First some background.

One of our volunteer staff, occasional writer, and friend of mine, vector is formerly of the band Information Society (aka InSoc) which had several impressive hits in the late 80's and early 90's including the infamous What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy), Walking Away, and Think. Around 1994 the band split up, Vector (Kurt Harland Larson) bought the name, and eventually he put out another album, Don't be Afraid (in which you'll find my name, wewt!).

Last year, as part of their " Bands Reunited" program, VH1 attempted to reunite Information Society, and although Kurt never agreed to put on another show, careful editing and poor acting led many a viewer of the program to believe that he had agreed and simply failed to show up.

Now in Vector's own words, we bring you a behind-the-scenes look at what really happened and what a tremendous fantasy "reality" television can be. Because this document is quite long, we're presenting it in segments. Now, part 1.

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PURE FANTASY (Or, THAT'S NOT AMANDA!)

VH-1's website about the "Band Reunion" (whatever) show has a picture of the band from appx. 1990. It's a nice picture, but... that woman is not Amanda. It's Sally Berg, who we hired to play drums with us for a while. It also has this blurb about InSoc:

"In the mid-'80s, the techno-pop band was a world-renowned dance club sensation. But clashing personalities and a mysterious departure ripped the group apart. In 1983, three high school friends from Minneapolis – Paul Robb, Jim Cassidy, and Kurt Harland – formed Information Society. With the addition of Amanda Kramer, the group was off and running. Performance art, hip-hop beats, and innovative sampling gave the band a rabid following. But soon after they topped the charts, Amanda Kramer made a sudden departure. Founder Paul Robb and singer Kurt Harland continued to butt heads… until they walked away in 1993. It's been almost two decades since these four musicians shared the stage. Can we bring them together for one last night of pure energy?"

   This is a rather embarrassing mix of junior-high-school-level journalism (surf the web before going to bed, write the report on the bus) and creative writing. All through the interview, and again reading this, I got the impression that their method was to cast a large and cursory net onto the web, (heh) and connect the dots between whatever really random stuff they found to form a story-arc that would sound good in a 30-second TV ad for the show. They knew some stuff that was bizarrely obscure, but didn't seem to know what was relevant and what wasn't. And, I don't really care that they got a picture with Sally in it instead of Amanda, but I think it again displays the ad-hoc, random nature of their scattershot journalism.

   More to the point:

   This story they drew in the air about how "clashing personalities and a mysterious departure ripped the group apart" is just wishful thinking. People like stories that have certain shapes, and TV content producers know this. They pound facts into the story shape with sledgehammers.

   The truth is, Amanda was no longer in the band by September of '88, after having only been IN the band for two years. We had just STARTED to climb the charts, and we were pretty much over the "mysterious departure" by January of '89.

   Lots of strange but unimportant factual errors bewilder me:

   - We started in '82, not '83

   - Adding Amanda was in the FIFTH year of the band, so I'm not sure what they mean by "with the addition, the group was off and running". There were 6 other people who had been in and out of the band by that time.

   - Calling us "world-renowned" in the "mid-80's" is a non-fact I would be embarrassed to say. If you call the "mid-80's" 1983 - 1987, then we were known only in Minneapolis, Miami, and NYC.

   - I didn't walk away in 1993, the labels walked away from US. Somehow they managed to entirely miss the fact that I put out another InSoc album in 1997, and that I didn't quit the band until 1998. I mentioned that to the voice talent they had interviewing me, he had no clue. That's fine, I don't fault them for that... but with all the trivia they unearthed, and supposed investigation they did, how did they manage to miss an entire ALBUM? It's still listed on Amazon, ferchrissakes! How hard could that have been to find? What, they can figure out that Amanda had a drug problem 16 years ago, but they couldn't find DBA?? Near as I could tell, they missed the existence of the InSoc website also. ( http://InSoc.org )

   Furthermore, Paul and I had been "butting heads" since the fall of 1982, and we continued to do so all the way up to 1993 when Paul decided that having just been dropped from TommyBoy/Warner, and with a new wife and a baby on the way, he would rather to go back to school and work on his music production career than try to scare up a new record deal. He and I managed to "butt heads" for 11 years without it ever breaking up the band, and when the time came for us to stop doing the band together, we were friends.

   So what IS this strange TV show that appeared on the air out of nowhere, confusing and disappointing hundreds of people? What was meant by all that was said, and whom can one believe? Read on, dear reader, if you dare... prepare yourself for a tale of intrigue and conflict, scurrilous machinations and desperate loyalties... read on, the story of:

InSoc VS. TELEVISION!

   (Music swells, something gritty but nothing that will offend people in Kentucky. IS vs. TV theme song starts: Lyrics: Whatchya gonna do when TV comes for you, ooohhh whatchya gonna do, HEY! whatchya gonna do? How ya gonna think then the lights make you blink, yeaaaaaah when TV comes for you, OH! when TV comes for you... Cut to commercial)