116. MURDERTIZER - Sounds Like Static - Dan Rather, REM And...Kenneth
Say what you will about Dan Rather - the famed newsman and former anchor of the CBS Evening News has had an ... interesting ... time of it over the years. There was that time that viewers of the broadcast in the Eastern and Central time zones saw a black screen instead of Rather because he'd walked out in a huff over a tennis match digging into his time. Then there was the time a cab driver in Chicago decided he didn't like where Rather wanted to be driven, locked the taxi doors and drove frantically around the city for an extended period of time, with Rather hollering for help out of the cab's window. But nothing, of course, compares to the day in 1986 when a then-unknown assailant and an accomplice accosted and beat up Rather as he walked home in Manhattan, yelling "What's the frequency, Kenneth?!" A lot of people thought the whole thing was a figment of the anchorman's imagination. No one really knows what happened in Michael Stipe's imagination, but the incident triggered a free-form string of lyrics that Stipe's band, REM, backed with a beat and a melody - and it became a Top 40 smash hit. Go figure. But as Melissa describes in this Murdertizer (an appetizer of murder), Rather really was accosted just the way he claimed, and the way the identity of the assailant was discovered is chilling (we don't put "Murder" in "Murdertizer" for nothin', kiddo).