Don't Tell Me! Richard Simmons!

From the queen of irritating comes this ridiculous little song that chastises the fatties. Mr. Simmons will not be accepting their pathetic excuses.

Richard Simmons - Don't Tell Me (mp3)

I was briefly a member of the "space-fag god rock"/high concept band Strawberry and we covered this song. I am very proud that I had to learn this goddamn song, sing the "YOU CAN DO IT! I KNOW YOU CAN DO IT!" parts and do a little hip-thrusting dance to accompany it. Oh, it was my favorite number.

For a period of time, when playing live, Strawberry would pristinely pre-record all of the tracks and pretend like they were playing them on stage. Everyone involved were master musicians and performers who knew how to play the songs inside and out and they convincingly pulled off the stunt. I was the only exception- I was a keyboard player whose miming could be extremely generalized and hidden by racks of cheap synthesizers. In order to confuse and confound even more, the guitar player would sometimes play his parts live. One of my favorite stunts was when a member would be seen in the background mouthing the words of the songs into a headset microphone in an attempt to throw off reality even more- who really was singing? who is actually playing? ...usually no one! It may all seem a bit gimmicky, but everything was pulled off with extreme seriousness.

As they put it: "...sounds like a collision between Missing Persons, Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, and Mötley Crüe. Now throw in Iannis Xenakis, Cole Porter and the Andrews Sisters and you've got it!"