WHAT IS MAINSTREAM AND WHAT IS NOT?
In or about the year 1976, a by-stander told me the name change of singer John Waldo Waybill from “Quaalude” to “Fee Waybill” was a stroke of genius and humor. However, Wikipedia says a bassist who played for the band gave him the name “Fee” because of his resemblance to the King of Fiji (From Bio on Fee Waybill of The Tubes).
Contestant apparatus is like a game show with paid guests and judges that mold the collective message. The corporate editor then can more easily control the content and info flow. The U.S. Governmental Agencies can regulate the corporate media “monopoly” in a quasi-prior restraint mode. There hasn’t been a cohesive “alternative” platform like the one which existed in the United States after the British Invasion of 1964 since the nineties. “How now brown cow?” “Your ass is mine!” Principal Edward R. Rooney of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Control the message, control the Mob.
“When I hurt you daddy…tears, tears like rain fall from my eyes.”
Copyright 12-27-2012
John Rubens
Ref: “A New Monza!” The Tubes (1975)
Just saw a Fee Waybill interview (2009) from Kalamazoo MI. He said the A&M label executives treated The Tubes like their own “Pet Band”. Then watched a YouTube rendition of “What Do You Want From Life” recorded at Foxboro in 2010. Didn’t hear the line in the diatribe (like a rap) “A New Monza!” [A Promo Line from the TV Show Let’s Make A Deal].
“We Coulda’ Been Somebody.”
Reference: On the Waterfront (1954) “I could have been somebody… . I could have been a contender.” Re: Fee Waybill’s retrospective from the 2009 Kalamazoo interview regarding commercial promotion of The Tubes by A & M Records in the late seventies (we want to be stars not a cult band). Dude, you can’t have it both ways, can you? Fee shows the many cross-currents: Capitol Record execs tell him post A&M: “You’ve got to sell records.”
Similar to what happened to The Beatles in the late sixties: they had to care what the gatekeepers and critics wrote. Paradoxically, Fee also says he definitely “doesn’t” want to be a “cult” band. No band does. Bands want to “sell records”. [From the Kalamazoo interview found on YouTube (2009) reposted (March, 2012)].
Name changes: Quaalude to Fee Way-Bill circa 1976. Someone told me the humor and genius of the name change regarding the contractual shipping term “fee waybill”, but I didn’t follow what he said. I hadn’t been to law school “Contracts” as of that time.l
My brother, guitarist Richard Rubens, told me circa 1996, around the time ABC and Disney, CBS and Paramount were allowed by Federal law, to consolidate and market as a fungible entity, “David Bowie never would have made it in today’s music business.”
[Foster married model Yolanda Hadid in Beverly Hills on November 11, 2011 in a star-studded 11/11/11-themed ceremony.[16]
Foster’s sister, producer Jaymes Foster, is the mother of Clay Aiken‘s son Parker Foster Aiken.[17] A cousin, Billy Foster, died in a race car accident in 1967.
In 1992, Foster was driving on the Pacific Coast Highway when his car struck actor/dancer Ben Vereen, who had crashed his car and was in a daze. Despite being thrown 90 feet, Vereen survived. Vereen went on the record to state that it probably saved his life as he had had a serious drinking problem. From the Wikipedia entry on Canadian David Foster, Verve Music Group].
JOHN RUBENS is no Mother Teresa. 