Steve Miller Band "Fly Like An Eagle"

Like pretty much ever single solitary person my age in the late 80s, I owned a copy of Steve Miller's Greatest Hits on cassette.  And I listened to it constantly.

I mean, I knew every word, every inflection.  I knew how long the pause was from one song to the next, so I could start humming, in sync with the music.  In fact, at a certain point, I didn't really need the cassette at all.  I could have sung/hummed the whole album, in real time.

WBCN was promoting that Steve Miller would be stopping by the station, and he would be playing live in the studio.  He had a new album out, but he was sure to play some old hits too.

And he did oblige, launching into a spaced-out version of "Fly Like An Eagle," solo, on an electric guitar.

"Time keeps on slippin' slippin' slippin . . . into the future . . ." Miller sang, and I sang too.

Then something strange happened.

Miller sang "Feed the children, who don't have enough to eat."

I kinda froze.  What was he going to do?!?!

Now maybe you're saying to yourself, "I don't get it.  What's the problem?

Here's the problem.

The lyric is "Feed the babies, who don't have enough to eat.  Shoe the children, with no shoes on their feet."

But he had flipped a word, singing "Feed the children, who don't have enough to eat."

Was he going to have to complete the word flip and sing, "Shoe the babies, with no shoes on their feet"?  That doesn't make any sense.  Babies don't need shoes!

And it's not like he can stop the song to gather himself and think his decision through.  He's going to have to do something.

We're only talking about 2 seconds.  But I learned a valuable professional lesson in the space between the lines.

If it's live, let it go.

I've opened up the microphone on live radio tens of thousands of times.  And sometimes, you make mistakes.  You stumble over a word.  Or a whole sentence.  You misplace modifiers.  You accidentally swear.  You introduce a Bruce Hornsby song as "Bruce Cockburn."

And when you do, there's not much you can do.  Once it has gone out, you can't bring it back.  The only thing you can do it go forward.  You can compose yourself so you don't fuck up again.  But you go forward.

That's was Steve Miller did that day.

He sang "Feed the children, who don't have enough to eat.  Shoes the babies . . ." and then he just let his voice drift off, and filled with his guitar.  He picked up the lyrics with the next line, "House the people, living in the street, oh-oh there's a solution" and he just kept going.

I took that lesson to heart.  Even Steve Miller, a guy who probably sang "Fly Like An Eagle" more times than even I had, can screw up from time to time.

But professionals don't let a stumble completely derail things.  They just gather themselves, and plow ahead undaunted.

It's great advice for DJ's, and for life.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Suicide Machines "Hey!"

I was unshowered, unshaved and generally unkempt looking as I hurried into the restaurant to pick up some take-out on Saturday.  Looking the way I was, I certainly wasn't expecting a compliment.

"Dude, love the shirt."

I had to look down to remember what I was wearing.  I don't suppose I should have had to even look, since this was the shirt I put on Friday morning, wore to bed that night, and kept on, all day Saturday.

And really, there is but one shirt in my collection that elicits such a regular response, particularly from guys who'll call you "Dude."


Let's go waaay back to the year I met my wife.

It was a pretty whirlwind year.  We met at the mvyradio Big Chili Contest.  Progressed very quickly to serious.  She moved to The Vineyard to live with me within 6 months.  And before our first full year together had passed, we were shopping for engagement rings.

For our first Christmas together, she made me a little book.  It was the 2nd one she'd done.  Some very simple pictures, depicting various milestone scenes of our first (less than) year together.

Here's the picture she drew, to represent moving to the Island.



It's reasonably accurate (though I must admit, the cat was actually deeply unhappy about the move).

The one kind of funny detail is my shirt.  It says "Some Punk Rock Band."

We had a good laugh about this.  She admitted that when she was drawing the picture, she couldn't remember the actual names she'd seen on any of the handful of band shirts I owned.

I think she probably had in mind my Suicide Machines t-shirt.



But "Some Punk Rock Band" really struck me.

"We should make shirts that say that!" I joked.

Guess what she gave me, on the next present-giving occasion?
 


I love to wear this shirt around, and I love to get compliments on it.

Because I love telling people that my wife made it for me.

"Dude, your wife kicks ass."

Hell yeah, she does.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Y&T "Summertime Girls"

Here's another Weekend Post:

. . . and if we're going to talk Summertime, hair metal/pop, WBCN songs of the 80s (as I did with yesterday's post), then I should pull out this one too.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Jim Carroll "People Who Died"

Here's another Weekend Post:

I remember this track from WBCN when I was a kid.  I also remember playing it on the air as part of my 90s Alternative show, and the song's re-release with the soundtrack to the movie about Jim Carroll, "The Basketball Diaries."


Hear the song on Youtube.

Weekend posts are a chance to revisit songs that have happy memories, not of anything in particular, other than just hearing the tunes.

Many of these songs were tracks that I played during my 90s stint as an Alternative/Modern Rock radio show.  They're tunes that I hardly hear these days, but are wonderful to revisit.

Click on the "Weekend Posts" label below, to see other posts like this.

Stevie Ray Vaughan "Cold Shot"

This isn't so much a story about the day Stevie Ray Vaughan died (which happened 22 years ago, this Monday).

This is a story that takes place on the day Stevie Ray Vaughan died.  So as the story reaches it's culmination, you can imagine SRV songs being played in the background.

But before we get to the culmination, let's go back, to the Spring of 1990, to the end of the semester at UMass.

I had just met this amazing girl.  I'd known her from around for a while, but we had both recently become single again and we had connected.  Really connected.  Hearts pounding.

But the semester was winding down, and I didn't know what the summer would bring.

Meaning both, I didn't know if we would be able to maintain something as we returned to our hometowns, and I really didn't know what I was going to do with my summer.

This was the summer between my Junior and Senior year, and I was aware that I should probably be doing something to prepare for a career.  But hadn't spent any time planning anything.

Somewhere late in the game, I lined up a TV production internship in my hometown, but to make it official, I had to get one of the Professors in the Communications department to sponsor me.

I looked down the list of Professors.  There were many I liked.  Several I respected.  And a few I was totally impressed/slightly afraid of.  But none of them were likely to deal with me, so late in the game.

No, if I was going to slip one under the wire, I knew who I had to go to.

There was this tenured professor, who must've been a few seconds away from retirement.  I'd had him for a couple of introductory classes.  He was very nice, but clearly he was some combination of a) noticeably kinda senile, b) somewhat flaky and c) not really giving too much of a shit.

"I only give two grades for internships," he absently told me, while signing off on my paperwork.  "And all I ask is that you write me a 3 page paper on your experience.  Turn that in on time, and you get an 'A.'  Don't turn it in, and you get an 'F.'"

Seemed simple enough.

Okay, quick summer montage . . . I work a ton of hours at the local cable company doing TV production and learning valuable skills . . . to make some cash I work the graveyard shift at a local gas station . . . I fall head over heels in love with the girl, and any waking second that I'm not working or sleeping, I get in the car to go visit her.

August.  The Finns take a vacation.

With this being my last summer "off," before entering the Real World, my folks decided we should take one more family trip, to Disney World.

In the planning stages, this sounded great.  But now, I was devastated that I'd go for a week without seeing my girl.

I visited her the night before we were supposed to leave for Orlando.  Before our tearful goodbye, I asked her to do me a favor.

(Remember that this is 1990, before email, before cell phones)

I gave her my 3 page paper, outlining all the terrific things I had learned on my internship.  She was headed back to UMass in a couple of days.  It seemed much safer for her to drop the paper with my professor, than for me to trust the US Postal Service to get it there on time.  She agreed.

The Finns had a fine time in Florida, and it WAS the last chance for my parents and two siblings and I to all vacation together.  But I missed my girlfriend terribly.

After touching down at Logan, we headed up Route 1 to home, WBCN had the news:  Stevie Ray Vaughan had died in a helicopter crash.

We listened to Stevie Ray songs for the ride home.

The first thing I did upon arriving home, was call out to UMass to talk to my girl.

After a bit of chit-chat I asked, "What did my professor say?"

"Oh my God . . ."

There was a long period of what seemed like silence.  Then I realized that she was crying.

She had forgotten to turn in my paper.  It was due 2 days ago.

My internship was for course credit.  Not just the weight of a single class, but for the weight of four classes.  I tried in my head to figure out what the equivalent of a full semester's worth of "F"s would do to my already weak GPA.  Probably something I would never recover from, academically.

But you know what?  After about 5 minutes, I didn't care.  I just wanted to see her.

I got in the car at the crack of dawn and raced to see her.  Stevie Ray Vaughan played on the radio as a barreled down Route 2.
 
It was a tearful and joyful reunion.  She had hardly slept, so upset at missing my deadline.  She'd gone down to my professor's office in the middle of the night and slid my paper under his door.

I took the stoic approach.  What was done, was done.  Nothing to do about it.  "Well, you're going to have to support me, when I can't get a job," I told her.

Flash-forward to a month later.  My grades come.  I may have acted stoic, but in the moment, I felt ill, my heart pounded.  I opened the envelope.

"A."

I got an "A."

What would the equivalent of a full semester's worth of "A"s would do to my GPA?  Well, hopefully make me moderately employable.

And, the post-script . . .

In my wise years, I have learned to leave well enough alone, but in 1990, I couldn't.

How did I get an "A"?  How did he not notice that the paper was days late?

I couldn't resist.  I went to my professor's office, and asked for my graded paper back.  (Again, this was in the days before real computers, so I didn't have a digital copy of the paper; he had the only copy)

"Uh . . .hmmm . . ." he shuffled through disheveled stacks of books and folders and papers on his desk.  "Where is . . . hmm . . . uh . . ."

"Well thank you for the 'A'" I said.

"Hmm . . . yes, if I gave you an 'A' I must've read it, right? . . . hmm . . . but I don't see it here.  Well . . . "  He just trailed off, and gave me a look that said, "Is there anything else?"

I don't know if he ever got the paper, or read the paper, and I guess it didn't matter.

My academic career, much like SRV at the end of this video, was magically resurrected.


Hear the song on Youtube.

Joe Dolce "Shaddup You Face"

I saw director John Waters speak back when I was in college, and I remember him remarking that no matter what he did for the rest of his life, the first paragraph of his obituary would talk about his infamous "Pink Flamingos" film.

Sometimes we are remembered for dubious things.

Despite the fact that my folks, especially my Dad, liked Rock N Roll, we were not a Rock N Roll Radio Station listening family when I was little.

While my buddies were listening to WBCN or WAAF at the behest of their older brothers, we always had WBZ AM on the kitchen radio for breakfast.

So Dave Maynard was the first radio personality (beside, perhaps, Red Sox announcer Ned Martin) that I really remember following on a regular basis.

Maynard was a much loved, much honored (he's in the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall Of Fame) presence for folks in the Boston area for the 80s into the 90s, and when news of his passing came over the transom last month, I'm sure that all over New England, people were remembering funny, chatty, friendly moments in their kitchens and cars spent with "Maynard In The Morning."

In a manner not quite befitting his stature, I had an instant recollection too. To "Shaddup You Face."

Back before WBZ turned to an All-News format, they did play several songs over the course of an hour. And inexplicably, Joe Dolce's novelty hit seemed to be a smash on Maynard's program.

Being, you know, 10-ish years old, I thought it was the greatest song in the world.

But I have very clear recollections of Maynard wearily announcing that he would be playing the song again, for another morning, months on end, as a never end slew of requests for the silly song kept coming, coming, coming.

I couldn't understand why he wouldn't want to play the funniest song ever written, again.

Years later, whenever I come across a song that I have no desire to ever hear again, ever, I think of Maynard.

It's not exactly the kind of thing you want on your epitaph . . .


Hear the song on Youtube.

Tommy Conwell & The Young Rumblers "I'm Not Your Man"

There was a time, a long time ago, when I wanted to write.

It's so long ago that I'm not even sure what my aspirations were. But I used to write.

Tucked away in folders and on floppy discs are a few dozen short, and not so short, stories that I worked on in the post-college years. It was the kind of thing I'd do when I got home from work, late at night, to both unwind and to feel creative.

Whenever I'd get stuck, blocked, or unmotivated, I'd put whatever I was working on to the side and do a little exercise.

I'd write a scene. Just one short page. And then I would pick some inanimate object featured in that scene, and I'd write about its story. Just one page.

Every object has a story that we don't think too much about. A simple pencil in your hand is the product of thousands of decisions made by lumberjacks and writing utensil designers and pencil company marketers and truck drivers and sales clerks and absent-minded co-workers who leave that pencil in your office. The pencil, as in invention, didn't exist at one point in history, but somebody dreamed it up. And others, maybe hundreds or thousands of others, refined that idea. The simplest thing has a complex history. I'd write about those things.

I started having fun, researching Corn Flakes and Bag Pipes and Donuts and Narwhales and soon the exercise became the project.

Characters started to form and a small storyline developed and objects (and jokes) would boomerang around from scene to profile to scene.

I never had a huge amount of time to work on this story, but because it only required a page or two at a time, I could put it down for months and pick right back up when I did find the time.

Unfortunately for my writing hobby, my other creative pursuits---radio and, uh, life---were getting more and more complex. As the years progressed, mvyradio demanded more of my time and creative energy (which is a good thing). And my life went from only being responsible for myself, to getting married, to becoming a parent of two.

Creative writing---and free time itself---stopped being an option.

Then, mvy asked some of the DJs to write blogs. And, because it was part of my job, writing became a daily thing again. And it made me think of my story.

I re-read it. It's about 80 pages long. It's better than I remember. I wrote more than a couple of jokes and lines that I'm proud of, and I wish I could say I'll finish it.

But shit, I started it nearly 15 years ago.

So this week, I'm sharing 5 excerpts from "Fruitless Minutae," the book I'll never get around to writing.


The main character is a college-age Record Store clerk, so there is plenty of music mentioned throughout the story. I was spent some time, while writing this section, trying to come up with some kind of obscure 80s pop-rock tune to reference, that even a snobby record store clerk might not recall. Anyone remember WBCN playing the heck out of the song mentioned at the top of the post?

So in this scene, he meets a woman who will turn out to be his nemesis and perhaps is the most wretched, annoying person on the planet. But for now he's intrigued, as she has just, dramatically, entered his store:

If Goth guy were here, he’d be all over this girl in the Misfits t-shirt.

Thankfully---for so many reasons---my co-worker has left the record store. He’s on a “coffee break.”

“So what is it, exactly, that you might, want to be, trying to find. Here.” I am poetry in motion.

“I heard you have inexpensive vinyl,” she says. “I need it. Armloads of it.”

“Well,” I tell her, “we have armloads and more. Carloads. Alpaca loads.”

“Alpaca loads?”

“Uh, Alpaca. It’s a small kind of llama.”

“Yes, I know. It’s just that I left mine at home. Couldn’t I use a shopping cart or something?”

She’s playing along, sure, but she seems to be looking right through my soul.

“Sure, sure.” My eyes begin to dart around her, shifting nervously from her eyes to her feet to her hands to the wall 10 feet behind her. “So what are you looking for? New stuff? Old stuff? We’ve got a few Misfits imports I think.”

“Misfits?” she asks.

“Here.” I lead her over to the M’s.

“Oh!” she says. “Classic vinyl.”

“Are you a big Misfits fan?”

“Of course, of course,” she says absently, as her eyes run over the cartoon cover. “This is a little more expensive than I had in mind.”

“Yeah, if you’re going for value, stay away from the imports. They’re basically just for collectors.”

“I’m much more in the mind for volume. I need to replace a whole bunch of vinyl that . . . that I . . .”

Her eyes begin to well. Internally I wince a bit, but turn that awkward moment inside out by smiling warmly and turning her to the back of the store.

“It’s gone, huh? That happened to me once, too.” My ex- took the REM singles and Prince’s Black album when she moved out. Technically, she was the one who paid for them. But I was the one who listened to them. “We’ll check out the used vinyl section and see if we can’t replenish your collection.”

I lead her to the back section, which is a step lower than the main floor of the store, lit by a couple of weak fluorescent lights. “Try to find some stuff here,” I say. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Cassie, it’s Cassie,” she says. She grabs my wrist and looks me straight in the eyes. “Thank you.”

For the next hour I watch her hunt and peck through the bins. She discovers the used 45s, which are only 25 cents apiece. I just sit on the stair, staring, and I pretend I don’t work there. Hopefully no one is stealing anything.

“You’ve got some great stuff,” I say, surveying her bounty I as ring it up at the front counter.

“Yes, yes. I think this shall do,” she says, the relief in her voice apparent.

“This Replacements 45 has ‘Date To Church’ on the b-side, with Tom Waits.”

“You don’t say? Interesting. I suppose you know a lot about these artists?”

“Many of them. You’ve got a few in here that I don’t know. Who is Tommy Conwell?”

“Oh, I’m not sure,” says Cassie with a flip of her hair, “I just liked the looks of it.”

“Well, you’ve got a pretty good collection going here, Cassie.”

“I couldn’t have done it without you.” Again she makes hard eye contact. “You must let me repay you.”

“Well, you just spent 40 dollars in my store.” I’m awe-shucks-ing. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“Oh but I do, but I do. You’ve given me such inspiration. I just must have you over. Will you come over?”

“Come over to your place?” I hope I didn’t just audibly gulp. “Sure!” Say it cooler. “Uh, I mean, yeah, sure, if you want. That’d be great.”

“I’ll make you a fabulous dinner. Oh, but it will have to wait until next week, until I get my remodeling done. Come next Wednesday at 8, won’t you please? Let me write down my address.”

Day after day we suffer countless indignities. But every once in a while you do the right thing, you say the right line, you make the right move, you’re in the right place at the right time, and, if only for a moment, your human spirit swells and those countless indignities melt into the distant haze for a moment.

I have a date.

Smoke that on your coffee break, Goth guy.

The Fools "Life Sucks Then You Die"

For anyone under the age of, say, 25, it’s probably impossible to imagine, but there was a time when computers were not in the classroom.

In fact, my first academic interaction with a computer was in my Junior year of high school. The building had one computer lab, and juniors and seniors could take computer classes. I guess Freshman and Sophomores weren’t quite ready yet.

And there wasn’t really software, per se. Or operating systems like Windows.

So computers were pretty new. And really, they couldn’t do too much.

One of our early assignments was to print out something we’d written. That was the extent of the complexity of computer programming: can you type something, and get it to come out on a piece of paper. High Tech, for 1985.

“What to you want us to type?” someone asked.

“Anything you want,” Mrs. Larnard told us. “It doesn’t matter. Just type it and print it. That’s the assignment. And she left us to our task.

So I typed up something that had been rattling around in my brain for the last few days, got it to print on the first try, passed it in and didn’t think about it again.

A few nights later, I was wandering through the kitchen near dinner time, when Dad asked me to come sit at the table. Mom stopped what she was doing and joined us.

Uh-oh.

“Everything okay?”

“Um. Yeah . . .” I was, of course, wracking my brain, trying to think what I might have done.

“You’re sure?”

Yes.

“School’s okay. You’re not feeling down?”

I’m fine.

“It’s just . . . Mrs. Larnard said you passed in some writing, and it was pretty upsetting. It sounded like maybe you were having some problems at school.”

The next day, I had a sit down with Mrs. Larnard.

“You’re okay, then, PJ?”

“Yes, Mrs. Larnard. They’re just song lyrics. I’m not depressed. Don’t worry about me.”

Here are the lyrics that I’d handed in. Just the first verse and chorus. (You can also read the full lyrics)

My house burned down in a flash of thunder
My wife ran off with a one-legged plumber
The crops fell dead when the riverbed went dry
My dog got squashed by a pick-up truck
My son ran away and got hooked on drugs
My daughter's knocked-up by the Class of '85

People say that life is good; it don't seem good to me
I'm lost without a paddle and I'm headed up **** Creek
People say that life is fun but I don't know why
As far as I can tell,...
LIFE SUCKS...then you die!

This was a popular, regional song, played quite a bit on WBCN, back in the 80s. It was the first thing that came to my teenage mind when I was asked to write something. It didn’t seem like a bad idea at the time.

I guess the irony of the song is lost, on paper.

Fortunately, the intervention was canceled.