An American Family (TV Program)

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    Lance Loud Was an Early Reality Star. He Was Also a Gay Punk Pioneer.

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    Loud was part of “An American Family” in 1973, but his wild band, Mumps, never signed a record deal. Now their songs are being released on the 20th anniversary of his death.On February 20, 1973, Lance Loud earned a place in musical history that, at the time, nearly stopped his career cold.That night, he appeared with his band, Loud!, on “The Dick Cavett Show” as part of an evening devoted to “An American Family,” the PBS program credited as TV’s first reality show. The cinéma vérité series, which featured the entire Loud clan, both riveted and appalled the nation with two revelations: the collapse of the parents’ marriage right on camera, and their eldest son, 20-year-old Lance, making his gay identity extravagantly clear. It was a profoundly rare declaration in that era of television, and by performing on Cavett, Lance led what was likely the first rock group with openly gay members to appear on a major commercial network.“We never considered ourselves a ‘gay band,’” said Kristian Hoffman, Lance’s best friend, who wrote most of the group’s music. “We were a band.” But Loud! did have a broader identity challenge. “They saw us as this joke band from television,” Hoffman recalled from his home in Los Angeles. “No one took us seriously.”At least, not at the start. But once the punk scene began, and Loud! morphed into the band Mumps, the group dovetailed perfectly with “the new culture of shock,” as Hoffman put it. Fans clamored for its Technicolor mix of glam-rock and operatic pop, which smashed together influences from Sparks, Roxy Music and the Kinks, crowned by Loud’s hyperbolic singing.The Loud family, the subject of the PBS reality show “An American Family.” Clockwise from top: Kevin, Lance, Michele, Pat, Delilah, Grant and Bill.John Dominis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesIn 1975, Mumps became one of the first bands to play CBGB, opening for Television. They went on to become staples at that club, as well as at Max’s Kansas City, and toured the United States, even opening some shows for Cheap Trick and Van Halen. “They were one of the most interesting bands ever to perform at CBGBs,” the Talking Heads’ drummer Chris Frantz wrote in an email. “Their music was a unique mix of sweet and naughty.”Yet, in their six years together (with a lineup that shifted a few times), Mumps never earned an album deal, managing to issue just two indie singles.Now, nearly five decades later, in a music industry teeming with out L.G.B.T.Q. acts, Mumps are getting another shot. On Friday, the label Omnivore Recordings, known for releasing rare material from artists like Buck Owens and Alex Chilton, is releasing “Rock & Roll This, Rock & Roll That,” a 23-song compilation of the band’s work that’s the first to feature material from Loud! The release also marks a sad milestone: the 20th anniversary of Lance’s death of complications from hepatitis C.The roots of Loud! began at Santa Barbara High School, where Hoffman first met Loud in art class. “I was the teacher’s pet, and Lance was the funniest guy in the room,” said Hoffman, who played keyboards in the band.He cited Pat Loud — the family’s matriarch, who died in January at 94 — as the group’s first cheerleader: “The family had all these musical instruments laying around in the garage, and she encouraged everyone to get in there and play.” Two bands came out of the Loud household: the one seen on the PBS show featuring sons Grant and Kevin, the other led by Lance. “They had the skill,” Hoffman quipped. “We had the will.”(They also had the chutzpah. After Hoffman and Loud attended the notorious Altamont festival in 1969, where they saw the Rolling Stones perform the not-yet-recorded song “Brown Sugar,” they not only started playing it in their sets, they took credit for writing it.)Lance Loud, left, with his parents on “The Dick Cavett Show.”ABC Photo Archives/ABC, via Getty ImagesOnce “An American Family” became a sensation and the invitation came from Cavett, Pat agreed only if her children’s bands could play. But as Hoffman recalled, the performance was met by the studio audience “with a profound silence.”To complicate matters, Loud was still reeling from bruising press, including a lengthy New York Times article published two days earlier that referred to his “flamboyant, leechlike homosexuality,” and went on to call him “the evil flower of the Loud family,” who lives in a world of “backward genders.” Hoffman said that the unflagging support of both men’s families made them both fully confident in their sexuality and gave them strength to persevere.The band was buoyed by its nascent talent, including the drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, who went on to play in the Patti Smith Group; and an agile guitarist, Rob Duprey, who later worked with Iggy Pop. As their frontman, Loud proved so energetic, his sweat became a feature of their show. “He could actually aim it at someone,” Hoffman said. “And because CBGBs was so crowded, they couldn’t get away.”The hip label Bomp Records released their debut single, “I Like to Be Clean,” a wry anti-sex anthem, and Mumps snagged Sparks’ manager, Joseph Fleury. Yet, when Fleury pitched A&M Records on both Mumps and another band he handled, the Dickies, the label snapped up only one, telling the manager, “We don’t want ‘the gay band.’”“Those were the exact words,” Hoffman said, noting the irony that at a time when ostensibly straight rock stars were rewarded for gay affectations, actual gay people were punished for them. “Freddie Mercury had to pretend to be straight to be a rock star,” Hoffman said incredulously. “Freddie Mercury!”Loud executing a headstand onstage at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco with Mumps in 1979.Ruby Ray/Getty ImagesMumps songs never featured gay love scenarios, preferring sardonic observations and satirical exaggerations. Their second single, “Rock & Roll This, Rock & Roll That,” sent up the slogan-like salutes to the genre in song titles that, by then, had become a groaning cliché. “That was specifically written when Lou Reed titled his album ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Animal,’” Hoffman said. “How desperate must he have been to align himself with some trope in its death throes to sell a record?”An intrigued Sire Records commissioned some demos from Mumps but ultimately passed. At the same time, other artists recognized Mumps’ rarity and worth. “The caliber of their musicianship was high,” said Clem Burke, the drummer for Blondie, who shared many bills with Mumps. “They were energetic and fun and probably smarter than most of the other bands on the scene. In fact, they may have been too smart for their own good.”What impressed Rufus Wainwright most was that Mumps “followed no creed,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly punk or musical theater, but it had aspects of both. And they managed to put the dramatic flair of opera into a rock band. Plus, Lance was so sexy.”Still, the eccentricity of the music, with its fitful chord progressions and askew melodies, could be daunting for audiences to fathom and for Loud to sing. “I wrote songs that didn’t always play to Lance’s strength,” Hoffman admitted. “But he was one of the greatest frontmen of all time.”Mumps’ lack of success led to their 1979 split, after which Hoffman worked with artists including Klaus Nomi and James Chance, while Loud sustained a successful career in music journalism. (He contributed regularly to the magazines Details and Interview.) The two stayed best friends until Loud’s 2001 death. Now Hoffman is proud their music may finally reach a wider audience.“We were out of our time back then,” he said. “If we came up now, who knows?” More

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      Pat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPat Loud, Reality Show Matriarch of ‘An American Family,’ Dies at 94A mother of five, she unapologetically laid bare the drama of her family life as a star of the first reality show.The Loud family (clockwise from top): Kevin, Lance, Michele, Pat, Delilah, Grant and Bill.Credit…John Dominis/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty ImagesJan. 11, 2021Updated 5:11 p.m. ET Before “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” before the Kardashians, before the idea of living large and unscripted on camera became a TV staple, there was a startling program on public television called “An American Family” with a startling female character named Pat Loud.Ms. Loud was a California mother of five. She drank, she plotted her divorce, she adored, and accepted, her openly gay son. She did it all in Santa Barbara and all on camera — in 1973. Loving, boisterous, witty, resilient and sometimes angry and hurt, she did not act like most women on television at the time. But she was ostensibly not acting at all. She was the first reality television star on the first reality show — and she paid a price for breaking new ground.Critics called her materialistic and self-absorbed. An “affluent zombie,” one said. What wife and mother would do such a thing? Newsweek put Ms. Loud, her husband, Bill, and their children on its cover with the headline “The Broken Family.”Many others, however, saw her as honest and brave, uninhibited and unconditional in her love for her children.Ms. Loud died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles, her family said in a Facebook post. She was 94. She was 47 when the show that made her famous first aired, and she spent much of the rest of her life explaining why she had done it and how it had changed her family. She made few apologies.She told the talk show host Dick Cavett in no uncertain terms that she had no problem with her son Lance’s homosexuality. She wrote in her autobiography, “Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story” (1974), that given how she felt that her family had been mistreated after the show aired, “now we are all unabashedly trying to get anything we can from the instant fame.”But life went on. Once a homemaker and Junior League volunteer, Ms. Loud found new work with Ron Bernstein, a literary agent, and later with the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. She moved to New York, then England, before returning to California in the late 1990s to be with Lance after he became sick with H.I.V. in 1987. (He died of complications of hepatitis C in 2001.) She divorced her husband, though they reunited many years later.Ms. Loud with her son, Lance, in 1990. She was forthright in asserting her acceptance of his open homosexuality when “An American Family” was generating wide publicity in the 1970s.Credit…Ann Summa/Getty ImagesBy the time she was in her 80s, public perception of her had shifted. Where once she had been seen as an unmitigated self-promoter, now she was a wise, refined matriarch of a genre gone astray.Speaking of the “Real Housewives” franchise, Ms. Loud told The New York Times in 2013, “It just seems like all these beautiful blond girls, all made up, with stem glasses of white Chablis, and they’re all just fighting at dinner somewhere.”Critics of “An American Family” accused it of being contrived, but the Louds long maintained that they had behaved as normally as they could with cameras constantly trailing them. Craig Gilbert, a producer for WNET, chose the Louds for his subject because the family had lots of children — and because they said yes.“We asked the kids, and they all agreed,” Ms. Loud told The Times in 2013. “It seemed like a fun thing to do.”The family expected the filming to last for just a few weeks and doubted that the final product would find many viewers. In the end, more than 300 hours of film captured over seven months was reduced to 12 one-hour episodes.“They just went for the sensational stuff,” Ms. Loud said.The most sensational involved scenes from Lance Loud’s flamboyant life in New York — where he performed in a rock band and where his mother visited him, accompanied by cameras — and the breakup of the Louds’ marriage.Bill Loud had been unfaithful for years, and his wife knew it. In one wine-saturated conversation captured on film, she complained about his affairs to her brother and sister-in-law. She told The Times in 2013 that she had been “coerced” into letting the scene be filmed. Mr. Gilbert rejected that assertion.“I said, ‘Pat, we must shoot that,’” he told The Times in 2013. “She said, ‘I do not want you to.’ I said, ‘We must, Pat, because otherwise it’s going to come out of the blue. No one will understand it.’ She finally agreed, and her brother and sister-in-law were in the room when she agreed to it. And now she says she was coerced.”In a later episode, Ms. Loud told her husband that she wanted a divorce. “By the time she asked Dad for a divorce, she didn’t care if the entire city of Santa Barbara was watching or the whole world,” her daughter, Delilah, said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. “She just wanted Dad out.”Ms. Loud in 2013. By the time she was in her 80s, public perception had recast her from a self-promoter into a wise matriarch of a genre, reality TV, that had gone astray.Credit…Robert Caplin for The New York TimesPatricia Claire Russell was born Oct. 4, 1926, in Eugene, Ore., the daughter of an engineer. Her family was close with another family that had a little boy named Bill Loud. They met when she was about 6. Years later, when she was studying history as an undergraduate at Stanford, Mr. Loud would visit her from the University of Oregon.“He would drive down and pick her up and then go to Tijuana to see bull fights,” Delilah Loud said. “They had quite a courtship.”Ms. Loud graduated from Stanford in 1948. The Louds eloped to Mexico in March 1950. By the time the cameras showed up, in 1971, Mr. Loud had built a successful business making parts for mining equipment, and the family was living an affluent life. They had a house with a pool and a Jaguar in the driveway. They took long vacations to Europe.Ms. Loud was widely read, and she talked with her children about art, music and books. Life was bigger than Santa Barbara, she told them.“They were adventurous types,” Delilah Loud said, recalling the family conversation about whether to participate in “An American Family.” “They wanted us to experience the world and they thought, ‘Well, what the heck, it’ll be a new experience.’’’Bill Loud, with whom Ms. Loud reunited in 2001 at the request of Lance, died in 2018 at 97.Ms. Loud’s is survived by Delilah and another daughter, Michele, as well as two sons, Kevin and Grant, according to the family’s Facebook post.Ms. Loud moved to New York with her daughters in 1974 and lived in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for more than a decade while working as a literary agent and doing other work.She lived in Bath, England, in the early 1990s before moving back to California to live with Lance. In 2001, Lance, who had led the rock band the Mumps and was a freelance writer, asked the original camera and sound equipment operators of “An American Family” to document his final days. He did not tell his mother that the cameras would show up.“I don’t know why Lance did that, but he wanted to do it,” she told The Times.In 2003, public television aired “Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family.”Alex Marshall and Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More