Tempe, Arizona is a college town adjacent to Phoenix, home of the Arizona State Sun Devils. I lived there for fifteen years, moving from my mom’s house at the ripe old age of 25, using proceeds from the smash hit Meat Puppets album, “Up On The Sun.” I lived with my bass player and his girlfriend for a while, until I set up housekeeping in a cool old duplex with a young woman of my own. Shortly after that relationship crashed to the ground, the house itself was demolished. So I moved in with another couple — aguy who roadied for us occasionally and his girlfriend. This time, the house was a darling old red brick bungalo with inadequate air conditioning.
Continue reading ‘Stamp Collection Part Three: Northern Europe’
Just in time for our latest podcast, another broadcasting controversy erupts. This time, insupportably unkind remarks made by radio legend Don Imus on his “In The Morning” program provoked his masters at NBC and CBS to give him the boot. Opting against using the airwaves to “commercialize and mainstream sexism and racism,” CBS Chairman Les Moonves offered a fine piece of bottom-line corporate double-speak, characterizing the controversy as “a significant opportunity to expand on our record on issues of diversity, race and gender. We intend to seize that opportunity.”
Nowadays, we have the internet to keep us aligned with the wonderful world of entertainment. (Many of you, in fact, may at this very moment be reading this for entertainment.) But couch potatoes of previous generations were not so lucky. They had to rely on such rudimentary tools as print. I was no exception of course, but I did attempt a privative sort of interactivity. Armed with nothing so advanced as scissors, some glue and a few free pages in an ordinary spiral bound notebook, I managed to create my own “channel” of sorts, made up of my favorite newspaper clippings.
I used to dread driving with my stepfather when I was a kid. He always kept the radio tuned to the local “beautiful music” station. In later years, I learned to take a perverse pleasure from muzak, which has now blossomed into full-blown affection. But as a pre-teen rock fan, I seriously didn’t get it. Full orchestras and studio jazz arrangements were completely alien to me back then. And, worst of all were the vocals: happy choirs humming and “bah bah”-ing to the music instead of singing the words. My stepfather would hum along, sometimes whistle, and sometimes do this annoying imitation of a trombone. He said it helped him relax when he was driving. He even preferred the wordless approach, since lyrics were a “distraction.” He disliked being distracted when he was driving; in fact he discouraged conversation in the car when he was behind the wheel. This was okay with me, since it limited my potential exposure to a lecture, like the time he told me that the