Talking Simpsons - How I Spent My Strummer Vacation With Chris Wade

Krusty Gets Kancelled is honestly one of the weakest episodes from the 'classic era'. Some very funny moments but no real story. A few of the episodes at the tail end of season 4 show real signs of burnout from the writers, the show got back on track when David Mirkin took over with an almost entirely new staff.

Nick Mould

Love that one. And the Kiss “I will never go to school.”

Tyler M.

Hahahahahaha...Tommy is the gift that doesn't stop giving. I bet if he showed Reggie or bowser an idea he had, he'll frame it as working at Nintendo for R&D

Frank Grimes

Have had to come to the conclusion that I kinda hate all the star-fucking Simpsons episodes, including the highlighted "Homer at the Bat" (none of those guys could act) and, yes, "Krusty Gets Kancelled". Yes, it has "Worker and Parasite", maybe the funniest joke in the entire series.... but my god, they're all flatteratures of genuinely terrible people. Only Luke Perry is convincing and funny. Sadly, the best one may indeed stand as Mel Gibson's turn.

Thad Komorowski

This episode is a mixed bag for sure, but I do have a personal connection to it. My uncle Davey Faragher has been the bass player for Elvis Costello since 2001. Apart from being an incredible session musician, he has also managed to be a regular background vocal performer on Seth McFarlane shows (American Dad primarily), and Bojack Horseman (He voices a seahorse giving birth in the fan favorite underwater episode). He also has a lot of on screen cameos in film and television for some reason. You can see him in an episode of the Office, “Phyllis’ wedding”, in which he is a bass player for the fictional band Scrantonicity. You can also see him playing bass in the Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School, and the 2008 comedy film Step Brothers. I guess If you need a guy to convincingly play bass in the background while people do comedy, my uncle is your man. From everything he has told me, Elvis Costello is a wonderful collaborator and a truly sweet man. As a kid watching this episode I felt some sense of pride that someone I was related to knew a guest star on the Simpsons! Sure I never met the guy myself, but it still counts damnit.

I remember Rolling Stone magazine was hyping up this episode before it aired, declaring the "The Simpsons Make Rock History!" and having 3 alternative covers of the show's characters parodying classic rock albums (including the Simpson Family as The Beatles crossing Abbey Road, Bart underwater as the the baby in Nirvana's Nevermind, and Homer's rear end in place of Bruce Springsteen's for Born in the USA). These all featured Matt Groening's signature at the bottom, but I'm guessing like a lot of promotional art for the show, they were actually done by an artist at Bongo Comics.

Ian Stratton

When it comes to "fantasy camps", one of the funniest stories I've heard was the infamous Tommy Tallarico (who may or may not be Steven Tyler's cousin) claiming he was a "Hall of Fame minor league Yankees player" in his resume for an Amico pitch document. Turns out he had only been to one of these fantasy camps designed for rich baseball fans, in this case the Yankees. Not even the craziest lie Tallarico's been caught in, but it is very funny.

Harry Thornton

You touched upon the Steven Tyler stuff, and yeah, it's both gross and weird. Gross for obvious reasons, weird because he basically bragged about all of this shit in the band's official biography released over 20 years ago. I was a big Aerosmith fan as a kid and read that bio as an adult and it was pretty unsettling to me then. He may have talked about it in his own biography which came out maybe 10 years ago which I didn't read, but it always is odd when "Obvious creep for a long time is now acknowledged as such many years later" without any real new information. Hopefully it's a sign that attitudes are just changing for the better. For a long time, it felt like there was an attitude of "boys will be boys" towards rock stars and their perversions that really should have never been tolerated. Then again, I believe more than one state has either passed or proposed laws making it easier for adult men to marry minors so maybe, like seemingly everything else, it's all actually getting worse. This episode is just an empty calorie gag-fest. There's some funny bits and lines, but it's just all fluff without substance. The starfucker episode has grown stale at this point, and like you guys mentioned, past attempts at such were better and more successful with "Homer at the Bat" being my personal favorite. The only defense I can give this one is that the guest stars at least put forth the effort and I didn't get the sense that any of them were phoning it in. I always forget that this episode came early in Season 14 as it has a real "season finale" feel to it.

Joe Hodgson

Elvis Costello lives in Vancouver now! He married Diana Krall, a famous Canadian jazz singer who's from Vancouver Island, and did the correct thing of moving up here to be with her.

nina matsumoto

i was curious to see how each of the artists featured in this episode were doing commercially/critically in november 2002... as you mentioned, the rolling stones had just put out the 'forty licks' compilation to coincide with their 40th anniversary tour, but outside of the four obligatory new songs, it's a career-spanning collection that was designed to sell well (which it did). the stones would have a third or fourth renaissance a few years later, with their most recent album, 2016's 'blue and lonesome,' reaching #4 on the u.s. album charts. elvis costello released a very good album in late april that year, 'when i was cruel,' and his highest-charting album since 1980, the pleasant-but-ultimately-forgettable 'secret, profane & sugarcane,' came out in 2009. incidentally he's the only artist from this episode that i've seen in concert. lenny kravitz was still riding high from the previous year's 'lenny,' which has the great tune "dig in" on it. his albums still do pretty well, though his last few since leaving virgin records have performed much more modestly. bittersweetly, tom petty's final album with the heartbreakers, 2014's 'hypnotic eye,' was his first u.s. #1 album of his career. a friend worked on their 40th anniversary tour and said that being around tom was like being around yoda. joke all you want about brian setzer but his time in the stray cats in the '80s more than makes up for any '90s swing revival excess (of which i'm a fan!). about three weeks before this episode aired, setzer released what might be the most consequential album of his career: 'boogie woogie christmas' was the first of what is now a series of FOUR brian setzer orchestra christmas albums (three studio, one live). setzer's pivot to christmas music, along with sporadic stray cats reunions, has kept him about as busy as the rolling stones for the past 20 years.

Eric Schuman

Let’s stock our writers room full of miserable middle aged dads! What can go wrong.

Lockerus

StSanders! My family and I crack up at his Jake E Lee Shreds video with Ozzy clapping off-beat. Looking it up his late night appearance with Slash was on Jimmy Kimmel in 2008.

Mike Mariano

SHREDS! around 2008 was when shreds videos became mega popular on Youtube.. It started out only targeting the bands who were trendy to hate back then (Creed, Nickleback) as a means of making them look ridiculous, before long though a number of copycats cropped up and flooded the internet with shred-version music videos for every major musical act out there. Can't remember the name of the guy who's credited as having created them, but I do recall him guest appearing on... something (Conan/Letterman/Fallon) at the time to promo his new artform and do a live performance of a shredified version of a GNR song, after which they brought Saul 'Slash' Hudson as a surprise guest who, had looked into the Shreds craze and was clearly not impressed with what he saw, was there to do a live performance of the song previously made a mockery of by the Shreds artist. The whole thing sort of felt like an intervention.. Slash was very cold and his affect was one of clear offense, whereas the Shreds guy was completely oblivious and 100% star struck to be meeting Slash, which seemed to antagonize Slash even further. I'd also point out to Chris, that recently Margot Robbie was tapped to replace Depp in a continuation of the Caribbiverse, which has even more recently been cancelled, HOWEVER the film franchise has made far too much cash for it to ever go away completely and the way Jerry B has talked about it recently, would suggest something in this series will ultimately get made in the not too distant future.. maybe back in Australia (where the people are both warm and direct). 'Aaaand everybody's naughty' was my fave part of this ep

Rob MacBride

i know most Simpsons fans have dismissed that 'UnaUthorized Oral History of the Simpsons' book form 2009, but it did have some fun guest star gossip. like for this one, apparently Hank Azaria and Mick Jagger didn't get along after Mick brushed him off when Hank tried to introduce himself. Good to hear they apparently had fun in the recording booth, though. and I can't imagine anything sadder than going to a rock and roll fantasy camp because you saw Homer Simpson go to one.

Blake R.

I tried to get back into weekly viewings of the show and post in the weekly threads on No Homers at the start of season 14. I made it only four episodes. This was the season that truly ended it for me. Not as groan worthy as what came before, but just endless episodes where I didn’t recall laughing once. It’ll be fun to try once more with you guys.

Tyler M.

They've already mentioned onlyfans. It was from an episode last year. Bart sings about money and says he'd start an onlyfans...see this clip @ the 32 sec mark https://youtu.be/H_eE0GInotc

Frank Grimes

I used the “woo El Salvador” image for my presentation on the historiography of the Salvadoran civil war during the end. My professor loved it!

Blarghjon

Chris is right, they did do a joke with Disco Stu's family being different genres of music in Season 32 in the episode where Homer worked at a Chuck E Cheese style place as a teenager in the 90s. His parents were Doo-Wop Steve and Public Domain Debbie.

Daran

I had no idea who Brian Setzer (Seltzer?) Was, I just assumed he was from NRBQ.

Camille Walters

A minor point at the end of the episode. I had no idea that wasn't michelle obama on that episode. ooof.

Peter Hanneman

I just... don't even know what to say about this episode. There are definitely worse ones but this just felt so soulless and the most visceral reaction I had to anything in it was mild disgust at the cursed caricatures of Jagger and Richards. Now knowing that it was a filler episode to take a load off of Al Jean's back & to promote the Rolling Stone's new tour explains a lot, and honestly reminds me a lot of their current fate of being corporate stooges for Disney. It's a shame that THIS is the last Scully episode.

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

Homer acts insanely obnoxious - check Homer takes drugs - check Ridiculous fake out to get to the main story - check Multiple guest stars - check Guest stars are all boomer-era rock musicians - check Homer inexplicably befriends celebrities and gets what he wants - check We're supposed to feel bad for Homer despite his terrible behaviour - check Episode ends with a wacky action packed chase where Homer gets repeatedly injured - check Yep, this is a Mike Scully episode. Not so much a final hurrah but a fitting swan song.

Nick Mould

I was just grumbling as I started watching Fubar (Netflix) and it began with Sympathy for the Devil playing. Now I'm listening to you guys talk about the band and it's bringing those feelings back. I never want to hear that song again. Or the band again. I've heard more than I've needed to.

Andrew O.

Chris Wade! Perfect catch! 👍

Jessica S