Tommy Lee Goes To College

[Soulstation1]

Dude, where's the chicks?

[Michael Fitzgerald]

No, that look (in that context) says, "Where's 'one'?"

Mike

[7/4]

  Michael Fitzgerald said:

No, that look (in that context) says, "Where's 'one'?"

Mike

←

[Joe G]

The look from the guy on the far end would seem to confirm that.

[Joe G]

Also the guys on either side of him, come to think of it. They're concentrating hard so as not to let Tommy's time throw them off.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

What time? He's not even playing!

Mike

[Nate Dorward]

Tommy Lee cracks the books, uh, sort of

Okay, so TV producers made him do it. But the Motley Crue rocker did attend classes and even joined the drum line, albeit with his clothes on and his piercings out, CATHERINE DAWSON MARCH writes

By CATHERINE DAWSON MARCH

Globe and Mail, Monday, August 15, 2005

Back in 1979, 17-year-old Thomas Lee Bass faced a life-altering decision. There were still two months to go before he could graduate from high school, but his garage band had been offered a recording contract.

"Finish school or go make records, tour and rock the world. That wasn't a hard decision for me," says Lee (who dropped his last name when he dropped out of school).

"You would not believe how many times I heard, 'You gotta have a diploma. What if this music thing doesn't work out for you, Tommy?' " But Lee told his parents that he was "put on this planet to make music and entertain people." Within a year, he invited them to Motley Crue's sold out concert at Great Western Forum in Los Angeles.

"It's, like, 16,000 people in there. I remember the house lights coming on and I could see my parents out there. Both of them had huge smiles on their faces.

"For me that was the definitive moment of like, 'Now do you guys get it?' And they got it."

And now, it would appear that Lee gets it. Twenty-five years later, his gluttonous appetite for sex, drugs and celebrity sated, it seems he has acquired a taste for higher learning. Last fall, the 42-year-old rock star spent a semester at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He studied American literature, chemistry, horticulture and played drums in the marching band.

Was it for real? Not really, but it's fun to watch.

Lee went back to school because TV producers asked him to (and Journey's Steve Perry said no). The adventure became a six-part comedy-reality show, but it's more comedy than anything else. Lee was never enrolled at UNL; he just attended classes. He also never lived on campus, despite how his very funny search for a compatible roommate plays out. (How else could Lee get away with a dorm-room makeover that included a huge, flat-screen TV, video games and La-Z-Boys?)

Tommy Lee Goes to College premieres tomorrow night on NBC and CTV. If the incongruity of the title doesn't grab you, maybe the rocker-out-of-water concept will.

Tommy Lee is one of the baddest boys in rock, playing for one of the most hedonistic metal bands in an era known for its excesses. Motley Crue took off in the eighties and sold more than 40 million albums. Lee played drums, naked much of the time, and when the metalheads weren't on stage, they were backstage downing Jack Daniels, shooting heroin, and having more sex than most men ever dream of. They were even out-partying Ozzy Osbourne; Ozzy dropped the band as his opening act during the 1983 Bark at the Moon tour.

For Lee, marriage (to a Penthouse pet for 30 days, Heather Locklear for seven years and Pamela Anderson for three years, until he was jailed for hitting her in 1998, and they have been on and off again ever since) didn't slow him down much. Parenthood (Brandon, born in 1996 and Dylan, born in 1997) just changed the fun (he once gave Brandon a bath in cherry Kool-Aid because it was his favourite drink).

Lee is a heaven-sent celebrity for the tabloids. His mother can't stop reading them, and it drives Lee crazy: "She buys all of them and will call me up and say 'Hey, I heard about . . .' And I'm like, 'Mom, you've been buying those . . . magazines again, haven't you? Stop!' "

So imagine his mom's relief when she found out he was going back to school, even if it was just to tape a TV show. "She was trippin'," said Lee, on the phone from Utah, where Motley Crue is performing, after a six-year break, as part of their reunion tour.

The series begins with Lee giving his mom a kiss and promising to get good grades. (Despite the fact he didn't actually enroll, UNL still graded his work. Lee is tight-lipped about his marks. Even his Mom has to wait for the finale to find out how he did.) He drives up in a shiny red Shelby Cobra and nods, signs autographs and gives the occasional hug to stunned students who can't believe Tommy Lee is on their campus. These scenes are priceless, and likely the only unrehearsed bits of the entire series.

There were a few professors who didn't like the idea of Lee, a convicted felon, making a TV show at their school. What kind of an image would Lee bring to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, they asked. They were overruled by the school chancellor; prime-time advertising on a national network was too good to give up.

Guess you can't blame the academics for grabbing a piece of Hollywood PR. Lee is doing it too: If you listen, you'll hear him singing in the background. The theme song is taken straight from his just-released album and many of its songs make up the show's soundtrack. Coincidentally, Lee's autobiography was released around the same time he started at UNL. So, in an upcoming episode, watch as Lee's American literature teacher uses Tommyland -- which opens with a dialogue between Lee and his Johnson -- as a class text.

Walt Whitman. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tommy Lee. Whatever, Lee dug it. "It was kind of cool to be chilling on that New York Times bestseller list and having people in the class review my writing." Any criticism? "No, everyone actually really enjoyed the style of the book," he said, sounding just a little surprised.

At least that was one book that Lee was familiar with.

His teacher gives him the gears about catching up with the class and he said he did, eventually, read one of the books he was supposed to: "It was [called] something like Women of the Dunes? Was that the name of the book? When I got there, they just threw all this stuff right in my lap and I was playing serious catch-up. . . . There just wasn't enough time in the day -- you're making a TV show and you're supposed to study at the same time?"

Even joining the drum corps proved troublesome, and that's something Lee expected to ace. He used to be part of the drum line in high school, but it's been decades since he had to read sheet music. "When I play drums now, I play by heart and by feel, I just do my thing. . . . It took me a while to refresh my memory on time signatures and note values." Eventually he "rocked it" and learned the routines.

"They've got the hot-chick beat, when a hot girl goes walking by we play this really sexy salsa beat, and then we've got the mullet beat, when a guy in a mullet walks by."

But there was no way the UNL drum major would let Lee play at their legendary football games until he looked a little more Nebraska, a little less L.A. "They were so serious about your appearance, it was really regimented. I had to take my piercings out and cover up the tattoos. I had tattoos on my hands so I had to wear gloves." A turtleneck covered the lip tattoo on his neck.

For a guy who used to play naked, covering up had its appeal: "For a minute there, I got to not be Tommy Lee, I got to just be part of the Nebraska drum line. It was like, no tattoos, I'm just like everyone else."

[Soul Stream]

I love it....now "reality" T.V. doesn't even include the reality portion of the show anymore. No, Tommy Lee doesn't "really" go back to college...that reality may not be as funny or as controlled as the producers wanted for the show. So...let's do away with the reality of it all together. Beautiful. What else could you expect from a genre that was begun by a show called the "Real World" that was anything but...

[BruceH]

Don't you have to go to High School, or at least pass the G.E.D., in order to go to college?

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Time signatures? Note values? Not having ever heard this college band, dare I ask whether there's anything out of 4/4 in their repertoire?

I know it's all fun, but like a few other things that colleges do, this kind of stuff is demeaning to the people who are there for education. Too bad those folks can't get their moment in the spotlight.

Mike

[joeface]

I wrote this a while back when I first heard about the idea of this Tommy Lee show.

A Crude Hypothesis on Reality Tee Vee

I haven't watched much reality Tee Vee in my time (or much Tee Vee in general for that matter), but I believe I have seen just enough in passing, and read enough commentary about it, to find in it a brilliant concept in how it achieves an unstated aim. All these shows seem to have the same purpose. But to give credibility to my theory on this purpose, general groundwork needs to be laid.

(disclaimer: this is in no way a final statement, or completetly accurate, comprehensive, blah blah blah. These are initial thoughts open to other insights and corrections. I haven't studied much in communications theory, marketing, psychology, etc. so my assumptions may very well be naive or outdated).

We live in a peculiar age in terms of how people might understand themselves. Not just an age of self-expression, but one characterized by introspective self-construction. In large part, people believe that they are responsible to define themselves at very basic levels. Many think or assume that our identities, our respective personhoods, are in some part an empty holding space until each of us fill them in on our own, and then complete a definition of self. To some degree or another all mediums of art and entertainment, but most especially and blatantly the Tee Vee medium, keeping in step of the social climate, seek to facilitate this personal task for us. Every package delivered through television, regardless of its content, has bent to this ultimate goal for the viewer, even though the proximate motives and goals of Tee Vee programming will vary.

TV commercials, sitcoms, news programs, religious programming, televised political events, the mini drama, and so on ... all of them by simple virtue of being television-based, labor under overarching assumptions regarding the ability of a human being to redefine oneself (in this case the viewer) through the right conditioning (in this case the meta-message of the television medium). For more on this, check out a little book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman, whose analysis is more relevant now than when it was first published in the 1980's.

Now more recently, through competent marketing campaigns, the Reality TV phenomenon has convinced many that this trend is 'alternative' television. In other words, even though we are still processing images and information through the Tee Vee box just like the sitcom and the drama and the commercial, this is fundamentally different from all other Tee Vee because the content is raw and unfiltered data reported from reliable sources coming from the very same world we exist in, not engineered characters from some script writers' theatrically fabricated world.

Well I would argue that this is an illusory effect, it is still a theatrically constructed world with the same aim as every other show and program on Tee Vee. More than that, the reality Tee Vee show exists to promote the reality-relevant nature of all other Tee Vee prorgamming.

If we are the compliant audients which the ratings pollsters need us to be, we become convinced of a constructed reality's relevant realism, mostly because of some variables involved that are emphasized -

- The characters that populate the reality show's constructed world are non-performers (or performers appearing to take on very normal, non-performance roles, like Tommy Lee),

- they have been given a certain space of improvisation to fill with speech and actions and (somewhat) autonomous free will decisions.

- The situations and/or environments which the characters must navigate through are portrayed as being taken from either very ordinary layers of society,

- or on the other hand extremely contrived scenarios which are supervised by very ordinary professionals.

But from here, it becomes obvious that there's very little 'reality' actually occuring. A program divided up by commercial breaks are edited down and framed in ways very similar to any other show. Speech, behavior, and scenarios must be edited and filtered in such a way as to convey the familiar progress, developments, and flow of drama which characterizes staged plays. Miniature scenarios and challenges are highlighted. Personal accomplishments or failures are arranged and structured to fit into their given spaces, so that the viewer can enter the commercial break in the exact same frame of mind they are in during other Tee Vee show commercial breaks. And they will return to the next episode of the reality show for the exact same reasons they will for any other drama or theatrically constructed show. The viewer is being conditioned to learn the pace of life according to television: everything is broken down into intermittent lessons between commercial breaks and between episodes. Nothing is left unresolved ultimately, unless for further dramatic effect.

And like the characters in any other dramatized Tee Vee program, some ultimate goals are accomplished. This ultimate goal, I believe, is the entire justification for the existence of the reality show from the perspective of those in positions with the most control and supervision over the direction and success of their television business.

And that ideal goal is this: At the end of it all, a reality show participant is given the opportunity, or I should say responsibilty, to be interviewed directly by the camera, outside the 'matrix' of their constructed reality/fantasy world, to provide direct meta-commentary. Specifically, this character mostly describes what sorts of feelings they have about particulars. But here is the ideal climax of these kinds of shows: we are told by this character how he or she has learned something new about himself/herself that he/she will carry well afterwards (for the rest of their lives perhaps). In that sense, for any reality show whose participants have to achieve some external concrete goals yet fail, that is immaterial to their purpose. The participants' personal lessons and express feelings are most important. They need to prove to us that a television show changes us all for the better. And this is the inductive proof: it has changed at least one of us.

This is brilliant!!! This is marketing as performance art, soaked in a very pure form of irony. Look at what's going on: the television producers have given back to the faithful television viewers a volunteer from among the very same television audience - ordinary people or people in non-actor roles - so that they can explain to the rest of audience how we are supposed to redefine ourselves through the structured format of television programs. This must appear very uncontrived -- and it does! because the non-actor participants are oblivious to most anything being communicated outside of their own performance -- in order for us to accept the idea that we are simply getting raw and unfiltered, emotionally pure communication of information without an agenda. And so we are especially vulnerable and malleable at this point.

Thus, the hypothetically receptive viewer has either gained tools or have their existing tools re-enforced, by tools I mean something like a low-level mode of submissive cognition necessary for passive conditioning of self through an aggressive medium. I would call television an aggressive medium because its programming is designed to relay disconnected series' of information faster than we can thoughtfully absorb on a real-time conscious level. But often times, the seeming disconnectedness exists in order to obscure the big picture coherency of television: a medium assigning itself the responsbility of providing for the audience a redefinition of self. True this is exploitive, because the express purposes of television shows are not stated in so many large letters. But on a psychological level it is key to relate to viewers at lower levels of cognition so that the impact is lasting.

This redefintion of self is not an end in itself, from the perspective of television producers. It serves the purpose of maintaining an attentive audience week after week, where we discover our world fresh and validate (or challenge) ourselves. And I know this is cliche but still no less true -- the upkeep of an attentive audience serves the purposes of many business alliances involved: fuelling a vibrant consumerism.

Reality Tee Vee, therefore, is the national treasure of the TV syndicates. Because they (purportedly) understand us better than we understand ourselves - we the general public will invent reality where we don't already see it. We will invent identity where we don't already have it.

Edited August 15, 2005 by joeface

[Soulstation1]

it's on right now

[Soul Stream]

I saw this and, actually got a kick out of it even though I didn't want to....

[scottb]

I too enjoyed it quite a bit. Obviously not "reality" but quite funny. Some nice moments with the Chancellor and the band leaders where Tommy is on the spot.

Even my 5 year old kept asking "Why is that guy gulping so much?" Of course there were many other questions such as "Why does he have so many tattoos? Why is he not playing the drums too good? Why is he wearing those funny clothes?"

And she only saw the show for a minute when she came downstairs while I was watching.

[Soul Stream]

I thought they did some really good editing and sound effects and camera work to yuk up the comedy. It worked pretty well. It may wear thin after a while, but I did dig episode 1 even if it was against my will...

[Tjazz]

Yeah, I flipped by the show and it seemed just like the SIMPLE LIFE show. They just switched Paris Hilton with Tommy Lee.

There's no way he can complete a class in college. They should have had him take mickey mouse classes with the jocks.