Disclaimer: My favorite Teddy Kennedy story may not be true.
But it was reported, so that's go to count for something, right? It was a news and notes item the late BAM Magazine carried waaaaay back in the day, like the late 1970s/early 1980s when the original Dead Kennedys lineup was still intact.
According to Bam, Ted Kennedy was making a campaign swing through California on behalf of some candidate or cause when the Dead Kennedys' anthem “California Über Alles” started playing on the PA.
Kennedy, who had been engulfed in conversation, paused, listened and then indicated–and I'll paraphrase because who the hell knows where one would find the actual quote now?–“Hey, I like this. Who is it?”
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Apparently younger people around Kennedy knew exactly which band performed the song, but they just could not bring themselves to tell him the band's name, so they quickly changed the topic of conversation.
Too soon?
Speaking of Ted Kennedy, the Dead Kennedys and that song, Media Matters reported in May 2008 that on the day it was announced that the senator had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage said, “The poor guy's been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he's been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated. And so, to cut this out in some respect for Ted Kennedy, here's a tune coming at you from the Dead Kennedys. Go ahead and play it, please.”
He then played “California Über Alles.”
Who knew Savage read BAM?
Still too soon?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.