My Damn Channel Director of Production: Melissa Schneider

Meet Melissa! Melissa Schneider is our new Director of Production, joining the My Damn Channel family with the experience, energy and cred we need to help produce over 30 new original series in the months ahead. She's also the lead producer for our new 2012 mega show with YouTube...My Damn Channel: Live

Melissa expands our management team in the NY office where Jesse Cowell (Director of Content) and Molly Templeton (Director of Talent & Audience Development) work with Rob Barnett (Founder/CEO) to oversee more killer original comedy and music than legally allowed on the Interweb.

"Melissa brings awesome experience, talent and spirit to our team as we prep to make 2012 the year My Damn Channel delivers more new original programming than ever before," said Rob Barnett. He added, "She's developed and produced over 30 original digital series and branded entertainment campaigns and over 30 independent music videos, commercials, and short films. She worked for David Chase for god's sake!"

Melissa graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and went on to work for The Public Theater / NY Shakespeare Festival during George C. Wolfe’s tenure. She left the theater to work in (wait for it) The Sopranos...in the writers' office for creator David Chase, and writers: Terence Winter (creator, "Boardwalk Empire"), Robin Green & Mitchell Burgess (creators, "Blue Bloods") and Matthew Weiner (creator, "Mad Men").

Melissa went digital...producing online content for Macy’s, XBOX, Vuguru, Nickelodeon, Swanson, Verizon FiOS, CJP Digital, and Summit Entertainment to name a few. She was the Director of Production at Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG) in New York City, where developed and produced digital series and branded entertainment campaigns.

More announcements on our new series, stars and launch info for My Damn Channel: Live hits this space soon.

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My Damn Channel: Our 3rd Birthday

My Damn Channel is 3 years old today.

Punk was still a baby when this photo was taken. Nixon is looming in the background. He's pointing the finger!

The pic is taken during a time called "college radio" before consultants sucked freedom out of the souls of rock radio madmen and mystical women who turned us onto music completely capable of changing and defining our lives.

I first met Harry Shearer that year. I chased rock dreams through radio, television and film - and called Harry in late 2006, with the idea to start a then-unnamed business which became My Damn Channel. I called Don Was. I called David Wain.

We launched My Damn Channel exactly 3 years ago, on July 31, 2007.



We give artists we love, trust and respect all the tools they need to skip over stone walls of multi-national media empires and create video delivered directly to you.

We've never been stupid enough to think www.MyDamnChannel.com would be the most visited online destination in the world. But we built a home base big and bad enough for every creator to have their own channel and we built a massive distribution network to move video onto every digital platform where we can make a solid business deal to support the work. The good shit ain't free.

We built a business driven by advertising, licensing and the certainty that we can bring you talent and content in special events later this year - worthy of a buck or two from you to support the art. Crazy, right?

Artists like Illeana Douglas prove that companies like IKEA can connect in a whole new way with millions of people watching millions of videos every hour. Illeana birthed a baby called "Easy to Assemble," which Ad Age dubbed "the most-watched sponsored web show."



We survived the world's worst economy and found our way to success because YOU watch and share our videos. THANK YOU.

We have artists that trust us to respect their art. THANK YOU.

We have sponsors and business partners who believe that we can deliver the good shit and guarantee millions of eyes on it all. THANK YOU.

We have backers who put their faith and coin into a vision for a new show business as powerful today as television was in the 50's. YOU GET IT! THANK YOU!

We have a man named Warren Chao, our Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, who knew how to stop us from avoiding most of the mistakes baby companies make to screw it all up. Warren: I've never known a single human being as smart, dedicated and effective inside a company as you. THANK YOU.

Biggest thanks to our families for not killing us when the hill seemed to high to climb! 

RESPECT and THANKS to every one of you who have spent a day inside our small, evolving staff of rebels and business partners.
(Keep an eye out for your party invite!)



We start year four today. Documented in "the world's longest press release" here - with all our new channels for your immediate inspection.

One more major announcement is coming out in days to prove that you'll still have My Damn Channel to kick around for years to come. 
F Nixon.

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FAREWELL TO DANNY

This eulogy was delivered by Bruce Springsteen at Danny's funeral on April 21 in Red Bank, New Jersey:

FAREWELL TO DANNY



Let me start with the stories.

Back in the days of miracles, the frontier days when "Mad Dog" Lopez and his temper struck fear into the band, small club owners, innocent civilians and all women, children and small animals.

Back in the days when you could still sign your life away on the hood of a parked car in New York City.

Back shortly after a young red-headed accordionist struck gold on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and he and his mama were sent to Switzerland to show them how it's really done.

Back before beach bums were featured on the cover of Time magazine.

I'm talking about back when the E Street Band was a communist organization! My pal, quiet, shy Dan Federici, was a one-man creator of some of the hairiest circumstances of our 40 year career... And that wasn't easy to do. He had "Mad Dog" Lopez to compete with.... Danny just outlasted him.

Maybe it was the "police riot" in Middletown, New Jersey. A show we were doing to raise bail money for "Mad Log" Lopez who was in jail in Richmond, Virginia, for having an altercation with police officers who we'd aggravated by playing too long. Danny allegedly knocked over our huge Marshall stacks on some of Middletown's finest who had rushed the stage because we broke the law by...playing too long.

As I stood there watching, several police oficers crawled out from underneath the speaker cabinets and rushed away to seek medical attention. Another nice young officer stood in front of me onstage waving his nightstick, poking and calling me nasty names. I looked over to see Danny with a beefy police officer pulling on one arm while Flo Federici, his first wife, pulled on the other, assisting her man in resisting arrest.

A kid leapt from the audience onto the stage, momentarily distracting the beefy officer with the insults of the day. Forever thereafter, "Phantom" Dan Federici slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

A warrant out for his arrest and one month on the lam later, he still hadn't been brought to justice. We hid him in various places but now we had a problem. We had a show coming at Monmouth College. We needed the money and we had to do the gig. We tried a replacement but it didn't work out. So Danny, to all of our admiration, stepped up and said he'd risk his freedom, take the chance and play.

Show night. 2,000 screaming fans in the Monmouth College gym. We had it worked out so Danny would not appear onstage until the moment we started playing. We figured the police who were there to arrest him wouldn't do so onstage during the show and risk starting another riot.

Let me set the scene for you. Danny is hiding, hunkered down in the backseat of a car in the parking lot. At five minutes to eight, our scheduled start time, I go out to whisk him in. I tap on the window.

"Danny, come on, it's time."

I hear back, "I'm not going."

Me: "What do you mean you're not going?"

Danny: "The cops are on the roof of the gym. I've seen them and they're going to nail me the minute I step out of this car."

As I open the door, I realize that Danny has been smoking a little something and had grown rather paranoid. I said, "Dan, there are no cops on the roof."

He says, "Yes, I saw them, I tell you. I'm not coming in."

So I used a procedure I'd call on often over the next forty years in dealing with my old pal's concerns. I threatened him...and cajoled. Finally, out he came. Across the parking lot and into the gym we swept for a rapturous concert during which we laughted like thieves at our excellent dodge of the local cops.

At the end of the evening, during the last song, I pulled the entire crowd up onto the stage and Danny slipped into the audience and out the front door. Once again, "Phantom" Dan had made his exit. (I still get the occasional card from the old Chief of Police of Middletown wishing us well. Our histories are forever intertwined.) And that, my friends, was only the beginning.

There was the time Danny quit the band during a rough period at Max's Kansas City, explaining to me that he was leaving to fix televisions. I asked him to think about that and come back later.

Or Danny, in the band rental car, bouncing off several parked cars after a night of entertainment, smashing out the windshield with his head but saved from severe injury by the huge hard cowboy hat he bought in Texas on our last Western swing.

Or Danny, leaving a large marijuana plant on the front seat of his car in a tow away zone. The car was promptly towed. He said, "Bruce, I'm going to go down and report that it was stolen." I said, "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

Down he went and straight into the slammer without passing go.

Or Danny, the only member of the E Street Band to be physically thrown out of the Stone Pony. Considering all the money we made them, that wasn't easy to do.

Or Danny receiving and surviving a "cautionary assault" from an enraged but restrained "Big Man" Clarence Clemons while they were living together and Danny finally drove the "Big Man" over the big top.

Or Danny assisting me in removing my foot from his stereo speaker after being the only band member ever to drive me into a violent rage.

And through it all, Danny played his beautiful, soulful B3 organ for me and our love grew. And continued to grow. Life is funny like that. He was my homeboy, and great, and for that you make considerations... And he was much more tolerant of my failures than I was of his.

When Danny wasn't causing chaos, he was a sweet, talented, unassuming, unpretentious good-hearted guy who simply had an unchecked ability to make good fortune and things in general go fabulously wrong.

But beyond all of that, he also had a mountain of the right stuff. He had the heart and soul of an engineer. He learned to fly. He was always up on the latest technology and would explain it to you patiently and in enormous detail. He was always "souping" something up, his car, his stereo, his B3. When Patti joined the band, he was the most welcoming, thoughtful, kindest friend to the first woman entering our "boys club."

He loved his kids, always bragging about Jason, Harley, and Madison, and he loved his wife Maya for the new things she brought into his life.

And then there was his artistry. He was the most intuitive player I've ever seen. His style was slippery and fluid, drawn to the spaces the other musicians in the E Street Band left. He wasn't an assertive player, he was a complementary player. A true accompanist. He naturally supplied the glue that bound the band's sound together. In doing so, he created for himself a very specific style. When you hear Dan Federici, you don't hear a blanket of sound, you hear a riff, packed with energy, flying above everything else for a few moments and then gone back in the track. "Phantom" Dan Federici. Now you hear him, now you don't.

Offstage, Danny couldn't recite a lyric or a chord progression for one of my songs. Onstage, his ears opened up. He listened, he felt, he played, finding the perfect hole and placement for a chord or a flurry of notes. This style created a tremendous feeling of spontaneity in our ensemble playing.

In the studio, if I wanted to loosen up the track we were recording, I'd put Danny on it and not tell him what to play. I'd just set him loose. He brought with him the sound of the carnival, the amusements, the boardwalk, the beach, the geography of our youth and the heart and soul of the birthplace of the E Street Band.

Then we grew up. Very slowly. We stood together through a lot of trials and tribulations. Danny's response to a mistake onstage, hard times, catastrophic events was usually a shrug and a smile. Sort of an "I am but one man in a raging sea, but I'm still afloat. And we're all still here."

I watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and in the last decade when the band reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3, filled with life and, yes, a new maturity, passion for his job, his family and his home in the brother and sisterhood of our band.

Finally, I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. When I asked him how things looked, he just said, "what are you going to do? I'm looking forward to tomorrow." Danny, the sunny side up fatalist. He never gave up right to the end.

A few weeks back we ended up onstage in Indianapolis for what would be the last time. Before we went on I asked him what he wanted to play and he said, "Sandy." He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we'd walk along the boards with all the time in the world.

So what if we just smashed into three parked cars, it's a beautiful night! So what if we're on the lam from the entire Middletown police department, let's go take a swim! He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.

Let's go back to the days of miracles. Pete Townshend said, "a rock and roll band is a crazy thing. You meet some people when you're a kid and unlike any other occupation in the whole world, you're stuck with them your whole life no matter who they are or what crazy things they do."

If we didn't play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn't be in this room together. But we do... We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur...old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

Of course we all grow up and we know "it's only rock and roll"...but it's not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.

So today, making another one of his mysterious exits, we say farewell to Danny, "Phantom" Dan, Federici. Father, husband, my brother, my friend, my mystery, my thorn, my rose, my keyboard player, my miracle man and lifelong member in good standing of the house rockin', pants droppin', earth shockin', hard rockin', booty shakin', love makin', heart breakin', soul cryin'... and, yes, death defyin' legendary E Street Band.

(video tribute to Danny at www.BruceSpringsteen.net)

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ADAM CAROLLA

Last weekend, I googled the man I hired for the awesome little job called "replace Howard Stern." I found an anonymous blog that smelled like something rotten was stinking up the kitchen at CBS: http://somedudefromjersey.blogspot.com/2007/12/shit-in-my-awesome-sandwich.html Adam Carolla has a playbook filled with more options and winning strategies than any idiotic morning zoo or any hack program directors can ever hope to create. Danny Bonaduce was a desperate hail mary pass thrown by people too short-sited to see that it took Howard decades to build his radio empire. When Stern first syndicated, it took four years for him to lay waste to the competition. Adam was always first to say that Howard was irreplaceable. I couldn't have agreed more. But when 'the KING' departed for a new throne, someone was left having to figure out how to start over. That someone was me. I went home the night that I was given the ball and told my wife there was good news & bad news. The good news was that I was made President of CBS Radio programming. The bad news is that I had to figure out how to replace Howard. We'll skip the long stories here about who the REAL choice was for NY & save all that for later. The ONLY choice for LA, and for the west coast Stern stations was the man who'd been on Howard's show for scores of LIVE appearances - the man who rocked THE MAN SHOW with Brother Jimmy Kimmel - the man who made LOVELINE a latenight hit - the man with unique comic skills to improv and create immediate compelling content out of every scrap of raw material - the man who can build a house with his bare hands - and you get the drift: C-A-R-O-L-L-A. We gave Adam a new start in a new format called FREE FM. Our mission wasn't complex. Hire BIG talent and give them the support and freedom they need to build better radio on their own terms. People are sick of over-formatted radio with too many commercial interuptions. No breaking news there. Talent is the only answer to better ratings and revenues. But old media doesn't have a terrific track record backing talent. The current writers' strike is front page news that tells the same story in Hollywood. A great drama seems to be unfolding. Morning radio fans in LA, Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, Sacramento, Reno, Fresno, Palm Springs, Portland (Oregon & Maine), Boise, and Pittsburgh wait to find out if Adam Carolla will be back on January 2nd. I'll lay down this bet with a song: Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side The summer's gone, and all the flowers are dying 'Tis you, 'tis you must go.

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CAN LESS BE MORE?

When I last worked in corporate American radio, the employees, competitors, and constituents of Clear Channel used to enjoy calling them "the evil empire." Too many radio listeners feel the same way about most commercial music stations in this country. One fine day, in a plush board room somewhere inside "the evil empire," their generals decided to launch a new strategy designed to win back the hearts and minds of the disenchanted masses. Since most humans hate commercial interruption on music stations, their visionary new plan added MORE interruptions with less individual commercials inside each break. The most expensive suits in old media are cut with the most cynical cloth. They'll tell you the plan produced positive results. But common sense tells you the best way to fix the problem is to re-think the business and play LESS commercials. Before launching My Damn Channel, I reached out to a few chosen brains to gauge reactions to our evil little plans to disrupt old media by creating original, episodic videos by the best artists from television, radio, and film. One of the first V.I.B.'s (very imp brains) I approached was Seth Godin. Godin is a new media marketing guru. His books are required reading in our world. His titles pop. Small is the New Big, All Marketers are Liars... I'd read the books, seen Seth Godin speak, and broke bread with him once - enough contact to that know he'd throw the right kind of body blows to see if our plan was ready to last in the web ring. He questioned whether or not we'd be able to get our talent to deliver enough professional video on a consistent basis to build a business. This is where I first started to think about re-applying the "less is more" strategy. When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, the new media gold rush began. Most new sites that launched in the wake of this sea change have tried to win by imitating the mothership and putting up destinations with a similar look and feel with a ton of the same content. Megatons. We're fans and business partners with YouTube. But we don't think our audience is looking for another site with hundreds of "channels" and thousands of videos. Our "less is more" thinking is built to prove Brave Sir Godin wrong. In our first 4 months of life, we've brought a small number of big talents into a tent where they deliver new webisodes every single week. Here's the current line-up: Every Monday: DAVID WAIN Every Tuesday: HARRY SHEARER Every Wednesday: ANDY MILONAKIS Every Thursday: DON WAS Every Friday: BIG FAT BRAIN Our thinking is that if the best talent delivers the best videos - consistently - then less can be more. Or, not. Body blows welcome: info@MyDammChannel.com

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