From The Rheostatics website:
The music video for "The Tarleks" won a Gold Award for Music Video Production at the 2005 Worldfest-Huston Awards. Director Justin Stephenson, reduced to uttering a simple "Cool,"is justly proud of the award.
Frank Bonner appears as his character, Herb Tarlek, from the sit-com WKRP in Cincinatti that ran from 1978 to 1982. Mr. Bonner apparently gets similar requests all the time and, for the most part, refuses but when he played the Rheos' track for friends, their enthusiastic response encouraged him to join in the fun. Tarlek, the station's sleazy salesman, was renowned for impossibly ugly suits, matching white leather belt and shoes, and his relentless efforts to bed Loni Anderson's character Jennifer.
The Rheostatics have released eleven albums since 1987 -- only one a major label release, which speaks to their independent spirit, tenacity and mutual, though not unchallenged, commitment. Inspired by such national treasures as the Group of Seven, Stompin' Tom Connors, the divinatory -- not divine -- government of Mackenzie King, rolling prairies, Canada's national game, les couriers du bois and more, the Rheos have plundered the Canadian mythos to become a kind of bedrock myth themselves.
"People have painted us as being iconoclasts although, more often than not lately, I hear us described as Canadian icons. I think it's great to be iconoclastic icons." - Dave Bidini, Rheostatics guitarist.
