SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE MONKEES

I probably should say something about Don Kirshner.

Luckily, bedsitter23  has saved me a lot of work.

For myself, despite being a fan of The Monkees, I’ll always associate Kirshner with Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, which I used to watch whenever I was able to stay up late enough. I won’t pretend to be hip enough to say that’s where I first saw the Ramones or the New York Dolls (my biggest memory of DKRC is, for some reason, Foghat). But it did get me hooked on the idea that rock is best experienced live.

One of the great things about it was that, at the time, of course I had no idea who Don Kirshner was, or why it was his rock concert. To me he was just this guy who dressed cool (by 1970s standards) and gave hilarious deadpan intros. Which made him instantly recognizable when Paul Shaffer started doing imitations of him on SNL. It was probably the first pop-culture reference on SNL that I actually got.

Which is also probably why I ended up stealing the idea when I was making Talismania mixtapes for friends overseas. I’d come up with a fake band and intro it Kirschner-style, only I’d do it in the voice of Milton Host.

Which should tell you something about my misspent youth. (And why I do a lot of posts on copyright law and the public domain).

Anyway, I wasn’t the only one to pay tribute to DKRC. Blue Oyster Cult actually got him to play himself in “The Marshall Plan” possibly the only rock song ever to use the name of America’s post-WW2 plan to rebuild Europe to describe the story of a guy inspired to start a rock band to win his girlfriend back.

Like so.

Respect.

Oh, and thanks for the Monkees, Don.

That’s how it goes at these rock’n’roll shows,

This is dF