It’s been over six years since IBM’s Watson bested a pair of Jeopardy! champions, and now another venerable game show is getting the man-vs.-computer treatment. Starting this month contestants will battle a music-recognition app on #BeatShazam, a digital-age update of Name That Tune—a show I found myself on back in 1978.
I didn’t ask to be on Name That Tune. I was happily away at summer music camp when a counselor told me I was wanted at the front office. My school in Phoenix was fielding a three-person team for a special “School Showdown” on the popular TV show, and I had been chosen to go.
I guess it made some sense to pick me—I was a music-obsessed 13-year-old. But the music I was obsessed with—I was a bebop-besotted trombonist—wasn’t the sort that usually ended up on Name That Tune. I was unlikely to know songs that were current—more my speed were the sort of standards favored by Miles Davis in the ’50s. And indeed, I would draw a blank on the themes from Rocky and Baretta and was clueless about “Peg,” “Southern Nights,” and “Dreams.”
But first I had to get to Hollywood, a trip that didn’t get off to a particularly glamorous start. I was put on a Trailways bus from Flagstaff to Phoenix; the only seat available was next to a vagranty old man who followed each tubercular cough by spitting into an evil Styrofoam cup.
Things were better once we got off the plane in L.A. The waiting limousine took us to the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Blvd., across from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. With a limo at the curb and a show-biz burger on my plate, I thought I was halfway, and maybe just a bit more, to becoming a movie star.
The next day we were at the studio and soon the cameras were rolling. The year 1978 was the high-water mark of disco, and the production was as bloated as the Buicks of the day. There were yellow and orange lights flashing everywhere, two frantic bands (a small studio orchestra and a rock group that featured Mel Tormé’s son), and on a platform above the center of the stage, a pair of dancers twirling wildly. Strangely, after the show-open the dancers only appeared once more—not dancing but demonstrating a couple of prize pinball machines.
Out jogged host Tom Kennedy, an old game-show hand. I think I flummoxed him a bit. When we were pushed on stage he roared, “How y’all feelin’?!” I answered with a prim “Quite well, thank you.”
Not only was I a stiff, I went through the show in a slack-jawed daze. I’m the sort of Magoo who can’t find his glasses without his glasses on. And I wasn’t wearing them.
Adolescent vanity may have been enough for me to forgo my glasses—well, that and the deluded notion I was on the cusp of fame. But there was a proximate cause: the lovely Patty. She was on the other school’s team. Introduced at a pre-taping practice round, I learned that at her Los Alamitos junior high she was co-leader of the band’s auxiliary flag-carriers. She had a deep ochre tan and a bright smile silvery with braces; her blond hair was feathered in a full Farrah Fawcett. I was smitten. I put my glasses away.
Patty and her team were dressed like normal people, but those of us from Phoenix had been told to wear our band uniforms, which, in keeping with the times, were unspeakable—bell-bottom pants in chocolate polyester and tan satin pirate shirts. In these get-ups we jumped up and down like maniacs. We had to—it was demanded of us, a demand enforced by production assistants who stood by each camera bounding about and waving frantically at us to do the same. They were, of course, just a blur to me, except during commercials, when they got in our faces, pleading with us to jump, grin, and gesticulate like degenerate dog-track gamblers with a 30-1 greyhound coming down the home stretch.
After trailing most of the show, we did manage to win. To give my team the lead, I buzzed in with one of my few correct answers—I knew “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” when I heard it.
As the credits rolled we were told to dance around. I soon exhausted my limited repertoire of disco steps (a not-so-funky chicken, a left-footed Hustle) but the credits weren’t done. The wranglers wanted more. They urged us to try Travolta-isms. It is, in my memory, excruciating.
And then it was over. I did not become a teen heartthrob. I never saw Patty again. But at least I got more airtime dancing than the official Name That Tune dancers.
