Wednesday, March 29, 2000
Delhi dad made music history
BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
VH1 recalls a forgotten piece of Cincinnati music history today, Rick Alley's 1984-85 campaign to put warning labels on record albums with explicit lyrics.
“I've already had my 15 minutes of fame,” laughed Mr. Alley, now a 45-year-old Delhi Township grandfather.
VH1's RockStory documentary series premieres at 10 p.m. today with four 12-minute reports about rock 'n' roll censorship. The first person interviewed is Mr. Alley, who started the effort with a letter to Enquirer columnist Frank Weikel in 1984.
Mr. Alley was embarrassed and angered when his children heard the explicit lyrics of “Let's Pretend We're Married” on Prince's 1999 record album.
“As a parent, it just seemed like a wrong thing,” said Mr. Alley, parts manager for Cincinnati Machine Co.
“After we played the album, I was pretty upset and looking for a vehicle to vent. It snowballed pretty quickly,” he said.
Mr. Alley presented his idea for album warning labels to the Delshire Elementary School Parent Teachers Association in Delhi Township.
A couple of months later, the national Parent-Teacher Association adopted a resolution asking the record industry to place warning labels on albums with “profanity, sex, violence or vulgarity” in song lyrics.
Within a year, the proposal became politicized when it was picked up by Tipper Gore and an organization called the Parents' Music Resource Center (PMRC). Frank Zappa, John Denver and Twisted Sister's Dee Snider criticized the plan at Congressional hearings.
Within 18 months, the PMRC and national PTA had a labeling agreement with the Recording Industry Association of America.
“It kind of took a different slant once the PMRC got involved. They kind of took it over,” said Mr. Alley, whose children were 12 and 6 when he began the campaign.
As he tells VH1: “It was comforting for me to know there was a more conservative group than a group in Cincinnati who were taking a stand on an issue.
“It was pretty intimidating that all of this was happening over innocently playing a record album,” Mr. Alley said.
All he wanted was a disclaimer, like the ones which appeared at the time on adult comedy records, he said.
“I'm a First Amendment guy. I think people who write the songs shouldn't be hindered in any way. But I do want to know what's in the lyrics,” he said.
As a grandparent, and still a music fan, Mr. Alley has continued to use CD content labels.
“I think it's been a good tool for parents, or any consumer,” he said.
To him, what needs a warning label can be determined by a simple test:
“If there is something you wouldn't want to play in front of your mother, it's probably something that needs a label on it,” he said.
After the content warning deal was signed in 1985, Mr. Alley received letters, thank-you cards and flowers from grateful parents. Then he slipped back into the relative anonymity of life on the West Side — until VH1 tracked him down for the new weekly documentary series hosted by ER's Anthony Edwards.
“This turned out to be much bigger in the '80s than I ever thought,” he said. “And it showed the power of what just one man could do.”
ROCK ON: Cincinnati also figures prominently in the second episode of RockStory at 10 p.m. next Wednesday.
Half of the April 5 “Concerts Gone Bad” documentary is about the death of 11 people outside Riverfront Coliseum (now the Firstar Center) before the Who concert on Dec. 3, 1979.
Two concert-goers, Diana Cubert and Dan Smith, describe how they were nearly crushed by the crowd pushing toward the locked arena doors. The Who fans were jockeying for position to get the best seat, because only general admission tickets were sold for the show.
“People were just mashed together. A few people passed out standing up,” Mr. Smith says. The 11 were not killed in a stampede, he says. “It was a slow crush.”
VH1 also interviewed Dale Menkhaus, the former Cincinnati police officer who was in command of Coliseum detail that night, and Paul Wertheimer, the city's former public information officer.
General admission “festival seating” was banned by the city three weeks after the tragedy.
NATIONAL EXPOSURE: Cincinnati's Afrikan American Drum and Dance Ensemble perform on the Jenny Jones talk show Thursday (10 a.m., Channel 64) in a program devoted to talented children.
The 20 drummers and dancers flew to Chicago last month after a Jenny Jones producer saw them perform at Kenwood Towne Centre Feb. 12 during the Fine Arts Sampler weekend, says co-director Latifah Kituku.
“I'm always telling the children you never know who's going to be in the audience, and this certainly proves it,” says Ms. Kituku, a kindergarten teacher at Hoffman Elementary School in East Walnut Hills.
AROUND THE DIAL: CNN NewsStand devotes an hour to protecting your privacy on the Internet (10 p.m., CNN).
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