The dark side of being Casey Kasem

[LC]

I just stumbled across this on Google.  It's a lengthy collection of declassified/redacted FBI documents regarding several threats that were made against Casey over the years by various angry and/or mentally unstable individuals.  Some of it is related to the infamous Negativland-U2 lawsuit.

documents.theblackvault.com/documents/fbifiles/celebrities/caseykasem.pdf

[Mike]

After reading up on Negativland/U2, I kind of wonder what week Casey's rant/outtake would have come from. Would it have been when they had their first AT40 hit with "Pride (In the Name of Love)" (thus, somewhere in December 1984)?

[mkarns]

Feb 24, 2022 16:33:16 GMT -5 Mike said:

After reading up on Negativland/U2, I kind of wonder what week Casey's rant/outtake would have come from. Would it have been when they had their first AT40 hit with "Pride (In the Name of Love)" (thus, somewhere in December 1984)?

That would be my guess. By 1987, when they returned to AT40 with "With or Without You", Casey was praising them for their social and political activism in his countdown stories; being at least aware of that I don't think he would have yelled "These guys are from England and who gives a s**t!" (Plus by then he was probably at least aware of the fact that they're Irish.)

[LC]

In one of the FBI documents, it says that by the time of the whole Negativland thing, he had come to view the blooper recording of his comments as kind of a joke.

I would assume the same holds true for his "Snuggles" outburst. I've wondered for a long time how he felt about that stuff.

[mkarns]

Feb 25, 2022 11:45:48 GMT -5 LC said:

In one of the FBI documents, it says that by the time of the whole Negativland thing, he had come to view the blooper recording of his comments as kind of a joke.

I would assume the same holds true for his "Snuggles" outburst. I've wondered for a long time how he felt about that stuff.

I think Casey was upset at first when he learned about the Dead Dog rant leaking, likely well after September 1985. But since it was already out there and he couldn't do anything to make it disappear, he learned to laugh it off and even probably accepted it added an extra human dimension of sorts to him: "Yes, I do lose my temper. And yeah, I curse at times. So does almost everyone." He could be a perfectionist about his product, things weren't going well one day, and so it just boiled over as happens to us all.