See, I have a fair amount of sympathy for alcoholics. But the time to check yourself into rehab is before you kill someone driving, before you blow that crucial case for your client, before you leave your scissors in a patient’s stomach after you’ve operated, and, if you are an award-winning Country singer, before you massacre the Star-Spangled Banner at the All-Star Game Home Run derby, like Andress did last night.
Just listen to that caterwauling!
I find the Home Run Derby a bore, so I didn’t hear her off-key, dying-swan version of our National Anthem until the social media complaints about it reached me this morning. Andress’s breathless, lugubrious style, much in vogue these days, doesn’t appeal to me anyway, but that rendition was especially awful even by awful National Anthem standards, a high bar. How could a multiple Grammy-winner be that bad is a public performance on national TV?
Now we know: today she admitted she was drunk as a skunk, groveling on on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/”X,”
“I’m not gonna bullshit y’all, I was drunk last night. I’m checking myself into a facility today to get the help I need. That was not me last night. I apologize to MLB, all the fans, and this country I love so much for that rendition. I’ll let y’all know how rehab is. I hear it’s super fun.”
Oh! And she even threw in the Pazuzu Excuse while she was at it with “that was not me”! The demon should sue for defamation: he sings better than that. Remember his hit ditty from “The Exorcist,” “Your Mother Sucks Cocks in Hell”? Pazuzu has some pipes.
I assume she’ll be refunding MLB’s money that she took to embarrass the players on the field and the Texas fans at the event while giving headaches to everyone listening in. In the country music industry where the greatest of all icons, Hank Williams, was more or less drunk all the time, she’ll have few consequences from this unprofessional and unethical episode, but she should.
I’d like to see baseball ban her from games for life.
In related Asshole News, Rosanne Barr, who infamously did her own evisceration of the National Anthem before a San Diego Padres game in 1990, came to the singer’s defense. True, Rosanne’s version was even worse than Ingrid’s, but then everyone knew at the time that the nasal-voiced comic wasn’t a singer. She told TMZ that critics needed to back off because the Anthem is “hardest in the world” to perform. Besides, Rosanne thinks the country singer did just fine because her own debacle was worse.
Barr will say anything to sneak back into the news after being cancelled for flagrant social media racism, I guess. Being endorsed by the Queen of Assholes is the last thing Andress needs right now.
For some strange reason, the public forgives performers for being smashed on the job far more generously than it gives passes to other occupations. Not me! My rule at The American Century Theater was that any actor found to have imbibed alcohol before a performance was not only fired on the spot, but banned from future contracts with the theater, and would be the subject of a warning I would issue to every other professional theater in the D.C. theater community.
Ethics Alarms 
I don’t know. I heard this woman’s rendition and I think Roseanne’s wasn’t as bad. Roseanne, it’s always seemed to me, was trying to do some sort of impersonation of a bad rendition of the national anthem. I think. Remember her spitting and “scratching her nuts” at the end. It was some sort of ill-conceived standup routine. This woman’s performance was inexplicably awful to an unprecedented degree. Without rhyme or reason. Frankly, I’m not even sure being drunk explains it. Why she didn’t just say she was indisposed/ill and let them play a recording is beyond me. And where were her doubtless legions of assistants to help her not embarrass herself like this?
Just listened to one of her studio recordings. I think the problem is she can’t sing in any nearly conventional way, and certainly not in a way to be able to carry off the National Anthem in a live performance. She just sort of pants like Grimes. I think the drunk thing is a hastily conceived cover-up. She should sue her management for getting her that gig.
I think that’s a plausible theory. A singer should know her limitations. Luis Armstrong never tried to sing the National Anthem…
And I was thinking you can’t pitch adjust a live performance as is evidently done all the time in the studio these days.
She was better than Enrico Palazzo, just barely.
I think she was better than Carl Lewis. That ESPN clip with Charlie Steiner (if you’ve never seen it) is still one of the funniest live-TV things I’ve ever watched.
Oh what the heck…I need to laugh today, and so do all of you, so here you go…
My son is a sound tech. He says this clip is frequently much closer to the truth than you could possibly imagine!
No, he’s not at all biased, of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Rhh_4GZmU
Yeah, autotune is a terrible thing. I went to a George Strait concert and the opener was the new act (then) Deanna Carter. She was all over the radio. When she began to sing, it was obvious she couldn’t. It was embarrassing. Like Paula Abdul, I guess she made enough money to get singing lessons because I heard her years later and she wasn’t bad.
I ‘produced’ my next door neighbor for a few years. She was a music professor who sang in operas, etc in the summer. So, she needed to send out an audition CD every year that I put together for her (She and her husband bought me dinner, does that make me a professional producer?). She usually received multiple offers from London and NY organizations, but one year she received nothing and she didn’t understand why she had been downgraded. Autotune was pretty new and I explained it to her. I was shocked that she didn’t know about it. She wanted me to do that for her. Instead, I changed the label on her CD to read “Audio modified ONLY for gain and noise reduction, no Autotune”. She received multiple offers.