The Fame That Got Away

Speaker 1 Back in May of 2021, I booked an interview I was really excited about.

Speaker 2 You're doing a piece on fame or something?

Speaker 3 Yeah, so we make this podcast called Dakota Ring, and every episode's about science.

Speaker 1 The interview was with Justine Bateman.

Speaker 1 Justine Bateman is most famous for having played Mallory Keaton in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties, in which she co-starred across from, among other people, Michael J.

Speaker 5 Fox.

Speaker 6 I will not have my communication governed by one of your silly charts. A 45-minute discussion about somebody's leg warmers.
You call that communication.

Speaker 6 Who asks you to listen to my phone conversations anyway?

Speaker 9 Valerie, the human eardrum is discussed.

Speaker 1 The show was a huge hit, the number two show in the country at a time when network TV was pretty much all there was to watch. It made Justine really, really famous.

Speaker 1 And that's what I wanted to talk to her about: being famous.

Speaker 1 We were starting to work on an episode about the psychology of fame. It was a pretty hazy idea at this point, but that's normal.

Speaker 1 Sometimes the way it works is we have an idea and I start talking to people, hoping they can help me sharpen that idea, figure out what the idea really is. And Justine seemed perfect for that.

Speaker 1 In the years since Family Ties, she's done some acting and directing.

Speaker 1 She got a degree from UCLA in computer science, but she also wrote a book that came out in 2018 called Fame, The Hijacking of Reality.

Speaker 2 I'd thought about that ephemeral

Speaker 2 something that comes into a room when somebody famous walks in and how it changes everyone's behavior.

Speaker 11 And I'd wanted to get at what that is.

Speaker 1 The book is this vulnerable, spirited accounting of fame, and it's full of personal anecdotes, specifically focused on what it's like to have fame and lose fame, and the perspective that gave Justine into its distorting, concrete power.

Speaker 1 But what the book is not, is a memoir.

Speaker 12 I fucking hate memoirs.

Speaker 13 I'm never going to write one.

Speaker 1 This is from the audiobook, which is narrated by Justine.

Speaker 12 If you thought this was a memoir, put it back on the shelf or get a refund, send it back. This isn't a shitty memoir.

Speaker 1 Nonetheless, I was kind of hoping she would talk to me like like she had written a memoir, that she would give me the story of her fame, narrativize it. I thought maybe we could ease into it.

Speaker 4 The way I would usually do this kind of interview is sort of just like kind of try to do it like chronologically.

Speaker 3 But in reading your book, I thought it occurred to me that you maybe would not be interested in doing that.

Speaker 3 And I just...

Speaker 2 It doesn't seem like that would serve.

Speaker 11 the purposes of your podcast. Well, it wouldn't.

Speaker 1 Justine was here on this Zoom call, giving me an hour of her time down to talk about her book in exactly the terms she'd written it.

Speaker 1 And here I was, trying to get something else, trying to get her to be a character in a podcast episode.

Speaker 4 I'm just curious, like, how did you end up being on family ties? Like, you just, and did you have any expectations that anything would happen?

Speaker 3 We don't have to talk about that anymore.

Speaker 7 No, it's like, just an audition.

Speaker 2 I just, yeah, I really am not. I mean, I only mentioned that to just

Speaker 2 give context to why I know these things. That's all.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, totally.

Speaker 3 So then, then let's, then let's, can we talk about the arc? We can talk about the, can we talk about the arc?

Speaker 4 Like, it can be, um, it didn't really get better from there.

Speaker 1 Definitely not helping was this exchange.

Speaker 4 When it was an academic piece, like, if you had to be like, what's your argument or your thesis? Like, was there one? And what was it?

Speaker 2 Oh, did you not finish Fame?

Speaker 3 I didn't finish it.

Speaker 7 Well, I'm not going to wreck it.

Speaker 2 No, spoil it it for me, please.

Speaker 7 I'm not going to wreck it for you.

Speaker 1 What can I say? But

Speaker 7 that is mortifying.

Speaker 1 The conversation meandered on, not very fruitfully. Obviously, it was my fault.
I wanted her to do what I wanted, recap her fame. And understandably, she didn't want to do that.

Speaker 1 She didn't want to perform her fame for me. She just wanted to talk about the ideas.

Speaker 2 I guess I just don't see fame as

Speaker 8 a part of of me.

Speaker 2 I see it as something, so something like a cloud that visits and

Speaker 9 then moves on.

Speaker 2 And that's why so much of the book is about decoupling from

Speaker 9 whatever you associated with it.

Speaker 1 We talked for the whole hour, but after the interview finished, I was as hazy as ever on what an episode about fame should really be.

Speaker 1 I closed Zoom and put the interview aside. And then a couple of days later, we decided to take this idea and can it.

Speaker 1 This is Decodering. I'm Willip Haskin.

Speaker 1 Over three years of doing Decodering, we've shelved a bunch of reporting on episodes that never quite came to be and shelved even more reporting from episodes that did.

Speaker 14 It's part of the process.

Speaker 1 When we were looking back on the stuff we put aside this year, we noticed that a lot of it had to do with fame. We may have decided not to do that episode, but the idea kept popping up anyway.

Speaker 1 So we're going to give into it, sort of. This is a cutting room floor episode, but on a theme.
It contains four segments that all touch on fame.

Speaker 1 Two are from that abandoned fame story, and one of those is about primates. Another is a segment from her episode about tattoos, and the last is a great interview from her episode about selling out.

Speaker 1 It's definitely not the episode on fame I was imagining, but it will give you some different perspectives on our experience of it.

Speaker 1 So, today on Decodering, three stories about fame and one story about monkeys

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Speaker 1 The first story I want to share is an interview we did for that canned episode about fame. One of the researchers we spoke to was named Michael Platt.

Speaker 1 Michael's the director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 He spent his career studying monkeys to get an understanding of the underlying behaviors that drive both monkeys and people, particularly around questions of celebrity.

Speaker 20 My initial academic training was in anthropology. I wasn't a neuroscientist.

Speaker 20 But I was increasingly interested in why do we do the things we do? And why do we make some of the kind of weird decisions we make, like plunking down five bucks for a People magazine, right?

Speaker 20 Or spending time watching, you know, being obsessed over people on TV that we'll never meet. Like, that's kind of a weird thing, right, from a biological point of view.
And so...

Speaker 20 You know, I became a neuroscientist so I could actually peek under the hood in terms of what's driving our behavior and what's driving our decisions.

Speaker 20 And in this case, you know, what we discovered is deeply baked into our brains.

Speaker 20 It's pretty hard to escape what's driving our interest in celebrity.

Speaker 20 Our first salvo in this area was we developed this task that we called the pay-per-view task for monkeys.

Speaker 20 So they basically were making trade-offs between getting a squirt of juice or choosing to see pictures of other monkeys.

Speaker 20 And those other monkeys could be high status, low status, male, female, you know, attractive, not attractive.

Speaker 20 And what we found is that monkeys consistently will give up rewards. They'll pay a little bit of juice to see pictures of high status monkeys, the monkey celebrities.

Speaker 20 In monkeys, just like people, there's an enormous drive to attain status. And there are kind of different paths to status in monkeys, just as there are in people.

Speaker 20 So if you're a male monkey, one path is to just be a bully, right? Be big and strong. That path can get you there, but it doesn't last very long, right?

Speaker 20 It lasts for about as long as you're big and strong, which is maybe just a few years.

Speaker 20 The other path is to be really savvy and to make a lot of alliances and to use those alliances to kind of, you know, to get your friends to help you out when you're in a jam. But what you do see in

Speaker 20 monkeys of a variety of sorts is that, at least in males, being high status, although it confers some benefits, comes with some costs. It seems to be stressful.
So to maintain your status,

Speaker 20 it's actually really hard. And you're always looking over your shoulder and

Speaker 20 somebody's going to come along and knock you off, topple you.

Speaker 20 So these monkeys, this is classically shown like 20 years ago, often have advanced heart disease.

Speaker 20 you know and they're not sitting around smoking and and eating you know a high fat high sugar diet it seems to be because of the stress of being top dog.

Speaker 20 One of the things that we got really interested in was

Speaker 20 why does sex and celebrities sell? Why does it matter? Why 100 some years ago,

Speaker 20 advertisers started putting human faces

Speaker 20 in advertisements? Why in the world does that work? And we think it works because those social stimuli have automatic priority in our brains.

Speaker 20 And so if that's true, we reasoned we should be able to actually

Speaker 20 use

Speaker 20 social information, sex and celebrity, to sell things to monkeys.

Speaker 20 What we did is we had monkeys, we just put TVs in their, in their housing, and what they would see is like a picture of like a celebrity monkey, a high-status monkey, next to say, the logo for Starbucks.

Speaker 20 And then you might put a low-status monkeys picture, you know, a non-celebrity next to the logo for Dunkin' Donuts.

Speaker 20 And, you know, we had a variety of different household brands and a whole bunch of different kinds of pictures. And you're just running an advertising campaign

Speaker 20 in front of these monkeys while they watch it. Then you give them choices between the brands.

Speaker 20 Okay, you just put it on the screen, like, and they could touch it and they get a piece of food no matter what. Do you want Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts?

Speaker 20 They choose Starbucks. Okay, it doesn't matter which one they choose.
They always get the same food reward.

Speaker 20 But they formed an association between that brand logo and the celebrity monkey, right? So it's the same thing we see in people. Celebrity endorsers are kind of their aura, if you will, their

Speaker 20 attentional prioritization and value is getting attached to the product.

Speaker 20 In marketing, it's often the case that there are theories about why people behave the way they do as consumers, right? And the way they respond in this case to advertising and marketing.

Speaker 20 And a lot of those theories are cultural bound or they suggest that it's a result of how you're, you know, what you learned growing up so that it's highly malleable and flexible. And

Speaker 20 so

Speaker 20 I think what we're discovering is that a lot of this is so baked in. I'm not saying you can't get around it, but

Speaker 20 it's there and it's going to be running underneath the hood, even if other things are happening.

Speaker 20 You spend enough time with these two species and you study their behavior and you study in particular the biology and it's amazing how similar it is.

Speaker 20 Humans seem much more like monkeys to me than perhaps

Speaker 20 like humans.

Speaker 1 Another researcher we spoke to was Donna Rockwell. She's a clinical psychologist who specializes in fame.

Speaker 1 Early in her career, she did a research paper in which she spoke anonymously with a number of very famous people about their experiences of fame.

Speaker 1 And she now works with famous clients as a fame coach and is the co-author of Being a Celebrity, The Phenomenology of Fame.

Speaker 8 So I used to be in the media. I was one of the founding members of CNN when I was in my early 20s.
And I sort of watched fame arise around me.

Speaker 8 And I was sort of perturbed by the differences I saw that it made in people. I saw that their personalities changed.

Speaker 8 I could not understand the shift in their way of relating to the world and to people around them.

Speaker 8 I went into the study to look at like why did people change so drastically and I was thinking I was going to come out with like all these terrible findings of what happens to a person but what happened instead is that I came out with so much compassion.

Speaker 8 Danny Bonaducci, who is in my study, study, he said to me, I've been addicted to every substance known to man, and none is more addicting than fame.

Speaker 8 When someone becomes famous, it's overwhelmingly exciting. And all of a sudden, you have all of this attention on you, people are loving you.

Speaker 8 So, what happens after a while, though, is that it gets penetrating, like it's too much. So, the person has a love-hate relationship with their celebrity.
First, they love it, then they hate it.

Speaker 8 And what happens is that the whole neural system in the brain of a famous person changes.

Speaker 8 That adulation that you didn't expect before becomes an expectation. And when it doesn't come, we're hungry for it.

Speaker 8 So there's an addiction, actual neurological addiction to the fame experience that occurs, just like with anything.

Speaker 8 You know, I was doing an interview for my research study and I was talking to a person, a woman on on television and I was sitting in her dressing room and she had all these handlers around her going crazy for 15 minutes about how perfect navy blue was for her.

Speaker 8 That was totally her color. Don't you think it's her color? I think it's her color.
Oh my gosh, you are navy blue. And I was just sitting there saying, how long can you talk about a color?

Speaker 8 There's just so much like a sponge sucking up all of this attention that it changes the brain.

Speaker 8 After After all my research participants told me how tough it was and what fame robbed from their lives, I asked them would you trade it back? And not one of them said yes.

Speaker 8 Everybody said they wouldn't trade it back because of the

Speaker 8 accessibility, because you're in an exclusive club now.

Speaker 8 Another finding in my study was that when someone's famous for any length of time, they create

Speaker 8 an entity. They feel like they become entitized.
So there's their famous part and then there's their authentic part. So there really is a sort of character splitting that you and I don't really have.

Speaker 8 They have to be their famous self or they have to be their real self. And to have to negotiate that, like the cognitive dissonance of these two selves, is very hard for anybody's mental health.

Speaker 8 One of the people in my study is a well-known around the world R ⁇ B superstar. She's an older woman now.

Speaker 8 And when we were talking, she said, you know, she'd be walking down the street and her neighbors would yell out and see her and go, hey, hey, hi, didn't you used to be? And then say her name.

Speaker 8 And it's really crushing, you know.

Speaker 8 And it's a terrible thing because how you can never get away from being a hasbin. You can never cure that unless you're not a has-been anymore.
But fame is fleeting.

Speaker 8 So every single famous person has to to become a has-been at some point in time. How do we prepare them for that? And that's sort of what I think my job is, is to keep people steady as a fame coach.

Speaker 8 I think people feel famous now as a result of how many clicks and likes they have versus recognition walking down the street. Maybe that's the modern day recognition is clicks.

Speaker 8 No matter what platform you're on, whether it's movies or radio or podcasts, it's all just fodder for the ego to grow and grow and grow and become even bigger than the person's authentic self.

Speaker 8 The internet is always right there, buzzing around on your device, and your fan base is sitting right there. You don't have to go out to find them anymore.

Speaker 8 So, I do think it is more insidious, and I think it's less escapable because there is nowhere to hide. The more eyeballs and clicks we get, the more addicted we do become.

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Speaker 1 So now we're going to switch things up a bit. Our next story about fame is not set in the present.
It's about a type of famous person who first appeared in the late 19th century. the tattooed lady.

Speaker 1 Benjamin Frisch, Dakota Ring's producer, learned about her for our episode about tattoos.

Speaker 10 If you lived in New York City in the 1880s and you wanted to get up to some trouble, you'd head straight for the Bowery.

Speaker 10 The Bowery was the debauched entertainment hub of the entire city.

Speaker 10 There, sailors would descend on saloons that had in-house tattooists, ready to ink ships, anchors, hearts, and stars on arms and chests for just a few quarters.

Speaker 10 The Bowery was also home to dime museums, a combination of circus, curiosity museum, and freak show, run by the likes of P.T. Barnum.

Speaker 10 In the 1880s, the tattooists and the dime museums combined to create a buzzy new spectacle, the tattooed person.

Speaker 10 Not just a person with tattoos, but a person who was so completely tattooed they could be a sideshow spectacle.

Speaker 10 And among the most successful of these performers were tattooed women, who became minor celebrities in their own right.

Speaker 23 They had anchors, hearts, ships, busts of presidents, battles. A lot of them had their names tattooed on their chests, which I think is really funny.

Speaker 10 Amelia Clem Ostrud is a librarian and the author of The Tattooed Lady, a history.

Speaker 10 One of the very first tattooed women was Nora Hildebrandt. If you went to see Nora at one of the Bowery's dime museums, you'd pay 10 cents.
and walk into a room where she'd be standing on a platform.

Speaker 23 It would have been fairly shocking. These women wore like short shorts, like little bodices that, you know, came up to just above their breasts.
So bare arms, bare legs, mostly bare back.

Speaker 23 But if you look at their ankles, their stockings are literally like rolled into little rolls around their ankles, kind of titillating, like, hey, I rolled my stockings all the way down.

Speaker 23 This is pretty exciting.

Speaker 10 As you walked around the room and looked at Nora's tattoos, she would tell you her story. And her story was particularly harrowing.
It went like this:

Speaker 10 Nora and her father were traveling through the American West when they were captured.

Speaker 23 They encounter Sitting Bull and his guys.

Speaker 10 At this time, Sitting Bull was famous for his involvement in the Battle of Little Bighorn and resisting the U.S. government's encroachment on the West.

Speaker 23 Sitting Bull apparently wants a tattoo once he learns that the father is a tattooist.

Speaker 10 But one of Sitting Bull's men says, Wait, how do we know that's safe? What if this guy, this tattooist, tries to poison you? We need to do a test.

Speaker 23 So the test is: they tie Nora to a tree, they force the father to tattoo her for 365 days. After a full year of this, he finally decides he can't go on.
He breaks his needles, they kill him.

Speaker 23 Nora is blind from the pain.

Speaker 10 Suddenly, the cavalry arrives and rescues the now blind Nora.

Speaker 23 Where she is then given $50 by circus owner Adam Fourpaw, sent back to New York, she regains her vision, and she goes on to fame and fortune as a tattooed lady.

Speaker 10 So, in case it's not obvious, the story is completely made up.

Speaker 10 We know that Nora was born in London, and then came to New York and spent time working as a maid before eventually emerging as a tattooed lady.

Speaker 10 But this kind of yarn, this outlandish story, would have been common. These stories are called captivity narratives and they have a long history going back to the beginnings of colonization.

Speaker 10 They are typically outright racist towards Indigenous people, but in the 1880s they were all over the newspapers and in popular fiction.

Speaker 10 These stories gave performers like Nora a personal brand and a professional identity, even if audiences would have recognized them for what they were.

Speaker 23 I don't really think that most people believed that she, in fact, was tattooed by Sitting Bull. You know what I mean?

Speaker 23 It's entertainment.

Speaker 10 For a performer like Nora, the captivity narrative served double duty. It was a way to hook the audience with an over-the-top dramatic story, but it also gave her an excuse for her tattoos.

Speaker 10 The story meant that Nora didn't want to be tattooed like this. She just happened to have acquired them in circumstances totally outside of her control.

Speaker 10 The captivity narrative allowed Nora to keep her dignity and her tattoos too.

Speaker 10 And it worked. Nora did well, even if she and other tattooed ladies might have exaggerated their worth.

Speaker 23 If you look at newspaper articles and pamphlets, they'll say, oh, they're making $300 a week. No, they weren't really.

Speaker 23 That's an insane amount of money for someone to make a week as a performer in the 19th century. But all indication is that they made very good livings.

Speaker 10 Nora would eventually have her common-law husband, who'd done her tattoos specifically so she could be a tattooed lady, committed to an institution.

Speaker 10 She was so famous by then that her second husband then took her last name.

Speaker 10 They would perform together as a tattooed couple, traveling with Barnum and Bailey, and working at many well-known New York dime museums while living in Brooklyn until she died of pneumonia in her mid-30s.

Speaker 23 She was 100% a trendsetter. They created this act for women, like this spot in the act for women that hadn't existed.

Speaker 10 Eventually, the dime museums were displaced by other entertainments like vaudeville and the movie theater.

Speaker 10 But the tattooed lady persisted throughout the 20th century in the sideshow and in popular culture.

Speaker 10 The song Lydia the Tattooed Lady from 1939 was one of Groucho Marx's signature songs and would be covered continuously over the 20th century.

Speaker 13 it, the wreck of the Hesperus 2.

Speaker 10 Tattooed women as sideshow acts persisted in the real world, too.

Speaker 23 The last tattooed lady retired from the sideshow in 1995, which is a very, very long time.

Speaker 23 Most of them were fairly elderly into the 1970s and 1980s, and were working as tattooed ladies, as old tattooed ladies, as older women, because this is what they've done, and this is what they've done through their lives.

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Speaker 1 So earlier this year, we did an episode about the idea of selling out and what happened to it. It was told through the story of Oprah Winfrey and Jonathan Franzen's conflict over Oprah's book club.

Speaker 1 But it took me a long time to land on that focus. And in the meantime, I talked to a lot of people about selling out.

Speaker 1 The musician Dan Zanes was one of them. In the early 1980s, he was in a band called the Del Fuegos.

Speaker 1 As you'll hear, the story he relayed to me is connected to the idea of selling out, but it's also about fame.

Speaker 1 Really, what happens when your underground rock band gets a little more well-known and starts getting opportunities it might be better off without.

Speaker 16 My name's Dan Zanes. I'm a musician and I grew up in New Hampshire until I left left home to go and go to one year of college and start a rock band.

Speaker 16 Started a group called the Del Fuegos on the first day of school and

Speaker 16 really could have dropped out on the second day. We stayed through the year and then we went to Boston and so we kind of fit more into that,

Speaker 16 I guess, punk mold just because it was,

Speaker 16 you know, it just sounded so raggedy,

Speaker 16 but our hearts were really in sort of 50s and 60s R ⁇ B.

Speaker 16 We played a lot of shows, drank a ton of beer, and we just figured that

Speaker 16 that's what you know, that any, you know, that to be in a band, you play shows, you just play as much as you can.

Speaker 16 You just play, play, play, try and write songs, you know, and we started getting a lot of great press. And then we signed with Slash, and so we're the first East Coast band to sign with this.

Speaker 16 You know, they were the hippest label by far at that moment in time. And so it was really a big deal.

Speaker 16 And I think everybody, you know, everybody had some kind of ridiculous job. So it wasn't that you needed to make,

Speaker 16 you know, you, it wasn't about making a living. It was really just that, you know, anytime you got to play for people was just an absolute blessing.

Speaker 16 So there was, there was a communal thing, you know, where the band and the audience are all together in some shithole somewhere, you know, but it's everybody's together.

Speaker 16 But then what happened was we put out our record and then we start touring and now we're getting more press.

Speaker 16 I think it's 83,

Speaker 16 83, and yeah, and our managers say, hey, we got this call from Miller Beer and they want to, you know, reach this new audience. You guys look like you might,

Speaker 16 you know, you might be a good bet for them. And this sort of American roots rock scene.
Our mindset was twofold. One is we've been advertising this stuff all along.

Speaker 16 We'd been advertising beer since day one. You know, there were always several beers on the amps, on the stage.
You know, it was just a part of our life.

Speaker 16 And the second was, this is just part of rock. This is just part of rock and soul history.

Speaker 1 Let's talk it all. I have a Coca-Cola.

Speaker 16 You know, like you think back to Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin doing Coke, you know, Rolling Stones do rice krispies. Elvis did donuts, you know.

Speaker 16 You know, we knew all this stuff. We had it, we had the historical context.
We assumed everybody else did, and everyone would just see it for what it was, you know, which is just

Speaker 16 a scrappy band trying to get some dough together to

Speaker 16 buy some gear, you know, upgrade.

Speaker 16 So the idea was we're going to make a commercial that looks like a video. It's going to be real artful.

Speaker 7 Cool.

Speaker 16 We were working with the guy who was the top video director at the time and

Speaker 16 it felt, you know, it felt all right, you know.

Speaker 26 Crock and roll comes from what happens to you every day. It doesn't come from sitting down and thinking about it.
It's about everyday things.

Speaker 16 You know, there were two things we didn't think about. One was we didn't think anyone would see it.
And the other was it didn't occur to us we'd be singing the Miller's Made the American Way song.

Speaker 16 You know, we thought we could sing one of our tunes. Big difference.

Speaker 16 We're in the studio making our second album. It's the day of live aid, or you know, the two days of live aid.

Speaker 27 And around the world, it's time for live aid. 16 hours of live music and aid of famine relief in Africa.

Speaker 16 We're watching live aid and then all of a sudden it cuts to the Del Fuegos selling beer. In the middle of all that, we're selling beer.

Speaker 26 Honest about rock and roll, or people can sense it.

Speaker 16 And so, you know, everybody's running one way, and we're just running the other way as fast as we can, selling beer in the middle of live aid. Over and over and over, all day long.

Speaker 16 This commercial is playing while everybody's out doing this,

Speaker 16 you know, humanitarian concert.

Speaker 26 Rock and roll is folk music, pretty much, but you know, that's because it's for folks.

Speaker 16 It felt like it was instantaneous. It felt like our lives changed that day.

Speaker 16 You know, in the space of 30 seconds, we realized that we were wrong about

Speaker 16 the idea that no one was going to see this thing.

Speaker 16 All the good press that we had had pretty much stopped that day. The shift couldn't have been more radical.
And not only that, but we started seeing musicians weighing in.

Speaker 16 Whether they mentioned us or not, they would say things like, well, we'll never do a Miller beer commercial.

Speaker 16 It became such a big conversation. I remember reading an interview with Tom Petty, and Tom Petty's talking about it.

Speaker 16 And he's saying, well, I don't, you know, he said, I don't understand why Eric Clapton needs to do a Michelob commercial.

Speaker 16 He's got plenty of money, but I can see why the Del Fuegos would do a Miller Beer commercial because they needed money. People that

Speaker 16 really have better things to do are being asked about this stuff. It was such it felt like it was such a conversation.
Would you do it or wouldn't you do it?

Speaker 2 Let's talk about your beer commercial that you did.

Speaker 21 How did you get hooked into that? Well let's just say it was being in the right place at the right time but the time the time now I think is the time to forget that it ever happened.

Speaker 21 I think even though we thought it was a tasteful commercial, one thing that we didn't realize is that something like that tends to follow you around a little bit longer than you expect.

Speaker 21 And I still, you know, I don't think that's.

Speaker 16 But the other thing that happened was out in the Midwest, people didn't care, man.

Speaker 16 They saw the commercial, they saw the band. They're like, oh, this looks cool.
Let's go to the show. So a lot more people are coming to the show at that point, you know.

Speaker 16 And we sold a lot of records, you know. So we had a great year.
But the stuff that we cared about, which is

Speaker 16 how our peers felt about us and how critics felt about us,

Speaker 16 that stuff, you know, that, that, that was, there was a radical shift there.

Speaker 16 You know, that's really, that, that really did hurt

Speaker 16 because these were our peers, you know, and we just thought, man, if anyone could understand, it would be our peers. And I get it too, you know, I mean, I get it.

Speaker 16 I don't want to say anybody was wrong to,

Speaker 16 you know, pile on us the way they, you know, it felt like they did. I mean, this is how it felt.
You know, I was like a sensitive alcoholic at the time, you know,

Speaker 16 sensitive, active alcoholic, so, you know, everything is, everything hurts.

Speaker 16 So it became a little more isolated, you know.

Speaker 16 I vividly remember driving through the desert, going to play someplace outside Las Vegas. It's, you know, completely flat, driving to the gig.

Speaker 16 It's nighttime, you see stars, and then you see something in the distance. You can't figure out what it is.
Is it a building? Is it a silo? Is it what is it? And you get closer, and

Speaker 16 you see then there's a club underneath it and you get there and it's a huge, probably four-story inflatable Miller bottle outside the venue. You know, like a beacon in the night.

Speaker 16 There's this huge thing all tied down with ropes. And then you, and that's where we're playing our gig, you know, so that kind of stuff was happening a lot.

Speaker 16 At every show, the Miller rep will show up, you know, wearing his Miller sweater, ask us if we'll sing the Miller song during the show. And we say, no, it's, you know,

Speaker 16 it's not part of the deal. And

Speaker 16 I remember we were playing a show, and a guy from a bigger rock band that we had known, you know, from the beginning, came back into the dressing room. And we said, hey, man, you want a beer?

Speaker 16 And he goes over to the cooler and he opens it up. He goes, oh, no, I don't drink Miller.

Speaker 16 I was like, oh, man, come on.

Speaker 16 And, you know, it's like, it was kind of, it was

Speaker 16 a tremendous experience as far as growing and being able to develop some compassion for the choices people make in life. But yeah, it was a drag.

Speaker 16 And then the third record came out and it just, you know, it was just kind of things were sort of winding down at that point.

Speaker 16 I think it changed the arc of the band, but I think if, you know, if we hadn't done the commercial, maybe I wouldn't be alive today.

Speaker 16 I'm grateful that we didn't sell another record, we didn't sell another ticket, I didn't make another dollar, you know, because everything I had, just speaking for myself, wasn't going into you know anything wholesome and healthy, that's for sure, you know.

Speaker 16 So I just kind of burned out by the end of the 80s and stepped back.

Speaker 16 My daughter was born in 1994,

Speaker 16 and I started trying to make all ages music, which to me would be music that was a shared experience with my daughter and myself.

Speaker 7 Sing, sing, come on, sing, house party song.

Speaker 16 Honestly, it felt like I had this rare experience of being able to recapture what had made rock and roll so exciting for me when I was playing for families. That people were

Speaker 16 coming out together, dancing,

Speaker 16 that creatively it was wide open. What we could do is so

Speaker 16 unusual to have a second chapter, a second opportunity. I felt like I was a useful member of society for the first time in my life, playing this family music.

Speaker 28 He has been performing children's music for over 15 years. As a Grammy Award-winning musician, composer, and uniting force, his music spans multiple genres and cultures.
Please welcome Dan Zanes.

Speaker 16 When I met my wife Claudia four years ago, I felt like like she was the person that I'd been looking for my whole life, you know, to like a sound that

Speaker 16 we were able to make together and the kinds of songs we were able to sing together.

Speaker 16 So I have a third chapter. How unbelievable is that? Nobody gets a third chapter.

Speaker 7 Moon and the stars.

Speaker 1 This is Decodering. I'm Willip Haskin.
This episode was written and produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch. Thanks to June Thomas.
We'll see you next week.

Speaker 1 It's our adventure in the sky. Sky Train 57.
And you can fake it if you try. Side train 57.
Night train 57 to the moon and the stars.