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Category: Music (Page 4 of 34)

The Mythology of Cher Breaking Up Rock Bands

June 12, 2023 / / 0 Comments

So I’ve been in a bad mood lately. My job has turned into a mess of chaos. And in the past, when work turned difficult, something else good was happening to distract me. And visa versa, if my life was, for a while, a trainwreck, work would be solid and fulfilling. One part could always carry me through the other.

Well, not so much right now. And it seems when you’re in a bad place, grumpy ideas seem to come to you you’re like a big, grumpy magnet. So over the weekend I started thinking about the ways Rock Music Culture has slighted Cher over the last 60 years (not to mention some of her fans).

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

What is that even? What is the trumped-up scarcity of yearly-open induction spots even about? My friend Coolia just visited Cleveland for some Cardinal baseball games, visiting my parents and going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She recently sent me a photograph of an electronic, daily voting board there where visitors can vote for their favorite artists and it shows the top ranking votes (Cher was #8 that day between Soundgarden and Weird Al) but what is that board even doing? Except manufacturing controversy between fans like the scam it is? Either the place is a serious museum to rock and roll (by which there would be no formal inductions of anything, just the facts of a music genre) or it’s a circus. It has chosen to be a circus.

The Sticky Mythology of Yoko Ono

When I was in third grade, some boys in Mrs. Hopson’s class were so stoked about the new band KISS. Why eight year old boys fell for KISS in the first place I will never understand; but I overheard them saying how much they hated Cher and how she was going to break up the band.

Now, I was in on the downlow about Cher at this time so I just fumed in silence. But my brother was a Beatle fan so even I believed in the Yoko Ono Myth at the time. Still, I thought, maybe Cher was performing a public service here. (My friend Coolia is a KISS fan too, so I can’t tread too far here). The point is I’ve come to learn a few facts about how the Cher entourage, (which is not quite so large as to produce the kind of shock-and-awe the Elizabeth Taylor’s entourage once did but is still probably significantly big),  became embedded in three bands over the decades, The Allman Brothers Band, KISS and Bon Jovi.

In the first case, Allman Brothers band fans were just as upset about the new presence of Cher in their lives as the KISS fans were. And to be fair, little Cher fans were none too pleased about the situation either. But Cher spent a lot of time with that band and according to the book, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band by Scott Freeman, everything Cher learned from David Geffen about extricating from bad music contracts she passed on to the Allman Brothers and they directly benefited from this and appreciated it. Oh and Dickey Betts married Cher’s personal-assistant-slash-best-friend Paulette. So if a band wanted to spend less time with Cher, would it marry her BFF?

Nobody from the band has spoken particularly poorly about Cher over the years, if you discount Gregg himself who has publicly said Cher has no talent but was “good in the sack.”

And as a sidebar, in times like these you have to give it to Sonny, who’s heterosexuality a plethora of women could attest to. Most heterosexual men don’t really get Cher although they may find her attractive. This seems a pretty average response from straight men. But Sonny was different. He saw what Cher fans see. You have to give him some kind of super-sensory credit for that. Sexist Italian guy that everyone agreed he could be, he thought Cher was more talented than anybody else did. And he gets a star for that.

Moving on to KISS, shortly after Gene Simmons started dating Cher (and the third grade boys lost their KISS-loving minds), Paul Stanley started dating Cher’s sister, Georgeanne, who went on to marry actor Michael Madsen and after that a man who was the head of Cher’s security team. So even small companies could find themselves enmeshed in the dating life of the Cher entourage. Turns out Cher is extremely likeable if you believe anyone who talks about her. Beside the point, because the determining factor was always Cher’s perceived coolness. She wasn’t cool enough to be dating Gregg Allman or Gene Simmons.

Now we can skip Les Dudek because nobody even knew they were dating anyway, or were in a band together, or that Les Dudek was between bands when they met, or where  anyone would go to overhear Dudek fans kvetching about Cher. I guess you could argue that Cher broke up the band Dudek was in with Cher, but that would still not be a Yoko-Ono-breakup per se in the sense that fans everywhere worldwide were deeply unconcerned.

Moving on to Bon Jovi, Cher dated Richie Sambora sometime after Jon Bon Jovi produced “We All Sleep Alone” and her 1987 remake of “Bang Bang.” So Cher was not quite the anathema to members of this band either. I honestly don’t remember what Bon Jovi fans thought about this. I should ask my friend Christopher who wholeheartedly believes Jon Bon Jovi is the most attractive man ever to breathe earthly oxygen. He also likes Cher so…I don’t imagine he was losing his mind at the time. But I’ll follow up on any concerns he might have had. At least Cher was moderately more cool in the late 1980s than she was in the mid-to-late 1970s vis-à-vis rock-music fans, at least cool enough to have her videos appear on MTV and not to have been relegated to the decidedly-un-hip VH-1.

But we should take comfort because I feel there is still time for Cher to break up a rock band. In fact, if she waits for when she turns 80 years old to do this, preferably with a young band of twenty-somethings I would be very pleased. Because it would hit a lot of rock’s stereotypes at the same time. And ironically, it would feel very rock and roll.

Cher Scholar’s Ultimate Cher Comp

April 12, 2023 / / 2 Comments

So when Robrt Pela and I were finishing our Quagmire of Comps project, we talked about our dream Cher comp. I have probably made about ten mix-tape Cher comps in my lifetime (not including new YouTube and steaming mixes). I mean the olde timey cassette tapes. This was back in the day when there was not a single comprehensive, across-the-many-labels compilation to be purchased. My last cassette mix was made in my late 20s and even had a fold-out of liner notes written by me in a moment of prenatal-Cher-scholaring.

By now, we’ve had a few good comps out there and it’s no longer a matter of wanting to see all her hits represented in one place. I’ve also done my share of sharing what I thought were the best songs (see the links above). So lately I’ve been creating thematic comps, like Love Songs, Philosophical Songs, Girl Power Songs.

As Robrt and I were talking about the Ultimate Comp I was thinking about songs that define Cher in some way, like personally. Which is very tricky. Somewhat newb interviewers since “Believe” have had a tendency to try to ask Cher what certain songs mean to her personally and she invariably responds like the person has just landed with that question from Mars. This line of questioning inevitably tanks. This is not an artist trying to reveal biography in her music (at least when taken as a whole). Her roots are too vaudevillian, too show-biz, variety-show for that.

But…fans like a little peak into the psyche of their stars from time to time, even from artists who don’t traffic in such disclosure. So it took me about ten minutes to come up with this ultimate bio mix. Then I was reminded of Biograph, Bob Dylan’s 53-song Box Set comp from 1985. In my mind, that was the first box set I ever saw on the shelves and I immediately pined for the Cher! Box! Set! And as you might recall, about a zillion box sets did get released, so many that they had to devote a special bin for those things. But that box set of Cher’s best/rare/popular songs never did come through (although we did get a cool wooden box up-sale with lyrics on tarot cards for the Love Hurts album in 1991).

Although my biographical  framework is a risky premise for a compilation list because album (and TV show) producers like Sonny and Snuff Garrett controlled her song selection for decades, there is much we can learn from the songs Sonny wrote for Cher, (some based loosely on their biography),  songs they both selected for her to sing,  songs she’s revisited over and over again through the years and songs Cher actually wrote, (what few there are). I didn’t include all of the songs Cher wrote in my bio mix, but you can see good summaries of those online:

A lot of my cassette mixes were called “This Is Cher” in a kind of a Whitmanian Leaves of Grass repurposing.  That title has always felt jazzy and back-door to me, a bit snooty so it works in both in a post-modern, wink-wink kind of way and yet still pretty earnestly (which is Gen X perfection in tone right there). But there have already been a few “This Is Cher” comps on the market and so I’ve appended “(For Reals)” to mine with the idea that this song list is a bit more of a personal peek into Cher’s inner life.

And lastly, I’ve broken the list of songs down by decade segments to wishfully indicate separate vinyl chapters, like those old, coveted multi-album box sets with their vinyl-cover-sized liner-note booklets. Oooh! That was nice!

The mix can be found on YouTube, the only streaming platform that includes Cher’s TV performances and her self-re-released Warner Bros albums from the mid 1970s.

1960s

  1. Baby Don’t Go
    Right before Sonny & Cher, as Caesar & Cleo, launched their recording act, Cher’s mother, disturbed by Sonny’s advanced age, physically extricated the underage Cher from Sonny’s apartment. They were basically just roommates at that point but this separation allegedly marks the point where Sonny began to miss Cher and began to see her as a girlfriend. This song and Sonny’s choice to sing Bob Lind’s “Cheryl’s Going Home” (not in my mix) possibly reflect this time of separation.
  2. I Got You Babe
    Sonny always spoke of this song as mythologically personal, referencing their time trying to break into show business. He casts himself as “young” like Cher which served him well until it didn’t seem so plausible anymore. Cher still calls it “my song.” When Sonny introduces the song on their first live album and in various television performances, he counsels her to, “Sing your song.”
  3. Hello
    Extremally personal, this is Sonny’s attempt to pull back the veil and show “the people” who Sonny & Cher really were, just everyday people. But in doing so, he has to draw Cher out of her shell and she seems highly uncomfortable with their improvisational conversation.
  4. Sunny
    The is 100% re-textualizing as Sonny with an innocent but truthfully reverent delivery.
  5. Just You
    You have to switch their roles here but Sonny has written a song about their relationship and gallantly given Cher the prettier part. We now know from various sources (including both Sonny and Cher) that Sonny didn’t find Cher very attractive or smart and she found him very attractive and very smart; and although it’s hard to believe, Sonny was the one making eyes at girls more his type (big-breasted blondes) and Cher was, in reality, the jealous partner. Very telling this one.
  6. You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me
    Cher sang this song with both Sonny and Gregg Allman, like two husband bookends. She must have revisited the song officially on vinyl for a reason.
  7. Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love
    The romance of Sonny & Cher was hindered by a big naysayer, Cher’s mother, understandably upset by the fact that her underage daughter was living with a man 11 years older. This song puts an innocent spin on that story but there’s a little grain of truth in there, at least from the perspective of an innocent teenage girl in the throes of a massive love obsession.
  8. But You’re Mine
    See “Just You” and “I Got You Babe” above. All the same things. I don’t love this song, tbh, and I keep wanting to take it off this mix. 
  9. Little Man
    Sonny wasn’t very tall and talking about this was a schtick in their act for 12 years. 
  10. It’s the Little Things
    See “Just You” above. All the same things.
  11. Don’t Talk to Strangers
    Sonny’s portrayal of Cher as innocent doe.
  12. Trust Me
    This one is interesting in light of the fact that Sonny asked Cher to trust him in all aspects of their business and personal life. Cher didn’t put up any resistance to this idea and unfortunately Sonny was cheating her in both regards. Both ironic and true.
  13. Just a Name
    See “I Got You Babe” and also a reference to  their propensity for unique names, their own and their children’s. Sonny on TV claimed that Cher picked out the name for their child Chastity but all of Sonny’s own children’s names (before and after Cher) begin with ‘ch’ and three of the four are also unusual names. They say Cher was allegedly as unenthused about making this movie as her self-character seems to be. Closeups on their wedding rings.
  14. Ma Piano (Per Non Svegliarmi)
    Someone recently posted a video on Tic Tok showing how Cher still remembers some of the lyrics to this song. Kind of interesting, that.

1970s (Part 1)

  1. Danny Boy
    Cher says in the introduction to the song on her first live album that this song is her favorite song. She gives it a pretty emotional delivery (for her anyway).  
  2. Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves
    Although this fictional song become Cher’s second signature song, there’s a bit of the gypsy, tramp and thief in her, too, which is why the femme-fetale trope keeps recurring in her movies, television skits and music.
  3. United We Stand
    By the end of the 1960s, Sonny & Cher did in fact have their backs against the wall and they stood by each other, despite an almost-bankruptcy, infidelities and retaliatory infidelities and a career nadir. 
  4. Vamp (The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
    Cher pulled off the ultimate portrayal of history’s vampish heroines and villains on the     Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. It felt a bit natural.
  5. My Funny Valentine (Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
    Although if we look to “Just You” and “It’s the Little Things” as an example, we could very well transpose the parts again, but by now Cher has redefined what it means to be beautiful in America, especially for brunettes and raven-haired ladies. Sonny can’t be anything but the also-ran from now on, a role that didn’t sit with him as well backstage as it did on-stage. 
  6. You’ve Got a Friend/Where You Lead (The Very First Glen Campbell TV Special)
    I don’t know why I included this one except that it indicates something personal in their relationship in the way they sing it, like Cher’s way of singing nasally like Sonny when they get to “Where You Lead” because where Sonny led, Cher would follow.
  7. Living in a House Divided
    And then the shit hits the fan. The year this record was made they imploded behind the scenes. Snuff Garrett might not have chosen the song for that reason, but its drama mapped perfectly to the situation. Except that nobody out in the Nielsen audience knew. It was a big secret for a year and a half. No one wanted to see it coming, even as Cher was already singing break-up songs.
  8. David’s Song
    Unknown to her fans, this was a song for Cher’s new love, David Paich. The song was also written by him (which is kind of weird and indicates he was trying to hint at her continued dependency on Sonny, if not professionally, a bit emotionally as well).
  9. Chastity Sun
    Cher’s re-wrote the lyrics to the Seals and Crofts song for Chastity and her version describes some sweet feelings of new-motherhood.
  10. The Greatest Show on Earth
    Truth be told, Sonny & Cher were putting on a master-class of acting every week on their variety show. Barely speaking offstage, they seemed perfectly fine on the air. 
  11. Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer Papa Used to Write All Her Songs (Parts 1 and 2)
    Sonny’s mean-spirited kiss-off song about Cher’s leaving him. The fact that he got Cher to sing these lyrics still blows my mind. If that doesn’t prove to you love is blind (and deaf), what could?
  12. Didn’t We (Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
    Cher’s heartfelt farewell song to Sonny in return.
  13. Rock and Roll Doctor
    Cher wants to sing rock and roll already….like since the psychedelic era!
  14. Love Hurts
    Cher will return again to this one. It’s a rare soul-baring moment.
  15. Stars
    Fame can be challenging. Cher sings about it here in a remarkably intellectual Janis Ian cover.

1970s (Part 2)

  1. Love Song (Cher)
    Cher’s relationship to Elton John has been interesting and semi-personal since the mid-1970s. She records his songs, he sings like her sometimes and writes songs about her. They also wrote a song together and have appeared together on Divas Live and Joan Rivers.
  2. All Is Fair in Love (Cher)
    Cher’s first torch-song choice after starting her new solo show. Possibly a reality-check message to America.
  3. Resurrection Shuffle (with Tina Turner) (Cher)
    The whole reinvention thing. 
  4. Keep the Customer Satisfied (Cher)
    Cher solo is getting more criticism now that she’s a single lady. It’s hard to keep everyone satisfied on and off the stage.
  5. Two of Us/We Can Work It Out (The Sonny & Cher Show)
    Sweetness in how Sonny & Cher can pick it up years later. Professionalism? Affection? They keep revisiting this medley on their variety show episodes so they must like it. “Two of Us” also harkens back to their early relationship and Cher’s description of how creative they were together at home.
  6. I Love Makin’ Love to You
    Cher described sex with Gregg Allman as “hot.”
  7. Island
    But Cher’s intense fame and Allman’s pharmaceutical habits made their relationship rocky.  Cher picked this song thinking maybe a bona fide island would help.
  8. You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me
    Cher revisits the song with Allman. Totally different style and tone. Interesting evolution of relating.
  9. A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Cher…Special)
    Cher delves into her childhood in this 1978 special and this Disney song describes a facet of her somewhat dreamy childhood self.
  10. Guitar Groupie
    Cher loves guitars, btw. Gene Simmons can be heard singing a line in the song.
  11. It’s Too Late to Love Me Now
    At the end of her second marriage, some heartbreak.
  12. My Song (Too Far Gone)
    More specific, Cher-co-authored heartbreak.
  13. Ain’t Nobody’s Business (Cher and Other Fantasies)
    This song comes up and up again.  “If I want to put my tits on my back…”
  14. Shoppin’
    Originally this album was written to give audiences a behind-the-scenes, reality-album version of Cher. The label wanted her to dance; she wanted to rock. This album happened as a tug-of-war. Cher loves to shop. Some nice Luther Vandross bopping to Cher’s shopping. 
  15. Mirror Image
    Cher compares CHER to Cher.  And laments the tabloids.
  16. Outrageous
    See “Aint Nobody’s Business” above. Also contains a nod to Bob Mackie. “God, my mother told me I was outrageous and she was right.”
  17. Hell on Wheels
    Cher was all up into the late-1970s roller-skating craze that had even me flying around Coachlite skating rink as often as I could. She had famous, exclusive skating parties at which costume malfunctions happened to her.

1980 – 1990s

  1. Young and Pretty (Black Rose)
    Getting old in Hollywood for women. The pressure of staying pretty.
  2. Take it to the Limit (Celebration at Caesars)
    Cher also calls this one of her favorite songs.
  3. Out Here On My Own (Celebration at Caesars)
    Although Cher had launched a solo-TV show without Sonny, she credited this tour/concert as being the point where she really felt alone out there for the first time as a solo performer.
  4. More Than You Know (Celebration at Caesars)
    This song comes up again and again and again on TV variety shows, TV specials and concerts. That could indicate she really feels this one.
  5. Heart of Stone
    Getting jaded in life. Cher follows politics and it can get depressing.
  6. After All
    Cher really fought to record this song as a demo so I feel it had some resonance for her. She always includes it in her live shows and never cuts it out after the first leg like she tends to do with the show’s other ballad, “The Way of Love.”
  7. I Got You Babe (with Beevis & Butthead)
    “We need a chick that used to be married to a dork and so now she’s all wild and stuff.” To be honest, Cher admitted she was kinda wild before Sonny. The fact that she left home at 16 and already had a sexcapade with Warren Beatty under her belt….kinda wild already one could argue. Cher is also distancing herself here from an earlier incarnation. At the end there’s a reference to Cher’s tendency to date younger men.
  8. Tougher Than The Rest (Heart of Stone Tour)
    Cher is one tough cookie…
  9. Many Rivers to Cross (Heart of Stone Tour)
    …but also vulnerable too, moving through the world with some humility (and pride). 
  10. A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Pediatric AIDS Benefit)
    See same song above. The child is strong in this one!
  11. Nature Boy (Sonny’s Death Special)
    Cher’s chosen homage to Sonny after his death. Some people were upset about Cher’s tributes and lamentations when Sonny died due to some previous slurs (see Beevis & Butthead above) but honestly their relationship was very, very complicated and probably not easily understood by everybody.

Fin de siècle

  1. Sisters of Mercy
    Cher wrote this song based on her mother’s stories of Cher’s time at a Catholic home as a baby and how the church tried to remove Cher’s mother’s custody due to their poverty.. It also ties into Cher’s own experiences with nuns at Catholic school. 
  2. When the Money’s Gone
    Cher has a big entourage and staff. This would make anyone wonder about their role as Sugar Mama.
  3. Human (Stuck on You)
    Humility.  Yeah.
  4. You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me (Burlesque)
    Not ready to retire.

Taking On Cher Compilation Albums

March 3, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I am very excited about this unveiling.

A few years ago, Robrt Pela suggested we compile a list of all of Cher’s compilation albums for the Cher Scholar site. So we did that. And it was quite a mind trap, I must say. Part of the project was culling out what was NOT a comp, like the three albums you see to the left, little imposter stowaways on the massive freighter of Cher comps.

We’d like to take you on the fantastical journey of our compilizing . So first we will summarize the experience of the toil and trouble.

Robrt: Here’s my postmortem paragraph about being a Cher Comp Wrangler. (Where’s my hazard pay?)

So, first of all, I have to thank you for your enthusiasm for this project. It would have been fair of you to say to me, “I think your desire to obsessively list all the Cher compilations is mad, and I don’t want to be friends with you any more.”

Also, thank you for letting me maniacally copy-edit this list.

So, a couple of things I noticed: One is that there are variations of variations of variations in the Cher Comp World. And also that I didn’t find it much fun tracking down some of this stuff. Like, knowing the difference between the Malaysian reissue of the seventeenth iteration of the Outrageous bootleg and the UK import of the original reissue of Holdin’ Out for Love, (which originated in Denmark as a repackaging of a Cher hits package from Canada) didn’t improve my life.

Here’s another thing: The Cher Comp Universe exploded in 2000, for obvious reasons: “Believe” was a monster, and every label, label subsidiary, and bootlegger wanted to cash in. All those annoying Holdin’ Out for Love comp variations started up around then.

Finally, all the similar comp titles and the variations on cover art made me want to jump off the balcony—and we live on the 14th floor. I mean, all those Golden Greats and Golden Hits and This is Chers were bad enough, but when they started swapping covers with one another, I thought I was going to burst into flames.

Which is pretty much what happened when I discovered that this already-weird Imperial/Casablanca mishmash comp called (of course) All I Really Want to Do has a variation cover that features two photographs of Cher THAT AREN’T REALLY HER.

After that I was like, “I’m done.”

Mary: I do feel your pain. While I was finally setting this all up in HTML I was losing the thread of my existence a little bit.

And as I remember it, you suggested this project and I was all like “I dunno…that seems hard.” And you were like,  “We’re doing this!” And I was like…”Okay. ”

But once we got going, it was a lot of fun (and very funny). I am still surprised it took us so long to complete the project but then I didn’t imagine there would be so many comps, so many details to track and so many life things that would intervene.

Parsing through my own collection was sobering. Why did I buy all these? Then looking for the photos was particularly maddening because many of the titles from different labels were duplicated. These aren’t respectable artifacts summarized on Wikipedia. I thank Discogs Music Marketplace for their very helpful database of details and photos.

The most fun for me was tallying up the statistics and organizing them (why so many German comps? Why do the Germans love “Holdin’ Out for Love” as a title so much? Because they love the song?).

And it’s worth mentioning, a compilation cataloguer’s work is never done. There are still a few comps in here that will need further research and I’m interested to see how streaming comps will evolve.

So without further ado:

The Cher Compilations: The breakdown by year, country, era depicted, hits, oddities, sound quality and our ratings.

Spoiler alert: there are 147.

The Discussion: Robert and I spent an evening talking about the Comp albums, our favorites and what makes us crazy about some of them.

Cher and Black Rose

August 24, 2022 / / 7 Comments

ImagesThe Twitter Cher scholar at Cher Universe mentioned on August 21 the anniversary of the release of the Black Rose album 42 years ago.

I'm always impressed by young social-media Cher fans who for the last few years have been finding the most amazing, never before seen Cher pics hidden out there on the Internets. I've been combing through Cher pics for 45 years now and I've never seen some of these photos.

I first saw this Black Rose picture below from Victoria Shell's YouTube great YouTube bios of Cher (part 1 & part 2) from last year. Never saw it before that.

And the photo was shocking in its silliness. I commented on Twitter this image might have been part of the band's credibility problem. 

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Allegedly, Black Rose was rejected from opening for the tours of every popular 1980s band except Hall and Oates. That might be an exaggeration but they were not a popular band.

2hde5a1This anniversary reminded me that I've been meaning to blog about the remastered Black Rose Import CD (which came from Ireland I think and during Covid it took months to arrive in the mail). The liner notes were worth the long wait because they include an extensive interview with Les Dukek about the experience, which is valuable. He was the main driver of the band, aside from Cher; and during the project he would also become her boyfriend of three years.

The liner notes call Cher's career "varied and unpredictable" and introduce Dudek from his work with the Allman Brothers ("Ramblin' Man"), Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, 3 solo albums and a member of DFK (with Mike Finnigan and Jim Krueger).

A-1280394-1349896448-9317Dudek calls this project a big mistake but also adds that Cher was not part of the mistake. He says he has very fond memories of his relationship with Cher. He says, "I totally lost my identity but I had a great time." The band itself, he says, was just a bad move for his career. 

He says he was approached by Cher to help put together a band. She took him to dinner at Nick's Fish Market on Sunset Boulevard. Cher said she was working with a few producers but no one she liked. Dudek suggested James Newton Howard. 

After working with them on her 1979 Prisoner album, Cher probably brought in the two members of Toto, David Paich and Steve Pocaro. Interestingly Jeff Pocaro is missing, a stalwart member of Cher's studio bands since the early 1970s). Dudek brought in Mike Finnegan for keyboards and he and Cher held auditions and jam sessions to assemble everyone else.

Other members included Ron "Rocket" Ritchotte, Mike Finnigan, Michael Boddicker, Trey Thompson and Gary Ferguson.

They recorded the album at Sunset Sound, Westlake and decided not to use Cher's name or photo in any early publicity materials, only to list her as a player with the rest of the band on the back album cover. (Eventually this changed.)

CcLqDfAUUAAN7vaBlack Rose toured with Hall and Oates and appeared on Merv Griffin, Tom Snyder (focusing on Cher) and The Midnight Special. There was a Central Park concert. 

Although Neil Bogart was "a sweetheart of a guy," Dudek says there were issues using Cher's current music label, Casablanca Records; but Columbia Records had passed. Not only was Casablanca primarily a disco label, but with Bogart dealing with terminal cancer the label would soon fold. Due to lavish spending "the record company fizzled," Dudek says and was bought out by Polygram. Only 400,000 records sold. Cher became depressed. Dudek claims it was he who encouraged Cher to try acting again and to "go for the Oscar." He went with her to New York City to meet with Robert Altman.

Blackrose_albumAnd the rest is Hollywood history. But I do like the front cover they came up with, its anklet of thorns and also Cher's attempt to downplay her Cher-ness on the whole thing initially.

I hated the album when I first heard it, then years later I thought it was okay, then years later I didn't like it again and now I like some of it.

It's a mystery why the band wasn't writing their own material, especially considering Cher and Dudek did write a song together. 

"Never Should've Started" was written by David Foster, David Paich, James Newton Howard and Valerie Carter. Cher sings the intro well but then her vocal becomes swallowed and the whole thing seems hyper, screechy and empty. Not an auspicious beginning. A live performance.

"Julie" was a Bernie Taupin/Mike Chapman song and Cher's vocal is completely indecipherable here; but I do like to send the song periodically to my friend Julie and pretend the opening lines are "She-blips lie in the hungry ears" because yeah, of course they do! When I was eleven (1981) I also made a mix tape of all the swear words spoken or sang by Sonny or Cher strung together and this song was very helpful in that project. 

"Take It From the Boys"  was written by Carole Bayer Sager/Bruce Roberts and I'm trying to think of something snarky to say about using David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager songs on your debut rock album, but thinking about it just makes my brain fog up. I have no idea what Cher is singing here in the verses and although Cher sounds convincing, I shall not be taking it from the boys in the street, whatever that entails. I do like the end though. You go Carole Bayer Sager!

"We All Fly Home" – This is just another way to say "We All Sleep Alone" but Desmond Child, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora wrote it better. This song also produced a gem for the cussin' tape. I would have been eating Dial soap tout de suite if my mother had found that cassette tape. Cher sings swear words really well, I will say.

"88 Degrees" – a song about LA on a hot day. I do remember the People Magazine album review taking special umbrage about all the vowels Cher uses to sing the word "split." (And no, the word 'damn' did not make the cut for the damn mix tape of Cher expletives.) This song really plods along. 

"You Know It" was written by Les Dudek and I actually like this duet, more than any of the Allman duets. 

"Young and Pretty" is the best thing on the album and the most likely song to be anthologized. Cher's still a bit muddled sounding but there's enough here to hang on to.

"Fast Company" – this was the song I most liked when I was 10 or 11 years old. It was challenging to sing along when I had no idea what words she was singing but I gave it a good go anyway. Like Redd Foxx told Cher on her solo show in 1975, you can get pretty far just on attitude. That's what this song says to me.

The liner notes say the album was mistakenly promoted as New Wave [which is pretty bizarre] instead of hard rock. The notes also maintain that the musicianship was high with quality songs and that Cher sounds "convincing as a rock vocalist" and "slots in with the rest of band…sounds like a proper band not a collection of session talents brought together to fulfill the aspirations of one person."

Except that is kind of what it was. Just having to say that…is kinda…the problem. 

R-3567371-1335637415.jpegI actually don't think Cher was ready yet for this project. And the fact that she was bi-furcated between this band and her big circus Vegas act of pop songs was more of the same brand confusion fans experienced during the Gregg Allman years. I'm sure the proceeds of the Vegas extravaganza were bankrolling the personal projects but maybe that was playing it too safe. In any case, the result skewed more toward a Hollywood idea of what a rock band was (see the back cover for example), or a hodge-podge, over-orchestrated attempt to create one out of thin air.

That said, I do think this whole endeavor was practice for the more simplified and cohesive Geffen years.

An aborted second album allegedly included the Frankie Miller song "Aint Got No Money," "Dirty Old Man," and "Don't Trust that Woman," the song Cher and Dudek wrote together. 

Mask-bikersInteresting to note there are two versions of this song: the version Cher wrote with Dudek and he recorded on his solo album Gypsy Ride (1981) and then the version Elton John re-wrote with Cher later and recorded on his Leather Jackets album (1986). In 1985 Cher also got Dudek a role in the movie Mask as one of the bikers. "I did an album and a movie with Cher and I'm proud of it, so there," Dudek says, "She has a great work ethic. She's real dedicated to what she does." 

Little timeline of Cher recording with men she was sleeping with:

1977: Allman and Woman, Two the Hard Way with Gregg Allman

1978: "Living in Sin" with Gene Simmons

1980: Black Rose with Les Dudek

And for a palette cleanser, Youtube served this up to me this morning, a Toto song I had completely forgotten about (thus giving me a K-Tel record flashback): https://youtu.be/rQysrhYnWHg. If only Steve Lukather from Toto had been in Black Rose too in order to give them songs like this.

And a shout out to Hall and Oates.

When Cher Sings a Song: What It Means

August 16, 2022 / / 3 Comments

Slander-libelSo I’ve mentioned before how when different people sing the same song, it can have different meanings; and this is because every person brings to a song their own “star persona” and personality and backstory and public backstory.

Andrew Goodwin talks a lot about this in his book Dancing in the Distraction Factory about music videos in the 1980s and 90s. A music video was never just a music video, but a piece in a conglomeration of promotional materials, star personas, the history of entertainment on television, (and he doesn’t mention it but this includes musical segments on old variety shows), posters, album covers, magazine interviews, TV interviews, aspects of business and the whole cyclone of products, promotions and pressures that circle around a song.

So while I was working on the latest Cher show this week, her opening song came up as a perfect example of this. First of all, I had never heard this song, “Keep the Customer Satisfied,” before last weekend; but I loved it immediately and saw it as the kind of song Cher would often use to explain herself, certain songs she sings over and over again, like “More Than You Know,” and “’Aint Nobody’s Business.”

I was very surprised to discover this was a Simon & Garfunkel song, written by Paul Simon. And when they sing it (and as the lyrics literally read) the song is about being on the road and the perils and pains found there.

Slander-libel2But Cher can’t help but lend a different spin to the song. She sings a few bars of the Janis Ian song “Stars” as the initial torch moment of the opening. “Stars” is a song about how alienating stardom can be. This was a significant song on her 1975 album (and not the only song on the album dealing with issues of fame) and it is significant that this was chosen as the title of the album. So from the beginning of this performance, Cher is setting up that “this song is about me as a famous person.”  This affects the context of the matching, following song, "Keep the Customer Satisfied" which in her hands focuses more on slander and libel than life on the road.

In her version, the road is more figurative for her whole celebrity life. At the time Cher was the most recurring cover girl on news stand tabloids, which were full of silly, off-the-wall stories about her love life (mostly involving people she had never met). She was also criticized for her divorce and risqué costumes. Here she’s presenting as a working showgirl just trying to do her job and entertain. The sheriff becomes not a literal middle-America sheriff but middle-America itself.

Slander-libel3So literal details can become figurative depending upon what the singer persona brings to the song. It’s a magical thing.

It’s also a catchy song. And this isn’t always the case, but here I like the Cher version better, even though the big production of the S&C version has a fun build. I feel the song fits Cher's drawl and delivery. She brings more gravitas to her version. Because really, how slandered and libeled were Simon and Garfunkel compared to Cher.

Or was anyone I submit to you.

The Gary Puckett version.

My Rick Springfield Story

August 5, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Untitled design (2)This story came to mind recently after a few nice people wrote to me about the Partridge Family/Cher post a few weeks ago. One was a music writer from St. Louis and I enjoyed her pop-culture writings on Cher, Cream Magazine and a very funny piece on Rex Smith. I also liked how she incorporated a representative music link at the end of her commentaries. And she reminded me how my two older brothers, solidly in the 1970s, St. Louis KSHE-radio rock-music demographic, once mercilessly made fun of Rex Smith.

This was separate and apart from their ongoing pressure for me to alter my music plays in the house. And even though my first instinct was to resist their suggestions in this area, in a few cases their influence did affect me unawares.

In the first case, they ruined Barry Manilow’s song “Mandy” by telling me the then-popular rumor that the song was about a dog. The second instance involved Rex Smith when my brothers mocked his single “You Take My Breath Away” one day while we were in the family station wagon because the song was basically the same two sentences sung over and over again into perpetuity. I had to agree they had a point there.

There was also their general, unspoken disparagement of pretty boys in all cases, (especially light-haired ones), which must have seeped into my consciousness somehow and pretty much made impossible any crushes I could ever develop on Rex Smith, Leif Garrett, Sean Cassidy, Jimmy McNichol and pretty much anyone from Duran Duran.

But that was all academic because I was too late a bloomer for Mr. Rex Smith. And I really can’t emphasize that enough. I was a late, late, late bloomer.

Screenshot_20220723-194805I was a perfectly happy camper being a kid with my girlfriends roller skating and playing waitress or teacher or famous novelist. We had our salacious sexcapades with the Barbies; we had incredibly complex township soap operas improvised around the Fisher-Price army of Little People and their building structures. We had board games, books, restaurant menu design, newscasts, pirating.

But the biggest thing was the Fisher-Price and Tree Tots villages we would create in our basements by pooling together our buildings.

Screenshot_20220723-194821My friend Krissy was a year older than me and we played this way for years…until she “turned.” Darcey Steinke explains “turning” for girls very well in her novel Sister Golden Hair. Turning refers to the change from girlish kid-hood into the adolescent tweens. Girls turn overnight, Steinke explained, and this completely jives with my experience growing up. Girls pass from childhood to adolescence overnight like a flipped light switch whereas boys could take months if not years to evolve into their adolescence. I don’t know how it was for gay or trans kids. Possibly something in between. But for cisgender girls, the change was Twilight-Zone quick. One day a girl had a kid personality, the next day that kid disappeared and the same girls were like zombies solely intent on finding out where the boys were grazing. It was unnerving if you were a late bloomer, kind of like watching a 1950s horror movie.

ImagesKrissy was older and so her disappearance was expected to some degree, although because she was in a grade higher at school, I rarely saw her again after that. But for the girls in my own grade, the loss of a playmate was much more egregious and painful because we would still be friends at school. We just weren’t spending our free time in the same way anymore. It was a confusing kind of loss. And in the condescending way of girls who mature faster than others, my friends were patiently waiting for me to ‘catch up’.

Screenshot_20220723-072550Jane in our grade went next. Boy crazy we called her then because she was a statistical outlier. But then suddenly all the girls started falling like dominos!

I made an impassioned case to save them, too. I said things like,

“Hey listen, I have two boys in my house! And first of all, they smell…like bad!

Secondly, they’re obnoxiously immature for like forever and it will be another whole year before one will even be able to have a civilized conversation with you.

Screenshot_20220723-194618What’s the rush anyway? You have the rest of your life to suffer over boys!

Let’s play a game of Life!“

As you might imagine, my arguments fell flat.

I remember my very last Fisher-Price friend. Her name was Chris and she was one of the last girls to turn. She wasn’t interested in boys yet because she was a tomboy, which I was not. I was just clear-headed and probably psychic about the prospect of a lifetime of love-drama ahead. I was also to into dollhouses and stuffed animals to be a tomboy. And I had no interest in climbing anything. A few times I did swear to my Screenshot_20220723-194506father that I could be a tomboy for 48-hours in order to finagle an invitation to the boys-only camping trips. But no luck; he never bought it. Not once. (And thus, an adulthood of compensation-camping for me).  

In any case, I was always willing to caucus with the tomboys if it came to that. And I thought, “okay here is someone who beats up boys at recess! She’s good for another year with this Fisher-Price stuff…at least.”

Screenshot_20220723-194539Her father did very well at a local company and so she got presents on holidays like Valentine’s Day. She had so much stuff, she’d give it away frequently. All my Michael Jackson albums were bequeathed to me when she got a full replacement set like on like Washington’s Birthday or some other non-gifting holiday like that.

So of course all her toys was great. She lugged them all over to my basement one day, all her Fisher-Price buildings, the airport, the cottage, the farm and the Holiday Inn (which I didn’t even know existed). Those combined with my farmhouse and parking garage and we had quite a metropolis.

Screenshot_20220723-194439And we were having a swell time in my basement when two days later she calls and says she can’t make it over that day.

(No worries. Everything’s fine.)

But then I get the same call again the next day and then the next day; and I know what this means. I’ve been here many times before. She’s turned. She’s still friendly at school and willing to do all the adulting things she’s newly interested in; but she suddenly has no interest in being a kid anymore.

So we’re talking on the phone a few days later and I say, “By the way, you’re going to have to come over and pick up all your stuff or I can bring it over to your house or whatever.”

And this is what she says to me, (and it still breaks my little heart to this very day). She says,

“You can keep it.”

Ugh!!!

(Flash forward a few decades and my mother kept all that Fisher-Price stuff, both mine and everything Chris left behind, and was a very popular grandmother as a result. All my nieces and nephews loved those toys as much as I did. Even the neighbor kid would come over. It brings me some kind of mitigating joy to know those things had those subsequent lives.)

But anyway, I was adrift then because you couldn’t play with that stuff alone. You needed to bounce your imaginative stories off each other. So Chris’ kid-defection effectively and forcibly ended my career with Barbies and Fisher-Price people forever.

Kid-business just ceased to exist for these girls. Roller skating now had to happen at a disco roller rink where boys could be skated in front of. No more Nancy Drew. It was now standing around at the shopping mall in a cute outfit. (Which, by the way: you couldn’t pay me.)

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about this turning business and my being so tardy with it. It’s like each girl in my grade became possessed with another personality overnight, all the girls except the ones who were never going to turn, like the ones who turned out to be lesbians. Every other girl turned before I did. Actually, most of the boys turned before I did, too. That’s how late I was. And it was a lonely year as far as after-school was concerned. I watched a lot of TV.

I have this theory that Gen X girls in my grade all turned during a three-to-six-month period of time in the early 1980s. And it was like they woke up one morning and said, “Hey, I like boys today!” and then they all went to the record stores all over America and said, “Hey look! There’s a boy!” and then they all bought that same, damn Rick Springfield album.

My friend Krissy was a perfect example. She was completely following my influence in her record album purchases, however questionable they were. Slowly in the late 1970s, Cher and Johnny Cash albums were stacking up in her bedroom. And then out of the blue one day she makes a renegade purchase and I find the Rick Springfield album lying there on her bed.

And it was like any disparaging thing I could say about boys would just result in a moony gaze at the Rick Springfield album cover.

It’s important to note here that this was a completely different situation than years earlier when one of my friends would put on a Sean Cassidy or Jimmy McNichol 45 record as we kept on playing with the Fisher-Price stuff.

I was like goddamnit Rick Springfield; you are making this so much harder for me! It wasn’t his fault, I suppose. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. So it wasn’t personal exactly.

It was a little bit personal though.

Of course, I did turn eventually. One day in science class two of my girlfriends forcibly made me pick out some rando guy to “like.” And what seemed like a perfectly safe and perfunctory choice in the moment turned into rent garments pretty quickly. Within days, I was so predicably swept away I couldn’t even parcel out all the incredibly deserved “I told you sos” to all my friends.

And from that day that I turned, I have no clue where all that Fisher-Price junk in the basement got stored away because, for the love of god, all that ceased to exist and within days the basement was repurposed into a dance floor where I was dancing to The Pointer Sisters and songs like “Let the Music Play” while daydreaming about stupid rando boy. I had a bathroom now miraculously full of makeup and hairspray, was giving a shit about what I wore to school every day, and even stinky socks and asinine immaturity seemed mysteriously surmountable and even immaterial and now possibly (alarmingly) even part of the new appeal!

I think we can all look back at this time and clearly see I was totally right about all of it; and if Rick Springfield hadn’t enabled the complete Gen-X-Girl Turnover of 1981 & 2, I would have had a fighting chance in talking sense into those precocious, hormonally-hijacked young ladies.

The Rick Springfield thing isn’t personal. It’s just a little personal though.

StateoftheheartThis grievance of course doesn’t include the Italian Rick Springfield. He’s a total hottie.

 

And now…the closing Rick Springfield song.  
(I did buy this 45 single in 1985 so I couldn’t have been that mad at Rick Springfield.)

The Kiss-Off Songs of Sonny & Cher

August 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Sonnyandcher01Full disclosure: when I was eight years old, I found Sonny & Cher's final record at the local library. This album seemed totally crazy (even for an eight year old) and yet I still proceeded to develop a nine-minute dance routine to Sonny's confounding title opus. 

Now, every time the song "Mana Was a Rock-and-Roll Singer, Papa Used to Write All His Songs" comes up on my music app shuffle, I can't help but compare it to the song Cher chose to sing to Sonny during one of the final episodes of their TV variety show.

MamaSonny's song is particularly venomous and disingenuous, full of bitterness. What's most shocking is that he got Cher to sing it.

"Damn you girl, you went and messed up the world" is really its prime motivation but includes attacks on Cher's alleged promiscuity, her looks, her treatment of him, and mysterious manipulations that allegedly led to someone getting jail time! Although Sonny does admit Cher is "super fine and blows people's minds."

The song then oddly floats into a reflective set of movements which take up two-thirds of the running time and proclaim a false modesty repeated over and over only to disprove the adage that if you repeat something enough times people will believe it.

The last two thirds include a full production with children's chorus, agitated strings and horns, a gospel singer, and a guitar solo which you don't even notice right away because so much is going on!

It's really something. Why is Cher involved in this again? Oh yeah, because even when she was pissed off at Sonny and he was being a complete dick, she still loved Sonny. And then, just when you think it's over…

DidntweIn contrast, Cher's fare-thee-well song to Sonny was Jimmy Webb's "Didn't We." Spectators to her performance of it, one of the final taped solos of the 1971-1974 series, say there wasn't a dry eye in the house, including Cher's.

Every time she sings, "And this time we almost made that long…hard climb," that emotional part always makes me sad.

Sonny also wrote a solo song called "Last Show" but it was mostly about losing the shows, not about losing Cher. And don't get me started on the grammatical uses of she and her. That song just makes me tired. I actually prefer the crazy opus if I had to choose. And, luckily, this world does not require that of us.

Cher, The Partridge Family Album and The Great American Themes

July 11, 2022 / / 1 Comment

Adventures-of-huckleberry-finn-136

As I started working on this post last Friday, I wasn't sure which blog it would end up in (the Cher blog or the poetry blog). I feel the topic is halfway between writing the great American story/novel/movie/song/poem and the Cher blog where I could start to talk about Cher’s major career themes. I decided on the later since I’m starting to work on a Cher book divided by categories which are much more generalized and less specific than the Great American Themes but that are worth looking at through the kaleidoscope that is Cher.

To date I’ve finished reading 61 books on pop culture topics. Which is nothing, by the way, a drop in the bucket in the proliferation of pop culture scholarship these days. Academic Pop Culture Studies have exploded in the last 30 years, ever since “the Madonna essay.” We can get degrees in this now? Indeed. Not when I was a kid.

But pop culture pontificating has basically borrowed the existing think-tanking apparatus from the study of literature, which I did get a degree in so… yes ma, my indulgent book-club degree may just be of use here.

Here is a small sampling of the Cher-book categories to give you a taste of what the book will cover:

  • Feminism
    • Women on TV in the 1970s
    • Cher as Drag
  • High vs. Lowbrow Culture
    • Camp Culture
  • Appeal as Gay Icon
  • Movies & TV
    • The Male Gaze, MTV and the Female Gaze Looking Back
  • Power Pop/Girl Music
  • The Diva/Icon/Unruly Woman
  • Fan Culture

As of now there are 17 major categories. From the beginning I realized my weak spot would be writing about music, a category I don’t feel particularly knowledgeable about or good at writing about; so two years ago I started reading books around that, which led to a few minor obsessions: a search for Lester Bangs' essays, Lester Bangs' reviews of Sonny & Cher, and women writing about rock music.

It also lead to three rock histories, Good Booty by Ann Powers (a history of popular American music through the lens of sex), How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll by Elijah Wald (worst click-bait title of a book I’ve ever seen…but nonetheless good alternative history of American popular music from a perspective of changing technology) and finally Mystery Train, Images of America in Rock and Roll Music by Greil Marcus. I was dissatisfied with the last book, only because the notes take up half the book and the meat of the thing only covers about five American themes:

  • Stagger Lee and the myth of the African American man as gangster
  • Everyman and freedom in the songs of Randy Newman
  • Pilgrims like The Band
  • Rags to riches and the country glamour of Elvis

But the book title does say "images" and not "themes" so my bad there. Anyway, this all got me to thinking about my own bigger list of the Great American Themes. And while I was wide awake last Thursday night it occurred to me most of the big themes are all oddly covered in the 1971 The Partridge Family Album.

TpfaBefore I launch into these themes and TPF Album, I want to say a few things:

  1. This was not my Partridge Family album. This was one of my brother’s albums. This thing came out in 1971 when I was 1 year old. Today both of my brothers refuse to cop to owning this thing but I am a witness to the fact that it was worn out by the time I got to it sometime in 1975. The cover was falling apart and the vinyl was worn and scratched already (and not by my parents, to be sure). Maybe it was neighbor kid Leewee's album (yes, that was his real name and we tend to blame him for things in situations like this).  In any case, this was the first non-Sonny & Cher/Sesame Street/Mr. Rogers/Disney Storyteller album I listened to. 
  2. PartridgeFor years I’ve been confused about why I still like it and looking at the back cover again today on the Googles, I can see why: it was essentially a Wrecking Crew album. The initial Partridge Family “sound” (and I would add, the initial very creepy sound) was based on the Ron Hicklin Singers and The Love Generation. But when everyone learned David Cassidy could sing, he was promoted to singer…for many obvious reasons. The album's non-Cassidy songs reflect the sickly-sweet foundational sound. 
  3. I was too young to be a fan of David Cassidy. He was old hat by the time later-day Gen X girls were crushing on singers and so Sean Cassidy was much preferred as was Kristy McNichol's brother Jimmy, which girls were losing their minds over as I recall. I've also never seen a single episode of The Partridge Family. It wasn't syndicated in St. Louis by the time I was watching copious hours of after-school TV. And these days, I can't look at that patchwork bus for very long before I start to get a headache.

So anyway, back to the themes. I made a table:

Theme

Partridge Family Album Song That Applies

Other Literature That Applies

The great American shoot-out, guns

  

Any western or gangster film

Reinvention, self-help
(Subtopics: failure, alienation, outcasts)

"Brand New Me"

Great Gatsby
Light in August

Upward mobility, rags to riches, class
(Subtopic: justice)

"Bandela"

To Kill a Mockingbird

The party, altered states, bottoming out

"Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque"
and "I Can Feel Your Heartbeat"

Infinite Jest

Nostalgia, the passage of time, the party’s over, loss of innocence

"Only a Moment Ago"

Blood Meridian

Driving, cars, wheels and rivers

"On the Road"

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The religious, spiritual quest, cults

"Somebody Wants to Love You"

Moby Dick

Self-actualization, identity (may not necessarily include a reinvention), general Me-ness

"Singing My Song"

Invisible Man

Pragmatism

"I Think I Love You"

Pragmatism by William James, anything by Ben Franklin

Survival of the fittest, The American Dream

  

The Grapes of Wrath,
The Jungle

 

Anyway, the Cher-text does not cover many of these American themes, at least not in song lyrics. Reinvention (and its root-cause of failure) is certainly a career theme, as is alienation, social mobility, and nostalgia (through remediation of old material). The shoot-out cowboy does make an appearance (via Sonny’s songwriting) as does coming-of-age and the loss of innocence (in both Sonny’s cowboy and teen pregnancy songs) and Cher does have a few songs about traveling on airplanes.   

More to think about there.                          

Starting on the Cher Show

May 3, 2022 / / 0 Comments

NewlogoSo back in March I promised to start reviewing Cher's solo show after April work ended. So here we go. The first episode has been posted along with some context.

Trashy3Other fans mentioned last year that, disappointingly, the Timelife episodes were cut, in this episode's case even more heavily than those that appeared on VH1 back in the mid-1990s. So that's kind of a drag. Since the songs cut from the first episode were jazz and Broadway standards, it's hard to blame the high cost of pop songs.

Episode two coming up soon.

 

And Then The Thing Was Done: The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour

March 16, 2022 / / 0 Comments

LogoWhew. The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour review is done: https://www.cherscholar.com/the-tv-variety-shows-and-specials.html.

Huge milestone!

I looked at my publication date for episode 1 and it was all the way back to January 25, 2019!! And here I thought I’d finish the whole series in a little over one year. (There are 52 weeks in a year, right? 67 episodes. No problem.) It took me 3 years and 2 months.

I remember starting the project sitting at my old desk at the Central New Mexico Community College job, happy as a clam. Shortly afterwards, I was unfortunately promoted to a job I did not want and went back to ICANN, COVID happened and now possible nuclear antihalation is on the horizon. But hey, at least we’re halfway done with this project! Smiley face.

The 67 Comedy Hour shows are done. We have 63  shows to go (29 Cher shows and 34 Sonny & Cher Show part deux, plus a handful of TV specials). I’m going to take a little break for NaPoWriMo 2022 but then I’ll be back to review the Cher shows, some of which I’ve still never seen, even though they come out on the Time-Life series two years ago. I was waiting to review them here right after watching them. So looking forward to that.

Last night I actually had a dream about the last episode I just posted, #67. I dreamed I was going to write about how this was a typical “clips” show, or “greatest hits” type show we’re so used to seeing now, the retrospective. And I had always read that this was a cobbled-together finale of clips.

But I dreamed a young producer met up with me to set me straight. Btw, none of the show’s producers are young anymore; some are not even alive. And he told me this the last show was assembled from never-before-seen clips that were cut from earlier episodes and thus, new to us. But in any case, not rerun clips.

I thought ‘how novel” and I looked forward to reviewing the episode today to see if this was, in fact, true.

It was!

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