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(Pictured: “This is all very nice for you, I’m sure, but how come you never write about things cats enjoy, like being fed and throwing up on the floor?”)

This website began on July 11, 2004, which means that as of today it’s old enough to vote. In keeping with ancient custom, here are some of my favorite posts since last July 11, in no particular order.

—I spent some time on a recent afternoon at the radio station recreating the radio edit of the Isley Brothers’ 1975 hit “Fight the Power,” which bleeped the word “bullshit.” A couple of posts about naughty language in radio songs (here and here) were fun to write and got a lot of response from the readership, which I always appreciate.

—I provided the usual yearly ration of philosophical navel-gazing: about the people we see in dreams, about how and when our narrow childhood perspective starts to widen, about long autumn mornings on the school bus and a Thanksgiving Day 50 years gone, and about what it would be like if we could remember everything.

—I got annoyed with “people of my generation who mistake normal processes of growth and change for assaults on All We Hold Dear.”

—In 1972, somebody thought it would be a good idea to invite Adolf Hitler to a Dean Martin roast, and hired Casey Kasem to play the part. That in turn inspired a closer look at Martin’s impact on the record charts.

—I wrote tributes to Charlie Watts and Howard Hesseman.

—I wrote about how doing a radio show is best thought of not as performing, but as making something. Alongside a firm belief in the service responsibility of the radio jock, it’s the rock I stand on these days. Every piece of a show must have a purpose, and the pieces should be consciously assembled, like building a bookshelf or a birdhouse. I’m not just spitballing to fill time anymore—the way I did for quite literally decades on the air.

—Joy and Fear: The Beatles, Chicago, and the Sixties by John F. Lyons inspired a couple of posts. I wrote about differing perceptions of the Beatles among boys, girls, and Black listeners, and (yet again) how Chicago was the first American city to hear the Beatles on the radio.

—Last December, I wrote about several Christmas warhorses celebrating 50th anniversaries: “Santa Claus and His Old Lady” by Cheech and Chong, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” by John and Yoko, and A Partridge Family Christmas Card.

—This is not a television website but it does have a TV category and the analytics available to me show that people like my occasional TV posts. I wrote about a series of programs commissioned by the U.S. Treasury to plug savings bonds, which featured mini-episodes of Cheers, Taxi, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Benson. I also wrote about the locally produced entertainment shows that used to run on daytime TV, and about the shows that topped the Nielsen ratings in summer of 1977.

—I also write The Sidepiece, a free e-mail newsletter you can subscribe to, which covers subjects not on-topic for this website. You can read about the likelihood that  American voters will freely choose Hell this November, or about the sick and helpless feeling one gets watching the GOP do what it does while the Democrats stand feebly by and do nothing. The Sidepiece post archive is available to all, even non-subscribers.

Almost every year in this post I write about how much I abused the editorial “we” in it, which I notice I have not done this year. So, in closing:

We do not write quite as often here as we used to; working for The Man puts demands on our time that are different from what they were during the first 17 years of this blog’s existence, when our gig-economy lifestyle permitted us to spend entire days noodling with it. Nevertheless, our intention is to soldier on here whenever we can, for as long as we can. If you keep reading, we will keep being grateful to you.

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(Pictured: Pabst Blue Ribbon is no longer brewed in Milwaukee, but some of the downtown brewery complex has been preserved. Part of it has been converted to a visitor center with a hotel, where The Mrs. and I stayed on a visit last year. Do not sleep on PBR itself; during our visit, I drank some for the first time in years and enjoyed it immensely.)

The muse has been a little stingy with inspiration recently, so here’s an old reliable fallback: a tour of some stuff that has passed through my Twitter feed recently.

Continue reading “Third-Shift Pub Crawl” →

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(Pictured: Donald Fagen onstage in 2017.)

Kurt Vonnegut famously said that future generations would look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad. That’s proven to be hyperbole, but social media has actually done it. Twitter and Facebook are quite literally killing people now and rendering others functionally insane to a degree television never could. Yet like rats who repeatedly press a button after receiving irregularly spaced rewards, we hit “refresh” again and again because amidst the toxic wave, we sometimes find something worthwhile. For example:

—There has been much Steely Dan news of late. The band postponed the first few dates of its current tour because of COVID, but also because of COVID, Donald Fagen has completed nearly enough songs for a new album. Since he was fairly clear in 2012 that Sunken Condos was going to be his last, we can count this as one of the few good things the pandemic has wrought. Two new Steely Dan/Fagen records were released last month, Northeast Corridor: Steely Dan Live and The Nightfly Live. I am more interested in the latter than the former, as I have no need to hear “Bodhissatva” or “Hey Nineteen” again. Northeast Corridor does, however, include the previously unreleased R&B cover “A Man Ain’t Supposed to Cry,” which has been closing Steely Dan shows for the last few years.

—Fagen also gave an interview in which he went deep into the process of music-making, his relationship with Walter Becker, and literature. He’s an interesting and unusual cat, but his interviews always leave me thinking that if I had the chance to meet him in the real world, I’d probably pass.

—Hooks and Harmony posted a good list of 20 important songs that peaked at #2. Plausibly related: If you are reading the Stereogum series in which Tom Breihan is writing about all of the singles to reach #1 on the Hot 100, you probably saw the little news nugget he dropped: he’s working on a book about the 20 most important #1 singles of all time.

—John Mellencamp is one of the first people I would kick out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He influenced nobody, and he’s there because he sold a lot of records over a long period of time. That said, however, I own some of those records, and I’m still playing some of his 80s hits on the radio regularly. Last week, he and Bruce Springsteen released a song called “Wasted Days,” in which their wizened voices combine to sing about the inevitable dwindling of time. I liked it a lot more than I expected.

—Old Grey Cat wrote about meeting Springsteen back in 2016. It’s likely that you’ll recognize yourself in his story.

—The forthcoming documentary Get Back, about the Beatles’ end-of-days, is going to significantly rewrite the band’s history. It will air on Disney Plus over Thanksgiving.

—In its 1950s and 60s heyday, WLAC in Nashville blasted R&B into 40 states and influenced an entire generation of kids, and musicians. Related: I am not the person to write a biography of WLAC DJ Hoss Allen, but I’d read one.

—On the subject of Nashville: one of the city’s most prolific musicians died last month. You’ve heard him play, even if you didn’t realize it.

—Lots of people have sung “My Way,” but it is ultimately one only Frank Sinatra could have done justice to, delivered with a bravado that was uniquely him. Ted Gioia wrote about what Sinatra’s performance means, and what it means to like that performance.

—We recently passed the 45th anniversary of the release of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life. This oral history provides a great deal of insight into Stevie’s creative process.

—We also passed the 30th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. The album’s producer, Butch Vig, is a Madison guy who ran a studio here for many years. Madison Magazine told the story of Nirvana’s early appearances in Madison, before anybody knew who they were.

—The Crystal Corner Bar is one of Madison’s famous nightspots, located in the heart of the city’s east side, an area where for a lot of people the 1960s never ended, in all the good and bad ways. In one way, however, the Crystal is still stuck in a different year—2004.

If you use Twitter but don’t follow me, head over to the feed in the right-hand column of this page and do so. Or maybe just delete your Twitter account entirely. Lead in the water pipes is good for nobody.

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(Pictured: Piano Cat is judging this website and finds it lacking.)

Yesterday was this website’s 17th [!] anniversary. In keeping with long-established custom, here are some of my favorite posts since the last anniversary in 2020.

The best book I read in the last year was James Kaplan’s two-volume biography of Frank Sinatra, Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman. Stories from the book led to several posts: about a TV interview where Sinatra expected to be treated like a president but wasn’t; about the odd kidnapping of Frank Sinatra, Jr.; about the writing of a song inspired by Sinatra’s breakup with actress Ava Gardner; and about separating Sinatra the gifted artist from Sinatra the often-terrible person.

More recommended reading: Jeffrey Melnick’s Creepy Crawling: Charles Manson and the Many Lives of America’s Most Infamous Family, about Manson before the Tate-La Bianca murders and his cultural impact long afterward. He wanted to be a folk-rocker and insinuated himself into that scene. He is also frequently credited with inspiring a famous song years after he was locked away in prison, but he did not. Also recommended: Fab Fools: The Last Ever Untold Beatles Story by Jem Roberts, which locates the Beatles along the spectrum of British comedy from the 50s to the new millennium. One part of the book discusses the Beatles cartoon series. David Wondrich’s Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843-1924 is also worth your time. Among other things, it discusses the importance of blackface minstrelsy to American popular music, which made me remember the minstrel show in my hometown.

We dug into the history of certain obscure performers and/or songs, or as far as one can dig with the attention span of a goldfish, the work ethic of a hobo, and a word count in mind. In this past year, we learned about the King Family; about the strangely affecting single recorded by an action movie star; about a familiar folk-rock hit of the mid-60s and the interesting career of the woman who made it; about the impossibly handsome mid-90s hitmaker whose biggest song is often mistaken for Elton John; about a famous song that owes its longevity to basketball; about a series of heavily ethnic comedy albums of the mid-60s; about how one of the most famous characters of the 70s inspired recording artists and became one himself; and about two of the most iconic Christmas hits as they celebrated their 50th anniversaries.

Further digging: we learned about Elton John’s brief 1975 tour in support of the album Rock of the Westies, and about the bizarre belief that kids of the late 60s were using peanut butter and mayonnaise to get high.

We noodled with the idea of finding the greatest single weekly Top 10 of all time, here and here. An even more foolish errand might be to find the single greatest Hot 100 of all time. Further noodling: what do we mean when we say that a song is “pretty”? And what’s the real difference between mono and stereo?

We got a lot of help from readers this year. One helped track down an obscure singer we mentioned here one time. Another did the research on songs that stayed stuck at the same position on the Hot 100 for several weeks each; several chimed in to answer a chart question I idly posed one day. I also borrowed the reminiscences of a friend who was on the air the night John Lennon was shot. Not everybody who reads my stuff is inspired to be helpful, however. I have received plenty of hate mail over the years. Read some here and here.

I wrote a lot of posts about American Top 40, and you can find them all by using the category menu and choosing “American Top 40.” A couple of specific 2020 posts to read: about the 1972 show guest-hosted by Dick Clark, and about the show hosted by Shadoe Stevens that I turned off before it was over.

There was plenty of the usual navel-gazing around here, including two posts about “Maggie May,” touch football, and the coming of autumn (here and here). I tried to answer a friend’s honest question: “why don’t you let stuff go?” Also, I did a podcast episode about the five nights I spent in the hospital last fall and what I learned while I was there.

And yet again, I grossly overused the editorial “we.”

Thanks for your continued patronage of this Internet feature. Thanks also for your kind words, both here, on social media, and in private messages about the new/old radio gig. All of it is much appreciated.