So the talk of the town lately has been about this certain Instagram guitar player who got busted, you know, stealing licks and miming guitar parts, I believe. And it's kind of funny because it didn't really phase me too much. I realized it's because when I grew up, pretty much everything was fake.
By that I mean everything seemed to be manufactured, you know, enhanced, exaggerated, or, you know, even outright deceiving. Little did I know that learning about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were just two little things in a very long line of heartbreaks and disappointments waiting for me. I mean, what's next? Are you going to tell me that DJs don't actually talk in that voice? Or that four out of five doctors actually don't prefer camel cigarettes. Now, don't get me wrong, I know a lot of these things serve a purpose, and now if I look back with my rose colored nostalgic glasses, I get a good feeling from a lot of it.
But I'm afraid that the fakery leached into my life way longer than it should have. Let's begin with movies. Now I could talk about all sorts of movies that I watched as a kid.
But for me, especially it was martial arts movies that really deceived me. I was just this wide-eyed kid thinking everything I saw on the screen was possible. And I really believed that if you knew karate, you could kick like 20 guys asses at once.
And I never really even noticed that they were coming at my favorite action heroes one at a time. So whether it was Chuck Norris or Bruce Lee, I never thought about, “Hey, they never just bull rush the guy.” I thought I could actually be a stealthy ninja back when I used to watch old Sho Kosugi films, you know, like Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, Ninja Three, The Domination, one of my favorites.
Swear to God, there's actually an exorcist scene in that movie. And by the way, that is Special K from Break-In. Still have a crush on her.
Well, I begged my dad to take me to this martial arts store called Rising Sun here in Minnesota. I ended up getting a ninja uniform, an actual sword. It wasn't sharpened.
But then I got some ninja stars. I had everything, even the crazy boots with the slit toe. I would sneak around my neighborhood at night.
I am so lucky I didn't get shot or bitten by a dog or something. But all of that came crashing down the day I thought I could hide out in the woods. So I climbed up a tree and this guy walked by with this vicious dog.
And the dog started going crazy and trying to claw at the tree. The guy comes up and he looks up at me and I'm just like, “Sorry about that.” And I climbed down in total shame and walked away and never put on a ninja uniform after that again.
If I would have been a real ninja, I would have thrown a smoke bomb and done a backflip out of the tree and disappeared.
And don't even get me started on pro wrestling. As a really young kid, we used to watch AWA on Sunday afternoons. And then I graduated onto WWF eventually. I remember programming our Betamax player to record WrestleMania Three. And I had to go to bed not knowing what happened. But when I woke up the next day and saw that I actually was able to tape it, I was in heaven. So when I eventually learned that it was scripted, by the way, I'll never say it's fake, because I know how much you know, those guys actually put their bodies through. But it really hurt me because in my brain somewhere, I still believe that it was true.
And then of course, growing up when I did, we were just inundated with TV commercials. You know, we'd get up and watch Saturday morning cartoons. And I didn't realize that all that was really about advertising to children so that we would beg our parents to buy these, you know, cereal brands or whatever.
You know, you watch these commercials, and everyone seems happy, everything's wonderful. And then you kind of look at your home life, and you're thinking, why is it my home like this all the time, and then they would hit you with a slogan that basically sticks with you the rest of your life. I mean, I can remember slogans from when I was really young.
“You've always been able to have your whoppers your way.” So you had, you know, all these actors smiling, looking happy to be, you know, pushing you into something that'll make you into an alcoholic or a diabetic someday. But I have to admit, there is one McDonald's ad that almost scared me off of McDonald's forever. It's the one where he's ice skating. I don't know if you've seen this one before. But it's terrifying. It looks like something straight out of a Stephen King movie.
Maybe I was especially naive. But I remember really thinking that the TV show, especially the sitcoms, I believe the characters were real people. So I always thought like Bill Cosby was this awesome dad. I thought I could, you know, eventually go on a date with Kimberly from Diff’rent Strokes. And I remember being really jealous of Ricky Schroeder from Silver Spoons because he had, you know, that train set, and he also had arcade games in his bedroom.
I was legitimately jealous for a fictional character on a screen. Now, if somebody would have flown me to Hollywood and shown me the actual sets, I bet you I would have had this Neo from The Matrix moment and like threw up when I realized that my whole life has been a lie.
I mean, this stuff was hardwired into our nervous systems at a young age, because my mom would watch reruns of Little House on the Prairie, and I actually thought Mary went blind overnight. I felt every agonizing minute when Carrie fell down the mine shaft. But the one I'll remember forever, I felt bad for weeks over was when the blind school burned down. And I believe Mrs. Garvey had a baby in her arms, and she was trying to break the window with it to get out. No wonder why my generation is so messed up and resilient, I guess at the same time.
I could go on forever about movies and TV commercials and everything, but what this video is really about to me is the music business. Why? Because it's the career path I chose to take in life.
You know I talked about things being manipulated and fake and exaggerated and all that kind of stuff. Well, I think it all began for me the first time I heard Kiss Alive, I must have listened to that album hundreds if not 1000 times as a kid. A huge part of the excitement of that album is imagining them on stage. I had never really seen a rock band before, so I could just go off the cover of the album, which I'm pretty sure now they just all kind of posed for it in a studio. It just looks like too perfect of a shot to capture live. But you know, you could hear the audience going crazy, and you could hear the fireworks going off and everything. So in my mind, I would imagine what it looked like.
And it wasn't till way later that somebody told me that the whole thing was pretty much, you know, manufactured in a way. I guess it was from a real show. But from what I know, they pumped in the audience cheering, they would like loop it on a tape machine and turn it up whenever they wanted to. And they even went back to the studio and would re record parts. So a lot of it was kind of put together afterwards, but they still capture the energy of a live show. I have to hand it to them, it's a legendary album.
And then I remember the time my dad got cable and we saw MTV for the first time. I had no idea that the bands weren't really performing when I watched their video. For example, I'd see The Pretenders video all the time, Back on the Chain Gang. And I thought Chrissy Hynde was actually singing. You know, I thought she was actually walking around the city and sounding that awesome, which by the way, I'm sure she could, but that wasn't what they were doing for this video, I didn't realize it was a pre-recorded track and they were basically lip syncing over it for the visual aspect for the videos. Now, don't get me wrong, they actually recorded the song initially, but they were just doing the lip syncing for the video. There were other acts later on some very notorious acts that weren't even really singing, they just brought other people in and then they would lip sync to pretend that they were the ones who actually recorded it.
So there is a difference there. But then I saw a lot of the actual live performances on shows like Solid Gold. This is really going way back and a band would come out and KISS was on there, I believe one time, and they would play and they would sound awesome. I didn't realize that they were also you know, faking it on stage for the most part, I think sometimes they would record the music first and then have live vocals, but I think a lot of bands just would lip sync to their own pre-recorded track. And it never occurred to me as a kid how weird it was that a lot of the songs would fade out at the end. That was a big thing that happened back in the day. I figured it was just some guy in the back turning the volume down. I just had no idea.
Throughout the years, there have been bands that have been like protesting doing that. So I think some of the most famous ones were Nirvana, and then you also had Iron Maiden, I think they actually swapped out instruments and you know, we're pretending to play so up to a certain point, a lot of my knowledge and belief in music was all smoke and mirrors.
But all that was about to come to an end and the band that would do it for me of all bands was the Grateful Dead. It's a weird story.
So I feel like I finally saw the wizard behind the curtain. Back when the song Touch of Grey was big. It's one of my favorite Grateful Dead songs. I know that makes me a poser, but I really do love that song. I distinctly remember the video, just the skeletons playing on stage. It was pretty freaky, but cool.
Well, I knew that song inside and out. I memorized all the lyrics. I loved to do that back then to my favorite songs, and then by chance, a radio station played some bootleg version of the tune. Well, the song kicks in and it sounded like complete garbage to me. It was just this mushy sound and the intro went on forever. I was like, when are they going to start the vocals? This can't even be the right song. At the time, my aunt's boyfriend was in the living room. I think he was smoking weed or something, but I asked him to come in because he knew about the Dead. I'm like, is this Touch of Grey? They said it was. It sounds weird. And he goes, “Yeah, man, this is the Dead, it's just LIVE. It was kind of like I could feel my heartbreak, you know? I'm just like, okay, well, thanks, and then he went back out to do his thing.
I contrasted it with KISS Alive. At the time, I didn't know that Kiss went in and re-recorded and all that stuff so I thought maybe KISS is just that much better of a band. That's all.
At the time, we were listening to Shout at the Devil quite a bit on vinyl and I would have had that same reaction if somebody would have been able to show me the live footage of them playing it. It would have been that same gut-dropping sensation, I think.
Whenever I went through my stepdad's records, I would try to find the live versions and I really got to know the difference between the studio-quality and the live-quality, and the studio quality would win out almost every single time until I went to my very first concert. And that's when my mind was blown the other direction.
So my first concert, I know I talk about it all the time, but it was KISS, the Hot in the Shade tour with Slaughter and Faster Pussycat. Well, Slaughter comes out, and Tim Kelly hits this A chord. They're dropped down a whole step, by the way so it's actually a G chord. And he does that toggle switch trick where it turns on and off really fast, the Randy Rhoads, I call it. And I could just feel it, you know, vibrating my chest, it was such an awesome moment, and then they came out, and they killed.
And then Faster Pussycat came out. They didn't do as well, but they were awesome, too.
And then KISS came out and just blew my world wide open. I've heard recordings from that tour, and it sounds okay, but I feel like if I would have heard the recording of the live show first, I would have been disappointed, but because I was at the show, I felt the energy. I finally understood what people meant about going and seeing an actual band live. I mean, you have the lights, you have the cheering, you have the band, you have the volume, you have the weed smoke smell. And so I started to get kind of a soft spot in my heart for live performances, because I realized that what was captured on audio does not do it justice.
So I talked to my stepdad about it, because he's a big deadhead, and he's like, “Yeah, man, you can't really listen to the dead on bootleg, because it doesn't do it nearly the justice as if you went to the show, obviously. It’s like when you go to the actual show and you're around the environment, the atmosphere, and you know, maybe you're chemically, you know, a little bit enhanced, and you watch the dead, it's like you enter a whole different realm, one that you will never experience just sitting there listening to it on a tape.”
I then realized that I would hate it if my favorite bands came out to play live and they always sounded just like the albums, I mean if they never deviated from it, never took a chance, never did anything dangerous, that would be kind of boring. I kind of like the susceptibility of disaster during live shows.
Recently, I went and saw Cyndi Lauper, and a lot of things went wrong and she just kept going, “What are you gonna do? You know, that's live performance for you.”
And like I said earlier, I'm grateful for all that deception. I know it sounds kind of weird. But it really allowed me as a kid to enter this dream world where I thought everything was perfect and rose-colored like my glasses are now when it comes to looking back at it, that is, but I'm still pissed off about those commercials that they showed us because I think some of them did irreparable damage to people.
I mean, I look at everybody who believed that McDonald's was the place to go or you know, you had to drink Coke or smoke these type of cigarettes and they're still paying the price to this day. But as far as just remembering Star Wars, or the first time I saw ET, or the first time hearing KISS Alive, those are all really special to me still. So I guess I've come full circle when it comes to you know, the fakery of my universe growing up.
And then there's the wake up period. It's very painful, but I feel like I've come full circle in accepting it and realizing that it's all part of this weird recipe that's called my life.
But let me know your story. I would love to hear something that you discovered was fake that really destroyed you. So I know this whole Instagram online guitars fakery thing is going to be a hot topic for a little while, but later on when people read this blog post, they're going to be like, “What is he talking about?” But I just wanted you to know why I feel kind of immune to feeling so upset about the whole thing. I lived through much worse, I believe. Okay, so be sure to leave your tale of deception in the comments section and I'll check them out.