That's the message of an unusual NBC pitch to youth
You can be somebody with a plan of your own, You can say no and you won't be alone, You can make yourself get higher than you have ever known, By making up your own mind, Doing things your own way, Setting up your own style, By being yourself.
By the end of next week, television viewers may know those words by heart. Set to an up tempo, the jingle will air nearly every hour during prime time on NBC for eight days. The oldest network is undertaking the most unusual public-service campaign in the history of television—and a major programming gamble. Every series episode will begin with a celebrity introducing the song, which is intended to be a rallying cry against teen-age drug abuse.
Such all-out attention is normally reserved for a national crisis. NBC says teen use of drugs and alcohol is just that: by age 17, 70% of all youths have sampled one or both. So the start of the network's season will be an antidrug special, half grim documentary, half musical extravaganza. The show, Get High on Yourself, also centers on the jingle, which is presented five times in pop, rock, acid rock, country and gospel versions. Warbling it among a huge cast will be 55 entertainment and sports celebrities, ranging from tuneful Olivia Newton-John to frog-flat Paul Newman. (Among others: John Travolta, Cheryl Tiegs, Tracy Austin, Muhammad Ali, Carol Burnett.) A week later the NBC campaign will close in a Bob Hope special, with a call by the comedian for a continuing, nationwide antidrug alert.
The whole effort has been guided by Hollywood Producer Robert Evans, 51 (The Godfather, Chinatown and Popeye). Evans has never worked in TV before. But then, he has never faced so special a challenge. In July 1980 Evans pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to agreeing to buy 5 oz. of cocaine for $19,000. Judge Vincent Broderick deferred judgment, offering Evans a chance to wipe his record clean after a year's probation. In return, said Broderick, "I want you to use your unique talents where others have failed in this horrible thing of drug abuse by children."
In a field dominated by scare tactics, Evans held to an affirmative theme. He committed $400,000 of his own money and recruited Steve Karmen, composer of the / Love New York theme, to donate the jingle. Get High on Yourself would ask "drug-free American heroes" to talk about the pleasure, and glamour, of life on a natural high. Just as important, during the 6-hr, taping of the commercials, the "heroes" would mingle with a racial rainbow of youngsters.
The special began as a single 60-sec. commercial and, with NBC's encouragement, just grew. It is a pastiche of folksy, campfire sing-alongs; rafter-shaking black church music; gritty rapping between Burt Reynolds and streetwise teens; and documentary footage about the making of the commercials and the special, with touches of Hollywood self-satire. Some of the sequences are blandly Middle American—Evans calls them "white bready." But there is plenty of funk in Rocker Ted Nugent. His hair hangs in crimped strands halfway down his bare, sweaty chest, and he talks in a singsong urban-punk cadence about how to stay straight while being more cool than the druggies. When he sings, the mild jingle becomes a heavy-rhythm wail.