That title is no accident.
This blog should not exist. I should've been shot and killed by the New York Police Department in May of 1998. Cold blood. Such that they still are removing brain matter from the side of the Palace Theatre, 25 years later.
I'll go into far more detail (if I remember to do so) on the 25th anniversary of when in about three months.
I decided to do this series (which will contain at least three posts -- two of which will be posted now and in the next day or two, the second of the three is a line of thinking some have which forces the above premise, given what was believed about me that I will explain in the third, but that third will have to wait for the 25th anniversary of my arrest in May).
But today, a Yahoo! headline article, done as part of Debbie Gibson's appearance last week on The Masked Singer, was in tribute to what Debbie was doing when she got the call -- grieving the one-year anniversary of the death of the one woman to whom she was almost absolutely inseparable: Her Warrior Queen (her words, not mine!!!), Her #1 Fan (and it was reciprocated), and her mom and Momager, Diane Gibson.
Debbie is right. She's damned right.
I should know. Diane Gibson was one leggy HELLCAT!!
(Don't tell anyone about the first adjective, but Howard Stern made note of it in a 1995 appearance, and Howard was most certainly correct.)
But it's the second part of that which I state more here. I know from very personal experience, as well as anecdotes from the rest of the "fan landscape" or "fanscape" of Gibson fans back in the day. (I refused then, and still now, to call it a "fanbase" -- a base implying unity which did not exist. And, as I found out later, this did not end with my forcible removal from it.)
One of the infamous stories Debbie would tell about her mother back in the day was the infamous "Carrot Routine" -- where a prospective date for Debbie would be brought before Mom -- and the Italian wit of Diane would have her get a large cutting board, a long carrot, and a sharp knife.
"When are you starting the date??" CHOP!!!!
"And when are you coming home???" CHOP! CHOP!! CHOP!!! CHOP!!!! CHOP!!!!!
That usually ended most discussions on possible dates for Debbie back in high school.
A second story was the first story I read when I joined (this was probably 3+ years before I stopped being on most speaking terms with the "fanscape") the then-online unofficial fanzine "Between the Lines".
Debbie was a guest star on the early-90's syndicated cop show Street Justice. It was apparently shooting in Vancouver, and several Deb-fans found out where and got on the set! And Diane let them have it, going so far as to threaten the end of fan access to Debbie. Very loudly!!!!
As I said, I also had personal experience with Diane.
One of a number of examples, and one of the better ones: A 1995 meet and greet in Nashville, after I finished with Debbie, had me get up the bravery to try to get a picture with her mother!! (What can I say, she was hot and I liked her attitude!!)
I got a taste of the latter as she tried to decline, needing intervention from the daughter and the gut feeling that she could get a vibe I wasn't like most fans ("You seem to have that vibe about you" -- and remember, this was 1995 and only the second time we met -- the arrest was just over three years down the road).
But that's just setup for where I want to go with this post -- and it's both endemic to the Yahoo! article and the conspiracy-theory nature of this blog. Go with me on this one.
You see, there's a dirty little secret a lot of people never get told. The entire nature of the music industry is rigged. The record labels (at least before the Internet really took over, and still to an extent today) buy who wins awards and gets #1 singles and all that stuff.
(Now, it SHOULD be 100% illegal, but the FCC has basically allowed it to stand. What they don't tell you is that doing away with it does away with the entire music industry, full square. What they try to pass it off as is that the buying and selling of airplay is done by independent promoters. The record companies pay off THEM, THEY go to the radio stations and dictate who gets played how much, etc. and so forth and so on.)
Why do I state this?
Before I do: From here, this entire situation is speculation, innuendo, and theory. And I can say honestly that it is one of only two stories in which I know Debbie will never give the straight answer -- in fact, part of the story is that all parties, to agree to do what they did, had to sign off no one tells anyone anything.
(The other??? Wait three months for the one person on this Earth I am certain Debbie HATES.)
I'm trying to recall if the year of this side discussion was 1993 (Body, Mind, Soul) or 1995 (Think With Your Heart). The unofficial fanzine had an Internet mailing list component, and, sometimes, discussions would go "off the board", as it were.
This discussion had done just that and, as I recall, involved at least four people: Myself, two moderators of the group, and a fourth person who had some involvement with at least the radio arm of the music industry, if not the industry itself.
That person with the involvement had relayed to us that Atlantic Records (Deb's first label, for four albums and a Greatest Hits slough-off) had given up on Debbie within two albums, even though she was the hottest thing on the label for about two years: A #1 album, two #1 singles, a number of top fives, two big tours, and a 1987 #1 for the #1 Dance Club song in the country.
But that, by and large, came to an absolute end shortly after the second #1. And anyone who remembers the charts in 1989 could know it: "Electric Youth" (the single) was screaming up the charts like a rocketship.
A bit of backdrop: Debbie's original manager was Doug Breitbart -- I'm not sure if he has any tie to the Breitbart right-wing media empire, but I would have no dispute, especially if this rumor and theory are correct, that he would be.
All of a sudden, some point between August 1988 and March 1989, Breitbart is OUT, and three things happen largely simultaneously:
- Momager Diane takes over as Debbie's manager.
- No one is saying a word as to exactly what happened or why it happened.
- That pretty much is the end of Atlantic's support of Debbie's career -- starting about a (depending on your take) 5-25 year exile from entertainment, where Debbie is largely seen as the butt of jokes and the like, for reasons which would be demurred off as "political".
It's the #2 that gets a lot of people interested, because of what we had well known by 1993, an album which didn't even sell 100,000 copies, two albums after Electric Youth.
So what happened? No one knows, but one of the other three in the group has an intelligent guess -- and the only guess which would make sense, given the state of affairs.
And it also is consistent with the premise of the Yahoo! article today that Debbie has no #MeToo to tell: Because the theory (and it was not originally mine, but I have adopted it openly) is that she was expected to be a #MeToo and basically be passed around like a joint, being the sextoy of the music industry the instant she turned eighteen (which would've been August of 1988, which is why I put that as one end of the timeline). (Which see Spears, Britney -- and why, if it wouldn't be someone with such interests, like her father, being an abusive conservator, the time since Spears was freed makes me wonder if someone else shouldn't have been named...)
And the moment Debbie refused (up to and including a fourth-album song called "When I Say No"), they pulled the plug, and everything else which she might have done well with was basic inertia. It was bad enough for some of us who figured it out as the years went on, but can you imagine if, while she still had some MTV pull, if something like this had gotten out -- especially when Debbie and her mother were fully in the right!!!
But the thing is, as I said above: One of the things which seemed to come with "You'll Never Work In This Town Again" (if the theory I've been given is correct) was a demand that no one say a word on this situation of any kind to anybody at anytime. And Debbie has well kept her end of that bargain.
(For the record, that she has no #MeToo to tell is fully consistent with that theory -- because it was the refusal which put a full-stop to her momentum.)
I'd like to say I didn't catch too much Hell from Diane, but that's not true. That's for Part Three, however.
Part Two, I delve into a Libertarian thought process from Karl Denninger which DEFINITELY would place the operative hypothesis of this series (that this blog, nor I, should exist) to the forefront, especially with what was in play by May of 1998.
