At one point, there was no limit to what networks would do to create the next great reality show that would bring them viewership. MTV and VH1 were notorious for this, creating shows like Room Raiders, Flavor of Love, and Next. Some ideas were so insane that if they were pitched in the 2020s, they’d never see the light of day.
In January of 2005 Fox premiered Who’s Your Daddy? a series that would take an adopted person and present them with several men that could be their biological father. Amongst a sea of paid actors was the person’s real relative. The contestant’s job was to suss him out and win $100,000.
If they failed to, the imposter would win the cash prize instead.
Intense Backlash got this Fox show canned
It’s a sensitive topic that really shouldn’t be reduced to reality television, but that was the early aughts for ya. The show immediately drew backlash from various groups, including Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute (National Center on Adoption and Permanency).
“The very idea of taking such a deeply personal, complex situation and turning it into a money-grubbing game show is perverse, destructive and insensitive to others,” Pertman penned in a scathing letter to Fox.
The immediate backlash led Fox to canceling it after just one episode. However, the tasteless exploitation of an individual trying to find her birth parents was already done.
While Fox never issued a formal apology, the show’s executive producers—Scott Hallock and Kevin Healey—offered an explanation in a 2005 interview. “I can understand the reservations,” said Healey. “But the people came to it with great excitement and a willingness to play the game. It’s a fun and healthy way to get to know this person that they’ve never met.”
They both emphasized that they didn’t surprise anyone with the concept, and they worked with a company that specializes in helping adopted children find their biological parents.
It wasn’t Fox’s first foray into the tasteless side of television, either. They aired The Swan, where contestants were “beautified” with cosmetic surgery, and The Littlest Groom, a play on The Bachelor featuring a little person. While looking back on it is tough, it’s important to see how much reality television has evolved.
MTV’s The Hills is one of the most unforgettable reality shows of the early aughts. A bunch of people in their mid-20s trying to figure it all out (and eventually having that mid-20s crash out), the cinematic soap opera-style editing; it’s peak millennial culture.
Initially centering around Laguna Beach standout Lauren Conrad and her Hollywood friends and frenemies, it followed the group around the city of angels. The Hills exploded in popularity, averaging over 2 million viewers per episode. During the height of Conrad’s ongoing feud with Heidi Montag, the show peaked at over 4 million viewers.
However, as the seasons went on, fans began to question what was real and what wasn’t. By the series finale, The Hills cast and crew decided to play into the long-standing rumors about the show. The rest wasn’t unwritten after all…
Reliving ‘The Hills’ Meta Ending 15 Years Later
Conrad departed The Hills in Season 5, making Kristin Cavallari the new standout. At the time, she was “dating” Brody Jenner, but the finale brought everything fans thought they knew into question. The group is ready to move on to their next stage of life. Lo and Scott move in together, Audrina has decided to buy a gorgeous beachfront property, Jenner is doing the usual nepo baby bachelor things.
As for Cavallari… she’s moving to Europe? As she heads to the airport after saying goodbye to her on-again-off-again fling, Jenner, the camera pans to show they’re on a studio set. The backdrop of the Hollywood sign is just a screen.
”The ending was genius,” Cavallari admitted in a recent episode of her podcast, Let’s Be Honest with Kristin Cavallari. “This ending to me is one of the cooler endings to any show.”
Cavallari acknowledges why it was very controversial at the time, particularly for fans who bought into the show.
“It was mixed feelings on that ending, and I get that. For those hard fans who really also thought everything was real, I can get why that kind of rocked your world,” she said. “I think for me, not only did I think it was so creative, but I also think it was nice for me as someone who really felt like I was acting in a lot of ways or doing improv. I think for me it was nice to be like, ‘thank you,’ because this sort of tips our hat at the fact that not everything was real.”
Reality television feels so orchestrated now—everyone is purposefully trying to create a viral moment what will sky rocket their careers. It’s completely inauthentic. In the early 2000s, that was far from the case. The unscripted programs didn’t feel like the cast were reading from a script or having a producer tell them what to do. American Idol was arguably the biggest reality competition show in 2006, creating superstars like Kelly Clarkson, Adam Lambert, Jennifer Hudson and Carrie Underwood.
However, one audition sticks out for all the wrong reasons that it’s unbelievable how American Idol let it happen.
The American Idol stalker
Producers would often pick the worst singers to perform in front of the judges. This led to them being publicly embarrassed on national television; but this audition was different. Paula Goodspeed was a superfan of judge Paula Abdul. However, it went far beyond liking her music or being a tribute act. Immediately when she stepped into the room, Abdul looked terrified (we later learn Goodspeed had allegedly been stalking Abdul for over a decade). Abdul was forced to sit through her rendition of “Proud Mary,” to which she received three “no’s” and was eliminated.
But her infatuation with the star didn’t stop there. Despite threats of police involvement, she continues. In November of 2008, Goodspeed tragically took her life in front of Abdul’s home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California. The fact that her insecurities were picked apart on a big stage and exploited to the public should’ve never happened. Furthermore, American Idol producers should’ve done more to protect their celebrity judges.
Abdul recalled the situation in an interview with Barbara Walters in 2008. “She came to the audition. I said, ‘This girl is a stalker of mine. Please do not let her in.’ Everyone knew. I was shaking. Abdul also claims producers insisted Goodspeed go through with the audition because it would “be fun for them to cause me stress.” She also claimed that wasn’t the only audition Goodspeed showed up to.
At the time, she was still under contract with American Idol, but she officially parted ways with the show in 2009.
On March 27, 1985, comedian and future Law & Order: SVU star Richard Belzer welcomed Mr. T and Hulk Hogan—who were promoting WrestleMania I—onto his short-lived talk show Hot Properties. Belzer interviewed Mr. T first that night, and things turned combative pretty early on in their conversation. When Belzer asked if the violence on Mr. T’s popular action series The A-Team was antithetical to his image, Mr. T dismissed the question because of Belzer’s use of a big word. “I’m a street brother,” Mr. T started to say, before Belzer interjected, telling him, “I’m from the street, too. I learned that word myself, not in college.”
Hogan evidently wasn’t happy with the way Belzer was talking to Mr. T, and made his feelings clear by the time his segment came around. Throughout the course of Hogan’s interview, he referred to Belzer as “cocky,” a “little dude,” and a “coward.” Finally, Belzer asked the pair to demonstrate some wrestling moves for him, to which Mr. T replied, “We ain’t showing you nothin’!” Belzer then stood up and pointed to Hogan, saying, “I’m talking to him, man, OK?”
Richard Belzer Sued Hulk Hogan After a Wrestling Move Went Horribly Wrong
After consulting with Mr. T, Hogan decided to oblige Belzer, and the two walked over to the side of the stage. From there, Hogan explained that the floor was hard and he didn’t want Belzer to get hurt, so he was going to use a simple front chin lock on him. “You just tell me, brother, when you want him to quit squealing,” Hogan joked to Mr. T, who was sitting off-screen. Within seconds of Hogan applying the hold on Belzer, the comedian’s body went limp, and Hogan let go, causing Belzer to drop to the ground and hit his head.
The impact cut the back of Belzer’s head open, requiring him to get nine stitches. “[Hogan] came very close to killing me,” Belzer said years later. “I was told by a sports medicine expert that if I had fallen a few inches either way I could be crippled for life, I could have been dead.” Belzer sued Hogan, Mr. T, Vince McMahon, and the WWF over the incident and received $400,000 in a 1990 settlement.
You can watch the entire 1985 episode of Hot Properties with Hogan and Mr. T below.
On December 5, 1992, Saturday Night Live opened up with a Wayne’s World sketch in which Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth (Dana Carvey) count down the top ten things they love about Bill Clinton. Among the items on their list are universal healthcare, investment in infrastructure, and the president-elect’s huge head. But modern-day viewers will no doubt notice a glaring omission by the time Wayne and Garth get to the number one entry: number two was completely skipped over. All you can tell from the edited version on SNL’s official YouTube channel is that the item in question had something to do with Chelsea Clinton:
During the original broadcast, Wayne had the following to say about Chelsea, who was 12 years old at the time: “While it is true that adolescence thus far has been unkind, we think she’s a future fox.” Myers reflected on the deleted gag in 1999, saying that he’d had horrible acne as a kid and was sensitive to what Chelsea was going through.
“She had the adolescent face, the kind of please-don’t-look-at-me face, and that was my adolescence,” Myers explained. For that reason, he worried that the joke would be misinterpreted and asked to have it taken out.
The Wayne’s World Sketch That Made ‘SNL’ Issue a Rare Apology
However, the producers told Myers that if it got a laugh in the dress rehearsal, it would stay in, and that’s precisely what happened. Come Monday morning, the gag had predictably sparked outrage, which Myers said was mortifying because it wasn’t done with ill intent. As a result, Myers made the unusual decision to write Hillary Clinton a letter apologizing for the joke.
Though it was never officially acknowledged by the Clintons, word eventually got back to Myers that it was appreciated and understood.
SNL showrunner Lorne Michaels even issued a rare apology of his own in response to the backlash. “We felt, upon reflection, that if it was in any way hurtful, it wasn’t worth it,” Michaels said of the offending joke, which hasn’t been seen since it originally aired. “She’s a kid, a kid who didn’t choose to be in public life.”
Bill Clinton shared similar sentiments, telling People, “I think you gotta be pretty insensitive to make fun of an adolescent child. I think there is something pretty off-center with people who do that.”
Katsushi Murakami designed the Voltron robots, most of the robots in Power Rangers, and many of the Go-Bots. Matt Alt, the author of Pure Invention, reported Murakami's death in a farewell to the designer on his newsletter on August 10, 2026. — Read the rest
In the Season 1 Game of Thrones episode “Fire and Blood,” King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) gruesomely forces Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) to look at her dead father’s decapitated head, which he has propped up on a spike. Joffrey then points out the heads of her dad’s household staff, who’ve suffered the same fate. However, if you pay close attention to one of the spiked noggins in question, it bears a slight resemblance to a former U.S. president.
You can check out the shot for yourself right here:
In the DVD commentary for the episode, series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss revealed that the head all the way on the left was modeled after George W. Bush. And before you jump to any conclusions, they were quick to point out that this wasn’t a political statement. On the contrary, they simply had to use whatever props they had lying around, and for whatever reason, Bush’s head was available to them. This would appear to be backed up by the fact that the head is facing away from the camera and has long hair, unlike Bush himself.
‘Game of Thrones’ Once Put George W. Bush’s Head on a Spike
But despite the reasonable explanation for the head’s inclusion, people were outraged once word of it hit the internet. This prompted an apology from HBO, in which they said that they were “deeply dismayed” by the situation and found it “unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste.” The network also made their feelings clear to the show’s producers, who apologized for what they called a “careless mistake.”
Furthermore, it was announced that the footage would be removed from future home video releases.
Benioff and Weiss issued a statement of their own as well, clarifying that they’d used a lot of prosthetic body parts on Game of Thrones, but couldn’t afford to have them all made from scratch. For that reason, they had to resort to renting them in bulk. “In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former president and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise,” they wrote in conclusion.
You can listen to George R.R. Martin recount the story to Stephen King in the video below.
In April 2006, South Park dedicated an hour’s worth of screen time to bashing Family Guy with their special two-part “Cartoon Wars” saga. The big reveal during the second episode was that Family Guy’s popular cutaway gags were constructed by manatees. As Cartman learns while visiting Fox Studios, the creatures come up with jokes for the show by selecting random “idea balls” that have different subjects written on them.
You can take a look at the scene in question right here:
Naturally, Family Guy fans were eagerly anticipating what series creator Seth MacFarlane would do in response. At the following year’s Comic-Con, MacFarlane was asked about South Park’s criticism, but didn’t react in the way many had been hoping he would. “We were actually overjoyed that they spent two half-hours of their airtime talking about us. I don’t have that kind of time,” MacFarlane explained.
“It really does come down to that,” he continued. “We would have to either do the greatest joke in the world that was really quick or do three episodes about South Park.”
‘Family Guy’ Cut Its Planned Response to ‘South Park’s Brutal Manatee Joke
MacFarlane went on to say that he didn’t know how to respond to the attacks and that it was probably best to leave it alone. He did reveal that there was one joke he considered doing to get even with South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, though. However, at the end of the day, the Family Guy staff decided that it would’ve been too much of a low blow. When the Comic-Con crowd booed MacFarlane for taking the high road, he pushed back by suggesting that he’d get the same reaction regardless of the choice he made.
Luckily, for those who are curious about the deleted gag MacFarlane was referring to, it did end up surfacing eventually. The joke was originally part of a scene from the 2008 episode “McStroke,” in which Stewie, disguised as an older boy, takes his date to a place called Anal Point, where people go to have sex.
As initially conceived, a guy in the car next to theirs can be heard yelling, “Ow, Trey!” to which another man replies, “C’mon, Matt, just relax and let it happen!” Check it out for yourself below.
Now you can immerse yourself completely in the uncanny valley by watching Fairgound, a new 24/7 AI slop channel available on Roku. It offers "series, films, and shorts from the world's best AI storytellers" across a variety of genres. [via Cord Cutters]
Fairground AI stands out as a pioneering offering dedicated entirely to AI-generated content.
There's been some speculation about exactly what Primetime, A24's movie about the hit show To Catch A Predator, is going to say. Having seen the trailer, I figure that if you were skeptical of host Chris Hansen's motives and character, this movie shares those concerns and might even be entirely about them. — Read the rest
When Netflix announced the first-ever Chef’s Table Food Festival, bringing 70 internationally acclaimed chefs to Park City for four days of dinners, demonstrations and excursions, I felt something between excitement and apprehension.
The series changed the way I understood food. I wasn’t yet sure whether a festival built around it could preserve the reason why.
If you asked me to name the greatest piece of modern food media, I would hesitate. Without missing a beat, I would say Season 1 Episode 1 of “Chef’s Table.”
It’s not because I think Massimo Bottura is the greatest chef alive. It wasn’t only the breathtaking cinematography or the immediate fantasy of booking a flight to Modena and a table at Osteria Francescana.
I’ve returned to it so many times because it permanently changed the way I think about food.
Yes, food media should make you hungry. But the very best examples also make you care about something greater than what’s on the plate.
I was initially drawn in by Italy. Like so many Italian Americans, I grew up seeing pieces of my family’s history reflected in its food and had an insatiable desire to learn as much as I could about the country my grandparents grew up in. Watching Bottura reinterpret the flavors of Emilia-Romagna felt familiar, even comforting, but that’s not why the episode stayed with me.
I still think about it and watch it over and over again because it beautifully articulates something I’ve always believed but struggle to find the words to explain.
“Chef’s Table” showed me that food could be a lens through which to understand culture, grief, resilience, identity, and community. It showed me that restaurants weren’t simply places to eat. They were living institutions capable of preserving history, supporting entire local communities, and bringing people together in moments of crisis.
Looking back now, I can trace so much of my own career back to that realization.
For years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards stories about neighborhood restaurants, family businesses, local farmers, and food traditions — not because they’re quaint or nostalgic, but because they’re windows into something larger. These people have tangible passion and intoxicating energy for what they do. “Chef’s Table” helped open my eyes to the fact that that’s the story. Not the rare ingredients or celebrity guests, the pure, genuine joy for cooking and sharing that with others.
One moment from Bottura’s episode has lingered most.
After earthquakes struck Emilia-Romagna in 2012, warehouses collapsed around hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, threatening the livelihoods of the cheesemakers who depended on them. Bottura responded by creating a recipe for riso cacio e pepe and inviting people around the world to cook it with him. Nearly 40,000 participated, and all 360,000 damaged wheels were sold.
In Bottura’s hands, Parmigiano was never merely an ingredient. It represented years of labor, centuries of knowledge and an entire community’s economic survival.
One of Bottura’s most famous dishes from his three-star Michelin restaurant is the Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano, featuring the PDO product at five distinct aging points (24, 30, 36, 40, and 50 months). He manipulates the physical form of the ingredient to showcase different temperatures and textures: souffle, cream, biscuit, foam, and air.
The dish isn’t about the cheese. It’s about tradition and craftsmanship and protecting your community.
As Bottura says in the episode, “Cooking is an act of love.”
It’s not a love expressed through expensive ingredients or elaborate techniques just for the sake of it. It’s expressed through responsibility — to your producers, neighbors, and the place you call home.
Years after I first watched Bottura’s episode, I read Ruth Reichl’s “Why Food Writing Matters” and felt the shock of recognition. Food writing has been dismissed as frivolous or shallow — as if writing about restaurants somehow exists outside the realm of “real” journalism. Reichl had found the language for something I had understood only emotionally: food journalism belonged in the larger conversation about labor, politics, culture and power. Every person needs to eat, which means every person has a relationship with food that extends beyond the plate.
“Food touches everything we do. And that it is definitely a political issue,” she says, “Every election analyst has pointed to rising food costs as a major concern for voters. Yet despite the evolution of food writing over the last thirty years, consumers still have very little understanding of the forces that drive those costs.”
For the first time, I felt as though I had discovered the tradition I wanted to join.
A cohort of people who pursued and brought light to all genres of food stories. That feeling has become harder to find these days.
In today’s media, there is simply so much food content competing for our attention. Social media has democratized food storytelling in remarkable ways, but it has also created an endless stream of restaurant rankings, viral menu hacks and “must-try” lists that reward speed over substance.
Thankfully, there are still creators proving that audiences are hungry for something deeper. Nicholas Nuvan reminds me that thoughtful food storytelling hasn’t disappeared—it has simply adapted. His videos don’t stop at recommending where to eat. They introduce viewers to the people, histories and communities behind a dish, proving what the best food journalists have always known: people don’t just fall in love with dishes, they fall in love with stories.
When Reichl first took over the food section at the LA Times, she got a lot of pushback for covering international restaurants and including recipes for things like goat soup, sea slugs, and eel. She received dozens of letters lamenting the “good old days” of “American” recipes like cola-soaked pork chops, but she didn’t listen.
And isn’t that really what it’s all about? Reichl had the courage to dig deeper and show people a different side of food writing in a time when most people only read the food section for the ads. Not only were readers interested in what she had to say, she helped show people and restaurants of all cultures and styles that their food and their story matters just as much as any Michelin restaurant.
That’s why I felt a genuine sense of cautious optimism when Netflix announced the Chef’s Table Food Festival. On paper, it’s easy to dismiss it as another celebrity chef event, many of which have become exercises in exclusivity — expensive tickets, buzzy names and Instagrammable bites. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it isn’t what made “Chef’s Table” resonate in the first place.
The series never asked us to admire chefs simply because they were famous. It asked us to understand them. To understand why they cooked, where they came from and what they were trying to preserve. Fame was a byproduct of that curiosity, not the goal.
“I see [the festival] as a celebration of why we come together to eat, why we go to restaurants,” “Chef’s Table” creator David Gelb told Bon Appetit, “That’s paramount and one of the most important things that makes us human. We come together around a hearth, we tell stories, and we eat.”
It wasn’t Bottura’s technical brilliance that changed me. It was his belief that food could be an act of service. That a restaurant could strengthen a community. That a wheel of Parmigiano could represent thousands of livelihoods. And that writing about those things wasn’t frivolous at all.
“Chef’s Table” didn’t convince me to become a food writer, but it convinced me that food could be the vehicle through which I wrote about everything else.
If the festival can capture even a fraction of that spirit — if it asks us to understand not only famous chefs, but the farmers, artisans, workers and communities behind them — it will be more than another stop on the culinary calendar. It will be a reminder of what food media can offer when it chooses to nourish more than our appetites.
Elizabeth Meriwether’s new series, which follows a female killer seeking vengeance against a network of abusers, is brutal, nuanced, and, at times, surprisingly funny.
Punk in the Big Apple is a subject that has been exhaustively—and some might say exhaustingly—documented over the years, yet a new reissue by the venerable Chicago crate diggers Numero Group accomplishes the mighty task of finding a fresh angle on the late 1970s scene. The set gathers the entire catalog of the short-lived boutique label Ork Records, founded in 1975 by the Warhol cohort, film buff and would-be impresario Terry Ork. It was primarily a vehicle for a band he was managing called Television, but he soon released foundational punk and postpunk singles by Television, Richard Hell and Alex Chilton with compelling obscurities by the Erasers, the Revelons and Prix. Spread across two CDs or five LPs, this modest catalog totaling 49 songs reveals a scene as it was coalescing and figuring out a new set of rules for rock ‘n’ roll. It’s easily one of the best reissues of 2015.
So what is this guy Link Cromwell doing on here? His pair of tunes stands out among the gritty, grotty punk anthems: “Crazy Like a Fox” is a folksy protest song about rejecting workaday conformity, more “Eve of Destruction” than “Blitzkrieg Bop.” And “Shock Me” is a jittery volt of garage rock energy, much rawer than the A-side but still not exactly the sound you associate with CBGB. Their inclusion on this set, however, is crucial. Both songs were recorded in the mid 1960s by a musician who would later have a profound impact on punk rock and in fact on all subsequent rock. Link Cromwell was actually the stage name of Lenny Kaye, who is one of the most influential men in rock history, even though most people have never heard the name.
Kaye recorded those two songs for his uncle Larry Kusik, who had written “Crazy Like a Fox” with Ritchie Adams. Both were professional songwriters and musicians, the former penning “Speak Softly Love” from “The Godfather” and the latter a member of the Fireflies and later the Archies. Link Cromwell was their attempt to cash in on the popularity of Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction,” although “Crazy” barely sold a handful of copies. Kaye continued making music, forming a band called the Zoo and writing for “Rolling Stone,” “Crawdaddy” and “Fusion,” among other publications.
In the early 1970s he started playing electric guitar while his friend Patti Smith recited poetry. Eventually, the project cohered into the Patti Smith Group, which self-released its first single, “Piss Factory,” on their own Mer Records. It not only inspired the music of New York but also the business by which that music would be disseminated. Power to the people, indeed.
Perhaps even more crucially, in 1972 Kaye assembled a collection of garage-rock tunes from the 1960s, tightly wound rock anthems full of bristly defiance and angst and attitude by bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, the Count Five, the Standells and the Electric Prunes. The psych explorations and hippie noodling of the late 1960s rendered that sound obsolete, but Kaye still heard something explosive and timeless in those Fuzztone guitar riffs and Farfisa organ rave-ups. He called his compilation “Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968,” and while its initial pressing wasn’t what you would call a blockbuster, the right bands heard it.
“Nuggets” was the foundation for punk rock in New York City and college rock in Athens. It was expanded in the late 1990s and fomented the garage rock revival that gave us the White Stripes, the Hives and Reigning Sound. Even today acts like Ty Segall, Royal Headache, Thee Oh Sees and Total Control owe a debt to “Nuggets.” It’s impossible to overstate the influence of that compilation, which arguably invented the concept of the reissue and possibly even the mixtape. Punk wouldn’t have existed without garage rock, and “New York, New York” wouldn’t exist without “Nuggets.”
Link Cromwell ended up on Ork because Terry Ork asked if he could reissue it—a request that reveals the influence of ‘60s garage rock on ‘70s punk.
Recently Kaye related the story to Salon: “One day Charles [Ball, who ran the business side of Ork Records] said to me, Can we put out your old ‘Crazy Like a Fox’ single? And I thought, why not? That’s how I got included in their great discography. My song is an anomaly because it’s not really from the time covered by the new Ork set.”
That certainly makes the song stand out. It connects this new punk scene with an older sound and style.
Absolutely. They all listened to “Nuggets.” In a weird way, “Nuggets” was a philosophical throwback to a time when rock ‘n’ roll was pretty open-ended and was still figuring itself out. I think that’s a good comparison to what was happening at CBGB at the time. Both were these interim periods when there are a lot of different stylistic things coming into the music and everybody’s having a good time putting them together in odd ways. So the bands that clustered around CBGB looked at the “Nuggets” album as a role model, I think. I grew up in that garage rock era, so I partook of that sense of experimentalism and excitement.
Were you surprised that “Nuggets” had so much resonance?
Well, the thing sold so few copies on its initial release! But it’s found a home among people who appreciated the spirit of the music. I suppose it was one of the templates of a kind of feeling within rock ‘n’ roll at the time that bands needed to rediscover their original motivations—why you make music in the first place. It’s not really to be professional musicians or to have a career, but to find a voice. Surely the bands on “Nuggets” and the bands at GBGB had that same spirit and were trying to return to what I call the original sin of rock ‘n’ roll. They were trying to find their own way.
Every generation seems to find “Nuggets” at a certain point, even now with the current wave of garage rock bands.
Two things about “Nuggets.” One, there is a sense of innovation and rediscovery within it. Second, it’s just great records. It’s not so much about the Fuzztone guitars and Farfisa organ as it is about these incredibly well-crafted and well-performed records. Even though they have a veneer of primitivism, they’re not as simple as they look. They’re unique. They come out of your speakers and they transcend genre. One of the things that I love about the Ork set is that it’s not as genre specific as people these days think of punk rock as being. When you say punk rock, the Ramones template comes to mind. But to me the bands on “Nuggets” were all over the place stylistically, and I think that’s true of the earlier bands at CBGB and the ones that Terry collected for his label. There are a lot of different kinds of music at work—a lot of people discovering themselves. And that’s what makes it worthy of its lavish presentation.
The Ork set definitely conveys a sense of community centered around Terry Ork, all of these bands orbiting around this very charismatic character.
It was a community. It was an underground collection of individuals who got to know each other and encouraged each other. That’s one of the things Terry was so good at—helping people become themselves. He certainly had that role in Television. He wasn’t much of a musician. He wasn’t even much of a businessman. For him to run a label was a stretch of his talent. But he took care of some of the practicalities, from finding his bands places to play to encouraging them once they got there. He was a good soul, a merry cherubic human. I never think of him as serious. When I think of him, I think of him as being somewhat mischievous.
And that seems to come through on the Ork set, even though he doesn’t play a note on it.
There was a certain playfulness, a sense of being far enough from the mainstream that you had no choice but to find your own path. All of these bands were essentially misfits, and that’s why the scene at CBGB could grow and develop unnoticed. No one was paying much attention, so people could take their time figuring out whatever new direction they wanted to follow or whatever new idiosyncrasies they wanted to adopt.
The focus is on these really intriguing bands, some of whom were caught in motion going on to the majors and some of whom would not be documented at all, like the Erasers. I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the Erasers had it not been for Ork. It’s great to hear “Little Johnny Jewel” and “Blank Generation” and to hear Richard Hell moving away from Television to his solo vision. It’s great to hear Alex Chilton between incarnations. But really, for me, hearing some of these other bands is a great thing, because otherwise they might be forgotten by rock history.
One thing about “Nuggets” is that it’s not your top-shelf groups. Maybe some of them became big, like the Standells. But a lot of them were the also-rans. That’s where I like my rock ‘n’ roll arrow of interest points—toward those bands that are off to the side. In a way they tell the tale of the scene much more than the successful bands.
I think that’s what “Nuggets” instilled in me: this idea that you didn’t have to be the Beatles to make good or important music. You could be nobodies and still have an amazing song.
Exactly. The Beatles are at such a level, they’re just the Beatles. In a weird way they’re disconnected from their times. But you listen to some of those Merseybeat bands and you get a real sense of what it was like in Liverpool at a certain moment in time. As a rock historian, I like to see the oddballs. I’m doing a little investigating into New Orleans in the late ‘50s, and I know Little Richard and Fats Domino and all those guys. But when I find a piano player like Archibald or this guy I’m really into now, Roy Montell, who has a song called “That Mellow Saxophone,” that’s really the fun stuff. In some ways they’re more revelatory and insightful that the major players in the scene.
You were in Patti Smith’s band at the time, and her first single, “Hey Joe”/”Piss Factory,” was massively influential, even from a business standpoint. Releasing it on your own Mer Records label showed that you could do this on your own and on a smaller scale.
I understood how to do it. I loved the a cappella doo wop labels that record stores in the tri-state area were doing at the time. That was where independent labels began. You don’t have a route to the major labels, so you might as well put it out yourself. It’s not so different from today when people are making their own CDs and selling them at gigs. You can see what you sound like and figure yourself out. Out little Mer Records didn’t have any other releases, because we weren’t businesspeople. It was an experiment to try to create, if nothing else, a rare record of the future.
You’ve talked about artists coming into their own at CBGB, but it sounds like you had come into your own a bit earlier than most of the people on Ork Records. Did that give you a different perspective on punk?
I was probably four or five years older than most of those people, which is enough for a generation. I did serve my rock ‘n’ roll apprenticeship in the ‘60s. I was in what would be known as a garage band, and it was called the Zoo. I played mostly on the fraternity circuit, which stretched across Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. If you saw “Animal House,” then you saw the type of band I was in. We were playing “Shout” for 20 minutes while the fraternity brothers swam in beer. You played four sets a night. I remember when I played the Delta Kappa Epsilon house—the D Kaps, which was the football players’ house at Rutgers, where I went to school—they would give us an extra $25 if we didn’t take a break. So we were up to $125! It’s a great way to learn your craft and a good way to go through college. I always think of rock ‘n’ roll as my true major.
To play in the ‘60s, when the whole playing field was changing so radically, was amazing. My first band started at the end of ’64, and when the Zoo broke up in around ’67, there had already been quite an evolution in how the music was regarded. I think the same can be said for the early ‘70s into the late ‘70s. The whole sensibility of what rock ‘n’ roll could be and who could play it changed radically. I have to laugh when I remember when the Zoo started. There were a couple of British Invasion songs in our repertoire, but mostly it was songs like “What’d I Say” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’.” By the time we broke up, we were sitting on the floor cross-legged playing raga rock. That’s a pretty large leap. I never thought I would be continuing it after college, which is why my subsequent career is so amazing to me.
Was there a moment when you realized that you could make a career out of music?
Yeah, about a year ago. You just keep doing it until you realize you’ve made a life of it. It’s really something to have this Ork box come out. You realize what a long life it’s been. It’s quite a commemoration. I certainly didn’t see Ork Records as such a thing. It’s like somebody putting out records with your friends, people helping themselves. But now you look back and it’s really quite a body of work.
When Ork put the “Crazy Like a Fox” single out, how did it do? Did it sell particularly well?
The single has been released on so many compilation albums and has been rereleased many times, so it’s just amazing how little impact it ever makes. It’s a cool single, though. I just performed at the Ponderosa Stomp under the name Link Cromwell, and it was his first appearance in 49-and-a-half years. I’m pretty amazed by his longevity. The single has never been a hit, but it continues on. In a weird way, it’s my own tale. It’s the theme song that tells the story of my life. “While they’re working on the inside, I’m having fun on the outside.” The song gave me a sense of myself as a musician, as a performer, as someone who could be that “Crazy Like a Fox” person. And I’m grateful that Terry and Charles helped move it along its lifeline. And in retrospect, I think it’s just a good song—a tribute to my Uncle Larry, who was a great songwriter. “Speak Softly Love,” the theme from “The Godfather.” “A Time for Us” from “Romeo & Juliet.” He was a great encourager of me at a time when I needed a little bit of encouragement.
Did you ever consider “Crazy Like a Fox” for “Nuggets”?
No. I never would have been so self-serving as to put it on. In a way it’s not really a Nuggets-y song. It’s not a band coming out of nowhere. It hasn’t got a great Fuzztone guitar solo, which is probably de rigueur for “Nuggets.” But it’s still a very hooky song. I especially have an affection for the flip side, “Shock Me,” since the bass playing on it is my first instrumental appearance on record. I didn’t play on the A side, but I played bass on the B side while my uncle tootled along on harp. It ‘s just a great little slice of folk protest.
Now that you’ve dusted off Link Cromwell for Ponderosa Stomp, do you have any further plans for him?
I have no idea. Sometimes in my imagination I invent a little lifeline that Link Cromwell might have had, had that song been a hit. There would have been the lost years in the desert, and then he would have tried to stage a comeback and re-create that hit. But to be perfectly honest, I’m happy with the way things have turned out. If the song had been a chart success, my whole life would have been written differently. Everything happens for a reason.
No matter how well-matched a couple is, every relationship brings with it some kind of compromise. In our household, one such compromise has resulted in me being a near scholar of the survival reality show Alone. I’ve hated camping for as long as I can remember and, in general, share Socrates’s preference for the city over the countryside. My Esteemed Partner is not the opposite by any means, but she would probably like to do more outdoor activities than we actually wind up doing. When we discovered Alone during the pandemic, that created an important release valve. She gets to indulge her fantasies of roughing it in the wilderness, while I get to apply my “always-on” analytical mind to a show that is in fact almost a parody of neoliberal individualism.
The premise is simple and cruel, taking the “skills-based” reality show paradigm to its logical limits. Contestants are dropped off in the remote wilderness, in the same region but far distant from each other. The winner is the one who is able to endure the isolation and deprivation the longest. All the contestants are in some sense survival experts, in many cases either living off the grid, providing instruction in survival, or both. Hence they have many skills that can help them extract some kind of living from the land. But few have the experience of extended periods of complete social isolation — perhaps we see here why the show became a hit during the pandemic? — and all of them are tormented by a complete lack of knowledge as to how many other contestants are still going and how long they may have to hold out.
Winning does not require holding out against death. Contestants receive periodic medical checks and can be extracted if their condition has dangerously deteriorated. (To my knowledge, no contestant has actually died, but part of me wonders if someone has and they just never showed the footage or acknowledged their existence.) Instead, they are holding out against the temptation to give up — an ever-present option. They are equipped with a satellite phone that allows them to “officially tap out,” the term of art for giving up. Within the space of an hour, a team shows up to film them sharing the vital life lessons they have learned from the experience and then to clean up their hard-won shelter so that it is as though they were never there.
The post-“tap out” filming is an exceptional moment — up until then, the contestants must film themselves. We occasionally get a glimpse of the quite imposing suitcase full of camera equipment they have to lug around in addition to their survival gear. Sometimes this gives them an advantage, for instance using the camera’s light for other purposes or setting up motion-detecting cameras to track animal habits. I assume that they have enough downtime that the work of setting up the shots, etc., doesn’t become excessively burdensome. But I suspect the act of filming is a double-edged sword. It gives them an imaginary friend to talk to (one contestant this year constantly addresses the camera as “you guys,” by which I assume she means the home audience), but sometimes the irony of constantly performing for an absent interlocutor seems to promote the inevitable spiral into abject loneliness.
I’m sure there is a lot to say about the subcultures that have grown up around the show, its effect on survivalist circles, the almost uncanny recurrence of the theme of a man leaving his very pregnant wife behind to be on the show, etc. I don’t know anything about that — I just know what I see on screen. And what I see is so perfectly, sublimely ideological that I almost suspect that Adorno is an executive producer. The surface-level content of the show is radically individualistic. Each of the contestants is completely isolated and forced to rely on their wits, their knowledge, and the limited kit of survival items they have cultivated. The contest appears to be a pure meritocracy, judged not by a fallible human being but by nature itself.
Yet seldom has there been a less “natural” setting. They are undertaking a task no human being has attempted or even would attempt. The places they are forced to survive in have, as far as I can tell, never been permanently inhabited by humans. Had they chosen to live there, they would not have done so in radical isolation, but in a group. There are no indigenous lifeways that involve shivering alone in a makeshift shelter north of the Arctic Circle or hunkering down under a tarp in the middle of a freak rainstorm in the South African desert. The scenario is, in short, completely contrived — it would only “really” come up as a result of a highly technologically-mediated event like a plane crash.
And their existence is itself highly technologically mediated. Their “tap out” phones depend on a network of satellites connected to the GPS system. They have an elite medical team on call at a moment’s notice. And the reason we can even see what they are doing is that they have a wide range of camera equipment — including extremely durable batteries and advanced solar cell technology — to capture them as they essentially generate endless video “content.” The material they are filming will be distributed on cable and streaming networks, but what they are doing is not essentially different from a TikTok influencer. In fact, many of them already are influencers — the “getting to know you” segments often include YouTube clips of their survival feats — and as the show has gone on, awareness of the past episodes and the surrounding social media discussion has deeply shaped how more recent contestants prepare. After the first few seasons, it became common for current contestants to name-drop past stars of the show, both as models and cautionary tales. The most radically individual experience is thus profoundly socially mediated.
The show is not without its pleasures. There is amusement in seeing an arrogant contestant brought low by his failure to catch any fish day after day. There is morbid fascination in getting a window into the minds of these certified weirdos (who else would even attempt such a thing?). And there can be moments of profound empathy when a bedraggled contestant drops out, unaware that they are one of the last two remaining and that their opponent is also hanging on by a thread.
As when watching obscure sports on the Olympics, one becomes an insta-expert, confidently judging the contestants’ choices. (My go-to commentary: Hunting big game? Always a mistake, absolute hubris. Fishing, only fishing!) But having seen almost all extant episodes, I cannot accept the notion that this is a contest of skill or merit. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. One rule of thumb, for instance, is that the person who builds the most effective shelter will always tap out shortly thereafter. As I have said, the contestants who get their food situation permanently “locked down” (by killing a big game animal and drying all the meat) wind up with an albatross around their neck — their sole task becomes to protect their horde from the various rodents and scavengers. And in the end, no one ever has “enough” food for the long haul. Winter comes, nature closes up shop, and the show becomes a “starvation contest” — a phenomenon that has itself entered the contestants’ patter. Along the way, competitors are more likely to be eliminated by sheer happenstance — as when an otherwise highly skilled Australian competitor’s boot came unglued shortly after he landed — than by any discrete mistake.
In the end, it is an emotional game, and few of us have the emotional resources to stand up to the boredom, deprivation, and isolation of this competition. Those who do seem to be either vaguely insane or — I don’t know how else to put it — a little bit stupid. A recent winner fit the latter description, letting every disappointment and setback roll over him, only once losing his temper (upon finding that the persistent marten he had nicknamed “Sassy” had yet again stolen his food cache), mostly passing the time by reciting self-help slogans and other banalities. He was not just the last man standing, he was the Last Man.
And yet one did not begrudge him. Indeed, we were rooting for him to prevail against the last holdouts. There is a certain satisfaction in seeing the person that the system has selected for. I have no doubt he would be an exemplary middle manager, an unflappable customer service rep. But at the end of the day, we were rooting for Sassy, the true winner — who received a life-changing jackpot from this man who had been forced to generate social media content at the outer reaches of the GPS network.
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