Singles 45's & Under: PowerSource - Dear Mr. Jesus

College is a great place to foster and develop one’s cynicism. In light of tragedy and things beyond one’s control, cynicism serves an important purpose. If offsets the realities of this cruel world by preparing us to tackle another day. If we linger too long on everything that is wrong with this planet, we find ways to hasten our exit from it, either consciously or subconsciously.

I never understood child abuse growing up, but then again, what is there to understand about it anyway? It’s a topic that grows exponentially horrid when you have children, and as a person who believes that we as a species should be better than killing another person in the name of justice, I falter a bit on the position whenever I hear stories about child abuse.

In 1987, a New York attorney was arrested after beating his step-daughter  to death. She collapsed after a blow to the head, and as she lay in the bathroom of the family’s Bronx apartment, slipping in and out of consciousness from her injuries, her step-father left her alone without medical attention, occasionally leaving the home to freebase cocaine.

He lived with a woman for several years, and she was also to blame for allowing the abuse to continue in the couple’s home. When she returned home from her job as an editor of children’s books for Random House one evening, she found the child close to death. The girl had been suffering for over 10 hours. It was at this time that she finally convinced her abusive partner that they needed to contact the authorities. The girl later died from her injuries.

The case gained national prominence, but I remember it for another reason.

During the trial, a radio station discovered a song recorded by PowerSource, a contemporary Christian musical group led by Richard Klender. The group recorded a song called “Dear Mr. Jesus,” a schmaltzy ballad about child abuse with stunningly bad 80’s production values. The song’s notoriety was secured when Klender asked 6 year-old Sharon Batts to perform lead vocals on his new song.

PowerSource released their first and only album Shelter From The Storm in 1986. “Dear Mr. Jesus” was nestled in the Bedford, Texas’s full length and probably would have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the aforementioned child abuse case in New York City. When some clever disc jockey found it and began playing it during the trial, listeners called in by the thousands to request it. From there, it began to spread across the country, where it finally entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart, peaking at #61 in January 1988.

I remember it being played repeatedly in the Midwest during the 1987 holiday season. My cynicism took note of the song’s content and the manner in which Mr. Klender chose to address the topic by enlisting a 6 year-old girl to sing it.

Take a look/listen to this incredible piece of 80’s righteousness and marvel at how Klender seemed to foreshadow later events about a girl “beaten black and blue.” The girl narrator is troubled by the news and decides to take her concerns directly to Jesus, or “Mr. Jesus” as it were.

Taking a clue from George Jones’ classic “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” Klender saves a money shot for the end of the song, when the little girl asks Mr. Jesus to look into this topic of child abuse, and to keep a family secret to himself.

“Please don’t tell my Daddy, that my Mommy hits me too.”

While my cynicism certainly took notice of this forgotten gem, it was the song’s curious decision to highlight the topic from the perspective of a 6 year-old girl that stuck with me for almost three decades. I recently found the song online and have been thoroughly enjoying it in the most ironic of ways for the past week.

In fact, I have been subjecting the children to this piece of fine art, causing my daughter to sing the refrain of “Please, don’t let them hurt your children” over and over, while my son has decided to stick with the “my Mommy hits me too” line, particularly when his own mom tells him to come in for the evening.

I also have the song on vinyl, a promotional single that I acquired from a radio station. When I found it, I used it for a few cassette mixes, utilizing some production tricks in the process. On the flip side, Klender conducted an interview with the young Sharon, asking her complicated questions about abuse and her supposed advocacy concerning the topic. Of course, her responses were exactly what you would expect from a 6 year-old girl who had been heavily coached beforehand. There are lots of one-line answers as well as the expected “child abuse is bad” message. It is exploitation at its most blatant, but it is exactly what you’d expect from a song that was created from such obvious heart-tugging that it can potentially cause cardiac arrest.

For my mix tapes, I would let Klender’s introductions and interview “questions” spin at the normal 45 r.p.m. speed. Then, whenever Sharon would pause to respond, I would change the speed to 33 r.p.m., causing her voice to resonate with a creepy, lower pitched voice. To hear Sharon’s innocent responses under the guise of a middle-age man’s voice was positively stunning. I wish I would have kept a copy for myself.

Child abuse is certainly no laughing matter. I understand this completely as a parent. But while my own opinion of this topic can certainly elicit unchecked rage from within, there’s something inherently wrong about exploiting a child to address a subject as morally repulsive to begin with.

Jesus, thought I’d take this right to you…

Eleventh Dream Day - Beet

By the time I had gotten around to learning about Eleventh Dream Day, they had already released a long-player on the same independent label that legendary Iowa band The Hollowmen had been a part of. I believe EDD stuff could be found in Amoeba Records mail order sheet that they tucked in the sleeve of The Hollowmen’s Pink Quartz Sunblasting release, but it wasn’t until I’d heard that Eleventh Dream Day had actually been signed to Atlantic records before I bothered to take a listen.

It was still somewhat rare for an underground rock band to be signed to a major label back then. The notoriety of the event got me wondering what I might be missed.

The closest reference point was an e.p. released by Amoeba featuring an atypical Neil Young cover that everyone seemed to note was Eleventh Dream Day’s primary influence.

But the e.p. also had a brutish rocker called “Go,” which sounded like strong potential, but certainly not of the commercial kind that Atlantic Records would surely be interested in.

From this brief introduction, a copy of their third full-length, Beet, came into the college radio station where I worked as the Program Director. The additional promotional copy of the record that came from Atlantic Records was promptly secured for my personal use, and it still bares the “Say It When You Play It!” sticker on the cover, encouraging radio station personal to mention the band name and record after each airplay.

Beet begins with the slow burning opener “Between Here and There” with nothing more than Janet Bean providing a tentative tom-tom gallop while guitarist Baird Figi butts heads with Rick Rizzo, Eleventh Dream Day’s other guitarist and lead vocalist. My Music Director recognized the song’s awesomeness and immediately added the track to our station’s playlist.

“You look past your prime,” Rizzo observes, adding that the years “Must weigh heavy daily on your mind.” It’s the result of a few years of being cooped up in an Econoline van, playing Midwestern dives to small crowds and even smaller paychecks.

By the chorus, the song unleashes, pairing Rizzo and Figi off each other and providing the second wind to get on the road again, “like the MC5 way,” suggesting that the band wouldn’t stop until the song is over.

“Testify,” Beet’s first single, is a concise moment of everything great about Eleventh Dream Day. It’s here that you begin to notice a pattern to Rizzo and Figi’s twin guitar attach. They don’t play with each other, per say, but more against each other. The guitar solo of “Testify” is a great example of this. It’s blistering, chaotic, a less sophisticated version of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd if they cared less about the precision of their playing and more about the power of it.

Rizzo and Figi maintain that power throughout the entirety of Beet, including another go at the awesome “Go (Slight Return)" but no clues as to what exactly was the strange occurance from April 1, 1988. 

Nearly every song on Beet finds drummer Janet Bean trying to keep time with the controlled chaos of the guitar but the hoot is the very Exene-esque vocals she adds to Rizzo’s own blue-collar delivery, lending obvious nods to X without the L.A. melting pot.

This is a very Midwestern record, and without the guitar heroics that decorate it, Beet could easily blend into the woodwork of forgotten local favorites.

Instead, Beet became a forgotten regional favorite, with appreciative fans peppered across the world thanks to Atlantic Record’s enormous reach.

Too bad the company couldn’t deliver an enormous promotional reach for Beet, but realistically, would the band ever be the kind of draw that pulled from beyond the underground?

Stranger things have happened, and one of them-a band from Aberdeen, Washington-would singlehandedly change the entire landscape of rock music, enabling bands like Eleventh Dream Day to have a legitimate chance at having a few good years of financial stability.

That sea change was still a couple of years away, and not only was Beet’s marketing might nothing more than a quick fart of Atlantic Record’s promotional department, the cover itself was low-budget and understated.

As it stands, Beet became one of those magical bargain-bin finds for many and a document of “I told you so!” snarkiness for any early believers trying to convince you to take notice. Beet’s strength is in its own desire to convince you of exactly the same thing-and to grab your attention through hard, honest performances. They’re bundled with unique and grounded stories, each one of them compelling and delivered with honest intent.

But the real reason for Beet’s enduring legacy is the aforementioned guitar hijinks, which are worthy of slack-jawed awe and probably the biggest shame of the record’s poor name recognition.

Nearly a quarter-century later, Beet remains in print, a testament to its supporters, for sure, but more importantly it gives fans of blue collar rock music with some very expressive guitar explorations another opportunity to discover an overlooked gem.

Ween - Pure Guava

Part of the reason why I love Ween so much is their humor. I relate to it. On a daily basis. And I can be a problem.

Because there isn’t that many people who can relate or immediately appreciate this kind of humor. It’s druggy, nonsensical, childish, and downright wrong at times. So whenever you meet-or in this case, hear-someone who expresses the same kind of humor, you’re a friend for life. Mainly because you don’t have to preface anything before you begin to unleash some truly inappropriate comments about something.

Pure Guava was my first exposure to Ween, so this would have been the record where I first caught a glimpse of Dean and Gene Ween’s inappropriate behavior. It is with this album that I began to appreciate the duo’s work and keep up with their whereabouts.

It began with the “Secondary Radio Markets Promotions Representative” for Elektra Records named Traci. She was swell. More than any other person that I dealt with on a weekly basis as the Music Director for some small town radio station in Iowa. The only other person who could compare to her was some other rep-I believe the dude was on RCA’s payroll-who I always thought was an asshole until one day I referenced Steve Albini to him. From that point on we were buds. He told me about a Big Black show he attended where Albini came up to his friend as he pulled out a cigarette, and asked the unsuspecting smoker “Need a light, buddy?” Albini then produced a blowtorch or some kind of welder’s torch, which he proceeded to use as a cigarette lighter.

Traci at Elektra was different, though. She was a girl and I was a guy, and the fact that I could have educated and extended conversations about music-on the company dime, no less-was pretty awesome to me. We were both in relationships, so it wasn’t about anything sexual, and the fact that I was in Iowa and she was in New York City put a stop to any real social encounter. The guy she married also worked at Elektra, and when he got a big promotion, her job became eliminated, primarily due to the fear of the way their relationship would look to other staff members.

Needless to say, Traci would provide me the hook up to all of Elektra’s releases and promotional items that were beyond what my station would normally play. Pure Guava resulted from that relationship and I appreciate that in more ways that can be explained with this resulting “review” of it.

First of all, I marveled at the fact that anyone…ANYONE…would could pull off releasing an honest-to-goodness four track recording on a major label like Elektra. This was the shit that you remembered from the late 60’s or late 70’s when record companies had no idea what they were doing, other than sending out droves of A&R people with orders of “Sign more hippies” or “Get me some punk rockers on our roster.” There is nothing in Pure Guava that hints at commercial potential, and whatever funds that Ween secured from Elektra records-at the time part of the massive WEA group, which included Warner Brothers and Atlantic records-should be immediately cashed for fear that someone will figure out the ruse and put a stop payment on the advancement.

The record is known for “Push th’ Little Daisies,” the single that was later incorporated into an episode of MTV’s Beavis & Butthead who declared it to be the worst song ever. The “endorsement” was enough to propel the song into the alternative top 40 (for whoever kept such a tally) and the top 20 of the Australian singles charts, because they put acid in Vegemite down under.

The song is easy and incredibly catchy, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the inherent weirdness that lays throughout Pure Guava.

The record begins with “Little Birdy,” a sweet ode to our winged friends that seems to go horribly wrong with its warble guitars and pitched vocals. At one point, Gene cracks up, explaining, “See, the birdy make me laugh/Take a little birdy bath/I don’t know why he got me high.”

To me, it all made perfect sense.

Gene and Dean also break character on “I Play It Off Legit,” another weirdo favorite that examines the parlance of the times, specifically, the word “legit,” as in to be “legitimate.” The brothers carry on what sounds to be a phone conversation, which is nothing more than a declaration of things that are, or are not, “legit.” To clarify, “Mom bought me a cool shirt/When I wear it, I’m the shit/Really not that legit/My Mom bought it.”

Got it?

Highlights are “Pumpin’ For The Man,” a fast tempoed anthem to the struggles of the working man, dealing with the bossman demands to “Get your fingers out your ass/Pump some faggot’s gas/Some asshole down on Main Street needs a jump.”

And the curio “I Saw Gener Cryin’ In His Sleep” which has Dean re-telling a moment when he finds his brother crying while sleeping. In between the shitty guitar solo and an even worse whistling solo, lies some sage advice where Dean tells listeners to block the bad shit out of your head because “When it’s time for bed/You shouldn’t think about such stuff.”

Pure Guava is probably a quarter-hour too long and riddled with too many inconsistencies for it to qualify as necessary listening. But if there’s a part of you that enjoys an examination of juvenile humor, audio experiments and too many bong hits, then Pure Guava may serve as a welcomed reprieve to “playin’ it off legit” with your milquetoast reality.

A Moment For Miss Peaches

The first mistake Barack Obama made during his first term as President of the United States is not invite Etta James to sing her signature song “At Last” during the Inaugural Ball.

Beyonce?

Seriously!

Miss Peaches was right to get her panties in a bunch and lash out at the President’s ears for the slight. She attacked him on a personal level because “At Last” was performed on a personal level; each swell of her voice and every note that it carried sounded like it came more from her heart than her diaphragm. It was an incredible instrument, and no sister come lately could effectively mirror Etta’s version.

Even when it was four decades removed.

I used to work at Iowa’s biggest public radio station, K.U.N.I., during my final two years of college and I can’t ignore how important that job was to my musical upbringing. It required me to go back to the masters, particularly during my weeknight music block where my old instructions were to play the blues between the hours of 8pm-9pm.

The station’s library had just received a large assortment of Chess records as their (then) parent company just undertook a large remastering effort of a bunch of their classic catalog titles.

Two of the titles caught my eye, particularly the eye-popping platinum blonde look of her At Last! long player.

But it was Tell Mama that caught my ears. I must have played that title track like a top forty smash for a while on my show. I was discovering what some people had already known for decades, that this Etta James lady was a badass, a probably deserving of such reverence that radio stations across the country should play at least one tune per night just to honor her greatness.

Soon after, James released a comeback album, Seven Year Itch, which was a fine representation of why Peaches was such a national treasure.

I didn’t even know she was sick. In fact, some of those from the hip comments towards Obama were later to be revealed as nothing more than side-effects of the medications that her illness required her to take.

It blows my mind that her passing coincides with the passing of Johnny Otis, the man that discovered her in the mid-50’s. Two giants from the early days of rock and soul walking in tandem to what’s becoming-unfortunately for those of us still here-a pretty awesome array of performers who changed the face of music.

And none of them came sweeter than this peach from Southern California.

Whatever, Nevermind

I dragged my ass writing this piece.

Each attempt ended in some cynical bit that tried to wash over how vital Nevermind was or it ended in some finger-pointing accusation, like it was the album’s fault that modern rock music doesn’t feel like it’s moved much from the record’s birth two decades ago.

And twenty-years ago feels like forever ago-you twenty-something will know this quicker than you think.

Everything seemed so black and white back then. You had those songs that you and your friends liked and then there were those songs that everyone else liked. The two never seemed to cross each other very much.

You heard songs on the radio and you understood that they were designed this way. The “design” was that there had to be some kind of pay-to-play provision to even get these songs on the radio. What else could be the reason why a song like Timmy T’s “One More Try” ended up at the top of the charts.

Surely, no one really bought these singles, did they?

For anyone who was noticing back then, you could see these “rules” change in the weeks following the release of Nevermind, and it’s an even that will probably never happen again in today’s fragmented and insolated musical platforms.

But I remember a time-perhaps naively-when it seemed like we won.

I don’t trust anyone who claims that they knew Nirvana would be huge after hearing Bleach. From what I remember after hearing it was how much more I liked Mudhoney.

I didn’t necessarily hate Bleach when it arrived at our university’s radio station, I just liked a bunch more records instead of it and my playlist during my evening shift at the station reflected it.

A couple of years later, the liberal playlist of the university station was traded for my first real full time job in the industry: a small-market top 40 station A half-year into the gig, I was promoted to the position of Music Director and given a raise of a dime an hour. I was told to mirror the charts of Radio & Records magazine, a trade publication and mirror our playlist of it. The guideline was that 10 of the songs should be from the top 10 of the A.O.R. charts, another 10 should be from the Top 40 charts, and the remaining 10 should come from the adult contemporary charts.

Since I was the station’s Music Director for only a few months, I followed the instructions pretty religiously I was more concerned with keeping that extra dime an hour than trying to lobby for up-and-coming hits that I personally liked.

Besides, there wasn’t a lot of appeal in my choices anyway.

One of the best parts of the position was that I was able to take a bunch of the promotional albums that we didn’t use and I’d trade them in for stuff that I wanted for myself.

About once a month, I’d take a bunch of stuff from the station and drive up to Iowa City to trade them in. I’d buy one disc for the station’s library to make it look legitimate, but make no mistake about it: these trips were designed primarily to fill out my own collection.

“Have you heard the new Nirvana album?” asked the record storeowner during a visit in September 1991.

Thanks to my experience with Bleach, I gave an ambivalent response.

That mood changed he put Nevermind into the store’s cd player. The opening chords-F.B.A.D.-a clever lift of Boston’s “More Than A Feeling.”

By the end of “In Bloom,” my copy had already been secured.

In my excitement, I immediately played Nevermind for my girlfriend. I was disappointed that she didn’t see the brilliance of it immediately out of the shrink-wrap. Instead, her first reaction was to comment on the album artwork.

“That’s not very nice to his fans!” she declared after staring at one of the sleeve photographs.

It was the picture of the band, out of focus, with Kurt giving the lenses a middle finger.

She felt that his pose was a slight to potential fans, an additional “Fuck you!” to the demand “Here we are now, entertain us.”

Personally, I thought it was awesomely appropriate.

I played it for a friend at work and within days he brought his copy to work.

“That hidden track at the end is awesome!” he told me.

“What hidden track?” I asked.

My friend instructed me to wait a few minutes after “Something In The Way” and a hidden track would begin playing.

I did as instructed, but after the last song on my copy played, my cd player stopped.

There was no “secret track” on my disc.

I used a contact in my Rolodex at work to make a quick call to Geffen Records. My promotional representative revealed that about 50,000 copies of Nevermind were initially shipped without the “secret“ song, “Endless, Nameless.”

That meant my copy was one of the initial pressings while my co-worker’s copy was the one released after the first pressing ran out.

Sure, my copy was a little rarer, but I was bummed that I didn’t get “Endless, Nameless.”

My friend was right: it was awesome.

The Geffen contact also advised that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would be released to Top 40 the following week.

By this time, MTV had some videos under a “Buzz Bin” distinction. Essentially, it was a select few videos that they began airing outside of their regular rotation, a spotlight of bands and songs starting to gain traction with the mainstream. It seemed that my little discovery was everyone’s little discovery, and most of those listeners who were quite content with what the mainstream was providing them were suddenly getting hip to this awesome anthem for the disenfranchised underground.

It transcended those early supporters, not so much because of the glossy Andy Wallace mix, but on the merits of the song’s power itself. Yet beyond this, I still didn’t think that it would be enough to pull the same audience that our own radio station catered to.

“Wouldn’t it be crazy if we added “Teen Spirit” to our playlist?” my friend suggested one day at work. I’d just gotten the “radio edit” of the song as my promotional guy warned me about.

For whatever reason, I never imagined that “Teen Spirit” would go beyond a Buzz Bin distinction, with a few daring rock stations adding it to their playlist. I thought that the song would be well received in larger markets, and I was envious that we couldn’t be a bit looser with our playlist.

At my station, the question “Will it play in Peoria?” was a legitimate one. And the last time I checked, Warrant just had a sold out show at an arena in Peoria.

The song leaped up the charts with the full-length not far behind in its trajectory.

I now had plenty of ammunition to add “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in case my Program Director questioned my decision. To be safe, I rigged it so that the song only played after 5:00 p.m.

In radio, they called this trick “lunar rotation.”

But we began receiving requests for “Teen Spirit” even during the waking hours, proving once again that the song was speaking more to just kids and young adults. It was turning into one of those generational touchstones, the kind that I’d read about in old Baby Boomer reviews and testimonials.

I was witnessing our generation’s own “Like A Rolling Stone,” “I Want To Hold Your Hand, and “Satisfaction.” There were moments before this when I considered such a modern equivalent existed, but nothing a definitive as Nirvana’s “Teen Spirit” and Nevermind.

Cobain, through one selfish act managed to call that assuredness into question somewhat, but I think now that it merely rattled my faith in rock music than diminished the power that Nevermind has. By questioning the merit of that album, I was-in some weird passive/aggressive manner-trying to distract the admission that I related so much to Nevermind, as did a bunch of people who I probably not share much else in common with.

And by pretending to ignore this record’s importance was in itself a defense mechanism that tried to somehow erase the fact that Cobain’s death profoundly impacted me.

That’s a discussion for another time.

I will admit that, prior to his death, I attempted to collect as much as I could Nirvana related. My faith presented every import and rarity as something I needed to collect.

After his death, those purchases stopped-as did listening to Nirvana’s music. Aside from the occasional radio moments, I haven’t listened to Nirvana in quite some time. If it’s the 20th Anniversary of Nevermind, my guess is that it’s probably been at least 15 years since I listened to the album in its entirety.

I have no plans to acquire the newly minted deluxe editions that are being released in the same manner of major label greed that I’m certain Cobain detested. But that’s my decision, and I have no beef with anyone who wants to pursue this new packaging.

For many years, I wondered about the band’s Madison sessions. I wondered if there was anything to Andy Wallace’s extra sugar, or if it was all some kind of half-hearted attempt by Cobain to shift the blame on why all of those mainstream carpetbaggers suddenly found a connection with mantras like “I swear that I don’t have a gun.”

Yeah, I was curious. But not to the point where I felt that I needed to re-purchase Nevermind to get a glimpse behind the scenes. The was the end result-the same record that I bought twenty years ago this month-that changed my life back then.

I can’t expect that anything in addition to that record will change my mind, and I doubt if a re-issue, or any record for that matter, will be able to replace those original feelings.

Such a task is impossible today. And judging by the gamut of emotions that Nevermind has given me over the past two decades, I’m not so sure that I want a record to impact me in the same way ever again.

Send My Love To Linda

There’s a reason why I continually buy books on bands, read liner notes, or watch endless Behind The Music type of documentaries about artists where I already know more things than most people would even care about: I might learn something new.

A good example of this is with Pink Floyd. I’ve heard the story of Floyd so many times that I can even name the band that Syd Barrett briefly fronted in the early 70’s before realizing after one performance that his heart really wasn’t in it anymore.

Despite all of this worthless knowledge, I continue to seek out more-a thirst for that juicy bit of trivial information that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. That excitement at feeling you’ve learned something new about an artist-a factoid that gives you a one-up on your equally geeky competitor.

Your peer in this rock and roll fanaticism.

Take Jimi Hendrix.

Just a few days ago, I “wowed” my old lady with the bitchin’ tale of “The Night That Jimi Hendrix Choked On His Own Vomit.” It’s not really “bitchin’,” I mean the guy who essentially designed the blueprint for rock and roll guitar playing ends up dying at the end of the story. But it’s a story of the final day of Hendrix and the weird little plot twists and turns that unfolded after he died.

Here’s the Twitter version:

Hendrix gets loaded, chokes on puke. Turns blue. Girlfriend freaks. Calls Eric Burdon. Burdon yells “Call the doctor!” Too much time passes. Jimi Dies. Chick later shacks up with Uli Jon Roth. Chick kills herself twenty years later from guilt over contributing to Jimi’s death.

Actually, I think that’s more than what Twitter would allow, but you get the idea.

I think the word that the kids would use to describe my wife’s reaction to the story above is “Meh.” Perhaps you don’t really care about the life of Jimi Hendrix or get the six degrees of Kevin Bacon in that whole piece, in which case the novelty of it is completely oblivious to you.

Or better still, you have a better story about Jimi-one that can put mine to shame-and you learned in through on-going research, a devotion that would come to fruition at the very moment when you smacked me upside my rock and roll loving head with an even better narrative.

John Ridley is the man who would smacked me upside my rock and roll head last week.

Ridley’s piece about Hendrix on NPR’s All Things Considered is a dandy; a compelling tidbit of Jimi that is so crucial to the man’s rise to fame that it embarrasses me that I did not know about it earlier.

Read (or listen) about the story here, but better yet, listen to the song.

For the first minute of the story, I thought it was going to be about how this new unreleased Jimi Hendrix track sounded like a Nirvana song that most of you are quite familiar with.

But it isn’t.

Instead, it’s an amazing tale of how a caring woman planted some pretty important seeds into Jimi’s head which set a path in motion where he finally found the success and attention that he deserved.

If you can tolerate the ridiculous Guitar Hero video that accompanies it, someone has graciously uploaded this incredible unreleased track up to You Tube.

Why this thing hasn’t been made available yet is beyond me.

There’s also a very brief take with vocals out there too, but this full instrumental version is just incredible.

Daniel Schorr R.I.P.

Daniel Schorr died today.

He was 93.

I knew he had been around forever, but since he still gave relevant essays on N.P.R. and delivered them with such intelligence that the coherency belied his advanced years, I could have sworn he was twenty years younger.

The dude was hand-picked by Edward R. Murrow, got thrown out of Russia for not adhering to their strict sense of editorial review, was threatened with jail time for not revealing his sources, and was one of the key members of the press during Watergate.

In fact, when news divisions got a hold of the Nixon Administration’s “Enemies List,” he began to read it aloud on the air and paused ever so slightly when he got to name #17.

The name was his own and the reason for his ranking was because he was considered “A real media enemy.”

But the best Daniel Schorr story-the one that enables him to reach such a pathetic blog like this one-is the time when he joined Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on stage.

Zappa was trying to get young people to vote, and who better than to relay that message than Daniel Schorr. Nothing screams hip quite like an old Jewish dude with an encyclopedic memory.

The true test of Schorr’s hipness was after he gave his little speech when Zappa teased him with a question.

“Would you like to sing something?”

He agreed.

Schorr through Zappa a curve by singing a few bars of “It Ain’t Neccesarily So” from the Gershwin musical Porgy & Bess.

Frank and the band tried their best to try and find the correct chord progression to the song while Schorr himself tried to find the right key.

You can hear a bit of that event at the ten-minute mark, but do yourself a favor and check out the complete NPR story below.

More Tower, More Power

Well look who's a new Arbitron diary carrier!
At one point in time, this would have been big news to me, but now all I could think was "Damn, I really don't listen to radio that much."
Actually, that's not entirely true-I do catch a bit of NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, but there are days that go by where I will not even listen to radio at all.
But now that I've been named as someone to keep track of my time with local radio stations, I think about all of the things that I'd like to comment on and give diary support to some of the more obscure stations. I'd like to tell KKRQ that it sucks how they let Brad Company go and how I don't listen to that station at all as a result. I'd like to let people know how annoying the afternoon guy "Shark" is on another rock radio station. I'd like to tell them how much I miss satellite radio every time I have to endure listening to a terrestrial station.
But why punch a bunch of dumbasses when they're down?
And more importantly, what good would it really do?
It's not like radio will ever get over the hump and return to profitability again. That media may not be dead, but it sure is becoming less and less relevant while old-school program directors scratch their balls as listeners figure out they don't have to deal with all of the static (ads, retarded DJs, limited playlists) when they listen to their iPod instead.
Remember when people paid radio stations to play records? Christ, you don't even bother nowadays because I don't think that anything's getting bought when radio says it's good.
Radio will more than likely continue to be a part of the telecommunications piece, but it certainly has fallen out of flavor which may explain why the sweet revenge with my Arbitron diary doesn't taste as good these days as it did before.

Right Turns On Left Of The Dial

Do you want to know why people don’t listen to the radio anymore? Because there’s no personalities, there’s no distinction between one station and another, they play the same songs that they’ve always played for the past quarter century, and there’s no localism being broadcasted.
One would think that the stations left of the dial-those that take up the non-commercial bandwidth-are staying true to their roots and broadcasting the things that other radio stations are too afraid to play.
What we have here is an actual playlist from KRUI 89.7 FM, a student run radio station at the University of Iowa that used to be a Mecca for subversive and challenging music. Sure, the quality of the airshifts varied from dj to dj, but I don’t ever remember it looking this bad:

You Don't Need to Be A Prostitute - Flight of the Conchords
Magnolia Mountain - Ryan Adams & The Cardinals
Percussion Gun - White Rabbits
Walking the Dog - fun.
Charmer - Kings of Leon
Kids - MGMT
An Eluardian Instance - Of Montreal
Have You Ever Loved a Woman - Eric Clapton
Non Dairy Creamer - Third Eye Blind
Doris Day (Don't Go) - Jack's Mannequin

Again, this may be just a show that’s playing by their own rules and totally dismissing the intent of the station. Maybe the thinking is that by including such mainstream acts like Third Eye Blind, Eric Clapton, and Kings of Leon that they’re actually being rebellious or an alternative to the alternative.
My thinking is that they’re not thinking. That they’re using the public spectrum like an Ipod shuffle while encouraging us to, ironically, reach for their own Ipods.
And yeah, in case you’re wondering: Flight of the Conchords have a new disc out and, like their first one, the best FotC you can get is the one available on dvd.

OCD Chronicles: Kim Mitchell-"Go For Soda"

One of the coolest things that my father ever did for me was to hook up and FM antenna that I got for free, on the ceiling of our attic and run the cable all the way down to my bedroom. He tucked the cable into the trim on the wall and snaked it to my Technics receiver, transforming it from a static inducing nightmare into an awesome FM signal-capturing giant. I was able to pick up rock stations like 97X in the Quad Cities with no trouble and, on occasion, I could even pick up the legendary KSHE-95 in Saint Louis when the leaves fell off the trees.
For those of you not familiar with KSHE, it was the premier AOR station in the Midwest. They played your typical AOR hits, but they also developed their own-regardless if it was a hit elsewhere in the country. Back in the early 80’s they spun some pretty new wave sounding songs that most AOR stations wouldn’t touch. I’m not saying the songs were good, I’m just saying it made the station sound a tad more eclectic than other stations with similar formats.
It was from these memories that recently I began creating an IPod playlist with somewhat of a nod to the old KSHE 95. I began adding minor hits to the mix, carefully avoiding the trappings of worn out rock tracks like “When The Levee Breaks” or “Crazy Train.” Instead, I began filling those spaces with things like April Wine’s “Say Hello,” Honeymoon Suite’s “New Girl Now,” and Saga’s “On The Loose.”
Notice a pattern?
What the fuck is with Canadian rock bands from the 80’s with their occasionally catchy songs, only to disappear into obscurity? I suddenly remembered one such Canadian rocker with his only claim to American fame that was woefully missing from my AOR playlist.
Kim Mitchell’s “Go For Soda.”

If you’ve never heard the song before, you’re not missing much, really. Musically, it’s forged from anonymity, a relic from the 80’s that you’d easily overlook in between songs of similar structure. But if you spend a few moments paying attention to it, “Go For Soda” may harness you in. Mitchell comes up with a pretty good guitar hook and a chorus that seems to celebrate sobriety, without an indefinite article. I mean, why not go for a soda. For Mitchell, he just goes for it.
I quickly download the song and chucked in a few bucks for a track from the obscure Kansas City group Missouri a track from another Kansas City alumnus called Shooting Star and the long version of Manfred Mann’s “Blinded By The Light.”
Real AOR stations don’t play single cuts.
All together, I have a pretty nice playlist of AOR cuts with just the right amount of familiarity and surprise closet classics.
And Kim Mitchell? From what I hear he still goes out every once in a while to play “Go For Soda” for the millionth time when he’s not working his day job as a DJ for an AOR station.

KGGO Summer Jam

Back home. Arrived late last night after a meeting with Ann & Nancy Wilson. We left the kids with the Grandparents in Des Moines while we experience at least one day as a couple.
Des Moines obviously has their shit together. While they have the benefit of not having to contend with a massive flood to clean up after, it’s clear that they have organizers around the city that coordinate events alongside each other and promote the shit out of said events. There wasn’t a newspaper, television, or radio station that didn’t say anything about the art festival this weekend, and in glancing through the events, who wouldn’t want to attend. The only excuse would have been the heat, which was massive here in Iowa for the past few days.
Over here in Eastern Iowa, we heard nothing of the festivities. I had similar complaints for last year’s 80/35 Festival, but that event seemed to be more about the region in general. The art festival seemed more about the community.
What I found to be funny was how you could see Collective Soul for free while organizers for Burlington Steamboat Days were charging top dollar to see the band just a few days prior. Way to go, Burlington!
KGGO apparently has created their own “Summer Jam” to go along with the art festival. On the following night is a country version, and it’s already sold out, indicating that there’s a bunch more fans of country than rock n roll out here in Iowa.
Or maybe it’s because the country night book two very popular current artists-Keith Urban and Taylor Swift-and that Iowans will flock to anything modern and popular.
That rules out KGGO’s bash which featured the headlining band Ratt, a band that hasn’t been anywhere near the charts in twenty years.
To fill out the line-up, the station booked a ton of also-rans: April Wine, Pat Travers, Great White, Head East, and the dude that isn’t Paul Rodgers that sang for Bad Company who’s touring under the name ‘Bad Company.’ As unremarkable as this line-up may seem, I could have been swayed by the ticket price-$27.50-based on the fact that three of those bands (Ratt, April Wine, and Pat Travers) have albums currently taking up space on my IPod’s hard drive. But by the time I’d heard about the show, I would have been required to spend double the price to see this event.
What the fuck?
Now, I completely agree that early birders should have an opportunity to get cheaper tickets, but at what point do the promoters just stop giving a shit about putting asses in the seats? There is one thing that has prevented me from going to this show: the price. That translates into two extra people to buy beer, merch, whatever. I have to believe that there are other people on the fence too that are now planning something else because of the ticket price increase. It seems to me that you would want to get as many spontaneous sales as possible, but like their format, KGGO is clearly out of step with the times.

The Last D.J.

It’s truly the end of an era for me as the land man standing was forced to sit down. Brad Company-aka Brad Dennison-aka Blake Davis-aka Solitary Seven-was unceremoniously released from his job at the local classic rot radio station, presumably before he was scheduled to converse with Heaven & Hell about their new album. I don’t know what would be worse: losing your job or not being able to talk to Ronnie James Dio.
I met Brad at a different station, one for which I wasn’t employed at. I was supposed to meet the Program Director at the station on a Sunday afternoon and Brad was the first one to open the door. He looked at me with suspicious eyes-the kind that led me to believe he was applying for the same gig. Later on after I got the gig, we realized a mutual love of rock music, even though his collection had a few more Keel cassettes than mine. It would be so easy to rail on about his taste in music-particularly around this time period-but his expertise grew and we’ve both grown to appreciate that to get to the good shit, sometimes you have to go through a few Warrant albums. Nobody reading this can claim to have perfect taste in music and there’s nobody cooler than a music fan who can stand up for what they like, regardless of what others think about it.
Unless that band is Saliva.
Brad was always up for a practical joke while on the air. One of the funniest things-and this is something that will make no sense to anyone who’s had no radio experience-was the time in which I dared him to start his airshift off with Fleetwood Mac’s “Over My Head.” To most of you, this doesn’t sound like anything. “Over My Head” is a perfectly fine song I suppose and there’s nothing about it that’s even remotely offensive. But in radio, dead air is one of the worst things possible and, given that fact, “Over My Head” may be one of the worst songs ever that a radio station can play. The reason is because “Over My Head” starts with an incredibly long fade in, so unless you start the song while another one is still playing, it sounds like someone has screwed up and isn’t manning the controls because of the few LONG seconds of dead air this song provides.
My girlfriend and I were getting ready to go out of town, and for some reason I thought it would be funny to have Brad start his hour with “Over My Head.” The hour started with the news, some commercials, the weather, and then a bright, upbeat station sweeper that identified the call letters. Brad agreed to do the joke and we were in the car anxiously listening for the dead air. Right after the call letters were announced by some namely choir of singers came….nothing. At least twenty seconds of silence while “Over My Head” began to be audibly heard over the airwaves. There is only three people laughing about this right now, because it’s such an inside joke that nobody else would consider it to be funny. My girlfriend and I laughed about it in the car, but what made it funnier was coming home to a blinking answering machine message. When we played it, we heard Brad. “Are you listening now? It’s ‘Over My Head.’ I started the hour with ‘Over My Head.’"
Even if that story isn’t funny to you, you should appreciate the fact that the motivation behind it was a sense of pride about every hour of your airshift. You wanted everything to sound tight, to give listeners no reason at all to change the station. Every aspect of your shift, even the music rotation, needed to sound perfect. We would continually make sure that “train wrecks” didn’t occur-those moments when songs that didn’t sound right together weren’t played next to each other. The playlist may have told you to play Michael Bolton next to AC/DC-and if you were stupid, you’d play them together just like your music log told you-but anyone with half a brain and a sense of pride would make sure that something else was moved next to AC/DC to prevent the dreaded “train wreck.” Or you could be like me and Brad and not play Michael Bolton at all, regardless of what the music log said.
There’s none of that anymore, and with people like Brad out of the business there will be one less person who took an active role in making sure their airshift sounded good. He will be replaced with someone who doesn’t consider this, or even care about what they’re playing, saying, or who their audience even is.
I’m sure that a lot of Brad’s enthusiasm over the finer things concerning his airshift diminished over the years as his station became more homogenized and less local, but I’m even more sure that he still cared about maintaining every listener that he had. I’m fairly confident that he’ll be replaced with someone cheaper and with no concern whatsoever about who is listening.
In other words, he’ll be replaced with someone who lets the dead air right before “Over My Head” play on without getting the joke.

Photo of Brad Company courtesy of My Motherfucking MySpace.

Around The Dial

It’s pledge week on public radio, which means that the morning and evening commute is jacked because if it’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a bunch of bleeding heart liberals asking me for my fucking money.
It means that I’m forced to listen to commercial radio for an entire week.
I’d listen to the obligatory classic rock station, but I’ve heard “Stairway” more than I care to imagine, so I changed it over to KRNA, the home of shitty current rock. I was anticipating a little bit of “Dwyer & Michaels” action in the morning, but to my surprise, I was met with a little bit of…you guessed it…getting the “Led” out. Thankfully, the Zep tune was “Nobody’s Fault But Mine,” one of the many Page/Plant tunes that hasn’t been raped from excessive AOR burn, but it struck me that KRNA didn’t play tunage, other than brief bumper music bullshit, when the comedic genius of Dwyer and Michaels are on the air.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with Dwyer and Michaels, they are as incredibly unfunny as any typical medium/small market morning show complete with interviews with stupid people and the pair waxing poetic about hot topics.
I’m sure they’ve made a few comments about Sarah Palin looking like a MILF as discussing the finer points of her political agenda isn’t really a ratings grabber.
It doesn’t appear that their morning fodder was much of a ratings grabber either as the duo was nowhere to be found after the Zeppelin. In fact, the station promo sweeper identified mornings on KRNA as the equivalent of “less talkin’..more rockin.’”
I really don’t know the details of why the “two idiots” are no longer in the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City airwaves. My guess is that if they were a huge success, the station would have insured that they would still be on the air. I do remember some rumblings about them getting sued by Clear Channel for a non-compete violation when they began broadcasting here after getting booted from their original Quad Cities home.
Who knows, maybe they’re back on at the Q.C.
The website doesn’t address this and two stations are listed on their website’s links.
Factoid: the Quad Cities actually has a higher Arbitron market rating than the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area even though Cedar Rapids is the state’s second largest city and Davenport is built upon a foundation of clay sand and fecal matter.
Have I mentioned how much this market’s radio choices suck? For fucks sake, people own iPods with 5,000 song playlists and these stations are still rolling over the same fucking 900 songs continuously.
Wanna know why radio is losing listeners? Even two dorks can figure that out.
And then there’s this recent bullshit, at least on KRNA, where we’ve got radio “personalities” with clever one names like “Shark” and “Static.” Since I don’t listen consistently, I can only comment on the brief amount of experience I’ve had. And that, my friends, is with “Shark,” a name so stupid that you don’t even care how he got it. “Shark” had a comedian on one afternoon who happened to be a little person and who happened to have a show going on that evening at a local comedy club. The comedian drew attention to his height, stating that he could get away with things like grabbing girls’ asses. Shark thought this was funny and laughed at every word the comedic dwarf said even though nothing was even remotely humorous.
Compared to Shark, Dwyer and Michaels are like Bob Fucking Hope. They’ve been mainstays in Eastern Iowa, specifically the Quad Cities, but only because they invented the genre of morning show for us po’dunk Iowans. In the late 80’s, the best you could get were an announcer and the newsreader to chitchat about some bullshit AP news of the weird stories for a few minutes. Dwyer and Michaels expanded that concept for an extra forty minutes and, as a result, they’re viewed as deities even though 90% of their shtick ain’t even funny.
I would encourage readers to figure out why Dwyer and Michaels are not on KRNA anymore, but by the time you do, pledge week will be over and I’ll be back on the public radio tip again.

Left Of The Dial

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Satellites Gone...Way Up To Mars

You wanna know why radio sucks? Well, there’s a long list of reasons to it and a notable history of general shit-slinging, but one has to point to the 1996 Telecommunications Act as the ground zero of suckiness.
It paved the way for the wonderful Clear Channel absorption of nearly every radio station on your car radio. This meant that, no matter where you called home, you could hear 103.5 “The Beaver” is all its glory, occasionally with the same canned shtick-kickers reading from the same AP entertainment wire copy. The idea was consistency, I guess, placing you local radio station along the same lines as a McDonalds. You knew that your Filet O Fish would taste the same no matter where you ordered it, and you knew that “The Beaver” was about ready to kick off another 30 minute rock block with the latest from Creed.
It was wonderfully American.
It was also woefully bland: listeners with more and more options at their disposal fled in droves and many like me found some solace in satellite radio. I logged a lot of windshield time and treated myself to one of the two providers available. I based my decision to go with XM on three things: It was commercial free. It (supposedly) sounded better, and it (supposedly) had a better range. Almost immediately I was hooked and singing its praises.
After a few years, however, I had a tough time justifying the expense (which I learned was automatically deducted from my credit card with barely a courtesy card. I noticed that some of the disc jockeys that I rather enjoyed were now absent, and the playlist of the “alternative” station became a bit tame. I heard plenty of shit by, say, The Walkmen or New Pornographers but very little in terms of cutting edge bands. I went over to the 80’s alternative channel until I recognized the limits of their playlist (maybe about 1,000 songs strong). I then went over to the metal channel, became disoriented in how everything sounded the same and locked in the classic metal channel for a while.
I found a way to work around the Sirius log in feature while at work (meaning: I got a hold of somebody’s password) and enjoyed some of their channels. I specifically remember one of my favorite channels, Underground Garage, used to play “Dead Man’s Curve” a little too frequently for my tastes. But the first time I heard it, stoned and a little drunk in a friend’s car equipped with Sirius, that Jan & Dead tune was awesome.
Ain’t that the truth with the first time you hear a song. I mean, you can’t top the first time you hear “Stairway” or “Smoke On The Water.”
But no, radio had to fuck that shit up. It didn’t seem to get that there were other tracks on IV or Machine Head that were just as awesome. They’d tell you some bullshit that the tracks they played had been “researched.” That’s pretty amazing considering most radio dudes I know don’t have a statistical degree but they totally understand that they can’t eloquently explain why they’re playing songs that a few people may not be able to identify.
The FCC, seemingly retarded and not realizing that the Clear Channel fiasco of government-aided homogenization, approved the merger of Sirius and XM radio as both companies faced mounting debt and lurking bond notes. In other words, the FCC completely reneged on their original decision to ensure there wouldn’t be a satellite radio monopoly and approved a satellite radio monopoly.
How this will ultimately impact subscribers is yet to be seen, but one has to consider what good came from any monopoly of service and why does the government now seem so keen on allowing satellite radio to become one?
It seems obvious that we’re set for another round of generalized homogenization, appealing to the largest audience possible and providing Sirius XM with an unfair advantage over like-minded broadcasters.
I’d be outraged if I gave a shit, but thanks to another FCC ruling from several years ago, I rarely listen to radio anyway.