Goodbye, Dave.

We're taking another break from our alphabetical countdown of music from the 80s today.

Tonight, David Letterman's last show will be broadcast, after being a late-night television staple since 1982. Unless this is your first time in about a month that you're online, you've no doubt seen tributes and articles ad nauseam about Letterman and his legacy. There are articles covering every aspect of his two late night shows, Late Night with David Letterman and The Late Show with David Letterman. I'll leave it up to you to scour the net to find them. They won't take long to find.

I watched David Letterman from the very beginning. (Before the beginning, really. I had seen quite a few of his short-lived daytime show, The David Letterman Show in 1980.) And I knew that I was seeing something different and special. Here was a guy that would take a needle to the balloon of pomposity, bursting it with every chance that he could. You couldn't be pretentious and "hollywood" on his show without being called out on it. And you needed to have something to say. Even if it was something that no one but you would understand. It was okay to be an oddball on his show. After all, aren't we all oddballs to one degree or another, with Dave, himself, often the oddest of the odd.

I said that we were taking a break from our focus on music from the 80s. But, an article about David Letterman's legacy wouldn't be complete without at least a mention of his importance to bringing music that had never been on a national stage before to the masses. Before his show, it was rare that rock music would be featured on a talk show. Bands that did show up were ones that had been around for ages or had "proven themselves" by having hit songs on the charts. Dave's show brought bands that no one had ever seen before on television. Acts like The Talking Heads, Tom Waits, and Lene Lovich got rare if not the first exposure to a mass audience on his show. But, perhaps, the biggest band to debut (at least in American television) on Dave's show was REM. On October 6, 1983, they performed "Radio Free Europe" and "So. Central Rain" (though at the time, that song had no title.)  Here's that performance:

And a quick interview that Dave did with the band between songs: (This was not something that you saw, at the time, and is even more rare today.)

And here's an article in which Mike Mills, of REM, talks about that fateful appearance.


Dave's will no longer be on our televisions every night. Hopefully, we'll see him somewhere before long doing something equally groundbreaking as his first 33 years were. As a companion piece to his last show, which airs tonight, (or has already aired by the time you read this), here is the very first episode of Late Night with David Letterman.

Thanks, Dave. We'll miss you. Hope to see you soon.