Remember Your First Band? (with Riki Rachtman)

How Did We Get Weird with Vanessa Bayer and Jonah Bayer

All Things Comedy

Society & Culture, Comedy Interviews, Comedy

4.9 • 680 Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2022

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thirty years in the making, this episode of HOW DID WE GET WEIRD? sees Jonah and Vanessa catching up with their long-lost cousin and the former host of the MTV's Headbangers Ball, Riki Rachtman. We discuss how Riki is related through marriage to the Bayers, the time Jonah almost invited Riki to his Bar Mitzvah and the time Axl Rose flew to New York with Riki to get our cousin his first hosting job on MTV. We also talk about our first bands, what it was like owning the Sunset Strip's most infamous club and why Alice Cooper was the first person to know about Riki's engagement. Vanessa also laments the loss of the old-school answering machine, Jonah reminisces about music video culture and Riki remembers a time when having tattoos made you an outcast. There truly is something for everyone on this episode... unless you're a Caribou Coffee enthusiast.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Vanessa Bayer and this is my brother Jonah.
0:05.9	We're two siblings who love to talk about our childhood and nostalgia and how it shaped us into the people we are today.
0:10.4	Who are pretty intuitive, if I do say so myself.
0:13.2	Welcome to How Did We Get Weird. Well, Jonah, this is the podcast we've been waiting for.
0:30.2	This podcast is 30 years in the making we've been talking about trying to make something like this happen.
0:34.6	I can't believe it's actually happening.
0:36.3	Yeah.
0:36.7	I would almost go so far as to say like 40 years. I mean, this is really an exciting day. Today, our guest,
0:43.5	we always heard growing up, we were related to this person. And I don't even know how to intro this.
0:48.1	What do you think, Vanessa? Okay. I know. We're at a little bit of a loss for words. So when we were
0:52.3	growing up, Jonah was obviously very into like rock
0:56.0	music and metal and stuff. And a show that we would watch all the time would be Headbanger's Ball.
1:02.0	And our great aunt, Masha, our grandmother's sister, would always kind of tell us that we were
1:07.2	related to the host of Headbanger's Ball, Ricky Rackman. And we were always like,
1:11.6	is that true? Is that not true? It was sort of like a rumor in our family. And we couldn't
1:17.3	quite figure out if it was true or not. I remember our grandma kind of saying things. Like,
1:21.9	our grandma was not a fan of Ricky's tattoos. That's right. She was not a fan of tattoos in general. That's right. That's right. She's not a fan of that.
1:27.6	I remember her saying Ricky had a sister who was very successful. Those are really the two things I
1:32.2	remember like, oh, he has all these tattoos. His sister is very successful. That's all we knew. And I was
1:36.4	like, is this? Couldn't really get more info on our dad would also make up a lot of things when we were growing up. So I wasn't sure if it was like an embellishment, like maybe someone met him once or like, I don't know. You know, it was before like really the internet,
1:47.4	like you couldn't really figure that stuff out. I mean, again, we could have asked a little
1:52.2	more. But like when you're a kid, you don't like you just hear stuff and you're kind of like,
	...

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