Monday, August 09, 2010

Listen my friends . . . to the Moby Grapes


Guten Morgen! This is your daily Omaha or, in this case, your daily "Omaha," with Moby Grape on the Mike Douglas Show in 1968.

Perhaps, though, I ought to just call the seminal psychedelic group
"the Moby Grapes," so as to not publicly embarrass the ghost of Mike Douglas. Moby Grape, and the whole counterculture thing, confused Mike*. A lot.

(I had forgotten to add the asterisk to Mike Douglas*, which is a major faux pas for anyone who lived through 1960s and '70s television. Mike Douglas* always gets an *. It may have been somewhere in federal law, actually.)

But, yeah, Moby Grape confused the hell out of Mike* in 1968.



OF COURSE, things had not gotten any better by 1976, when Tom Waits first appeared on The Mike Douglas Show*. Tom Waits may have confused Mike Douglas* even more than "the Moby Grapes" did.

Mainstream America doesn't do eccentricity well. It does "eccentric genius" even less well.

And by the time you're done watching Mike Douglas* and Marvin Hamlisch -- and let's face it, Mike* wasn't musically fit to hold Waits' ashtray -- awkwardly condescend to the young eccentric genius, you have this intense desire to travel back in time, flick your Bic and hold it really close to their polyester duds.

Don't miss the end of the show. Young people
's lack of exposure to really, really dumb, really, really awkward spectacles such as that has left them wholly unequipped to deal with a lot of crap life can throw at a person.

Is what I'm saying.

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