'Dreams' a rock 'n' roll nightmare to '60s experts
Brad
Forget about Geraldo drawing maps in the sand, or Peter burying his
face in Saddam Hussein's nether regions. Stop worrying about how to
tell the difference between the Mayflower Madame and The Bachelor. The
real controversy is, what are those compulsive liars on American
Dreams going to do tonight?
Few shows on television kick up more cyber-angst on the Internet than
American Dreams, NBC's drama about a working-class Philadelphia
family's troubled journey through the 1960s. Tonight's episode will
end at 9, and by 9:02 message boards all over the Net will be lit up
with diatribes by cantankerous baby-boomer truth squads complaining
that everything from the hairstyles to the record labels was wrong,
wrong, wrong.
''The historical accuracy people,'' sighs American Dreams executive
producer Jonathan Prince. ``I don't think they ever call up ER and
say, `Hey, listen, it's impossible to crack open three chests in an
hour the way ER did last night. Most emergency rooms do maybe one a
year.'
``But our show is an open door. You don't need a law degree or a
medical degree to have an opinion about the '60s. Far more people
consider themselves an expert on the Supremes or the Four Tops than
they do on heart surgery.''
The American Dreams revanchists rip the show for slighting the truth
in everything from the gear of its high-school bands (what fool
couldn't see that the snare drums were strapped in modern harnesses?)
to its references to old TV shows (any idiot knows that The Fugitive
aired on Tuesday night, not Thursday).
And, please, don't get them started on American Dreams' monstrous
historical libel of the Beatles. An American Dreams episode built
around the group's debut on The Ed Sullivan Show implied that the
Liverpool lads -- I hope you're sitting down when you read this --
played I Want To Hold Your Hand as their first number, when of course
it was actually their fifth.
''A slap in the face,'' one enraged Beatles scholar wrote in one of
the milder rants after that show. Another suggested the next episode
might as well have 15-year-old Meg, one of the show's characters, sit
down at the piano to help Paul McCartney write Let It Be.
TV CRUSADE
If that seems a bit peevish to you, you obviously don't take your rock
'n' roll seriously enough. ''It's like if you wrote a term paper on
the Civil War, and you began it with Lincoln's assassination, then had
the Battle of Bull Run right afterward,'' says Chuck Miller, a
columnist for the record-collector magazine Goldmine. 'If you handed
that in at school, you'd get an F. But do it here and you get a
Directors' Guild award.''
Miller is a one-man wrecking crew when it comes to American Dreams.
His weekly critiques of the show's time-line goofs on the Internet
news group rec.arts.tv, written under the pen name boardwalk7, rate
each episode by how many stuffed animals he hurls at the screen in
disgust. (Record so far: 12.) When he missed a week, the news group
boiled with demands that he return.
''I know I sound like the same kind of person who sits there watching
Star Trek working out the equations on photon boosters,'' Miller says.
``But I'm not a Net kook. I'm a record collector and I love music of
the '60s, and it's almost like the people who write the show didn't
experience the music the same way the rest of us did.''
Miller's not alone. In virtually every scene of American Dreams,
there's a radio, or a phonograph, or a TV tuned to American Bandstand
in the background. (Two of the show's main characters are teenage
girls who dance on Bandstand.) And anytime one of them is playing a
song that hadn't actually been recorded yet -- this season of American
Dreams has taken place in late 1963 and early 1964 -- legions of aging
hippies all over the country begin frothing at their computer
keyboards.
The timeline goofs on records began literally in the first instant of
American Dreams, when Stevie Wonder's pounding Uptight (Everything's
Alright) -- which wouldn't be recorded for another two years -- played
over a montage of kids scrambling to get to American Bandstand on
time.
The bloopers have continued at roughly the same rate that kids said
I-give-it-an-85it's-got-a-good-beat-and-youcan-dance-to-it on American
Bandstand. Most of the time the songs are off only a month or two. But
once in a while there's a whopper, like when a record-store clerk
urges his teeny-bopper girlfriend to listen to a 45 rpm of Bob Dylan's
Mr. Tambourine Man -- which was never issued as a single, and wouldn't
even appear on an album for another two years. Even errors of a few
months can be jarring to anyone who knows his rock 'n' roll history.
In one episode, the kids on Bandstand were asked to rate You Really
Got Me by the Kinks a full eight months before it was recorded -- and,
worse yet, a couple of months before the Beatles even launched rock
'n' roll's British Invasion. ''I guess that means the Kinks actually
were the first British Invasion band and we've been mistakenly loving
the Beatles all these years,'' observes a sarcastic Miller.
NO APOLOGIES
The fact that American Bandstand's eternal teenager Dick Clark is one
of the executive producers of American Dreams only enrages the show's
critics further. ''Dick Clark, quit kissing your bank book and pay
attention,'' demanded one message board poster.
Clark takes to cracks like that one about as cheerfully as he would
the suggestion that Clearasil causes cancer. ''We do it so guys like
you can ask questions about it,'' he snapped at me during a visit to
the American Dreams set a couple of months ago when I mentioned some
of the timeline glitches.
Prince is more understanding, if equally weary. ''I know that for some
people, the ones who really, really know their music, hearing the
records in the wrong year may just snap them out of the story, just
the way hearing a bogus motion may snap a real lawyer out of the story
on Law & Order,'' he concedes. ``Fortunately, most of us don't hold to
such a high standard.''
That said, Prince concedes he's not always the best judge of how far
you can push baby boomers who regard rock 'n' roll as the soundtrack
of their lives. At age 44, the days of American Dreams are a gauzy
memory to him -- and to several of his writers, in their 20s and 30s,
they aren't memories at all, just history.
The lack of deep roots in the era showed through in the original
American Dreams pilot, when the Beatles' Let It Be, a 1970 record, was
played over a montage of images from President Kennedy's 1963 funeral.
TV critics complained -- well, screamed -- and by the time the episode
aired, Let It Be had been replaced by Amazing Grace.
Before going any further, it's time for full disclosure: I may bear
some teeny-tiny measure of blame for the music in American Dreams. I
was one of the TV critics who took Prince to task over Let It Be.
Probably to stop me from pounding my shoe on his desk, he suggested I
send him a list of records I thought would be good for the show.
It ran 20 pages (listen, when I write about cantankerous baby boomers,
I know whereof I speak) and Prince tells me his staff actually looks
at it from time to time. The only thing I know for sure is that I
dared him to use Ray Stevens' Ahab, The Arab, an excessively
multicultural ditty about an Arab princess with a bone in her nose,
and it actually turned up on the show one week.
So if you think I'm just sucking up to Prince in order to get another
one of my songs on the show (see the box above), I'll understand. But
I do feel sympathetic when he points out that American Dreams, for all
its attention to historical accuracy in clothing, hairstyles and
politics, is not a documentary. And I think the show's critics are
letting quibbles over the records distract them from the fact that
American Dreams is one of the best dramas on television.
''We're not trying to be 100 percent accurate, we're trying to get the
right feel,'' Prince argues. 'When people say we made a mistake, when
they say Dusty Springfield didn't record Wishin' and Hopin' for
another six months, well, it's not a mistake. I know when the song was
released; when I get permission to use it, I have all the details
right in front of me. We pick the songs because they sound right and
they feel right, not because they were released in the right month.''
That's why, for instance, the Zombies record She's Not There was used
in an episode that took place in April 1964, even though it wasn't
really released until October. The refrain -- it's too late to say
you're sorry, how would I know, why should I care? -- matched up
perfectly with multiple plotlines about romantic indiscretions.
MTV-ERA GUESTS
Another source of musical anachronisms is what Prince cheerfully
admits is his willingness to suck up to MTV-generation stars he's
trying to lure onto American Dreams to play 1960s artists. He has
managed to sign LeAnn Rimes, B2K, Ashanti and Usher, among others, by
giving them some leeway about what songs they'll sing.
And I might as well warn you: It happens again tonight. The power-pop
group Third Eye Blind will portray the Kinks, singing All Day and All
of the Night a full seven months before it was issued.
''I was talking with Stephen Jenkins, the Third Eye Blind lead singer,
when his girlfriend [singer Vanessa Carlton] was on the show playing
Dusty Springfield,'' Prince says. ``And he casually mentioned they've
always had a thing for the Kinks, especially All Day and All of the
Night. And they would love to do that on the show.
'Well, when Third Eye Blind wants to do All Day and All of the Night
on your show, you don't say, `No, guys, it doesn't come out for
another seven months. You just say: Thank you. More.' ''
rock 'n' roll nightmare to '60s experts
Jorabi
>
> http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral...ent/5776274.htm
[snip]
Great article! And Chuck (Boardwalk7) gets some well-deserved
attention.
I still think they should try harder to be accurate, regardless
of what Prince thinks. He would be appeasing the experts while
the clueless masses don't get hurt any.
20 and 30 year old writers? No wonder! I'm surprised they get
most of it right. The must have regular dialog reviews.
manhn
"Brad" <deroue...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1c372589.03050...@posting.google.com...
> http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral...ent/5776274.htm
>
> When he missed a week, the news group
> boiled with demands that he return.
>
Boiled with demands? Gee, how ironic.
Lewis.
Maureen Goldman
>http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral...ent/5776274.htm
Really entertaining and well-written article. Thanks! (Have to say
that I'm just as glad I can watch the show without catching music
mistakes.)
Userb3
@posting.google.com:
> http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral...ent/5776274.htm
> ''The historical accuracy people,'' sighs American Dreams executive
> producer Jonathan Prince. ``I don't think they ever call up ER and
> say, `Hey, listen, it's impossible to crack open three chests in an
> hour the way ER did last night. Most emergency rooms do maybe one a
> year.'
But they do! And if you're making a drama that takes place during the
adolescence or young adulthood of the nation's largest demographic group,
you should get the details right. It's not like you're placing your show in
some obscure culture and can take liberties.
Default User
"Brandy Alexandre" wrote:
[huge snip]
> Hehehe! What'd I tell ya?
What, that you were planning on quoting the whole damn article just to
post a one-liner? AOL has a new offer out, looks like you need to get
over where you belong.
Brian Rodenborn
Marlene Blanshay
<use...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Also, ER is fiction, and people don't really expect shows like ER to
mirror reality. It's not supposed to be about historical events.
manhn
"Marlene Blanshay" <blan...@total.net> wrote in message
news:blanshay-080...@192.168.1.3...
Uhm, last time I checked, American Dreams is fiction.
Lewis.
manhn
"Userb3" <use...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9375735545B...@207.14.113.17...
> deroue...@hotmail.com (Brad) wrote in news:1c372589.0305071754.37d02b78
> @posting.google.com:
>
> > http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral...ent/5776274.htm
>
> > ''The historical accuracy people,'' sighs American Dreams executive
> > producer Jonathan Prince. ``I don't think they ever call up ER and
> > say, `Hey, listen, it's impossible to crack open three chests in an
> > hour the way ER did last night. Most emergency rooms do maybe one a
> > year.'
>
>
> But they do!
Boardwalk also does medical critiques of ER? Wow, he's multi-talented.
Lewis.
Default User
"Brandy Alexandre" wrote:
>
> Default User <first...@company.com>, with thought and calculation,
> said in rec.arts.tv:
> > What, that you were planning on quoting the whole damn article
> > just to post a one-liner? AOL has a new offer out, looks like you
> > need to get over where you belong.
>
> Oh boy! You sure told me!
Yes, but the real question is whether you learned anything. One can
hope, but one also has to be prepared for the reality of the situation,
that some people never do get it.
Brian Rodenborn
Default User
"Brandy Alexandre" wrote:
> There was nothing to learn. I was being deliberately annoying about
> the issue.
Ok, I assume there was some value added in doing that, but it escapes
me.
Brian Rodenborn
Default User
"Brandy Alexandre" wrote:
> P.S. Thanks for letting me push your buttons. It's been a blast!
And I yours.
Brian Rodenborn
Tony Calguire
>
>
> Also, ER is fiction, and people don't really expect shows like ER to
> mirror reality. It's not supposed to be about historical events.
If the doctors on ER did open-heart surgery by laying the patient on his
belly and cutting into his back to get at the heart, there would be
complaints, too.