Democratic Failure Thread

Was he on Dave? (Lil Dicky’s show on Hulu?)

 

Yeah, I chose them for contrast specifically because I was pretty sure they were your biggest fave/influence and if not at least in the top three.

Whereas, I sort of marked them on first hearing as a band to follow because I thought they sort of sucked but were going to be great . And indeed, for several years every issue would contain a song or two that was really good, several things that were of interest, and a whole bunch of "I guess you hadda be there." Then comes "Document" to my station, and promise fulfilled --still a lotta "hadda be there" but several truly great tracks too.

It was a hellacious year, maybe the best ever for me re music, and "End Of The World As We Know it" is maybe my favorite song from it most days...

But still-- late as I came to it, "Countdown To Ecstasy" is right up there just under my desert island top 25...

 

Steely Dan was all over the FM radio station I listened to in high school, and I still have room Fagsn's solo album, The Nightfly, which came out when I was in college. However, I had no trouble getting into REM from the very opening notes of "Radio Free Europe" which I heard the first time on a college radio station in my home town when I was taking a year off between college and law school, unless I got money for grad school in English.

The University of Georgia was almost applied to, by the way . . . but I had a vision of the future involving me dropping out and working in a record store, only to meet my demise at a tragic concert event...

https://www.theonion.com/37-record-store-clerks-feared-dead-in-yo-la-tengo-conce-1819566399

 

Funny enough, there's a lot of rappers and hip hop producers that love Steely Dan. I like Steely Dan myself. Great music chops. REM on the other hand, no thanks. I'll change the station if I hear Everybody Hurts. For 80s, give me Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, and Dead Kennedys.

Right now I've been digging Khruangbin, Stereolab, and Little Dragon. I've yet to be disappointed in a Khruangbin track. Highly recommend them. Their video for the song Evan Finds the Third Room is great.

 

As for Biden, it's a classic Biden gaffe and he admits he screwed up. There were a million other ways for him to say, "Trump is awful and he doesn't care about you."

Like I said, Biden is calling our dad and admitting we massively messed up.

 

I've been sending the bassist letters expressing my love but she hasn't responded. Yet.

 

Big fans of the last three, too. And to further bridge musical generations, the first Surfers show I attended, I helped talk down somebody having a bad acid trip, using techniques I heard Wavy Gravy explain in the Woodstock movie. Eventually, I handed off the task to club personnel, because I was missing the show and had done enough, IMO, for a random stranger who, to be honest, should've known better than to pop some acid at a Butthole Surfers show where they were projecting bizarre and atrocious images onto dry ice-generated fog balls that were floating around the room.

 

Does she stand just like Bill Wyman?

 

Here's an early concert. Stipe looks so different than just a couple years latter.

 

HS yearbook pic

 

Gone the way of the phone book/booth for the most part

 

I think you misunderstood. I preferred bands that wanted to rock sometimes; and I didn't think F&B had enough of that in them. (BTW I'da said Boddhisatva was about as rock as they ever got. I didn't mean AC/DC kinda stuff, just something to pick up the pace or the volume a bit. "Raised On Robbery", "Memphis In The Meantime," "Walk Of Life.")

Doing radio--at least doing it my way-- you are always trying to trick part of your regular audience a little bit, to carry the people who like what you playing right now to the thing you are going to finish the set with without a jolt so that even though the artist you are going to finish with might be one they never heard of, or even one they might easily think they hate, they wind up hearing it from a new perspective sort of, and hopefully you sell a few records for the artist someday.

So for example you are playing Buddy Guy to fulfill a blues requirement, and you need to play the REM version of Richard Thompson's "Wall of Death" from the (then) new Thompson tribute. (You want to play brand new stuff last in the set so that the next thing they hear after it is you yelling them who and what it was-- the notion is that some folks may actually have liked the hell out of it and you want them to hear how to get their very own copy ASAP-- and this is the one chance you get to want to do what they want you to do also. So you are always trying to finish with the new songs, not start sets with them.)

Okay-- so we're listening to Buddy, and I'm gonna say it is something with the classic blues ending. Buddy guy is going to have caught and held the blues freaks in the audience tonight (Taos' representative audience is about 1/3 electric blues fanatics.) Bonnie Raitt made her bones as a blues guitarist. probably very few people who like Buddy Guy dislike Raitt. But we're trying to get to a rocker by an alternative rock band. Bonnie Raitt covers a couple of songs by NRBQ who were alternative before these guys were born, and they are easy to get to out of a blues ending. Maybe I can get to it from "Green Lights?" No, almost, but the tempo's just a little too fast, even if I suppress the accoustic intro and pick it up at the "no,no,no" fade in.

But look, heres "Willya Woncha" on that Raitt album, and its at a better tempo and the fade is punctuated by that hammering piano tag, which will butt up nicely to the vocal fade in, and there you go... you've given REM a fighting chance to draw in Buddy Guy's listening audience and Raitt is popular with the gay and lesbian audiences in Taos, and REM probably oughtta be.

 

I kinda lost track of where I was going in all that-- I untended to finish off the post by saying that somwhere along the line of doing that kind of set construction I tricked myself into liking Steely Dan...

 

Woof!

 

I followed it pretty well, I think.

Never imagined DJing being that planned out. I imagined them walking into the station, grabbing what they liked of the current and past hits and doing their thing without much more thought than that.

I've got so many friends who dig REM that I'm going to have to give them some time at this late date. I don't hate them or anything, just weren't on my radar at all. As I've said before, if it wasn't mainstream in some genre, it didn't reach my little town's radio stations.

 

Yoss has some good suggestions I'm sure. I'd start with the early-mid 80s albums or cheat and listen to Eponymous.

Since you're a big Bible thumper, you might like this one

 

Black/Latino leaders - hell no on Klobuchar as Veep. I agree.

But more than a dozen black and Latino strategists and activists warned in interviews that selecting Klobuchar would not help Biden excite black voters — and might have the opposite effect. Klobuchar would “risk losing the very base the Democrats need to win,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, which promotes women of color in politics. They pointed to her poor performance among non-white voters during the presidential primary, as well as her record as a prosecutor in Minnesota

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/...joe-biden-amy-klobuchar-vice-president-275326

 

Actually, I'm not, but if I were, this is the kind of church I could get behind

 

My first few years were very like that-- and all the other jocks were even more irresponsible than I, and we were going broke fast. The new owner brought in a "pro from Dover" to take over a Program and Music Director, and he literally came to town and hung out in bars and coffeehouses all day for a couple of weeks scratching up conversations about music with locals and tourists alike, to get a sense of the audiences. He did that before he ever came to the station and met with the staff.

Then he went through our library top to bottom and cleared out ptobably 20% of it as too damaged to air and another 20% as too unhip-- giving us a little chance to convince him otherwise on a few we knew better than he (I remember going to bat sucessfully for Elvis Costello's "I Want You" and Roy Clark and Gatemouth Brown's version of "Take the A Train.")

Then he installed a playlist system-- only its requirements left us as much freedom as we could maneuver for; as much as we could learn to handle, rather than telling us everything to play. The library was defined as "new," "major," and "minor." New stuff was the current out put of the record industry; the major artists were the list of artists he wanted to define the station's sound, and the minors were stuff that should appeal to the same audiences but be unusual/rare enough to enhance the hipness of the station and take advantage of the sizeable tourist audience who might not be hearing these things at home.

If you have three commercial breaks an hour in normal seasons (Christmas and elections seasons are a whole different picture) Then you are basically looking at eleven to twelve songs an hour. Each hour would have 5 "current" songs required in the hour-- more than was common most places and which convinced labels to update our back catalogues with cds as a priority, cleaning up the sound enormously. Records got crackly after about 20 plays, the vinyl was so crappy and out air so particulate.

Each set had to have a major artist in it, and you could not play a track if you were the last one to play it, or if it had been played less than a week ago if a major and less than a month ago if a minor. The majors list was pretty classic rock to start-- Beatles/Stones/Dylan/Allmans/Band/Dead/Santana/Los Lobos/Little Feat/ Byrds/Genesis/Dire Straits/Eagles/Fleetwood Mac/Jefferson Airplane or Starship/Pretenders/Traffic. Blues counted as a major if it really was in the pocket-- I could play Earl Hooker or Butterfield, but the Doug Sahm version of "Papa Ain't Salty" for all that it is really a blues and clearly a tribute to Louis Jordan, that would have excited comment... Motown was also counted as major if not too obscure, and he wouldn't complain if you counted Memphis in the Motown category-- Redding, or the MGs... There was also a Reggae category, and Marley was a major all by himself.

The list mutated a bit over time as people arose and others got a bit tired, and we and others began to have influenced the expectations of the audience. Rem was on it eventually, and there was a Lyle Lovett/Nanci Griffith category for example.

Over time I/we figured out that the mix came out much better if you went to a different album from each major each day...and that you can play the occasional 8-10 minute track, but you better have a few short ones stocked up to compensate.

There was also a good deal of spontaneity at times-- I was on the air when Miles Davis death came over the wire; I put on "Kind of Blue" and voice overed the news, and told the boss, whose office was next the control room-- and he took the playlist, scratched a current off each hour and subbed "any Miles Davis track." We did that for three days. And were never more popular in town and county...

He moved on after a few years, took over a big station in a major city; must be retired by now, but I listened to the station for a few hours when I was there, and AFAICT he was using the same basic system there