I spent a lot of time with The Faucet Guy that day, is my point, and a lot of time reading the newspaper clippings taped to the counter. Included were a couple of obituaries for Mitch Miller, a legendary Columbia Records producer and bandleader and, for nearly twenty years, the best-selling recording artist in the United States. Sing Along with Mitch was also a television show. Anyway, by the time Miller died in 2010, the critical consensus was that his stylings were, uh, corny as fuck. Proof? A Sing Along with Mitch Miller record was among the albums the FBI played at full blast in an effort to flush David Koresh and his followers out of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in the spring of 1993.
Suddenly I had an ardent desire and desperate need to know everything about what I now thought of as the Waco playlist and I submitted a FOIA request for any records relating to music played at the compound during the siege. I got a few references, mostly news clippings— not anything I hadn’t seen. I only found a few references to the recordings; they included Nancy Sinatra’s "These Boots are Made for Walking," an Andy Williams album, a loop of the Reveille, Buddhist chanting.) But I also got an enormous file of hundreds of letters from the public sent to the FBI during the crisis. That’s where I discovered that a lot of people (a LOT) wrote to offer their suggestions for what the agency should do to end the standoff. Some of my favorite selections follow. They are a rich cultural text, proof of the extent to which this event captured the cultural imagination.
Song suggestions
A couple of writers did suggest some audio. This writer recommended “loud and wild gospel songs,” a “wild Banshee scream or the 1812 overture, followed by ‘Hard Rock’ music.”
Get rid of Bob
This one was fairly straightforward: get rid of the current head of the operation (sorry, Bob Hicks) and appoint someone with “the ‘balls’ to terminate that ‘comedy of errors!’”
Try confetti
Shower … the compound with confetti?
The confetti gambit was only one of the eleven suggestions this correspondent offered to the FBI. They also recommended setting up a “drive-in sized rear-projection movie screen” in front of the compound and showing movies of “what tanks and assault weapons can do to houses” in order to capture the imaginations of the children—but to simultaneously “tell them again and again by loud speaker that you will never do this.” Alternately, the FBI could screen “movies of happy children in kindergarten, school, eating together at a table,” or “happy couples dancing, banquets, kite flying, Halloween, and holiday scenes.” Or, they suggested, launch “a skyrocket display as a substitute for a shootout in their psychics [sic].”