[Dean's World] Dean: Fred Schneider: An Interesting Experiment

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Posted by Dean:
Fred Schneider: An Interesting Experiment
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1162599382.shtml


   I'm about to tell you some lies and some truths. Tell me if you can
   spot the lies from the truths if you could:

   When I grew up in the early 1980s, the B-52s were a very popular punk
   rock group from Athens, Georgia. Their first amazing hit, Rock
   Lobster, was one of the formative songs of my youth. Here's a bad
   YouTube version of it:

   [EMBED]

   Then, many years after the death of their lead guitarist Ricky Wilson
   from AIDS, after everyone assumed they were washed up, the B-52s
   scored a string of Top 40 hits. At least one of their later hits,
   "Love Shack," unexpectedly soared to #1 in 1990. Some 16 years later
   that song is still very popular among white suburbanites. In fact, to
   this day most young white people's weddings feature this hit song.
   Here it is:

   [EMBED]

   You can buy their seminal debut album [1]right here. You can buy their
   unexpected 1990 smash hit album [2]right here.

   The lead singer of the B-52's from the very beginning is a guy named
   Fred Schneider. In addition to being their lead singer, he also
   published a book of poems entitled Bleb before they hit it big.

   Schneider was born in 1951 in Newark, New Jersey. He was always a huge
   Science Fiction fan, and loved Star Trek and Lost In Space and The
   Twilight Zone growing up. A notorious womanizer, he has had three
   wives and has fathered four children: Sandra, his daughter from his
   first marriage with a girl named Flora from Atlanta, Charlie and David
   from his third marriage with an hispanic girl named Carla he met in
   New York at the height of the group's popularity, and also had a
   long-unacknowledged fourth child named Sarah with a black girl from
   Macon named Irene whom he has only recently acknowledged.

   He sang with Sleater-Kinney in a Hedwig and the Angry Inch tribute
   cover of "Angry Inch" in 2001. He also sang with Richard Barone on
   Barone's 1990 album, Primal Dream.

   He continues to perform in clubs all over America, playing both old
   B-52s songs and also some of his original compositions. He gets
   together with the surviving members of the B-52's every few years, and
   he remains friends with all of those original members. He has
   generally eschewed politics, preferring to be non-political but to let
   his work stand for itself. But he is otherwise a proud Punk Rock icon.

   NOTE: I JUST LIED ABOUT FRED SCHNEIDER, BUT ALSO TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT
   HIM.

   So what did I lie about? You shouldn't answer if you know.

References

   1. http://www.amazon.com/B-52s/dp/B000002KKD/sr=1-1/qid=1162603865/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0079506-3067269?ie=UTF8&s=music/deansworld01-20
   2. http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Thing-B-52s/dp/B000002LGY/sr=1-2/qid=1162603865/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-0079506-3067269?ie=UTF8&s=music/deansworld01-20