Privacy?
Let’s travel back to 1969 to the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. In that year and place, a bar started with the name the Bull & Finch Pub. It was popular with the locals, so much so that in 1982 the Bull & Finch Pub was named the “Best Neighborhood Bar” by Boston Magazine.
But something else happened in 1982 that would change the Bull & Finch Pub forever.
Charleses in charge
It turns out that Glen Charles, Les Charles, and James Burrows, the producers of a television show in development, needed an authentic setting and ended up in Boston scouting out locations (we’ll return to that).
“After visiting other Boston bars, they returned to the Bull & Finch and declared, ‘This is the place.’ An American television classic was born, and they would name it Cheers. The TV show premiered on September 30, 1982, and remains one of America’s most beloved situation comedies of all time.”
After the show ended, life imitated art and the Bull & Finch Pub was renamed Cheers Beacon Hill. That was the name it bore when I visited Boston in July 2006 for that year’s International Association for Identification conference.
But I’m not going to talk about that.
I’m going to talk about the song.
Where everybody knows your name
TV shows need to have theme songs, and “Cheers” was no exception. Charles, Charles, and Burrows turned to a New York songwriting team, Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart-Angelo (known for “People Like Us” for the musical Preppies). After several attempts, the duo came up with a song, and Portnoy recorded the vocal demo to guide whatever big-name singer the producers selected to perform the real song. The producers selected…Gary Portnoy.
So for 11 years (and afterwards in syndication) we heard Portnoy’s voice at the beginning of every episode.
The name of the song?
“Where Everybody Knows Your Name.”
Say what?
When you read that song title, remember two things;
- The song was written in 1982, not 2006 or 2026. Today, if someone says “when everybody know your name,” we immediately think of the surveillance state where everybody knows you name, your mother’s maiden name, and the name of your favorite pet.
- The show was nostalgic, drawing upon the 19th century style illustrations in the show intro (even though the inspiring bar was founded in 1969). The neighborhood feel reminded us of a small community where everybody DID know your name.
Was society like this in 1982? Not really. We had spent decades in the anonymity of big cities where we often didn’t know our neighbors.
And the surveillance state we face today was already in existence in 1982. The same band that wrote a song about Bob and Judy “scouting out locations” wrote another song (“Life During Wartine”) with the line “we’re tapping phone lines.”
So even in 1982, “Cheers” and its theme song were a fictional anachronism divorced from reality. The only reason that everybody knew our names was because our privacy had long since been compromised.
And one more thing; THIS song is NOT the one from “Preppies.”
And Virgil, Texas is another fictional anachronism, giving Talking Heads a hat trick (cowboy hat) in this post.
Bredemarket 