Rate Your Music score: 3.94 out of 5!
You'd think a band as respected as R.E.M. would still see airplay for all their hits, but I don't think I've heard this one on the radio in 30 years. Most of our local stations aren't exactly known for playing quality music like this, but you'd still think it would turn up at some point.
I was on the radio in 1993 during "Man On The Moon" mania. Northern Kentucky University had a small student station called WRFN, and I was a DJ there. WRFN was not an FCC-licensed station but was somehow available in some buildings on campus. They called it a carrier current station. According to Wikipedia, this means the station broadcast with very low power using existing electrical wiring.
The important thing here is that it did somehow broadcast. I was told that you could pick it up on a standard AM radio if you were within a very short distance of the wiring. The airwaves are public, and being available over the air meant the station had a great responsibility to the community. Keep that in mind, because this point is central to this story.
"Man On The Moon" was a tribute to Andy Kaufman and was full of references to the comedian's Elvis Presley impressions. The song was near the top of WRFN's playlist back then, so we played it quite a bit. One day when I was on the air, one of the other DJ's - who was one of the managers of the station - was in the lobby of the studio and started loudly singing his own lyrics to the song. He was easily loud enough to be heard over the air.
"Elvis Presley gettin' a blowjob...Yeah yeah yeah yeah," he sang.
That was aired to much of the campus.
That's called broadcasting in the public interest! Or at least it served the public interest better than TV talk shows sending kids to boot camps.
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