Music

The bizarre news anchor assault that inspired an R.E.M. hit

by Richard Howard

“What’s the Frequency Kenneth” was a jaunty and inescapable song from the 1994 R.E.M album Monster. That song was everywhere and has had some serious lasting power, still sneaking into movies and DJs’ playlists pretty regularly.

However, the seemingly happy-go-lucky song was anything but – it’s actually about an older guy trying to understand young people and failing miserably. Darker still than the basic subject matter was the inspiration for the song’s name: In October 1986, world famous network anchor Dan Rather was minding his own business walking to his NYC home when a bunch of men accosted him and kicked the ever-living shit out of him. Throughout the assault, one of the men repeatedly shouted “Kenneth, what’s the frequency??” Weird, right? Rather chalked it up to a random mugging and R.E.M used it as a metaphor for the generational gap, but pretty soon the actual event was forgotten.

Until they found the guy who had led the assault – and let me tell you this shit is cray-cray. Due to a tip from a psychiatrist, the main attacker was identified as William Tager who was currently serving time for killing an NBC stagehand. Turns out the extremely unbalanced Tager blamed the news media for beaming signals into his head (yikes) and in an attempt to stop them first assaulted Rather then years later murdered the unsuspecting stagehand.  At the same time, the most interesting mystery was solved – it turns out ‘Kenneth’ wasn’t a random name picked out by Tager but actually existed. Most likely, Tager was referring to Ken Schaffer, an inventor who had figured out how to receive Soviet broadcasts using regular TV satellites. On the night Dan Rather was attacked, both he and Schaffer had been at the Colombia University campus watching some of the Soviet programming – Rather presumably gathering information to present to the  Cold War/Soviet communism news hungry American public. In the end, it looks like Tager just followed the wrong guy.

Oh, but that’s not all, folks. To amp up the ‘aroo??‘ the story has a post-script recently uncovered by Dangerous Minds. Schaffer wasn’t just an inventor, but also a former music publicist and rock music fan. Pursuant to his interests, he actually developed one of the earliest wireless systems in the early ’80s that was quickly adopted by KISS’s Ace Frehley, Van Halen, The Rolling Stones and Angus Young of AC/DC. In the case of AC/DC, Schaffer’s device did more than allowing Young total freedom to pull off his manic crazed-schoolboy act without tripping on guitar cables. As a side effect of its operation, the wireless unit created additional harmonic distortions – and as such was an integral part of Young’s ‘that-schoolboy-seems-to-be-channeling-Satan’ guitar tone. When recording seminal albums like Back In Black and Highway To Hell, producer Mutt Lange asked the guitarist to record with the Schaffer wireless unit to recreate his live sound.

In short: Dan Rather’s merciless beatdown, a random murder, the R.E.M tune “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth” and the guitar sound on “You Shook Me All Night Long” can all be traced back to a single ex-hippie New Yorker named Ken Schaffer. Oh yeah, he also did publicity for Jimi Hendrix and was married to the Russian woman with one leg from The Sopranos. I feel like this guy is a cross between Dos Equis’ ‘The Most Interesting Man In The World’ and Forrest Gump.