BROADCAST #08
AIR DATE: 02-14-06

Welcome to the jetlag insanity show. I put this one together on the plane back to USA from Australia and Engineer X and I put it all down on the hard drive. I did this show having been off the plane only a few hours so there was a little insanity there.
     I will be back in town next week and I have a great show for you with some cool rare stuff and a lot more that I think you might like.
     Many of you wrote in about how much you liked the Rat interview. Thanks for all the kind mail. I thought it went pretty well. I think I may have been a little too intense for him but he seemed to be ok with everything. I wrote him the other day, thanking him on our behalf that he came in and talked to us. I have not heard back(!)
     Some of these songs you may remember from 2004. I don’t want to play stuff I haven’t played before when it’s a pre-tape situation. It’s really fun to be live for the songs I haven’t played yet.
     I am in NYC tonight. I will be up early in the morning for an hour with David Lee Roth on his radio show. I will be on 0800 – 0900 NYC time. You can stream the show pretty easily from his site. I think his shows are archived so you can check it out later. I don’t know how that one will go, I have not seen Dave for a few years. It’s never dull with Dave, that’s for sure.
     Mike Steele at Indie gave the show a re-broadcasting time. It’s Thursdays 0200 – 0400 LA time. This should rock you Australians and Europeans. I have been getting a lot of letters from Europe asking for a better time slot. I hope this helps.
     Anyway, here’s the music we listened to on this night. I think all the parts that weren’t ads or me talking were pretty great, right? I hope you liked it, Fanatics. Tune in next week when we go live.

Tenor Saw – Ring The Alarm: If you stay with the show, you will see that some of my favorite tracks of all time were suggested to me by Ian MacKaye. I was at Dischord House one day and Ian played me a tape of Tenor Saw being interviewed on the radio and at one point, the interviewer played a live version of Ring The Alarm. It blew me away. It was one of the coolest songs I had ever heard. I eventually caught up with the studio version on a 12” and that’s the one we hear tonight. Born in Kingston in 1966, he died in Houston TX in 1988, hit by a car so says a bio I read on the internet. He barely got a chance to get it going but if you listen to what little he did, it’s easy to tell that it would have had an amazing ride. http://www.bigupradio.com/artistDetail.jsp?aid=266

WKYS Roll Call: I think I taped this off WKYS FM in DC in 1986. Pretty amazing. The hosts just put a beat on the radio and people call in and rap. It’s all live. If you don’t tape it, it’s gone. I think that’s so cool. I have a lot of radio stuff where I like how the host or DJ talks so I tape it. I’ll bring in some of the late great Jim Healy at some point if I remember it.

Eddie and the Subtitles – American Society: A hard-to-find single for sure. Eddie and the Subtitles were a So Cal band from the 80’s. I never saw them but I have the records. There’s two albums and a single. I played the single version of American Society which I like better than the version on the Skeletons In The Closet album. The Adolescents did a song called Do The Eddie. Apparently there’s a studio version of it somewhere. I have a piece of it but not the whole song. If anyone has it, gimmie!

Blind Willie McTell – This Is Not The Stove To Brown Your Bread: There’s a lot of Blind Willie comp. records around but when available, I always get the releases on the European label Document. They are very thorough and it may be more than you need of any one artist but if you want to hear it all, Document’s your label. Anyway, on the Blind Willie cut we played, I don’t think that’s Blind Willie singing, I think he’s just playing the guitar but in any case, I found it on the Document CD Blind Willie McTell Vol. 1 1927-1931. McTell was a great, clean 12-string player and worth researching and checking out. http://bluesnet.hub.org/readings/mctell.html provides some cool info.

Hank Mizell – Jungle Rock: Hank released this one in 1958 and nothing happened. Almost twenty-five years after the fact, it became a hit. I did some hunting around for some of his stuff and I found the Jungle Rock single but apparently the Jungle Rock CD is hard to find. I have this song on a really cool rockabilly comp. called King-Federal Rockabillys that Nathan from the Teen Idles turned me onto about twenty-five years ago. I can’t believe it’s on CD but it is. The Fall did a version of this song on their 1997 Levitate album. It’s pretty cool. You can fit everything I know about Rock-a-Billy in a thimble. I have some of the That’ll Flat Git It comp. CDs on Bear Family and some other ones I have found in England but I have no expertise in this genre. There’s no doubt in my mind that I’m missing out on some really amazing stuff.

Skunks – Good From The Bad: First heard this on the Labels Unlimited comp. LP. Been playing this one for years. Single was released in a black and white sleeve in June 1978, a run of 2000. A song called Back Street Fighting was on the flip. Pete Townsend of the Who produced it. They got a deal, perhaps in part due to the Townsend connection and re-named themselves The Craze. They released two singles under that name and then I don’t know what they did next. I got The Craze singles, so excited to hear the answer to the question: “What happened to the Skunks?” Played the singles, couldn’t stand them. Oh well. Good >From The Bad is a great song though.

Andre Williams – Jailbait: I don’t know much about this guy. I heard this song about twenty years ago on KCRW FM and found an LP of his. I have been looking around for this song on CD but can’t find it. If you know of its existence somewhere, please let me know. I know that he was doing shows awhile ago, I think he was getting a helping hand from Jon Spencer, what a potentially great combination that is! A cool song.
Silver Apples - Whirly Bird: A guy in Australia tuned me onto these guys a long time ago. The records were hard to find and I eventually got a bootleg of the two LPs and then later on, they were officially released, through Universal. Whirly Bird was released in the late sixties, 1968 I think. Amazon is showing a lot of used copies available. Want more info?  http://www.silverapples.com/ gets you there.

Brian Wilson – Good Night Irene: From the amazing A Vision Shared tribute to Guthrie and Leadbelly CD. Someone wrote in asking if I had heard Little Richard doing Good Night Irene. The question made me remember that I had not played anything off A Vision Shared. It’s so cool hearing Brian Wilson do this. The CD is out of print I think but it’s worth checking out. Dylan and Springsteen are on it. Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie are both amazing and should not be passed by. As for Leadbelly, I would suggest a best-of or the Smithsonian release called Last Sessions. The Rounder collection of his Library of Congress recordings is great too. All I have of Guthrie are the Library Of Congress Recordings set on Rounder, and The Asch Recordings Vols. 1 – 4. Both are great.

Joseph Spence – Out On The Rollin’ Sea: The great guitar player from the Bahamas! Many years ago, I was given the Happy All The Time album and that was it, I was hooked. I have never heard anything like him. Listening to him got me checking out all the island recordings made by Alan Lomax and pretty much anything else I could find in the way of calypso. There’s so much cool stuff from the islands: Mighty Sparrow, Lord Kitchener, Lord Invader, Neville Marcano the Growling Tiger. And all kinds of great compilations as well: All the Alan Lomax Caribbean Voyage recordings are great, The Calypso At Midnight and Calypso After Midnight CDs are cool and if you ever see Peter Was A Fisherman or London Is The Place For Me, they’re great as well. Here’s a Spence discography site: http://www.wirz.de/music/spencfrm.htm and a cool page about him: http://www.indiana.edu/7Esmithcj/cjsbvoi2.html

Hemingway - Nobel Acceptance Speech: I got a one hour cassette of Hemingway talking a few years ago. I had never heard his voice before. It’s strange. He speaks like his writing reads. He won the Nobel in 1954. I have read a lot of Hemingway, not all of it. I never read Green Hills Of Africa, Garden Of Eden or Across The River And Into The Trees. I have read all the early novels and all the short stories in the expanded Finca Vigia edition of his short story collection. I guess for a lot of us, we know Hemingway best from his short stories like The Snows Of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber or his novels, For Whom The Bell Tolls, To Have And Have Not, Old Man And The Sea. I’ve read a few books about him and I have a really interesting documentary on him. Not always good to his friends, family and others but he certainly put some good stuff across the plate. He lived in a very interesting time. It’s a period of American literature that fascinates me to no end, the age of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, loosely ganged up as part of the Lost Generation writers, a phrase coined by Gertrud Stein from what I’ve read. I have spent years reading and re-reading these guys. I don’t know if Ring Lardner would be considered a Lost Generation writer but he was part of that gang to a certain extent. I’ve read their letters, their notes, critical biographies, all I can get my hands on pretty much. I’ve been to some of their dwellings. Went to where F. Scott died. Went to Thomas Wolfe’s mother’s house. I obviously can’t get enough of these guys. Wait a minute, this is a music show! Hemingway shot himself in the head at his home in Ketchum, ID in 1961. Here’s a website to download more voice samples. http://town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio/012494_harp_ITH.html. Oh, and since we’ll never get to any of this again, if you have never read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe, you should, they’re really great. Wolfe’s first two books, Look Homeward Angel and Of Time And The River are amazing. I read parts of them over and over.

The Very Things – The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes: The Very Things singer, The Shend, was also in a cool band called The Cravats. Both bands are great but The Cravats are out of print. The Shend is trying to get that together with a cool 2CD release. I wrote the band the other day and told them when they get The Cravats out, I will do my best to spread the word. I was surprised to get a letter back from none other than The Shend himself! How cool! There’s another Very Things track I want to get to soon and will also bring in some Cravats so you can get a taste of them. For those of you who already know these two bands—they’re great, right?!

Cab Calloway – The Jumping Jive: This is off one of my Cab Calloway bootleg CDs. It’s a testament to how much music was coursing through this guy at any given moment. The scatting at the end of the track is worth the price of admission. Most of the records you find of Cab are best-of comps. Chuck Dukowski turned me onto to one of Cab’s songs called San Francisco Fan. Amazing lyric, I was hooked immediately. There’s a serious documentary about Cab called Minnie The Moocher where’s he’s interviewed about the days, what a storyteller. A buddy of mine Albert Watson, took the last photos of Cab and gave me a beautiful portrait shot.

Tommy Johnson – Cool Drink Of Water Blues: I think Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club spent some time listening to this man and if you check out the Gun Club’s Fire Of Love album, you might think the same. You can get all of Johnson’s recorded output on one CD from the miraculous Document label. Great stuff. http://search.eb.com/blackhistory/micro/726/89.html
Dee Dee Ramone – Bad Horoscope: From Dee Dee’s Zonked album. That’s the one and only Lux Interior of the Cramps singing. He’s so great. This is the album that has that track I played weeks ago with Joey Ramone singing I Am Seeing UFO’s. I have all the Dee Dee solo records, I think they’re really cool.

Albert Ayler – Ghosts First Variation: From the Spiritual Unity album. Mike Watt turned me onto Ayler in 1983. Ayler did a lot of recording in the summer of 1964. I think all those ESP label albums were from around that time. This one, Bells, Spirits Rejoice and New York Eye And Ear Control, are really great. There’s a lot of Ayler out there. The later stuff on Impulse might be a little far out for some people but I think it’s pretty cool. Besides Spirits Rejoice, the other album I play a lot is a live album on Impulse called Live In Greenwich Village which recently got expanded to a 2CD set. Worth checking out. Many nights I have spent writing with this album playing loudly. Coming soon, the Holy Ghost box set, it’s like ten CDs of rare Ayler. It’s going to be great. A guy named Jeff Schwartz wrote a great biography on the man and sent it to me many years ago, he has since posted it online so you can read it for free.
http://www.geocities.com/jeff_l_schwartz/ayler.html

Raven – All For One: From the All For One album. This album is awesome. I have had it for years. Earlier today, I looked at it and couldn’t believe I hadn’t brought this one in yet. Not rocket science or refined but well played and full of energy and what vocals! Solid as a rock with swords in the air! Beware the Raven! Dept.: It was 1985 I believe, I was in Boston on a panel for Boston Rock magazine with Rick Rubin, Steve Berlin, one of the Aerosmith guys and John Gallagher of Raven. Raven man had this amazing fire engine red leather suit on, jet black dyed hair and the pastiest white flesh you’ve ever seen. At one point he said, and this is pre-Spinal Tap but SO Tap, it’s not to be believed, anyway, quoth the guy in Raven, “I’m calm now, right? But onstage and in our videos, I’m a wild man.” Immediate laughter all around the room for John, the son of the one and only Rory!

Mick Harvey – Intoxicated Man: The great Mick Harvey of Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds fame. He did a couple of CD of Serge Gainsbourg’s material. There’s the Intoxicated Man CD and one called Pink Elephants. I don’t know much about Serge and my excuse for that is lame. I have read interviews of hipster bands who are really boring who worship him and it was an indicator to stay away. I went out with a girl once who played me some of his stuff and I dug it but I don’t know what I heard.

Sods – Copenhagen: We listened to their song Pathetic weeks ago. They only did one album called Minutes To Go which is finally on CD, only out of Denmark I think. Worth checking out. I wish there was more interest in music like this so I could license some titles and release them here so people wouldn’t have to search high and low for these records at stupid prices. This one will cost you unless you can find it used. The Sods changed their name to Sort Sol and released a bunch of records under that name. They’re cool too.

The Fall – Cyber Insekt: From The Unutterable album. I didn’t get this album the first couple of times I listened to it but I gave myself a few months away from it and came back to it and now it’s one of my more oft played Fall albums. We sure like it on this show!