker, including a detailed account of his routine as best he could remember it. Lahr’s article appeared in the New Yorker on November 1, 1993. Bill Hicks still wasn’t done talking about the unreasonableness of the situation, but he didn’t have much time left to make his case. He died on February 26th of the following year at the age of 32.
But the story doesn’t end there. On January 30, 2009–over 15 years later–David Letterman invited Bill Hicks’s mother, Mary Hicks, to appear on The Late Show to talk about her son’s life and work.
It’s interesting to speculate not only about why David Letterman did this, but also why he waited until 2009 to do it. I would point to two reasons. One reason Dave was willing to air Bill Hicks’s censored segment is that he had long since given up in the ratings war with Jay Leno.
The Late Show with David Letterman premiered on CBS on August 30, 1993–the end result of a rather messy, public battle over who would succeed Johnny Carson as host of the Tonight Show. David Letterman was bitterly disappointed when NBC selected Jay Leno as Johnny Carson’s permanent replacement. David Letterman left NBC and took the 11:30 time slot with CBS in direct competition to the Tonight Show.
A few features of the show had to be renamed in order to avoid intellectual property issues with NBC, but The Late Show with David Letterman was much like his old show on NBC. In same ways, however, David Letterman changed how he approached the show in order to broaden his appeal. He took to wearing tailored suits and monitored the content of the show more closely. Bill Hicks’s routine, with its references to Christians and the pro-life movement, hit too many hot buttons for David Letterman to allow it on the air.
For a couple of years Letterman’s new approach to the show worked, as his show’s ratings were consistently higher than those of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It wasn’t until Jay Leno’s interview with Hugh Grant (“What the hell were you thinking?”) that the ratings of the Tonight Show topped those of David Letterman’s show. Since that time Jay Leno has maintained his ratings dominance in late night programming.
In an interview with Rolling Stone quoted in Bill Carter’s book The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, when asked why the Tonight Show has consistently scored higher ratings than The Late Show, “The answer is me,” Dave said, “I just think that Jay has wider appeal than I do.” Bill Carter also provides further reasons why Jay Leno has consistently bested David Letterman in the ratings game. Quite simply, Jay Leno follows the ratings of all the late-night talk show hosts with great interest and he has tailored his show to suit popular tastes based on his study of the ratings. According to Bill Carter, none of the other late night talk show hosts even came close to Jay Leno’s level of interest in these numbers. Also, unlike Jay Leno, Letterman shows little interest in working with the network’s affiliates, Letterman rarely does remote segments anymore, and he has taken to only working four days a week–the Friday show has gone from being taped on Friday to Thursday to Monday so that Dave can have a relaxed long weekend.
Another (perhaps related) reason David Letterman chose to air Bill Hicks’s segment in 2009 is that it appears he is no longer so wary of expressing a political viewpoint. Johnny Carson had established the image of the talk show host as a genial, neutral presence. He certainly made reference to political events of the day, but he joked about them in a lighthearted way that caused few to take offense. Letterman’s humor was always more caustic than Carson’s, but much like Johnny Carson he shied away from making political statements to the point where his political leanings were anyone’s guess. David Letterman has shown greater willingness to tangle with political figures in recent years, however, particularly during the 2008 presidential campaign. Granted, his sarcastic jabs at John McCain arose in large part from McCain’s abrupt cancellation of his appearance on the Late Show in the midst of the financial crisis–only to be interviewed by Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News at the time we would have been taping his appearance on David Letterman. But it goes beyond that. In one of John McCain’s appearances on The Late Show, David Letterman made the observation, “It seems like everyone’s gone wacky in the Republican party.”
Perhaps this helped clear the way for David Letterman to revisit the censoring of Bill Hicks. In a sense, David Letterman gave Bill Hicks the last word, even though Bill Hicks had effectively given his “last word” in a statement he wrote just before his death.
I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961 in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always “awake,” I guess you’d say. Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place’
All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who’ve helped me. I’d read these words and off I went – dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words – Vision.
On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having “liver cancer that had spread from the pancreas.” One of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. “Why me!?” I would cry out, and “Why now!?”
Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions. That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness.
Amen
I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.
