Baseball made Jason Giambi a wealthy man, but after hearing about the fading slugger’s time in an 80s boy-band, you are left with the impression that’d he’d choose poor-heartthrob over rich-and-hobbled-DH any day of the week.
Everything seemed so right when, at the age of 11, Giambi joined Metric System, the boy-band that Ed McMahon once said “would change the world.”
Metric System’s first studio album, Two Kilos, took the U.S. teen scene by storm. Gigs on local cable access TV were quickly replaced by shows in mobbed shopping malls.
Their first single, “By Any Measure (U Get Me Longer),” made Billboard’s Top 100 in 1982.
But the good times didn’t last long.
The hit single’s not-so-subtle message, and the band’s name itself, were too much to handle for the powerful Reagan Administration.
Later that year, President Reagan disbanded the U.S. Metric Board -- a move that George Will wrote at the time “has nothing whatsoever to do with inefficient bureaucracy, and everything to do with a pubescent Italian-American named Giambi and the song he sang.”
Les Franklin, the band’s manager, said he chose the name to “kind of stick a finger in the eye of the anti-metric system establishment” of the 1980s. “We thought we’d be rich and open people’s eyes at the same time.”
“Of course,” Giambi says, “what we didn’t know -- what we couldn’t have known
-- was just how radioactive the metric system really was in America back then.”
Today, there is little talk of a Metric System reunion tour, but Giambi won’t rule it out.
“Back in ’02, we did shows in Liberia and Myanmar (the only other countries in the world besides the U.S. to not use the metric system),” Giambi says (pictured above with fans in Myanmar).
“But here in the States? Maybe someday, but not now.”
Everything seemed so right when, at the age of 11, Giambi joined Metric System, the boy-band that Ed McMahon once said “would change the world.”
Metric System’s first studio album, Two Kilos, took the U.S. teen scene by storm. Gigs on local cable access TV were quickly replaced by shows in mobbed shopping malls.
Their first single, “By Any Measure (U Get Me Longer),” made Billboard’s Top 100 in 1982.
But the good times didn’t last long.
The hit single’s not-so-subtle message, and the band’s name itself, were too much to handle for the powerful Reagan Administration.
Later that year, President Reagan disbanded the U.S. Metric Board -- a move that George Will wrote at the time “has nothing whatsoever to do with inefficient bureaucracy, and everything to do with a pubescent Italian-American named Giambi and the song he sang.”
Les Franklin, the band’s manager, said he chose the name to “kind of stick a finger in the eye of the anti-metric system establishment” of the 1980s. “We thought we’d be rich and open people’s eyes at the same time.”
“Of course,” Giambi says, “what we didn’t know -- what we couldn’t have known
-- was just how radioactive the metric system really was in America back then.”
Today, there is little talk of a Metric System reunion tour, but Giambi won’t rule it out.
“Back in ’02, we did shows in Liberia and Myanmar (the only other countries in the world besides the U.S. to not use the metric system),” Giambi says (pictured above with fans in Myanmar).
“But here in the States? Maybe someday, but not now.”
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