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.