Wayback Wednesday: Daryl Nathan Sings ‘The 4th of July’ [Video]
Long before YouTube, artists had to appear on local cable access channels to be heard. And one voice made his mark on Grand Rapids back in the 1990s.
Desperate to fill programming time, local cable access was a playground for the eccentric, like the great Daryl Nathan. He had his own show on GR cable access in the mid to late '90s.
Nathan rang up quite the following in the heady days of cable access, with his long blonde wig, his Casio keyboard, and his strange songs, which usually had something to do with 'pretty girls'.
Daryl's still out there kicking somewhere, and a documentary about his life was posted online about 12 years ago, where his show was described as follows:
Daryl was a local legend due to his cable access show "The Great Daryl Nathan's Entertainment Show" on GRTV in, I think 1996. The next year I wound up interning at WKTV, the cable access station just outside of Grand Rapids. I asked Daryl if I could do a documentary on him. He said sure. By this time he had stopped making shows for GRTV. After shooting the doc Dale Chilton and I started producing Daryl's new show for - "The New Great Daryl Nathan's Entertainment Show." It was a blast. Alas, all good things come to an end and I moved to Los Angeles. After finding some of Daryl's videos on YouTube I decided to dust this thing off.
Since the advent of social media, cable access isn't the weird wacked out stage it once was, and we're all the sadder because of that.