Your Favorite Little Podcast: Episode Seven
Published September 4th, 2007 in Obligations, Treasure Tags: Music, Personal, Podcast.
I recently had the pleasure of contributing to the 365 Days Project, hosted on the WFMU site. Despite the hate mail I received from a certain camp who felt I offered too little respect to my subject, the experience was otherwise benign. Bostworld gained no surge in hit counts for my effort; in fact, I’ll probably give up my Google ranking for the album I contributed. (I guess I deserve it for recycling one of my previous posts.) No matter: logrolling is sometimes the better part of valor.
I visited the WFMU studios on more than one occasion back when my old group used to regularly breeze through their neighborhood. For my band mates, it was just another alterna-format station with a standoffish know-it-all staff that liked us better back when no else had ever heard of us. But I was already a WFMU fan by that point. I was dating a girl who was not only a regular listener — she was a bona fide Irwin Chusid groupie. If fact, if the truth were to be told, Irwin had an indirect influence on Puppets listening habits, thanks to her. Unless I’m confusing him with someone else, Irwin’s dupe for her of the “Burn The Honky Tonk Down” compilation is directly responsible for the onslaught of George Jones songs the Meat Puppets used to cover live.
Back during a mid-eighties Manhattan exile from the Puppets, I let her talk me into doing a solo interview at WFMU, just so she could go down to the station. I was on the air for almost three hours during the graveyard shift. I used to have a tape of it, and if memory serves, it was quite unremarkable. But I did get to dig through their wonderful stacks and find some cool shit to play. Unfortunately, my musical education was comparatively limited at the time. I barely knew who Nelson Riddle was back then, let alone Esquivel, Raymond Scott or Wendy and Bonnie.
WFMU was first station I ever heard that regularly played “oddball” artists, long before it became commonplace. I heard my first song-poems thanks to them. I got my copy of “Shut Up Little Man!” during one of their pledge drives. And though it all, money crunches, relocations, advances in technology, changes in both public taste and their own horizons, they’ve managed to weather it all. And so, this edition of “Your Favorite Podcast” — the medley show! — is dedicated to them.
“Dance Craze Medley” - Ray Anthony
“Jobim Medley” - Debbie Deitrick, John Davis & Co.
“Divorce Medley” - The Dovells
“Salute To The Sixties” - The Going Thing
Click here to subscribe to “Your Favorite Little Podcast.”
Derrick, thanks for the link. I’m honored, since the Meat Puppets were one of my favorite bands during those post hardcore SST days- the golden age of indie-American punk rock. I was kinda blown away when I found that you guys had recorded that GJ song when the reissue of Out My Way came out, I guess we all listened to the same records. There were a lot fewer choices back then.
Ted
Don’t mention it. Thanks for Death Week!
The most remarkable thing WFMU survived was the 1995 closing of Upsala College. I used to listen to the station all the time when I lived in New York, and check their website regularly now.
I am a big fan of George Jones. A while back I posted “Eskimo Pie”, on my blog, a song written and performed by Jones that you might find interesting. Definitely one of his stranger novelty numbers, it was released on Mercury/Starday in 1958, but never shows up on Jones anthologies.
Ah yes: “Eskimo Pie” is in fact one of the songs we used to cover!
That’s great–it’s quite a fun song, and catchy too!
It is frustrating how little of George Jone’s material is in print. His Musicor sides are tough to find, and the UA stuff is not much easier. Mercury and Ace had some excellent compilations of his Starday/Mercury material, but those have gone out-of-print too. I wish someone like Bear Family would come along and release some “complete” Jones box sets. It’s crazy that such a major artist (someone Frank Sinatra once quite credibly referred to as “the world’s second best white singer”) has been so poorly anthologized. If someone put out “complete” Starday/Mercury, UA, or Musicor box sets, I’d buy them in a second.
I agree — if it weren’t for the long hours I put in digging through dusty crates, I wouldn’t have found most of the stuff in my George Jones collection. There has never been an acceptable reissue program for him.