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Authors: Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer
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the same type guitar, a Rickenbacker, that Jim McGuinn of the Byrds played, except Ron was left-handed, and Arnoff was a great character because he had the longest hair and the oddest demeanor, a kind of Dylan meets Hendrix persona.
My garage band days coincided with the beginning of home video for my dad. He would bring out the new Sony camera and video deck, half-inch tape, reel-to-reel, and make videos of our band playing in the living room.
It was the mid-’60s, with all the craziness over the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones. I loved what was happening. I loved the English invasion—the Kinks, the Animals, the Zombies. I thought I was going to be a rock musician for about five minutes, not knowing anything about what it took to get out of the living room and get a real, paying gig at the Troubadour or the Whisky A Go-Go or Gazzari’s on the Strip.
Toward the tail end of my dad’s KNX show in the summer of 1965, when he was doing double duty performing on the radio and shooting
Hogan’s
at the same time, I was with him one evening at the basement entrance to the radio building at Columbia Square. Suddenly we were surrounded by five longhaired guys as my dad was trying to find his keys. I was slyly looking at each of them in turn as my dad finally got the door open. We let them into the building, and they headed to the Columbia Records studio as we took the elevator up to my dad’s office.
“Dad, do you know who those guys were?” I asked.
“No, Bobby, I don’t.”
“That was the Byrds.”
“Who?” As much as he knew about music, he didn’t follow what was happening in rock ’n’ roll.
The Byrds had just come out with the
Mr. Tambourine
album. David Crosby, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman. I had been standing there in the presence of greatness.
Two years hence, the Byrds’ “So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star” would address lazy wannabes like me. It’s one thing to play in the living room with your buddies, and another thing to get out in the trenches. We did have a few gigs—a birthday party at somebody’s house in the hills above Tarzana, the Corbin movie theater before a Saturday matinee, and a bar mitzvah at a restaurant in Encino called the Queen’s Arms—but my rock stardom ended with a ten-minute jam of “Hava Nagila.”
My dad’s farewell KNX morning show aired August 16, 1965, a month before
Hogan’s Heroes
debuted. It was a “Best of,” where he played his favorite interviews and music, drummed to a few tunes, and rattled his sponsors one last time with his witty, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you gimmicks. He was thirty-seven years old, late for emergence as an actor, but perfect for the role of Colonel Hogan.
Hogan’s Heroes
became an instant popular hit with its debut at 8:30 on Friday night, September 17, 1965. The series would finish number nine in the Nielsen ratings for that first season. Although many critics liked it, an equal number thought the show was in bad taste. It was, for them, still Nazis with a laugh track. Some critics felt World War II was still too fresh for comic treatment. The war had ended just a scant twenty years earlier. Compounding the issue, when
Hogan’s Heroes
premiered, some members of the press misunderstood or misconstrued the premise of the show, confusing a prisoner of war camp with a concentration camp, and took great umbrage. The editors of
TV Guide
remain offended to this day, calling the show one of the worst series in television history.
But
Hogan’s Heroes
takes place in a POW camp housing American, French, British, and other Allied soldiers. They are performing heroic deeds behind enemy lines. Some critics and viewers just didn’t see it, or couldn’t see it, or perhaps didn’t want to see it. I concede that maybe the memories of World War II hadn’t receded sufficiently. Interestingly,
M*A*S*H
appeared twenty years after the Korean War, and both the movie and television series won
My garage band days coincided with the beginning of home video for my dad. He would bring out the new Sony camera and video deck, half-inch tape, reel-to-reel, and make videos of our band playing in the living room.
It was the mid-’60s, with all the craziness over the Beatles, the Byrds, the Stones. I loved what was happening. I loved the English invasion—the Kinks, the Animals, the Zombies. I thought I was going to be a rock musician for about five minutes, not knowing anything about what it took to get out of the living room and get a real, paying gig at the Troubadour or the Whisky A Go-Go or Gazzari’s on the Strip.
Toward the tail end of my dad’s KNX show in the summer of 1965, when he was doing double duty performing on the radio and shooting
Hogan’s
at the same time, I was with him one evening at the basement entrance to the radio building at Columbia Square. Suddenly we were surrounded by five longhaired guys as my dad was trying to find his keys. I was slyly looking at each of them in turn as my dad finally got the door open. We let them into the building, and they headed to the Columbia Records studio as we took the elevator up to my dad’s office.
“Dad, do you know who those guys were?” I asked.
“No, Bobby, I don’t.”
“That was the Byrds.”
“Who?” As much as he knew about music, he didn’t follow what was happening in rock ’n’ roll.
The Byrds had just come out with the
Mr. Tambourine
album. David Crosby, Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman. I had been standing there in the presence of greatness.
Two years hence, the Byrds’ “So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star” would address lazy wannabes like me. It’s one thing to play in the living room with your buddies, and another thing to get out in the trenches. We did have a few gigs—a birthday party at somebody’s house in the hills above Tarzana, the Corbin movie theater before a Saturday matinee, and a bar mitzvah at a restaurant in Encino called the Queen’s Arms—but my rock stardom ended with a ten-minute jam of “Hava Nagila.”
My dad’s farewell KNX morning show aired August 16, 1965, a month before
Hogan’s Heroes
debuted. It was a “Best of,” where he played his favorite interviews and music, drummed to a few tunes, and rattled his sponsors one last time with his witty, bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you gimmicks. He was thirty-seven years old, late for emergence as an actor, but perfect for the role of Colonel Hogan.
Hogan’s Heroes
became an instant popular hit with its debut at 8:30 on Friday night, September 17, 1965. The series would finish number nine in the Nielsen ratings for that first season. Although many critics liked it, an equal number thought the show was in bad taste. It was, for them, still Nazis with a laugh track. Some critics felt World War II was still too fresh for comic treatment. The war had ended just a scant twenty years earlier. Compounding the issue, when
Hogan’s Heroes
premiered, some members of the press misunderstood or misconstrued the premise of the show, confusing a prisoner of war camp with a concentration camp, and took great umbrage. The editors of
TV Guide
remain offended to this day, calling the show one of the worst series in television history.
But
Hogan’s Heroes
takes place in a POW camp housing American, French, British, and other Allied soldiers. They are performing heroic deeds behind enemy lines. Some critics and viewers just didn’t see it, or couldn’t see it, or perhaps didn’t want to see it. I concede that maybe the memories of World War II hadn’t receded sufficiently. Interestingly,
M*A*S*H
appeared twenty years after the Korean War, and both the movie and television series won
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