American Idol Mar 20/21

That was 2001. Sanjaya was 11. They had to vote for somebody, so… long as it wasn’t Mellencamp as sexiest.

This is maybe a bit off topic, but can anyone who’s voted on AI tell me how often the line is busy when you call? I’ve heard this mentioned before, and it strikes me that it makes the voting pretty inaccurate. If the lines are always busy, then the system is at its capacity to record votes, right? If one contestant has ( 2 * capacity ) votes coming in to their line, and another has ( 3 * capacity ) on their line, they’ll still both get recorded as ( capacity ).

I remember the result of the final show when Reuben won was something like 50.08% to 49.92%. I wondered then if the voting lines were overwhelmed, and the .08% was just statistical noise.

So, we’ll have to endure eight warbled versions of “Ebony and Ivory.”

The worst part- it’s a duet between Chris Sligh and Phil.

Well, I don’t know if he’s broke but I think I have seen him hawking some music collection on an infomercial.

My sister had a huge crush on him back in the day, I was too young for crushes but I did end up listening to his music a lot, thanks to my sister. We kidded my sister when she got married, became Mrs. Brown and had a lovely* daughter.
*except for that teenage goth period she went through.

I’m sure there’s a cite out there but I’m too lazy to look for it. I heard Noone tell the stories of his two biggest hits and both were throwaways.

When he was a teen in (the UK equivalent of a) garage band he played a lot of batmitzvahs and teen-girl birthday parties and would always personalize the closing song- “Mrs. ______ you’ve got a lovely daughter”. (He said one Jewish family had an impossible to pronounce very long Eastern European name- one of those Cborgngzegrabinskya type of things- so after trying to pronounce it several times he finally sang “Mrs. Brown You’ve…” and got a huge ovation.) Short one song for an album the Hermits threw this one in as a “why not?” and were astonished when it became a hit.

The other was a pub song he remembered his grandpa singing- it was silly and light and he loved it as a kid and again, short a song for an album, threw it on, and “I"m Henry the eighth I am” became another huge unexpected hit.

Apropos to nothing but I just thought it was interesting: he talked on one show about the version of “Something Good” that appeared in The Naked Gun movie. The producers had received his permission to use the song and shot the video for it, but Allen Klein (considered the biggest bastard of the music business by some, but one who knows how to wring every nickel out of the songs whose publishing rights he manages) wanted $1 million or some similarly absurd amount to let them use the original recording. The producers balked, Noone balked, and so Noone (who’s the songs writer) simply recorded a new version of it for a tiny fraction of that and was rewarded when the song became a hit again following the movie.

If Sanjaya wins the program will undergo huge changes. He could sell no records yet they would be committed to putting one out. Hung will be have a better career.

Cite? :dubious:

Yes, he seems like a nice guy, but physically? At least to me he definitely is ugly.

That story makes me like him even more.

:eek: My head is spinning.

I read the Wikipedia article, but I am still, even now, not sure if it is real or not. Real? An exercise in creative writing? I’m still unable to completely believe it.

It’s all true! As a teenager in Boston in the early 1980s, I was already aware of the infamy of G.G. Allin and the Scumfucs.

G.G. Allin was all too real.