Could the newest Bin Laden video be really a bad Milli Vanilli lipsync job?

The founder of New York’s legendary punk club CBGB and OMFUG outlived his beloved garage-rock palace by one year. In the often mercenary milieu of NYC showbiz, Kristal was an accidental kingmaker. He’d opened his Bowery bar in 1973, expecting to book nice late-hippie fare (the name stood for “Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers”). Instead, he booked the new raucous rock acts then congregating in lower Manhattan’s (at the time) low-rent districts. Many of them became worldwide legends (Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith). Others became cult idols (Richard Hell, Wayne County, Television).

While CBGB’s initial stars became too big for the place, and its subsequent regulars never quite hit it big (remember the Shirts?), the “Home of Underground Rock” remained a constant for more than three decades. The New Yorker once called it “the ultimate garage–the place to which garage bands everywhere aspire.”

I watched the Disney Channel produciton High School Musical 2, the most hyped entertainment event on cable TV since the CNN/YouTube Presidential debate. The frothy, bombastic, hyper-squeaky-clean TV movie bears only a passing resemblance to the corny but human-scale live-action Disney sitcom movies of my own youth.

At minute 41, the precise difference hit me: This is a Bollywood movie that happened to have been made in Hollywood (well, actually filmed in Utah). All your Mumbai-musical elements are there–the gleeful overacting, the sudden breaking into song-and-dance at unpredictable intervals, the almost-but-not-quite-kissing moves in the flirtation dances, the overwrought farce, the family/tribal bonding elements, and especially the X-treme “wholesomeness” turned up to fetish/kink levels.

Elsewhere in East-Meets-West-land, I present the absolute weirdest thing South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have ever made. It’s a series of totally-sincere online animation shorts, done in standard SP style, based on brief snippets of speeches by the late philosopher/guru Alan Watts. Really.

(Priscilla Presley quoted in USA Today): “Elvis means something to people because he wasn’t a contrived person, he was organic and true to himself.”

Sorry, ex-mother-in-law of Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. You’re mistaken.

As Brit musicologists Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write in their fascinating new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Elvis was as contrived as they come.

He carefully constructed a persona that was one part nice Mississippi mama’s boy, one part James Dean sneer, and one part R&B outlaw. And it worked. These seemingly incompatible traits melded together in the 1954-58 Elvis persona, creating a musical legend and a world icon.

The trick to the early Elvis wasn’t that he was “natural.” It was that he made his particular artificiality seem natural.

Presley’s later reinventions, as a goody-two-shoes matinee idol and as an overstated Vegas self-parody, were no more or less “real” than his first persona. And they were just as successful with audiences of the time–as they are to this day, in the form of impersonators and merch/DVD sales.

So, on the 30th-anniversary week of Presley’s passing, let’s remember the real “real” Elvis, the consummate entertainer who found a way to rock the world.

(Faking It, by the way, is a wonderful book. Its chief premise: Forget “authenticity” or “keepin’ it real.” All pop music is a contrivance, and that goes for country, folk, blues, punk, hiphop, and square dancing too. Sure, the Monkees were a manufactured image–but so was John Lee Hooker.)

…to two of the greatest entertainers and entertainment packages ever.

Merv Griffin was a genius strategic dealmaker who also happened to be a genial talk-show host and made-it-seem-easy raconteur.

I’ve already told my favorite Merv Griffin Show story, about the long Richard Pryor monologue that slowly built up to one big punchline that was completely bleeped. For every moment like that, there were hundreds of smarmy lovefest chats with the likes of Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, Helen Gurley Brown, Eva Gabor, Jackie Mason, and Jonathan Winters. As dull as these segments often got, there was at least the promise of some opening repartee with his trumpet player Jack Sheldon (who was also Schoolhouse Rock’s favorite male vocalist).

But Griffin’s real talent was on the business end of the business. A brief outline:

• After stints as a big-band singer and radio personality, the Goodson-Todman game show empire signed him up to host Play Your Hunch, a blatant ripoff of G-T’s own To Tell the Truth.
• After four years of that, NBC signed Griffin in 1962 to host an afternoon talk show. It premiered on the same day (and from the same studio) as Johnny Carson’s first Tonight Show. Some observers believe the network was grooming Griffin as a potential relief pitcher, should Carson’s show flop.
• Carson, obviously, didn’t flop. NBC dropped Griffin’s show. But as part of the contract, Griffin got to place two daytime games on the network. The second of these, premiering in 1964, was Jeopardy!.
• By 1975, NBC’s daytime boss was one Lin Bolen. She believed in modern innovations, such as expanding soap opera episodes from 30 to 60 minutes. She hated legacy game shows with old-man hosts, such as Jeopardy!‘s original host Art Fleming. Bolen moved J! to worse and worse time slots, and finally axed it. But as part of Griffin’s contract, he got to place another daytime game on the network. That was Wheel of Fortune.
• Meanwhile, Griffin had revived his own show in syndication, then moved to CBS late night, then back to syndication, demanding and getting more cash each time.
• By the 1980s he’d successfully placed Wheel in syndication and revived J! as a sister show.
• He sold the whole thang to Columbia Picutres for $250 million and a share of future profits. He built that stake into a “luxury” leisure empire of hotels, casinos, resorts, and race horses.
• But he remained involved in TV production. He produced a kids’ game show, Click, shooting the second of its two seasons in Seattle. (He lived on a yacht moored at south Lake Union during the tapings.) And in his last days he was selling a new show, Let’s Play Crosswords.

His private life was as delightfully kitschy as his talk show. After one failed marriage, he appeared in public with the likes of Gabor and even the widowed Nancy Reagan; while rumors spread of his affections toward poolboys and valets. If true, that meant he had a real self he felt he had to hide from the world, even after he was financially set for life.

ACROSS THE POND, meanwhile, we must say goodbye to Tony Wilson, best known here as the subject of the film 24 Hour Party People. But Wilson’s achievements were too big for one movie (let alone one blog entry):

• He began by hosting a local music TV show in Manchester, welcoming acts the London-based network shows wouldn’t touch.
• He went from there into narrating serious network documentaries, and from there into anchoring Manchester’s only commercial TV newscast.
• On the side, he continued to support new music by cofounding Factory Records, home to Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, and many more.
• He opened The Hacienda nightclub, where top acts played (and “house” electronic music was partly developed) for 15 years.
• More recently, he became a political activist. His chief cause: “Devolution.” No, not de-evolution, but a crusade to bring more political power to England’s regions, away from London’s central bureaucracies.

Wilson was an honorable man in three often dishonorable professions (music, TV, politics).

And everything he did was informed by his lifelong devotion to his hometown.

He’s someone we could all admire and emulate.

…(or rather, a streaming-content company working with AT&T’s sponsorship) deliberately censor Eddie Vedder leading an anti-Bush chant during a live Lollapalooza webcast?

And in a related question, are there really still Lollapalooza concerts?

Yes to both questions.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake done by an overzealous “content monitor” employee at the content contractor.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT&T. (You’ll recall, won’t you, that today’s AT&T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the “Baby Bell” spinoffs of the original AT&T, which recently acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company’s online critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies’ warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called “throttled” broadband services (in which Internet service providers such as itself could speed up or slow down consumers’ connections to specific Web sites), and for cooperating too closely with MPAA/RIAA file-sharing crackdowns.

It’s not as if AT&T were censoring a site it wasn’t directly sponsoring.

It’s not as if you couldn’t get the deleted words from other sources. (Pearl Jam has put up the whole unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it’s not as if you can’t find anti-Bush messages online from many other sources.

Still, it ain’t good PR for a company trying to prove its trustworthiness (whilst basking in its share of the iPhone hype).

…Marlow Harris n’ Jo David have a nice, pretty puff piece about ’em in Sunday’s Seattle Times.

Meanwhile, yr. ob’d’n’t Web-ster’s continued the crowd-control detail at the orthodontists’ convention. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do usherin’ duty at a Philips-Sonicare sponsored free concert at Benaroya Hall, starring the ultimate dentist’s-office musician.

…we must offer one last bourbon-and-soda for lounge pianist Howard Bulson.

Somebody’s made a snarky/poignant collage music video to the Kingston Trio’s 1958 cold-war burlesque, “The Merry Minuet.” (Hard to believe, but the song was written by Fiddler on the Roof lyricist Sheldon Harnick.)

Rolling Stone came out with its 40th anniversary issue, full of celebratory interviews with 20 genuine Sixties Generation Icons (SGIs). In keeping with RS founder Jann Wenner’s long-standing priorities, there’s a demographic purity to the choice of celebs–eighteen white males and two white females. But then again, Wenner always was one to love, say, Howlin’ Wolf principally for inspiring covers and copy songs by Brit pretty boys.

The mag also has, hidden behind a fold-out liquor ad, a list of the 40 most important songs of the past 40 years, in chronological order. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is #38, which means the editors thought only two hits of the past 15 years approached its influence. Those are by Britney Spears and the White Stripes.

…“Elvis No Longer King of Dead Celebrities.” The current top money earner among deceased entertainers: Cobain.

…during what’s essentially the first springtime afternoon of the year. Ah, the smell of freshly mulched grass, the sight of Pike Place tourist hordes, the sound of road-repair jackhammers, the taste of premature California strawberries, the touch of temperate air on the skin. It’s the sort of day that lets one forget the entire S.A.D. season.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO LATELY: Still working with a team starting an exciting new online venture, which I hope to officially announce soon. One delaying factor: The difficulty of coming up with a good web-site name that hasn’t been taken.

LOSS-O-INNOCENCE MOMENT OF THE MONTH: Heard poorly-excerpted beats from The Jam’s 1980 power-pop anthem “Start” in an awful Cadillac SUV commercial last month. It was merely weeks after viewing the DVD set The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which contained a rousing performance of the song on Tom Snyder’s late-late-night talkfest. The set also includes a 1977 interview segment with Jam frontman Paul Weller and Joan Jett, both looking achingly young and vulnerable. Of all the fates that could have befallen that fresh-faced, 19-year-old Weller, I can think of few worse than to have become a shill for luxury sport-utes.

I’ll remember the Hollywood singing star from Preston Surges’s last great movie, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and also from such bold-as-brass pop singles as “Orange Colored Sky” and (the Bjork-covered) “It’s Oh So Quiet.” Hutton was one of the all-time great entertainers.

…the major record labels have been quietly pursuing their schemes to put Internet radio out of business via usurious royalty rates.

Author Marybeth Hamilton claims blues music, from its first appearance on 78 rpm records, has always been a vehicle for white intellectuals and curators to fantasize about the supposed primeval “authenticity” of ethnic folks. And it has continued to be so, on to the recent fad for Paul Simonized “world” music and the thug stereotypes deliberately perpetuated by gangsta rap.

WELL-DUH DEPT. #2: The TV show 24 is produced and written by pro-war Republicans. Who else would so lovingly depict torture as an act of heroism?