The Story of DANOTI (Do Anything Not on the Internet) - Part I - Television

This is the beginning of my origin story on the creation of DANOTI.

For most of my life, I associated the successful creation of art or entertainment with being on television, and being on television with making a living.

If, as child, I saw you on TV, that meant you were, at minimum, someone who made enough money to pay your bills. “Mikey” was someone who no doubt made money for his groundbreaking appearance in the Life cereal commercial. The lady in the Calgon commercial who said, “My husband, some hot shot” was doing just fine in her chosen profession. The man who yelled “Midasize it” from his truck to a passing car was making getting by as well. It didn’t matter that I, a working-class kid in the working class-town of Moline, IL, had no idea how or how much people on TV were paid. I repeated their slogans at school. How could that not lead to some kind of financial reward for them? If I knew one thing, it was that famous people were not like me, and that famous people made money.

And surely the people who occupied the actual television shows of my childhood were doing just fine. The actors of the characters Jack, Janet, and Chrissy were no doubt remunerated for their starring roles in Three’s Company. Ron Howard and Henry Winkler were well known for their roles as Richie Cunningham and the Fonz, respectively, in Happy Days, and their bank accounts must have been the better for it. Evil Kneivel; Gene, Gene the Dancing Machine; anybody on the Love Boat, these were people succeeding in the entertainment field, and that meant to me they were being paid for it, and probably paid well.

While I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid, I recognized a similar level of success in some of the authors of the day. Danielle Steel, Stephen King, Judith Krantz. These were novelists even I knew about, and they were clearly making money from their efforts, if not life-changing money. They were household names. They had movies made from their books. They were mentioned by people on TV as important authors who sold millions of copies and probably had lots of money. If I—a teenager who had never read a novel for pleasure and barely made it through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 10^th grade English class—knew about them, they were famous. Getting to the point that you were on TV, or mentioned on TV, meant you were a professional in the entertainment field who, at minimum, kept the bills paid.

The music business was the part of the industry I was most enamored with, especially as a teenager. I was a budding bass player who loved heavy metal and would alter my life to go and see Van Halen or Def Leppard or the Scorpions in concert. These acts came to me via TV as much as radio, with the newly-minted MTV featuring their videos and interviews. These rock stars lived the greatest of lives, from my vantage. They toured the world, played their music in giant stadiums for thousands of screaming fans, sold millions of records, and no doubt were rich. They were on TV. Of course they were doing fine.

After I left for college in 1987, I was still very much a musician, but the bands I followed changed. I became enamored with R.E.M., a band that—mystifyingly—seemed to go out of their way not to be on TV. If R.E.M. had a video on MTV—say, “The One I Love”—you had to wait for a while and look closely to even see any of the band members’ faces. What was going on with this band that they didn’t seem to want to be on TV? I was fascinated.

I believed that, even though R.E.M. were barely on TV, they were most definitely making living. They had a record deal and sold records to people in my dorm. They toured the country and played to thousands of fans. They were on the radio, even if it might only have been college radio at first. Miraculously, they seemed to avoid being on TV, and they didn’t have to go home after a tour and, so I imagined, work a day job. They were professionals. Being in R.E.M. was their day job, yet they weren’t bending over backwards to be on TV.

Such a revelation opened me up to an entirely new subgenre of music in which it was not necessary to be on TV to earn a livelihood. The Replacements, Husker Du, and 10,000 Maniacs were three bands even less likely than R.E.M. to be on the tube, but they were written about in rock magazines like Rolling Stone and talked about amongst college-age people. They played concerts around the country—not in my town, but by the pictures in the magazines, they clearly did. They sold records. No one was starving in these bands. If they weren’t making much of a living, they were probably making some money, and they were surely on their way to making more. Again, no TV, yet they gave off the appearance of a livelihood to a young person like me.

Despite these more down-to-earth paths toward careers in music, I didn’t suspect such an achievement was in store for me. I was a 19-year-old who taught bass guitar in Davenport, Iowa. I desperately wanted a path to a career in music, but I didn’t know what that path might be. I wasn’t good enough on my instrument to be a session player. I also wasn’t the kind of guy who could be in a band like Van Halen or Skid Row, and the bands that weren’t TV favorites like R.E.M. seemed somehow beyond me as well. They were more artistic than me in some way that I couldn’t explain. I didn’t know how to become like them. I taught kids Van Halen and Skid Row songs in my hometown, played in my diligently-practicing but barely-gigging original band, and waited for something to make my path clearer.

A move to Phoenix, Arizona, offered a clue.

Tune in next month for Part II.

Read the first book ever published by D.A.N.O.T.I.