CBS Tells No Age Guitarist No Obama Shirt on "Late Late Show"

No Age guitarist Randy Randall was forced to remove the shirt he was wearing before the Los Angeles duo performed on Late Late Night With Craig Ferguson. Randall's shirt did not feature any explicit language or indecent imagery, but rather a shirt supporting Barack Obama. "After the rehearsals, the people from CBS said I couldn't wear the shirt," Randall said. "I threatened to walk off the set and not do the show. They would not budge. They said that it was because they had to give equal time." The equal time CBS referenced was the Fairness Doctrine, a policy authored by the FCC in 1949, which required television networks to be balanced in their coverage in things like presidential elections. Unfortunately, CBS apparently missed the memo that the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in the Reagan era. "Dean and I talked and we came to the conclusion that it was better to do the show and make a statement on national TV than just walk away," Randall continued. "So I turned the shirt inside out and wrote free healthcare on it." The No Age performance is scheduled to air October 27th. "We are living through a seriously oppressive time when basic needs like health care and freedom of speech are up for consideration as though they were extravagant options and not necessities," Randall says.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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