Ken Reid on 10 Years of Talking TV with Rockers
A podcast with a punky past has the lowdown on your heroes’ television habits
Who is Fred Schneider’s favorite Star Trek villain? Which TV teenagers freaked out Devo? Ken Reid has the answers.
On Valentine’s Day 2014, Boston-based stand-up comic and onetime punk rocker Reid started began sharing his love of classic TV with the world by debuting his TV Guidance Counselor podcast. As a pop culture obsessive nonpareil, Reid owns a more-or-less complete collection of TV Guide back issues. Every week he invites a guest to pick one and discuss what they would have watched back then and air their thoughts on old-school TV in general, leading to some fascinating and funny exchanges.
Over the years Reid’s had a stunning assemblage of guests including comedians, actors, writers, and—in accordance with his status as a major music geek—loads of amazing musicians. Devo’s Gerry Casale, The Damned, Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, The Go-Go’s Kathy Valentine, Marshall Crenshaw, Juliana Hatfield, Mike Watt, Mickey Dolenz, Lydia Lunch, Tanya Donelly, and many more have joined in, sharing things they’ve never discussed in other interviews. In celebration of TV Guidance Counselor’s 10th anniversary, we got Reid’s take on a decade of talking television with rock heroes.
How does it feel having done a decade’s worth of TV Guidance Counselor?
It seems like it was incredibly fast. And I’m still shocked that I haven’t missed a week. I’ve never taken a break at all, and I’ve done more than 52 episodes a year. I think I’m too obsessive.
What are some of the biggest surprises you encountered from the musicians you’ve had on the show?
The Damned was the first one that was a major surprise. I was going back and forth with the manager about, “Dave [Vanian] doesn’t do interviews, you’ll have to talk to Captain Sensible.” And I was like, “That’s fine.” And then he stormed out on me after 10 minutes. I was like, “I’m screwed, I have no interview now,” and I ended up talking to Dave for like an hour and it was the best, most casual, “I’ve known this guy forever” kind of conversation.
Any other standout surprise moments?
There’s the time I interviewed Veruca Salt, and Nina Gordon told me that she bought her house because the guy who wrote the “Oh My Nose” episode of The Brady Bunch lived there, and she was such a Brady Bunch fan. Or [Sebadoh frontman] Lou Barlow told me that he soundchecks with the Family Ties theme song every time because it covers his complete [vocal] range.
Which of your musical guests have you gotten the biggest kick out of?
Marshall Crenshaw was fun. We were talking about the MC5 and it kind of struck me how much of a tough-ass Detroit guy he is, which people wouldn’t really think [laughs]. One of the things that struck me was how much Fred Schneider loves Star Trek, [lizard creature] the Gorn being his all-time favorite thing. I can’t hear the word Gorn now without Fred Schneider going [imitates Schneider’s vocal style] “The Gorn! We just love The Gorn!”
Have you noticed any commonalities in the TV tastes of the musicians you’ve talked to?
Every one of them has a favorite theme song. I don’t think I’ve ever had a musician who couldn’t bust out a theme song immediately.
What were some of the big favorite themes?
For a lot of people, Rockford Files; a lot of people, Barney Miller. Family Ties, WKRP, Addams Family, Munsters, those come up frequently.
Any other hot topics?
The Beatles on Ed Sullivan comes up all the time for people who were alive to see it live. It’s like when JFK got shot, they know exactly where they were. Some people bring up sketch comedy shows for the music, like they watched SNL for the music, or Fridays comes up often. A lot of people were like, “I didn’t really care for Fridays but they had good musical guests, like The Clash and Devo.” They were a little hipper with the music acts they’d have on.
What do you consider to be the major cultural links between rock and TV?
I think they kind of evolved simultaneously, because they’re the same age pretty much. Although TV started in the late ‘30s it was popularized in the ‘50s just like rock music, and both of them sort of aimed at that “first” generation of teenagers. Even from the first days of television there were always rock music shows, every town had an American Bandstand-style show. I also think a lot of shows that were trying to be topical I always talk about the punk rock episodes of CHiPS or Quincy—they were horrifically off and wrong, but it had the opposite of their intended effect. I think most of the people that watched those were like, “That kind of looks fun, this is clearly not what it’s like but I’m kind of interested in this.” Before you could Google stuff, they’re talking about hardcore punk on Quincy and CHiPS when that’s not on MTV.
VIDEO: Mayhem “Next Stop Nowhere” from Quincy
Do you feel like a certain side of TV culture was important to the sensibilities of early punk bands like The Dictators and The Ramones?
Yeah, the sort of junk food, latch-key kid thing. The first generation of punks were also the first generation of kids raised on television. So, we kind of saw what that did to certain types of people.
What are your thoughts on the way live music on TV evolved over time?
There really isn’t that much of a tradition of live music on TV because the vast majority was syncing to a backing track. SNL insisted that people play live…that was an unusual approach. I guess you had Austin City Limits or MTV Unplugged. For a music channel that’s really the only live music show they had. Solid Gold, I didn’t know this until Marshall Crenshaw told me, they didn’t play live but they had to record specific versions of their tracks to mime to that were exclusive to the show. There was a specific studio where you did that, it was a famous studio. Marshall was saying the only reason he did Solid Gold was that it was a studio you could never afford to record at. They just gave you a block of time, so he recorded like 20 songs there after he recorded whatever he had to get done for them.
Who are some of your favorite fictional TV bands?
Just the Ten of Us with The Lubbock Babes obviously; not my favorite musically but I love everything else about it. Kidd Video, the Saturday morning cartoon, I have the album, there’s a couple of good songs on there, Robbie Rist being the only actual musician in that group. The New Monkees and The Monkees. The Dregs of Humanity from It’s Your Move, that was a great one, a fictional band that Jason Bateman created so he could steal money from his high school, and then they died and had to play as reanimated skeletons. I like the one offs, like, “Let’s just start a band for this episode for some reason.”
TV played a crucial part in forming your musical tastes, right?
I didn’t sleep when I was a kid, so I would stay up and flip channels around. So, I was five, and MTV used to air The Monkees and The Young Ones back-to-back. The first episode of The Young Ones I saw was “Nasty,” with The Damned appearing. And I was just blown away. I said, “I don’t know what this is, but this is everything I like now.” Night Flight was where I got a huge amount of my musical taste from. They went to like a segment on The Residents or music from John Waters movies and I was like, “Yep, this is great.”
VIDEO:
How about your favorite guest appearances by musicians on TV series?
Jermaine Jackson on the Facts of Life. I loved Stacey Q on The Facts of Life when she would reoccur as Cinnamon. Pete & Pete is the one I think of above all else – Iggy Pop’s playing a kid’s dad, Michael Stipe’s an ice cream salesman, it was just bonkers. No one else was doing that kind of stunt casting at the time. El Debarge on Punky Brewster, that was a good one. Whitney Houston on Silver Spoons, that was a big one, she performs “Saving All My Love.”
There were a couple of great ones on Square Pegs, too.
Yeah, the Devo episode, which I talked to Gerry about when I had him on. He was like, “We’re a rock band and those kids on that show were partying more than anyone I’ve ever seen in my life! We were like, ‘Get away from us, you guys are too wild!’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5-5bAgEueY
What was Gerry Casale like?
Awesome guy, really fascinating. Devo were so proto-MTV. They were doing that before MTV was a thing. Their first record had a whole visual component of short films to it. They really set the tone and the style for the early days of MTV.
What was it like talking to Mike Watt?
The episode with him, the fascinating thing was that the week [of the TV Guide issue] he picked was the week he met D. Boon, which is a huge, life-changing thing for him. The story he tells me is they were both obsessed with this local horror host named Seymour, and D. Boon used to like to paint, and he painted a portrait of this guy, and it’s the first time he signed anything as D. Boon and not Dennes, so Watt has always equated it with this specific local horror host.
Let me just throw out a few names of other guests you’ve had. How about Kathy Valentine?
The thing that sticks out is that story she tells about The Munsters. When she was getting sober, she started watching it instead of drinking. She was sitting in bed and that became a new obsession until she cleaned up. She also told a story about how horrible it was when [The Go-Go’s] were on SNL. They were just drinking all day. They left [the band] on their own and they were just out of it, and it was just a really sloppy, bad performance. But she hadn’t watched it since then, and then she watched it recently and it wasn’t as bad as she remembered it. But they had gotten a lot of crap about it when they were on.
Bill Janovitz of Buffalo Tom?
He wrote the theme to This Old House, the second iteration. If you watch This Old House now, that’s him, that’s his song. And he of course appeared in My So-Called Life, which is another great music show, great music use. The first episode, Buffalo Tom is in it. And then Juliana Hatfield is in it later in the season… and on Pete & Pete, acting. I remember Juliana Hatfield was super into Columbo and obsessed with The Rockford Files.
How about Andrew W.K.?
We did that after a con, I did a stand-up show, he performed, so in the green room we recorded that. He’s a huge fan of The Facts of Life, especially the episode where they buy a bong for Mrs. G. not knowing what it was. People are like, “Is [Andrew’s persona] a character?” But no, it’s pretty much the same, just dialed down a little bit. He’s pretty much a rock guy from Detroit.
What was talking to Jello Biafra like?
He was as weird as I thought he was gonna be, but he had strong opinions about stuff. You kind of just set him off and he goes.
He’s famous for his massive record collection, too.
Oh yeah, especially novelty records, which he brought up on the show – “Have you heard this? Have you heard this?” He liked television a lot more than I would have expected. I expected a more critical assessment of pop culture or commercialism, but he was just like anyone else – “I love this show and I love this, and…”
You’ve played in bands, and you’ve always been a big music head. How has music informed TV Guidance Counselor?
They’re sort of intrinsically linked for me. Television sort of sparked my love of music, and then music reinforced my love of television.
Catch a new episode of TV Guidance Counselor every week on most podcast platforms.
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