11/27/22
Newletter171
The Crack of Dawn
Being inherently kind of cheap, I got the low-end HBO subscription for $3.95 a month, with ads. Perhaps due to an elderly bladder, I don’t mind having a break every fifteen minutes. Frequently, the ads are just a still shot of something that says, “This ad-free break was brought to you by All State Insurance.”
When I was a cameraman on Hawg Wild in Sturgis in 1988, the big finale concert was Foghat. I was set up on top of a wooden tower straight in front of the stage. Foghat opened with one of their two hit songs, Fool for the City. Chris the executive producer was standing beside me and said, “What do want to bet they close with Slow Ride,” their other, bigger hit. But these guys, who were probably about 40, were way over the hill, and reminded us way too much of Spinal Tap. I expected them at any moment to break into, Tonight We’re Gonna Rock You Tonight, Smell the Glove, or Lick My Love Pump. Whatever the lead singer’s name is, every time he spoke to the audience, with a high-pitched British accent, it was some variation of a cliché: “Are ya feelin’ good tonight?” “Are you ready to rock?” “Put your hands together.” Well, these bikers were all seated on Harleys – it was an outdoor concert – and they didn’t clap, they revved their engines, creating a mind-numbing cacophony of growling internal combustion engines belching out clouds of blue smoke into the air. After a really unimpressive hour-long set, they left the stage to the accompanying roar of a thousand engines. A moment later they returned and played Slow Ride. The executive producer harumphed, “I told you so.” Slow Ride isn’t a bad song, but it can easily be dragged out for 20-25 minutes, “Slow ride, take it easy . . . slow ride, take it easy . . .” ad infinitum.
The producers of Hawg Wild in Sturgis were rich young men from back east who had all met at Vassar College ten years earlier. Vassar had been an all-female college for over 100 years and had fairly recently gone co-ed a decade earlier when these fellows attended. I asked, “What was the ratio of women to men?” They all agreed to was at least five to one, maybe more. I was in awe of their brilliance. “How did that work out?” I asked. They all grinned and said, “How do you think it worked out?”
The executive producer was Chris Iovenko, whom I liked very much. His mother was Sally Bingham – I have her autobiography, but I haven’t read it – heir to the biggest fortune in Louisville, Kentucky. At a point the Bingham family owned most of Louisville’s newspapers, TV and radio stations, who knows what else, then they famously all went after each other’s throats, managing to litigate away everything. I didn’t know any of this when we shot the movie. Chris was just this terrific guy who liked to help do anything, like load equipment, which is rare in executive producers. It was a decade after we made the movie that I was reading a collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles, and there was one about the demise of the Bingham family fortune. Anyway, I’ve never seen Chris again. But the movie turned out pretty good.
Today is the first day of the rest of your life. I just made that up, what’dya think?