Must've been the summer of '69. He was already on the downward slope. But for a year or so there, he was the sixties "South Park", the hippest show amongst the barely pubescent.
Oh, Mr. Sales had been on TV for years. But it was a children's show. Until he got kicked off the air for asking his viewers to go into their parents' wallets and send him "all the green pieces of paper with the pictures of guys in beards".
There was no TiVo, no Internet to see if it was true. Word passed in the classroom. Was the story to be believed?
All we knew is he was off the air. For a week. And when he came back, there was not a kid in junior high who was not tuned in, to see the dancing girls kicking it up to "Happy Days Are Here Again"! It HAD to be real! Soupy was winking at us!
They beat the irreverence out of adults. We depend on children to challenge convention. A child can't understand injustice. An adult can explain away the lack of health care reform by talking about self-reliance, the political process...all a kid knows is he's got an owiee and he wants it fixed!
That's kind of what killed the music business. Outsiders ruled in the sixties and seventies, then there was so much money involved, especially after the advent of MTV, that wannabe stars asked "where do I sign?" They were willing to do anything and everything to make it. They lost touch with their audience. Oh, they paid lip service to their fans, but truly they were in bed with their advertisers.
Not Soupy. With a collection of barely physically there characters, Soupy was akin to radio. It was theatre of the mind, on an incredibly stupid level. And kids love stupid.
But stupid with a twist. When Bon Vivant recalled cans of vichyssoise for botulism I knew what the potato soup was because of Charles Vichyssoise, who appeared on Soupy Sales' show.
You went to school every day and imitated White Fang.
It didn't last for long, but longer than the hula-hoop. Soupy Sales was our hero. Maybe because our parents hated him so much, they couldn't see the brilliance underneath the idiocy.
Soupy was so big, he recorded a record. Entitled "The Mouse", we performed it faithfully. Didn't take much. Hey, do the mouse, you can do it in your HOUSE!
And we did.
But that's not what brought me to Columbia that late summer day. No, I rode my Raleigh down the hill to see Simon & Garfunkel.
They'd already had a number of hits, a veritable catalog, but it was before "Bookends", they were in a bit of a lull, they could be seen as an evanescent pop act.
I locked my bike to a fence. And Simon & Garfunkel blew my mind. Paul Simon was not yet precious. And they could already sing and play. I thought of leaving after their performance. I wanted to maintain the high. But I stayed. To relive my junior high school days.
Soupy was frenetic. It was entertainment more then music. But when he did the Mouse, I did too.
Eventually Soupy's sons migrated from the pages of "Tiger Beat" to play with Todd Rundgren. We paid attention to their careers because of their legendary father.
But Soupy had peaked.
But he's never been forgotten.
Watching clips today I'm jetted back to an era when TV meant black and white. When an aged hipster, a living "Mad" magazine character, could be the leader of millions.
That's what stardom is. When your fans are like putty in your hands.
It's not about exposure, it's about creativity.
Soupy may have aired a stupid show, but the creativity positively beamed from the screen. It was not hip to be dumb, you wanted to be smart. So smart, you could be stupid. Not so media would trumpet your successes, but so insiders would feel like members of a club.
Soupy Sales had a huge club. We graduated from "Mickey Mouse" to him. Long live the inanity!
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