The New Age Hit Machine

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Before 2021, the musician Olivia Rodrigo was best known for appearing on the Disney Channel.

She was in high school musical,

the musical, the series.

That's actually what the show is called.

Last season on high school musical, the musical, the series.

Rachel Hampton is the host of ICYMI, in case you missed it, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

And so she already had a musical career.

She was an up-and-coming Disney kid.

And like a lot of up-and-coming Disney kids, Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, other less successful performers, she decided it was time for a solo record.

And so her first single was Driver's License.

I got my driver's license last week, just like we always talked about.

Driver's license is a breakup song.

And you're probably with that one girl who

And some listeners began to speculate that the lyrics contained hints about the breakup, which seemed to involve other Disney actors.

And by now, we should have all watched that 30-minute video about, you know, like the love triangle that's going on.

So, in that video, there's a live of Joshua Battle.

Basically, this is the perfect storm for TikTok in that they love a mystery, they love to get in somebody's business that is not their own.

And so, this song becomes inescapable on TikTok because the first level is the mystery and the second level is just that it's extremely catchy.

Everyone was like, I'm crying about these teens that I know nothing about.

And now I love this song.

Within three days, the song was atop all the streaming charts and would soon be atop the Billboard Hot 100 as well.

It got to 100 million listens on Spotify faster than any song ever.

That's That's basically what TikTok did for Olivia Ardigo, in that they made her inescapable.

And she's not the only one.

I mean, TikTok basically runs like the billboard charts at this point.

TikTok is the way to make your song go viral.

But if TikTok is the way to do it now, it wasn't always.

30 years ago, before TikTok, before iPhones, before the internet, there was another way for musicians to go viral.

Frankly, it was kind of a bespoke way, but it worked.

And in 1994, a mustachioed Greek musician made it work for him

in the mid-1990s.

The new age musician Yami and his flowing mane of dark hair became a star and household name by selling millions and millions of records.

All thanks to some old technology.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

For this episode, we're re-airing a story from Slate senior producer Evan Chung about how Yanni and a number of other surprising acts made it big in the 1990s.

It's a throwback to a simpler time when it was still hard for musicians to break out, but they could do it using a telephone, a television, and our undivided attention.

So today on Decoder Ring, how did Yanni become a star?

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Hey, I'm Candice Lem.

And I'm Kate Lindsay.

And we're the hosts of ICYMI, Slate's podcast about internet culture.

On a recent episode, we had to talk about a certain somebody's tweets, and that somebody happens to be my governor, Gavin Newsom.

If you haven't seen them recently, they've kind of gone, let's say, off the rails.

There was some Fox News host he just called a ding-dong.

And as Slate's Luke Winky tells us, this isn't the first time the California governor tried to capitalize on the country's mood of the moment.

I'm in a group chat with some men from California.

Okay.

A male journalist who used to cover California politics and I just like, you know,

some stuff and like one of the first three things he said was like our typical performative male.

So does that mean his shift to Trumpian tweets is actually working?

Find out by listening to the whole episode on ICYMI and be sure to follow ICYMI now wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's Evan Chung.

The 1994 TV special of Yanni's concert concert at the Acropolis has all the trappings of a musician doing a victory lap after really hitting the big time.

There he was, set against the backdrop of the Parthenon, backed by no less than the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, tossing back his dark flowing locks as he tapped at his synthesizers while an enormous crowd cheered him on.

But if you thought that this was Yanni's reward for being world famous, you'd have it backwards.

Yanni wasn't on TV because he was a star.

He was a star because he was on TV.

Yanni was a niche player.

He was big in his area, but that's relative.

George Veris produced and directed the Live of the Acropolis special and worked with Yanni for years.

He wasn't considered a big player in the overall music field.

Yanni's field was the world of instrumental, electronic, new age music.

He had been releasing albums for a small New Age label since the mid-80s, and they got respectable sales within that market.

But the general public dismissed all that stuff as music for hot stone massages or being put on hold.

He was being buttonholed as a New Age artist, and there was no superstar in that genre.

If Yanni was well known for anything, it was for being the new boyfriend of a celebrity.

So I opened the front door.

Opened the door.

I took one look at him.

I lost my heart.

This entire 1990 Oprah episode is actually devoted to dynasty actress Linda Evans and her meet-cute with Yanni.

It was as if he was made just for my eyes.

I mean, there isn't a thing about him that I don't love.

The exposure was nice, but Yanni wanted to be more than talk show fodder.

The frustration was he was hitting like a glass ceiling.

But we believed in the music.

We saw that it could be used in a lot of other areas than just in elevators.

And that was the challenge we had to get it out there and let the public decide.

But what options did Yanni have?

His music wasn't really radio-friendly.

And MTV wasn't exactly making a lot of room for instrumental new age composers.

And then...

Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarati performed their first concert together in 1990 as part of the World Cup in Italy.

But the three tenors made their biggest mark during another major week-long event,

the March PBS Pledge Drive.

Now's your chance to do your part.

Wait for us

and pledge your support to help us.

It is very important to get all the telephones in the studio busy.

A quick refresher on what the deal with PBS Pledge Drives is.

They started in the early 70s.

PBS stations needed money and they couldn't make it the normal TV way.

Because we couldn't air commercials.

Commercials fund commercial television.

We were not allowed to do that.

Pat Callahan is director of membership at Arizona Public Media.

She's been fundraising for PBS stations since before they really figured out the whole pledge drive thing.

In the old days, we'd just put a slide up after Masterpiece Theater and then sit there for five or ten minutes while the announcer would be making a pitch over the slide.

Soon enough, they adopted the familiar pledge drive format.

The point was to get donations from people watching at home, which is to say, from viewers like you.

During a pledge drive, stations block off a week or two where they periodically interrupt their programming to make direct appeals to their viewers.

You just finished watching a marvelous program.

Why wouldn't you stand up, call the number on your screen, and then become a member?

The problem is, unlike most public radio shows, Normal PBS shows don't actually work that well for raising money, in part because they're hard to chop up for pledge breaks.

Look at Frontline, you can't interrupt that.

Look at Nova, you can't interrupt that.

There's a long story arc there.

You can't slice and dice it.

But pledge shows, successful pledge shows, have little story arcs so that they build for 15 or 20 minutes and then you go to a break.

15 to 20 minutes, then you go to a break.

That structure is perfect, though, for concert films.

So PBS stations often fill their pledge drives with one-off musical specials, even if they're completely unrelated to their usual programming.

When you build a music pledge show, you come out on a high.

I mean, I can remember big band specials where people would get up and dance in their own homes, they were telling us.

The Three Tenors concert special wasn't made for PBS.

ABC had actually aired it the year before.

It just got repackaged for the March 91 pledge drive, where it defied all expectations.

Never saw anything like it.

It was just amazing to be on the studio floor and watch those funds

just keep ringing and ringing and ringing.

The Three Tenors concert promises to be one of the most popular events that public television has to hold on.

We're going to send you the VHS copy of the program.

And you can have that for your gift of $180 if you want to.

We made a ton of money.

We made a ton of money on that.

And then it just spilled over and spilled out out into the mainstream.

The three tenors became household names.

Yanni and his producer, George Veris, they saw what was happening.

They saw the PBS Pledge Drive as a platform.

Or better yet, they saw it as a catapult, a catapult that they could really launch Yanni's career from.

We just knew that if we could get on public television, once you saw it, you would get absorbed by it and come back for more.

We had nowhere else to go.

We weren't with a big record company.

We We weren't with a big management team.

We were the unknown guys in the block.

Nobody believed in us.

Nobody.

So Yanni set out to prove everybody wrong by making his own concert special with George Veris as director.

Yanni and Linda Evans personally footed much of the bill, which was somewhere around $2 million,

all with the specific purpose of licensing it to PBS pledge drives, even though they had no idea if it was actually going to get serious airtime.

The question was how much and how many stations that was the big risk.

We didn't have any guarantee on that.

I mean that that definitely was the big risk.

If you're going to take a gamble you might as well go all in.

They concocted an audacious spectacle.

We needed to create something that would make what the bigness of his music was appropriate to the imagery on television.

They hired the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to lend an unexpected majesty to Yanni's keyboard compositions.

And they booked an epic outdoor venue.

The Acropolis, the apogee of all that is good and noble in modern man.

And to be clear, Yanni was not already going to be performing at a second century Athenian theater.

This was not a big in Japan type situation.

In fact, he'd grown up in Greece, but he had never played in Greece in his career.

He wasn't a superstar there.

He wasn't a superstar, period.

But he played one on TV, dressed head to toe in all white, snapping his fingers and punching the air to the music.

It was like doing an Olympic opening ceremony.

George Veris' background as a director was in sports, and that's the approach he took to the concert.

First of all, you need this spectacular scene set wide shot.

We lit the parthenon.

We lit the audience, not in white, but in violet, rosé, pastel coloring.

It was like painting a picture.

There weren't even that many people at the concert really, but George Veris made it all seem bigger with wide-angle lenses and skillful camera work.

What I call power shots.

Tight shots on the hands of the celloists, pan up to the face of the celloists.

Let's find the faces that emote emotion.

There's an incredible overhead shot from a high-angle jib that comes down to the keyboards in a rush to the crescendo of the music.

And now you're getting finally to Yanni.

Yanni at the Acropolis.

I'll never forget that.

I had never heard music like that.

And the beauty of the production itself, I mean, it was glorious.

The camera loves some people.

And, you know, they loved Yanni.

After PBS stations saw the finished product, they started airing it during their March 1994 pledge drive.

And over the course of the drive, it just gathered more and more momentum.

Stations scheduled it again and again and again, sometimes back to back in a single night.

It just kept raking in money.

I mean, you had to just get up from your couch or your chair and go over to the phone.

It was fascinating, fabulous.

Yanni's good looks didn't hurt either, considering the target demo of PBS pledge drives.

55-year-old women had never seen anything like this.

I think I may have been 55.

No, I'm

the CD version of the concert was released at the same time.

Within three weeks of the start of the pledge drive, it shot to number five on the Billboard album charts.

For an instrumental New Age live album, it was unheard of.

Yanni had never come close to that before.

Now even his back catalog started to chart.

You look at Yanni's tour numbers, they were just off the charts.

I mean, he was worldwide.

I don't believe without the PBS special, it would have happened.

Absolutely not.

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Yanni's $2 million bet paid off.

The three tenors might have seemed like kind of a fluke, but Yanni's meteoric rise showed that a PBS pledge drive, of all things, could launch a career.

And one person who took notice was another struggling New Age composer.

You could see what PBS was doing and that it was really the Discovery Channel.

Three tenors and Yanni, right?

Nobody knew who these guys were.

People actually did know who John Tesh was, but it wasn't for his music.

Hi, everybody.

Welcome to Entertainment Tonight.

I'm John Tesh.

Home Alone made Macaulay Culkin the hottest child star today.

Now the Million Dollar Kid is starring in a new movie.

It's called My Girl.

I was at Entertainment Tonight and I had been hosting for

eight years.

I was at that moment and had been for the last five or six years trying to get a record deal and I could not get record companies interested in me.

John Tesh did manage to get some of his compositions used in sports broadcasts.

This is the NBA on NBC.

But to the public, he was eternally the the E.T.

guy.

Yeah, I was playing in front of about 50 people at a time, basically, back then.

In fact, I remember getting hired, my band and I, like four of us, there was a special event at Nordstrom's in the shoe section.

We played background music, but they had to keep telling us to turn it down.

I realized that

if I was going to have a real full-time music career, that it was going to have to be some, you know some big event what i needed was something like a pbs special to to make a whole bunch of loud noise but even after yanni's acropolis success john tesh had to convince pbs you know i mean they joked like we didn't know you're a musician are you gonna read the celebrity birthdays with the orchestra you know celebrating a birthday this thursday july the 28th actress elizabeth berkeley is 22 which actress which i didn't think was very funny at the time so they basically said well we'll take a look at it if you record it but we can't guarantee that we'll put it on the air so with no guarantee that anybody would ever see it john tesh ponied up his own money for a pledge drive special and we basically took our savings and ended up having to take what amounted to a you know a second about our house and invested in this thing and we reached about 1.2 million with the by the time we were you know we were done which was ridiculous he followed yanni's fake it till you make it formula pretty closely instead of the acropolis as a backdrop he chose the ancient sandstone monoliths of the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.

And how do you go from annoying the Nordstrom's shoe department to packing the seats at Red Rocks?

You give away the tickets.

We paid a company to give away the tickets, and I was shocked that 12,000 people showed up.

I don't know if you folks know it, but each and every one of you are at this moment sitting right smack dab in the middle of my biggest dream, being here doing this.

And John Tash made sure they got their non-money's worth by putting on a spectacle.

Maybe, you know, some pyro would work here.

Or let's put Charlie, the violin player, up on this precarious rock, or let's have a hydraulic shoot the guitar player up in the air.

He even had Olympic gymnasts Nadia Komenich and Bart Conner on stage doing routines to the music.

I just realized that I needed to pull out every stop I had for this special because I just didn't have any guarantee that they were going to take it.

One programmer in Maryland did agree to test it out in the March 1995 pledge drive.

She She said, well, I've got a slot at midnight on Sunday night.

And, you know, her people stayed up and pledged it.

And

it was like doing better than three tenors.

And so they all started faxing each other at PBS.

And within a couple of days,

it was on the March schedule and it was on the March schedule.

I mean,

it was huge.

If you liked Yanni in concert, you'll love John Tesh live at Red Rock.

I realized from watching the people who were hosting the pledge drives that it was really an infomercial.

The music is lush.

The setting is gorgeous.

If you have a chance to have somebody evangelize about it, it's so much better than just having a song played on the radio.

And John, you're generating a lot of excitement for public television.

That's really why we're here.

If we don't make the phones ring, then we might as well go do something else.

It's up to you.

I mean, I've heard them say anywhere between $15 and $20 million ultimately that it raised for BBS.

The Live at Red Rocks special, it changed everything for me.

I mean, it was Red Rocks was that, was that seminal change in my life for sure?

Exactly one year after Live at the Acropolis, John Tesh proved that Yanni's model for achieving stardom could be replicated.

And so began the era of the unlikely Blockbuster PBS Pledge Special.

And you are watching River Dance, the show, the phenomenon that has swept the world?

I remember when I first heard about that program.

I mean, Irish Clog Dancing.

My last name is Callahan.

I couldn't believe that they were going to give us this plague show.

And I'm just blown away.

I mean, it was nothing like I used to see at my church.

And there was Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli, Andre Reu.

Yeah, I guess you'd have to say we were really rolling

in the 1990s.

They were in on data with ideas from people after things like three tenors, Yanni, Riverdance, and certainly me, right?

Because it was like, well, listen, if this guy can do it, I can definitely do this.

Only now they weren't all self-funded.

Major labels caught on and started putting money behind pledge specials that managed to break new artists like Josh Grobin and Charlotte Church.

The group Celtic Celtic Woman didn't even exist before their Pledge Drive special.

They were assembled by a producer for the purpose of debuting there.

These shows were inescapable.

PBS stations get the rights to air a special not just once, but in some cases six, seven, eight times a week.

That adds up to a whole lot of potential eyeballs.

For about a year and a half, two years, you couldn't get away from it, and people would run it back to back.

If you look at the role that Pledge plays and how much money it needs to bring in, it was very difficult to not play that show over and over again.

It's something that you viewers of public television want to see our programs a second and a third time.

The regular, heavy, core viewers were very upset by this constant, but we brought in a lot of

new audiences, I think, that liked our music specials.

So, you know, it was a a trade-off.

Yes, the constant pledge drive airings had succeeded in turning Yanni and John Tesh into unlikely household names.

But for a lot of people, those names became shorthand for bad music.

So you name one woman that you broke up with for an actual real reason.

Maureen Rosillo.

Because she doesn't hate Yanni is not a real reason.

Oh, no.

This is Yanni.

This guy is the biggest butthole I've ever seen in my life.

Yeah, yeah.

We're going to do that disclaimer about the John Tash album.

You got that?

Sure.

Not suitable for any living thing.

That Red Rocks thing is awful.

Moving on.

I think the reason it never got to me and never will is that I'm just as surprised as anybody else, you know, that anything great has ever happened to me.

When Triumph the Insult Dog made fun of me, it was like, well, I feel like I've been recognized for all this crazy stuff that I've done.

Live at Red Rocks.

I listened to it last night.

I haven't had so much fun since the doctor chopped my nads off.

It still seems pretty crazy, putting everything you have into a pledge drive special in the hopes it'll make you a star.

And it's probably even crazier today, though there are still artists trying to launch themselves with a PBS pledge drive, even with the single name and the outdoor Greek menu.

Nestled in the mountains of northern Greece, Castoria comes alive with the sounds of Pablo's Mediterranean guitar music.

But But crossover success on the magnitude of the Yanni phenomenon, that's impossible today.

The world is just so different.

Pledge drives don't work how they used to, and aspiring musicians have better, less risky, if also less reliable platforms like TikTok to use instead.

But Yanni and John Tesh, they didn't have those opportunities at the time.

Whatever you think of their music, Their strategy was brilliant.

They came across an ingenious, quasi-DIY way to find an audience.

And they were willing to gamble big to achieve their dreams.

You know, Coney O'Brien said, if the guy who used to read the celebrity birthdays on Entertainment Tonight is now playing piano and millions of people are coming to see that, then we all need to go to our closet right now and get our clarinets out because anything can happen.

And it's true.

And so I think that I was sort of the poster boy for quit your job and follow your dream.

For Decoder Ring, I'm Evan Chung.

And I'm Willipaskin.

You can find me on Twitter at Willipaskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

An earlier version of the story appeared on Studio 360, and a big thank you to PRX for letting us re-air it.

This episode was written by Evan Chung.

Decodering is produced by Willipaskin and Katie Katie Shepard.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts, and Merritt Jacob is senior technical director.

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