Turn Around Bright Eyes by Rob Sheffield Read Free Book Online

new fad happening in Japan—“public establishments with ‘karaoke,’ or sing-along equipment.” Billboard estimates that “there are about 200,000 bars and halls equipped with karaoke hardware.” It also notes that “customers are charged from 55 cents to $1.10 for each song with karaoke accompaniment.”
                      (Note: I only found this news item because I was having an idiotic drunken argument over the real reason why the pop group Wham! broke up, and I wanted to prove I was right, so I went searching in the Billboard archives, where I happened to find this article on the same page. Lesson: Talking about George Michael makes you learn things!)
    1987: Lip-synching becomes popular as an organized youth-group activity, with high schools holding contests in which kids dress up and act out. In rural Rhode Island, a girl I know wins top prize at her high school for dressing up as Sting, with a derby and umbrella, to lip-synch “Englishman in New York.”
    1988: Bon Jovi release New Jersey . Everybody agrees this album is nowhere near as good as Slippery When Wet , the 1986 smash that included “Livin’ on a Prayer.” But it contains my favorite Bon Jovi ballad, “I’ll Be There for You,” with the chorus, “I’ll be there for you / These five words I swear to you.” It becomes the big Dial MTV hit for the summer of 1989. I talk a couple of friends into joining me when Bon Jovi come to town in June with Skid Row opening up, and this is the song that gets all the lighters out. These days nobody seems to remember “I’ll Be There for You.” I always want to sing it at karaoke, and nobody even pretends to like it. Sample crowd-sourced review: “These five words I swear to you: This song sucks my balls.”
                      Someday, history will vindicate me. Until then, everybody likes “Livin’ on a Prayer” better, and that’s fine with me.
    1990: I get my first look at karaoke in real life. It’s a family reunion with my in-laws, at a theme park in South Carolina called Carowinds. Since it’s the summer of 1990, The Simpsons is new, and the park is full of tourists wearing bootleg Black Bart T-shirts. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry, just got busted smoking crack on camera in a hotel room, so lots of people sport the summer’s other big T-shirt: “The Bitch Set Barry Up.”
                      On Saturday night we all trek out to the Long Branch Saloon, a country bar down the road in Rock Hill. There’s a cover band onstage doing all the hits of the summer, as well as the regular crowd-pleasers. They play “A Country Boy Can Survive” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “Dumas Walker” three times apiece. It’s the kind of place where last call is 4 a.m., but they reopen the bar at 5 a.m., so they just make announcements that everybody needs to buy extra pitchers of beer for the hour when the bar is closed. To make sure nobody leaves, that’s when the saloon hosts its karaoke contest. People get up and sing, while the house band plays.
                      Aunt Caroline does the family proud with a tear-jerker from the sixties I’ve never heard before, “Don’t Touch Me” by Jeannie Seely. This is easily the best performance of the night. Most of the others are pure tone-deaf drunken bravado. One guy wheezes through Travis Tritt’s “Country Club,” while another does David Allan Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me by My Name.” A blond lassie in the Lucy Ewing/Tanya Tucker mold does “San Antonio Rose,” tossing her skirt ever higher to win over the crowd.
                      But the winner in terms of audience applause is the Elvis Guy. As I will later learn, every Southern karaoke place has the Elvis Guy. A couple of other contestants are doing Elvis songs, but only this man is the true bona fide takin’-care-of-business peanut-butter-and-bananas Elvis Guy. This