Technology rears its head . . .

. . . and many citizens are frightened in Sectors R and S. (With apologies to Firesign Theatre)

I made the first mp3 recording of the show today. (Wild applause sound) 

Not got it all worked out yet - the output that I tapped for the feed to the digital recorder seemed to be heavily loaded into the left channel, with little or no signal in the right hand channel. I'll be checking into that. 

What's next? A list of tasks: load the mp3 file into my computer and maybe load it into the "Audacity" program for a bit of editing - get online and get my domain Six Degrees.fm pointing to the chunk of bandwidth that I pay for (but never use) at Mac.com. - whack together a quick website for said chunk of bandwidth (or maybe it's just server space???)

If I knew what I was doing, I might be dangerous.

SummertimeWindBreezeBlues . . . in the City.

Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin and Guy Bolton.

Photo found at PBS.ORG

Saturday, July 5, 2008
Yow – long time no be here. Lots of notes typed in specific show pages, but nothing here on the blog. Today’s show was the “Summer” show, of course.
Summertime, Summer Breeze, Summer Wind, Heat Wave, Summer in the City (Hot Damn!) . . .
Played many versions of Gershwin’s “Summertime”. Did you know that it was originally known by the name “Moontitties”? Wait! Maybe this is a Wikipedia hoax! Any schmuck can make that stuff up for at least a little while before it is corrected . . . and I read it on the air! Whoops. Well, maybe that's a for-real story - time will tell.
Had a pretty good time with the show, despite almost being late due to a needed-to-be-reloaded printer driver. (See: re-installation of OSX).
I whined – on the air – about being hungry. I asked anyone passing by to leave a bag of hot buttered groat clusters on the porch and knock on the door.
I whined again (of course changing the reference to ‘goat custards’) during another break and it payed off (paid off?) – Hope Gaines came over to the studio with a plate of blueberry pie and a couple of peaches. I love this town.
It started out being one of those shows that I didn't feel really sure about, but turned into the kind of show that leaves me with a little buzz. That is why I do this. That, plus the huge $$$.

From Bob's lips . . .

I might do a feature on the show – The Word of Bob. That'll piss off the religious right, center and left I guess. 

(cue organ music) " . . . and now, Six Degrees brings you . . . The Word of Bob."
A little quote each week from Bob Dylan – lately the one that’s been popping up for me is from “My Back Pages” –

“ . . . in a soldier’s stance I aimed my hand
at the mongrel dogs who teach, fearing not that
I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach.”

It is a precarious and peculiar conversation that I have - sitting in the deejay chair.

Like the profile says," . . . I like music and I like to talk."

Anyone who knows me will agree with that. Especially the talk part.

I'm having fun there, and I hope that the listeners are enjoying it - but it's a funny thing from week to week, deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, as Bob Seger said so well.

The show evolves slowly . . . I'm younger than that now.

Lo-Powa

There was a piece on NPR today that touched on Low Power FM stations, among other things.
According to the program there are about 800 FM-LP stations in the country. I think it should be a growing thing - it seems like something that fills a real void. I mean, how many different stations do you need that play top 40 and have those SHOUTSHOUTSHOUT commercials?

Emmylou in the pivot.

I put the power to another challenge for yesterday's show (2/23/08).
CCA boardmambo David MacKenzie sent the Jim Kweskin to Peggy Lee challenge to me back in January. At the end of the month he smacked down another. (No money on the table . . . but that's not why we're here.)
Dennis Quaid to Janis Joplin. And, Dave had a specific path between the two in mind when he sent this to me. I struggled with it for a while and put it aside. Somehow it seemed to loom over my head for more than the three weeks it took me to put it together.
Quaid has plenty of footprint as an actor - it's harder to come up with concrete evidence of his well known sideline. Nothing on ITunes - the All Music Guide can't find him. Google serves up a reference to his band, The Sharks, but their website seems to require a plug-in that I haven't the patience to track down.
Dave stopped by the studio a week ago and delivered another hint to me. He said that the connection did start with a film.
I thought the key would be in the movie "Great Balls of Fire", where DQ played Jerry Lee Lewis. There is at least one YouTube-posted video of Quaid and Lewis amidst balls of fire, pounding out the title tune on pianos. Harder to find actual footage of Quaid singing a song that I could manage to include on the radio show. There was a clip of him singing a song called "If You Don't Know Me by Now" (no, not that one . . . )
Through the magic of computers and the internets, I used that YouTube clip over the air.

Back to the connection - it turns out that Solomon Burke played a part in the movie "The Big Easy".
I lit out after Solomon Burke and tracked him to a 2006 album called "Nashville", which featured duets with a number of females of the country-music persuasion. One of them was Emmylou Harris. From there I got to "The Last Waltz", the Martin Scorcese film of The Band's farewell concert. She appeared in the film, along with Paul Butterfield. Butterfield's album "East-West" was produced by Paul Rothchild. He also produced albums for Bonnie Raitt, Love, The Doors, Tim Buckley and . . . Janis Joplin. He did the production for her last album, "Pearl".

Noto bene: I am endeavoring to abide by Joe's challenge to lay off the 'songwriter' connection. My guarantee: All of the persons used in the above linking were - at one time or another - in the same place at the same time. And no animals were injured in the making of this link.
Thank you for letting me tell you that.

The Dennis Quaid to Janis Joplin challenge was featured on the February 23 show, which had a secondary theme of "Food".

Grammy-tastic.

Enjoy the clip of Bob and the Soy Bomb from the 1998 Grammy Awards.

So far, my favorite Six Degrees radio show is the Grammy Show that I did yesterday. Didn't include a six-degree challenge, but probably worked on the show as much as I've worked on any show that did include a challenge. I did a sort of very subjective survey of Grammy Winners Past. To keep it manageable I just went backwards in ten-year jumps, back to 1958.

1958 gave us Henry Mancini's "Theme from Peter Gunn" (Album of the Year) and Ella Fitzgerald doing "I Got it Bad (and that ain't good)" from "The Duke Ellington Songbook" which won the Best Jazz Performance-Individual award.

1968 yielded Jimmy Webb's "Up, Up and Away" by the Fifth Dimension and "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy", the Joe Zawinul tune by Cannonball Adderly.

1978 - getting into the era of my young adulthood. Songs by Fleetwood Mac bookended a live-in-Europe Al Jarreau recording.
I conciously avoided using anything from "Hotel California" which won Record of the Year. Enough said?
Here is my first rant: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year? Someone on NPR on Friday had a funny commentary on the Grammys. He likened the Awards Show to a summer camp where everybody gets a prize for something.

1988 was a very fat year for the Grammy Awards. Or maybe I mean it was a fat year for music fans. Record(!?) of the Year was Paul Simon's "Graceland", and Album of the Year was U2's "The Joshua Tree". I'm certainly nailing myself into a particular demographic group now. I was 35 in the summer of 1987 and these two albums are landmarks in my musical world. Very different records, both high points for the artists that made them.

1998's Best New Artist was Paula Cole. Haven't heard a lot from her in the past few years, but recently she did appear - in her role as a songwriter - on a television segment about last year's Herbie Hancock project called "Possibilities".
Album of the Year was Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind", produced by Daniel Lanois. Record of the Year and Song of the Year honors went to "Sunny Came Home" from Shawn Colvin.

I played a few pieces by some of this year's nominees - a few from Herbie Hancock's "River: The Joni Letters", a couple of selections from the Robert Plant - Alison Krauss record "Raising Sand", and of course one each from Feist and Amy Winehouse and one each from Raheem De Vaughn and Bruce Springsteen.

I'm sitting in front of the tube now - counting down the next 21 minutes 'till the Grammys starts. You can follow that story here.

Word out.

Photo by MQMurphy 

There's a little article on the Cape May Times website about Cape May County's newest radio station. For those of you more than ten miles from Cape May the best I can offer for my bit is that I'm looking into how podcasts (webisodes?) are done. Last Saturday's show featured no challenge, but the theme was "Royalty". That meant we had plenty of Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin - the Queen of Soul, songs about kings (King of the Road, King of Pain, King of Wishful Thinking), Dukes (Duke of Earl, Sir Duke), and your odd Prince. (Pun-tentional? Your call.)

A challenge was suggested yesterday - Dennis Quaid to Janis Joplin. The challenger says he already has the links worked out - we'll see what I come up with.
There'll be a Grammy themed show on the 9th of February, of course. Want to send challenges or suggest themes? Put them right here in the form of a comment, mes amis.

Details, details . . .

Been having an ongoing discussion with my interlocutor about the methodology of my linking. If anything, my reputation in general is one of consistent inconsistency.
On the one hand, Joe questions the use of a songwriter-in-common as a valid link - but he finishes with " . . . but it's your show, you make up the rules." Arrrgh!
As I look back over the Challenges there is a clear 'catch-as-catch-can' element. (Say that three times fast - you'll break your teeth!)
Let's say that I aspire to the purity of an "In the same place at the same time" quality of connection.
The last one I did - Rudy Vallee to Carly Simon - was a stumper. I got stalled on the Rudy end for a while. It's not as if he didn't have a long and broad career, I just couldn't make a link work. I ended up using (needing!) The Village People to put a breathing Rudy in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Real hand-to-hand, that - but then I completely break down into flimsy links based on who-formed-what-record-company. Granted, being able to include The Village People and Captain Beefheart in the trip makes the calisthenics worthwhile. Also, I like the idea that before yesterday, no one around here had heard "Bat Chain Puller" coming out of their radios for a few years. At least.

The Rudy-Vallee-to-Carly-Simon challenge was featured on the January 19 show, which had a secondary (lame-ass) theme of "About a Quarter to Three".

Over the transom.

David MacKenzie, a member of the Radio Committee at CCA, sent in a challenge a little ways back. It wasn't emailed or even called in - it was carried in on a slip of paper by his wife Hope Gaines. Dave wanted me to link Jim Kweskin to Peggy Lee.
Kweskin's name rang a bell (the Amazing Kweskin?) - it started a Pavlovian reel in my brain that is just six words long: "Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band".

I sort of knew what jug band music was - not really sure that I'd ever listened to much of it. Jug band music was part of the folk music revival of the late fifties and early sixties. Coffeehouse fare. (Editor's note: By definition - being part of a revival means that Jug Band music had a history before the folkies came along.)
I hit the Wikipedia with "Jim Kweskin" and the entry that came up had another name that I hadn't heard or seen in a long time - Mel Lyman.

Lyman played harmonica with the Kweskin Jug Band, and that experience apparently qualified him to move on to become a spiritual leader. A friend of ours from Philadelphia found the Lyman family in Boston and fell under the influence for a while.

Back on earth and in the music world, the Boston-based Kweskin Jug Band also featured Geoff Muldaur and Maria D'Amato. Miss D'Amato became better known to the music world as Maria Muldaur.
Ahhh, love. Before the Kweskin Jug Band, she had been a member of the Even Dozen Jug Band in New York. The EDJB was a late entry in the folk revival and when the band - uh, - disbanded many of its alums went on to other notable careers in the music industry.
Like who/what?
Like John B. Sebastian, who formed The Lovin' Spoonful.
Aside from his work with the Spoonful and his solo recordings, Sebastian was a prolific songwriter and at least one of his songs was recorded by Peggy Lee.
Her version of the John Sebastian song "Didn't Want to Have to Do It" was included in a 110-cut (whew!) box set collection of Lee's singles.

The Jim-Kweskin-to-Peggy-Lee challenge was featured on the January 12 show, which had the secondary theme of "Angels, Devils, etc".