Category: Music (Page 15 of 35)

Movies, Musicals and Music, Oh My!

November 4, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

Cher, The Musical…Still in Progress

Recently Cher met with Tony Nominee Rick Elice to pen the book for her biographical musical. Read more about it at Broadway.com, Contact Music, Out.com, Yahoo!

Witches of Eastwick

Logo TV just did a series of shorts on Witches of Eastwick for Halloween. (Thank you Cher scholar Tyler!)

Cher Scholarship

If you loved volume 1, Tamara Lorenz Hampton’s book The Fabulous World of Cher Dolls Volume 2 is out just in time for Christmas.

Here's a great discography of Cher discovered by Cher scholar Dishy: http://www.45cat.com/artist/cher

Bob Mackie, Johnson Hartig Discuss Cher, Kim Kardashian at LACMA (Woman’s Wear Daily)

Here's some bad scholarship for you. Two weeks ago, I reported Cher had never been on X Factor. The scholarship gods had a laugh when I was walking on my treadmill and Cher's X Factor appearance from 2013 came up on YouTube. Who could forget that light show? Me apparently.

Because I work at a very cool place, the social media gurus at Central New Mexico Community College posted an alert about the time change this past Sunday with Cher's meme. Pulled through to our website, it looked something like this (see right).

Because I have Cher-radar, I can't help but notice it on there!

Turn Back Time: Don't forget to Cher with your friends. It's a daylight savings time tradition now.

Thanks CNM!

Cher and Trump, an MMA Fighter, the Super Bowl, and Who is this Cher Person?

October 8, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I recently updated my friend at work about Cher’s history of feuds with Donald Trump. Here are the links I used:

– http://www.buzzfeed.com/olgalexell/15-times-cher-gave-donald-trump-something-to-cry-a-1eadi

– http://perezhilton.com/2012-11-14-donald-trump-and-cher-twitter-feud#.Vfnswpc1Mg5 (from 2012)

This week Cher tweeted to free an MMA fighter from suspension:

Want Cher to headline the US NFL Super Bowl? Sign the petition:

Logo story: http://www.newnownext.com/petition-demands-cher-be-named-2016-super-bowl-halftime-performer/09/2015/
Actual petition: https://www.change.org/p/national-football-league-nfl-cher-to-headline-2016-superbowl

Someone on earth who doesn’t know who Cher is: http://www.kdramastars.com/articles/99760/20151005/cher-last-name.htm

Scene-stealing Stars from Sitcoms: http://www.eonline.com/news/696599/cher-victoria-beckham-brad-pitt-are-among-the-top-9-sitcom-guest-stars-relive-their-scene-stealing-episodes

Cher and Madonna, Kate Hudson, Bang Bang

September 16, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

The blog Cher News came back with some tidbits in August:

– David Shelley, one of Cher’s guitarists passed away. The story has pics of Cher singing with him.
– A good compilation post of anthemic Cher mixes (listen at work!)

In the news…

It seems Kate Hudson has come out saying she's been inspired by Cher. I don't really see it but…

My friend Christopher sent me this clip, Buddha Bar’s chill-out version of “Bang Bang.”

Cher tweeted about people comparing her to Madonna. Here are some concepts for scholarship so you can do your own comparison (play the fun home game version!):

Amount of reinventions over how long a period of time
Likeability, relatability
Types of personality qualifications (TV, film, music, stage)
Video presence versus variety show presence
Voice conventions
Beauty conventions
Acting reviews
Intellectual/cultural point of view, something to say
Types of Billboard success
As gay icon

Cher in John Lennon’s Rock and Roll

September 2, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

In the outtakes of The Wrecking Crew DVD Mike Lang talks about the John Lennon Rock ‘n’ Roll album with Phil Spector and how Harry Nilsson came in wanting to do a duet with Lennon.

These sessions were famous because (a) Phil Spector reportedly held a gun on John Lennon and (b) this was during John Lennon’s infamous lost weekend, the year he spent estranged from Yoko Ono, the year of drinking and carousing with May Pang.

Apparently, during the Nilsson/Lennon duet, Cher arrived and did some backup. Mike Lang joked that they were like a strange Peter, Paul and Mary singing together. Then at some point during the duet Yoko Ono calls on the phone and upsets John Lennon and he leaves abruptly. Since all the musicians were there and the time was booked, Spector decided to go ahead and produce a duet between Cher and Harry Nilsson, (an artist not known for his many collaborations with women), covering the Martha and the Vandellas song, “A Love Like Yours Don’t Come Knockin Everyday.”

Here’s some online historical mentions of the happening:

In 1974, John Lennon was in a bad way. After he lost a copyright lawsuit to Chuck Berry, as compensation he was forced to record a few songs from Berry’s publisher’s songbook. Using this situation as an opportunity to create a rock classics album, he recruited the legendary producer Phil Spector and traveled to L.A. to record what would become 1975’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. During the sessions, Nilsson started hanging around the studio. Spector brandished a gun in the studio one night, Lennon began his descent into a sloshed hellscape, and Nilsson got to share a vocal booth with Cher (who chipped in on backup).

http://grantland.com/features/the-legacy-harry-nilsson/

As they progressed, the sessions quickly attracted a number of celebrities to the studio, among them Warren Beatty, Cher and Joni Mitchell. Lennon and Spector often fought, and the project was moved to Record Plant West after Spector let off a pistol one night at A&M Studios.

After three months a number of suitable takes were finally in the can, although Phil Spector's habit of taking the tapes away with him each night eventually led to disaster.

http://www.beatlesbible.com/people/john-lennon/albums/rock-n-roll/2/

May Pang’s words

Blogger: Was Harry Nilsson around at that time?

May Pang: Yeah, he came in for a visit. Joni Mitchell was recording in the other studio. When she found out that John was recording in the studio we were in, she was coming in all the time. She would bring in other people. One night it was Warren Beatty and David Geffen. Musicians were always coming through the door: Elton John, Cher. Then Phil would give his speech, “How dare you walk into my session.” I would have fights with Phil, because I wouldn’t take it from him. I was in my early 20s at the time, and I was really strong-headed with him. He couldn’t handle that. I was trying to keep John from all the crazy things that people were trying to drag him into, things he was not aware of.

http://articles.absoluteelsewhere.net/Articles/may_pang_rocknroll.html

The Cher influence on the outtake "Be My Baby"

In 1973 Spector produced a number of recordings for Lennon's Rock 'N' Roll album. Inspired by Cher's version of The Ronettes' Baby I Love You [CS: which Spector had just produced!], he slowed down Be My Baby and another of his hits, To Know Her Is To Love Her. Never one to underuse a recording technique, the trick was repeated on Sweet Little Sixteen, Bony Moronie, You Can't Catch Me and Since My Baby Left Me.

In the knowledge that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were separated at the time of Be My Baby's recording, the funereal pace and cathartic pleading transforms the song from being an account of teenage desire into a desperate plea for acceptance.

The decision not to include Be My Baby on Rock 'N' Roll remains puzzling. The song features some of Lennon's most impassioned vocals from the sessions, and stripped of the Wall of Sound backing it would not have sounded out of place on 1970's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

The song did appear on Roots: John Lennon Sings The Great Rock & Roll Hits, a rare mail-order album containing rough mixes of the sessions. The collection was released by music publisher Morris Levy and followed legal action over The Beatles song Come Together's similarity to Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me, a song owned by Levy. Roots was briefly available in January 1975 before EMI blocked its sale.

www.beatlesbible.com/people/john-lennon/songs/be-my-baby/

So, after the fights between Spector and Lennon over their resulting collaboration, Lennon did gain custody of the tracks but found many of them unusable. The resulting album only has a few Spectorish tracks. Some of the official song selections interestingly have been Cher staples for years: "Stand By Me," "Rip It Up," "Do You Wanna Dance," and "Bring It On Home To Me."

As for all the celebrity backup work done on the album, none of the songs use backups at all or just barely. "Do You Wanna Dance" maybe slightly. Little from the Spector sessions remain: "You Can't Catch Me," Sweet Little Sixteen," "Bony Moronie," and "Just Because." "Stand By Me" is not credited as a Spector song in the album notes but it sounds obviously wall-of-soundish to me. “You Can’t Catch Me” is the song that most addresses the lawsuit over the Chuck Berry song as it was excerpted into The Beatles’ song “Come Together.”

Lennon said the following about Rock 'n' Roll: "It started in '73 with Phil and fell apart. I ended up as part of mad, drunk scenes in Los Angeles and I finally finished it off on me own. And there was still problems with it up to the minute it came out. I can't begin to say, it's just barmy, there's a jinx on that album."

But Rolling Stone's Album Guide: wrote that "John lends dignity to these classics; his singing is tender, convincing, and fond." And AllMusic described the album "as a peak in [Lennon's] post-Imagine catalog: an album that catches him with nothing to prove and no need to try."

Listen to the Nilsson/Cher duet here courtesy of Dangerous Minds.

Other interesting tidbits surrounding the album:

Wikipedia album entry
John Lennon's Letter to Phil Spector (Rolling Stone Magazine)

LAX Fashion Shows, Mask, Wrecking Crew Outtakes, Chaz Productions

September 2, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Tweets

Here you can watch Perez Hilton dramatizing Cher tweets. Hmm…it already feels old before it got old. :-/

Outfits & Fashion

It's time for the latest Cher LAX outfit watch! See photo left where Cher is looking like a smooth and shady street corner pimp. (I do like the flowing pants and the whole pimp look, truth be told.)

Speaking of fashion and the career flack Cher always receives from critics (and I consider myself a hobbyist Cher critic), here's a good little blog post from marketing guru Seth Godin about how criticism is ultimately perishable.

Sooner or later, the ones who told you that this isn't the way it's done, the ones who found time to sneer, they will find someone else to hassle.

Sooner or later, they stop pointing out how much hubris you've got, how you're not entitled to make a new thing, how you will certainly come to regret your choices.

Sooner or later, your work speaks for itself.

Outlasting the critics feels like it will take a very long time, but you're more patient than they are.

Movies

Peter Bogdanovich is still talking about working with Cher in Mask. And you might ask yourself, who uses the word "druggie" anymore? Peter Bogdanovich, that's who!

I made that picture for Dorothy Stratten because she’d been murdered, and in the 10 months I knew her I found that she was very, very interested in The Elephant Man on Broadway. She went to see this production and she was very moved by it. After she was killed I figured it out: Dorothy identified with him because of her beauty — because her beauty was as much of a source of alienation as his ugliness. They came to me with this picture called Mask. I thought it was not a very good script but it surely was an interesting story because it was a true story. And then I remember how Dorothy felt about The Elephant Man and I thought, “Well, I’ll make it for her.” [We had] a list of actresses for the role of Rusty. Ellen Burstyn and Cloris [Leachman] and Jane Fonda — anybody with a name. About two-thirds of the way through the list, there’s Cher. I said, "That’s interesting. I can see her [playing] a druggie and riding a motorcycle, and I can’t see Jane Fonda doing it. She’s too sophisticated." Cher and I didn’t get along that well. She sort of irritated me, because she had such a negative attitude. But she’s very good in the picture. I don’t think I’ve ever shot more close-ups — she’s very good in close-ups and not that good in playing the whole scene through, because she loses the thread of it. So I shot it that way, and she should have won an Oscar.

Here are some outtake photos I found online with Cher and her director. These iconic Mask tableaus all look strange with Bogdanovich interrupting them all:

In the last one Cher seems to be giving him an"I don't respect you" look.

Music

Finally finished The Wrecking Crew DVD outtakes. Hand over forehead: It took days and days out of my life! Things to look for: Pianist Mike Lang talks about Cher during the John Lennon album sessions; there's a Phil Spector chapter with Cher talking about working with no breaks and how during the Spector Xmas album she didn’t go home for 6 weeks; there’s a S&C segment where Lyle Ritz talks about the scab labor used for the IGUB session and how they all got caught by the union and had to pay a fine but they finally got paid and it all turned out okay because they got like 100 more S&C sessions out of it; Don Peake talks about "The Beat Goes On" session and the dying of cancer joke that was told to Sonny who didn’t get it. (This story is also in the big Wrecking Crew commemorative book.)

There's also a Phil Spector Xmas album section where Cher talks again about the harsh working conditions, for example 15-16 hour days. Cher said she was 16 or 17 years old then and dying she was so tired so she didn't know how the old guys did it.

Frank Capp was the drummer on IGUB. Did we know that?

Snuff Garrett has a section. He says he didn’t know much about music or aesthetics and was basically a money maker. I know this is his thing to keep saying this but it just sounds disingenuous at the end of the day. I feel like it's become a way for him to cover for his choices, to not be accountable for his oeuvre.

Cher on Leon Russel was the best Cher outtake. She comments on Leon's normal unassuming personality and the one days he came into a Phil Spector session drunk. In a later clip, Leon himself says Cher tells the story accurately. After years of following Leon Russell as a respected, gritty solo artist, it was a kitschy thrill hearing him say “Cher.” You can say some of Cher's Narrative Period songs are hokey lyrically, but there were some interesting things going on musically in many of them. The music business is highly unpredictable hit-wise. There is truly no formula that has evolved to make pop songs assured phenomenons.

In other “I Got You Babe” 50^th anniversary news…

It’s similarly the 50^th anniversary of the St. Louis Arch, the "Poppin' Fresh" Pillsbury Doughboy, The Sound of Music, the Voting Rights Act, the Beatles playing their historic Shea Stadium concert in New York City, and my employer CNM, Central New Mexico Community College!

On August 14, Billboard Magazine officially commemorated IGUB: http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/6221458/rewinding-the-charts-fifty-years-ago-sonny-cher-got-to-no-1

And while researching Greil Marcus's commentary about Cher music a few months ago, I came across this Camille Paglia essay on one of his books about The Doors. The essay mentions a Cher story I hadn't heard before:

Oddly for a California writer, Marcus says little about the immense differences between the funky, fast-track Sunset Strip club scene from which the Doors emerged in Los Angeles and the utopian San Francisco milieu of hippie flower power. Furthermore, Marcus notes no parallels between the dark themes of the Doors and those of the Velvet Underground, whom Morrison in fact saw perform in Los Angeles while the Doors were working on their first album. (Cher, attending the same show, reportedly said of the Velvets’ music, “It will replace nothing, except maybe suicide.”)

Peripherals

Here is more coverage on Chaz’s new theatrical ventures including a website he launched for his production venture and August play:

Playbill review
StageScene LA Review with photos
Phoenix Fire Production's main page; the show cast and crew (which includes his sister Chesare);

Performance reviews have been good and the website looks great!

The 50 Year Mark, Jon Stewart, Sonny’s Park in DC, Chaz Play, Cher Art

August 13, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Music

Lots of people are talking about Cher’s 50th anniversary mark in the music industry this week. The lead article was this interview done for Billboard Magazine as her appearance on their chart (with Sonny) marks her entrée into the biz.

A few weeks ago I caught upon the cool blog Stargayzing when my Cher-friend Rick Hough sent me a link to the article he wrote on S&C first comeback, "The Sonny Bono Reinvention Act of 1971." It's well-written and has some great photos. In fact, Stargazing can keep you occupied for quite a few hours. There, I also found this amazingly awesome photo outtake of the Half Breed album cover by Gene Trindl. Read the post.

Speaking of Sonny…

Last week I found this story, "How DC Ended Up With a Park Dedicated to Sonny Bono." Apparently the park is controversial due to some people thinking anyone with money can buy and dedicate a park to someone. Hello! That's pretty much what anyone can do with private property. Am I missing something here?

I also found out yesterday that Chaz Bono is promoting his own production company and a play this weekend in LA. I miss LA for things like this!

Sweet Tweets

Cher expressed dismay at John Stewart leave-taking from The Daily Show. Stephen Colbert, David Letterman, Jon Stewart: I can’t take this much media change!!!

Cher Art, My Favorite Category!

I found another piece of "What would cher do" art on Stargazer last week and our good Cher friend, Cher scholar Cherokee99, posted some Cher art here.

Cher Scholar Michael also sent me this hilarious bit of funny.

Cher in St. Tropez, in LOVE Magazine, Harold Battiste

July 29, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I'm back from vacation. Back from a New Mexico family reunion (where there were 93 of us). Back from catching up on CNM projects. And there's so very much to catch up on. So much time has passed. Have we all changed?

Donald Trump has been busy making a mockery of a fiasco. Bobby Kristina is no longer with us. Oft-mentioned friend of Sonny Bono, Dick Van Patten, has passed on. There’s so much to cover, I’ll have to do take it in chunks. Today's chunk is a roundup of links regarding Cher appearances and music news.

Articles & Appearances

The rags have been busy proclaiming Cher's impending demise and her heavenly return to Sonny. That this tactic is even still in use tells us how much Sonny & Cher still maintain a hold on the national fantastical imagination.

Cher's cover of Love Magazine is out but it's hard to find. Cher scholar Dishy in New York City tells me her cover is even hard to find on newsstands in the city! I guess the problem is she shares the cover with other talents. And surprise, surprise! Her face is on the cover! (Click the photo to enlarge.)

Cher made a few trips recently and one magazine had all the dets!

Daily Mail said, "Can you Believe she's 69? Cher turns heads in skintight bodysuit and eclectic jacket as she departs from LAX." (Click the link for pics.)

Daily Mail also said in another piece that Cher could turn back time in hippy bell bottoms. (Click the link for pics.)

Then the Daily Mail posted pics of Cher walking barefoot in St. Tropez. And then even more pics of barefoot walking! (Click the links for pics.)

Then they posted more pics of Cher in see-through pants. (Click the link for pics.)

It's like they were stalking her or something.

If you'd like to see a roundup of all the people involved in the new Marc Jacobs fashion campaign, this site has it.

And here is another website that has taken on the task of reviewing Cher's most outrageous outfits! It's so subjective.

In Music News

Musician and arranger Harold Battiste has passed away in New Orleans. He received an obit in The New York Times. The article uses a photo of Battiste with Sonny & Cher (as their long-time arranger and musical director) to lead the story.

Giorgio Moroder Dishes On Producing Cher & Janet, Talks Gay-Bait Bathhouse Oblivion (Pride Source)

Someone has started a Facebook page to get Cher into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Cher World reports that Cher performed a private shew in Monaco. Some say this is proof she's starting back up to tour again. Here is some fan video to get you excited about this news.

In one odd story from Mediate, Mike Huckabee is shown dressed up like Cher to sing "I Got You Babe." I don't know what to say about this. I'm speechless.

Over my vacation, I was reading an email argument between some friends regarding the recent rape allegations against Runaway's producer Kim Fowley. One friend posted this NPR story about "the cruel truth about rock and roll" and how sexually predatory it is regarding young performers. It's truly sobering and something every fan of rock music should read. It makes you wonder what awful experiences Cher might have had as an almost-underage performer working in the 1960s.

Backgrounds of Cher

June 19, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I finally bit the bullet and purchased two autobiographies of the most prominent Wrecking Crew members, Hal Blaine and Tommy Tedesco:

Hal Blaine & The Wrecking Crew by Hal Blaine and David Goggin

Tommy Tedesco: Confessions of a Guitar Player by Tommy Tedesco

Tommy’s paperback book is out of print and price-prohibitive on Amazon. However, you can still get an eBook for $25, which is waaay too expensive for an eBook but I bought it anyway. The book is full (and I mean FULL) of typos. If you charge that much for a book an editor or proofreader should have been paid at some point. However, his haphazard recollections are still interesting and the big Italian Tedesco character comes through. “Whatever.” There’s only one Cher reference in the book, a line about Tedesco not realizing Sonny and Cher would be such huge superstars.

Hal Blaine’s book was better produced, better written and interesting as well but it was short and pretty sugar-coated. Well okay, it’s probably healthy to focus on the positive. Maybe it’s so short because they had to delete all the bitter parts. Anyway, he comes off much more cynical in The Wrecking Crew movie. There’s one line in the book about Sonny being Spector’s gopher in the 1960s and some gossip about how Cher was part of the celebrity and Wrecking Crew crowd who worked on the Phil Spector's album with Leonard Cohen. Did anyone else know about this???

This refers to the album The Death of a Ladies Man which came out in 1977 and was, like all Phil Spectorisms of the time, controversial. Joni Mitchell warned Leonard Cohen about working with Spector. The John Lennon gun-in-the-studio sessions had just happened. But Spector’s big personality lured Cohen into a short bromance and they ended up co-writing songs for an album at Spector's spook house. Trouble started in the studio where Cohen felt Spector took over the album creatively and continued his grand performance of intimidation by handing guns and bullying people in the studio. (Hal Blaine mentions none of this trouble and only lightly touches on Spector’s murder trial at the end of the latest edition of his book.) If Cher was indeed present for a track or two of this she must have witnessed some of the maniacal behavior.

Eventually, Spector hijacked the tapes themselves, before Cohen felt his vocals were complete even. Cohen has since said he felt he couldn’t take on the Spector “heavies.” Was everyone afraid of Spector’s heavies? Over the years Cohen has expressed various levels of dissatisfaction with the album. It was one of Cohen’s least successful albums critically and commercially, and hindsight has offered no argument to that. Rolling Stone Magazine called it a “doo-wop Nightmare” and said, “"Too much of the record sounds like the world's most flamboyant extrovert producing and arranging the world's most fatalist introvert."

Although both Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg are credited in the liner notes, Cher is not. I found a $5 copy and gave it a listen.

I have to agree with Wikipedia that the stripped-down style of Leonard Cohen jars when mashed up with the Wall of Sound noise, what Wikipedia calls “bombastic sprawl.” The lyrics are way below par for the exceptionally poetic Leonard Cohen. They’ve devolved to the creepy, girl-hating messages we’ve come to expect from Spector instead.

Like Spector’s mental state, the effect of the mess is unstable sonic blur. Which I just realized might be a good name for a band.

Add to that the fact that the vocals don’t even sound like Leonard Cohen or rather they sound like a sixties-ified version of him, a girl-group version of Cohen that is bizarre to listen to. The song “Iodine” sounds loud and screechy. “Paper Thin Hotel” sounds too precious despite its stalker-vibe. I wanted to get a restraining order after just hearing the song. Which brings us to the elephant in the room: the album sounds very dated for 1977. Spector was clearly stuck.

Interestingly, many of the sounds plod along in slow motion like the tracks Phil Spector did with Cher in the mid-1970s: “Baby, I Love You” and “A Woman’s Story”. Which reminds me to ask myself why in the hell I ever try to buy a Phil Spector-produced product attempting to hear Cher’s background vocals on it. I never freaking can! His backgrounds are always a big wall of crowd noise from which no personality could ever be extracted.

You can actually hear Bob Dylan (and maybe Allen Ginsberg) a bit in the backgrounds of “Don’t Go Home with a Hard-On” which is actually my favorite track on the album, the only track with some energy to it. The title song plods along for over nine minutes and the song seems to be the lovechild between the dirge of “A Woman’s Story” and Sonny’s opus of movements, “Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer, Papa Used to Write All His Songs.”

Cherrants, Dave Letterman Tributes and Cherbits

June 7, 2015 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

Social Mediums

Recently I also made an effort to check out Cher’s Facebook page. Reportedly she’s been posting more there and happy to have more room to speak her mind. But she doesn't post there as often as she does on Twitter and her tweets continue to make news on an almost weekly basis:

Cher on Obama and the ISIS war: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/27/cher-is-not-impressed-with-obama-s-isis-war.html

Cher being frustrated with the black hole that is Pinterest: http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a28569/cher-pinterest-twitter/

Pure Gossip

Cher is allegedly giving advice to Bruce Jenner and Kim Kardashian vis a vis transtioning.

Peripherals

Chaz Bono is still helping out on the West Hollywood election of Heidi: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3096389/Chaz-Bono-campaigns-help-former-bandmate-try-win-local-council-election.html

Old Boyfriends: Gene Simmons talks about the Cher/Diana Ross transition: http://www.guelphmercury.com/whatson-story/5653999-gene-simmons-fell-for-diana-ross-while-dating-cher/

Music

Autotune appreciation: http://wgno.com/2015/05/26/the-invention-that-changed-music-forever/

Television

David Letterman exists late night. This was cause for many trips down memory lane for the press, including many instances of Cher on the show.

The article describes the taking of the photograph above: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/photo-cher-peeping-dave-offered-laugh-article-1.2230110

More Cher/Dave reminisence: http://decider.com/2015/05/22/today-in-tv-history-cher-made-her-first-letterman-appearance-called-dave-an-asshole/

Okay so I was not prepared for my melodramatic sobs during the final episode. For the past 20 years I’ve only watched the show if Cher was on it. I stopped watching back in the NBC days. But the exit of Letterman affected me very emotionally for many reasons, none of which have anything to do with Cher.

It was time for Letterman to retire. Just like Johnny Carson did. The new kids have taken Letterman’s comedic and talk-show achievements and are now building further on them. This is as it should be. And as the tributes of Letterman have shown, the new comics revered him as he revered Carson.But it makes me sad for Letterman anyway. There’s a melancholy rightness about it but you still want time to stand still and time to bring you new and shiny things at the same time.
Although I hadn't been watching Letterman anymore, he represented "cutting edge" during my high school and college years. He was the acceptable alternative to Johnny Carson who Gen Xers like me did not relate to. Talk about ass holes. Ask Cher to tell a Johnny Carson story. Hopefully, we’ll get a bigger and more dramatic expletive. In any case, Carson was “tired ole” and Letterman was brilliant. The end of his show marks the mortality of most of my early cool sites. These mementos of cultural significance are retiring faster and faster. To make matters worse, most of my co-workers are now too young to understand Letterman as a cultural significance for me or the idea of panic caused by losing something from your childhood and how the modern world is less emotionally significant because of it. I’ve never felt sentimental about aging before. I DO feel wiser, stronger and better able to understand the world’s dramas and political quagmires. So this feeling is new for me. And as a Gen Xer who was very emotionally attached to my television shows, this predicts rocky weather ahead for me.
Letterman is built like my dad. Same body, same big head. For years my Dad watched Letterman, back on NBC and CBS. Both are sarcastic masters. Letterman’s aging sadly reminds me of my dad’s mortality. Ugh!

Which reminds us, Anne Meara passed away last week. My earliest memory of her is on this mysterious talk or award show she appeared on with Jerry Stiller Sonny & Cher as a they joked together as a mirrored foursome. I’ve never seen that clip since. Did I imagine it? Was that a dream? Sad to see her go.