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Queer Country Rate-A-Record
It all started with Dick.
If only Dick Clark could see how what he started decades ago on American Bandstand has grown into a mutant child befitting only Medium addicts like Paul Combs, Alex Markham, Buddy Gott, Arpad Nagy, Steven Hale (who suggested this latest installment) and me.
I would have loved to see how Dick and his ABC team (though Disney does own the network) would have marketed the following artists who follow arrows and limited rules while expressing their inner cowboy and inner punk. A guest turn on the old AB would have established these two performers as lip-synching deities, though if they ever choose to lip synch, I might give up more than one ghost in my own attic cabinet.
I’ve been spending my days holed up in my study working on a book that superstition forbids me from saying more about right now. I hope that one day you’ll get to see and hold and read it, and then maybe rate it between 35–98. It’s a labor of devotion and angst, and weds things that I casually and recklessly care about way too much.
In the meantime, I am devolving into basic Rate-A-Record form. Given commercials for Clearisil, Stridex Pads, and Herbal Essence Shampoo, perhaps Dick only had time to get his teens to rate two records per show, and if you remember (or if you don’t), he played at best only about 45 seconds of each, which…