WBCN: requiem for the rock

This Guy Right Here, at a WBCN event at Harper's Ferry

Note: In case you hadn’t heard, WBCN, the Rock of Boston, is closing up shop in mid-August after 41 years of broadcasting.  You probably know this, but I’m a DJ there.   This is mostly about my experience at the station – there have been plenty of obituaries written about 104.1 in the last few days.   Go read them, especially Danny Schecter’s.

It was January 2003.  I was driving back home from work, with a take-out order of egg lemon soup from the Greek place that I had ordered in hopes of fending off one of my nasty sinus infections.  I was driving on 495, it was about 5 o’clock at night, it was snowing lightly, and my phone rang.  It was my mother, telling me that she had received a phone call from Steven Strick at WBCN.

songs you don’t know: “Pork and Beans”, Weezer

Well, look, you’ve probably heard this song if you’ve had your radio on lately, but the video is what’s important here.

Remember when Weezer put The Muppets in their video for “Keep Fishin’”?  Well, this is sort of like that.  Except here, instead of Kermit and Miss Piggy, the band joins forces with the entire internet.  Yes, that’s right, the video features Kelly, the Numa Numa kid, the Star Wars kid, Miss South Carolina, Chris Crocker, the Banana from Peanut Butter Jelly Time… the list goes on and on.

It makes sense.  “Pork and Beans” is Weezer in their “hey, man, I’m gonna do my own thing and you can’t stop me” head space (also see: “The Good Life”, “In The Garage”, etc.).  Your more popular viral videos tend to feature someone ”being themselves” for the camera, as awkward and silly as they really are.  The ones that aren’t sort of “cinema verite” for the digital age are generally just really clever, which is why it’s cool to see Liam Sullivan’s “Kelly” character here as well. 

Oh, and in lieu of pyrotechnics, Weezer is playing in front of a bunch of exploding soda-and-Mentos bottles. 

on human cryopreservation and giant foam puppet heads.

You ever have one of those days where you go online to read about something, and before you know it, you’ve found yourself reading something completely different?  Today, to kill some time, I decided it would be pretty cool to learn about cryonics. 

(Wow.  That’s actually a pretty awesome pun. Cryonics?  Cool? Kill some time?  Get it?  No?  Aw, come on, man… why the cold sholder?  Haw haw…  no?  Okay.  Moving on. )

The 24 Best Songs of 2007: part two (12-1)

Here’s the rest of my Top 24 list.  Part one is over here.

12. The Good Soldier – Nine Inch Nails

Trent realizes that, yes, he did leave the gas on.

The new NIN record, Year Zero, is a sort of concept album about America in the near future after everything really goes to hell in the war on terror, and then an angel/alien shows up. (Trust me, it’s a lot better that sounds.) The album was promoted via an “alternate reality game” where people found clues and websites and flash disks with hidden songs and called weird phone numbers, and all sorts of things, which is apparently how everything is going to be promoted now. In amongst all that noise was some of the best music Trent Reznor and company had made in years, including this song, which gets inside the head of someone fighting on the front line.

songs you don’t know: “Seaweed”, The Gits

There were a lot – a lot - of “Seattle bands” who didn’t get famous. The Gits didn’t get famous.  Thing is, they probably deserved to.  If it wasn’t for one stupid, cosmically unfair crime, you’d have heard of them. If Mia Zapata, the seemingly indestructible lead singer of The Gits, hadn’t been murdered mid-way through recording their breakthrough album, you’d have heard of them.  But she was, and you haven’t, and life continues to suck.

ten songs i’m all like “gobble-gobble” about right now: november 2007 edition

See what I did there?  Because it’s Thanksgiving.  Yeah, I’m good.

Ten awesome songs, below the cut:

oh, bald headed one…

 

Last night, Amelie and I caught most of the third Smashing Pumpkins show at the Orpheum in Boston, MA. “Most of…” being the operative word, and I’ll get back to that in a second. But first, I want to share with you something Amelie wrote before the show. Her LiveJournal is mostly “friends only,” so if you’re not an LJ friend of hers, the most you’re gonna find is some entry from a year and a half ago. It makes sense, as she’s a teacher, and the last thing she needs is for one of her employers to discover her blog, where she occasionally uses words and discusses subjects inappropriate of a grade school drama teacher.

However, she gave me permission to repost this here. It’s all true, and this is why she’s a “keeper”:

Michelle Malkin hates children

There’s this kid, Graham Frost, and he was in a car accident a few months ago and was in a coma for quite some time.  When a bipartisan group of senators decided that it’d be a good idea to give health care to every child in the country, he spoke up and said that the only reason he was alive was because of the CHIP program, which provided health insurance to every kid in his state.  The Democrats had him deliver the official response to the President’s radio address.  Pandering? Sure.  But you gotta admit it was very poignant pandering.  The President gets up there, says “you don’t need this, heh heh heh,”  and he’s followed by a child’s voice saying “the only reason I’m here is because of a similar program.”  Pwned, Dubya.  Pwned. 

So, what did the right wing noise machine do?  Why, they attack him, of course.  They published his address online.  They released personal information about his family, claiming that they were rich and lazy and leeching off of your tax dollars and didn’t need any help from the CHIP program, and called him a liar.  He has recieved death threats.  He’s twelve years old.

That’s his radio address.  Reeeeeal subversive stuff, kid. 

Michelle Malkin described him as the son of an executive vice-president.   Yeah, Michelle.  He’s the son of an executive vice-president who’s family income is still only $45,000 a year.  In other words, they’re not poor, but they can’t afford health insurance.  You know why they can’t afford health insurance?  Because health insurance is ridiculously, unnecessarily expensive on account of deregulation.  Thanks, Reaganomics.   

So Graham Frost and his now brain-damaged sister go to a private school, but they do so on a scholarship, and there are lots of poorer kids who go to private schools.  Parochial schools, for example, like Catholic schools, count as private schools.  I went to a Catholic school for third grade, and my parents were no one’s idea of “rich.”  We weren’t poor growing up, we were solidly middle class, belonging to the same tax bracket as most of the pissed off white people that make up the right wing radio/blog audience in this country.

If that audience would sit and think for five seconds, they’d realize that, hey, maybe attacking this kid by saying his parents are rich and lazy isn’t such a good idea, because if their kids got into a car crash, they’d be screwed too.  If they sat and thought for ten seconds, they might realize that this economically tentative situation could not be blamed on Barbara Streissand or Michael Moore or Hillary Clinton.  Fifteen seconds of good solid thinkin’ might lead ‘em to think that just maaaybe Michelle Malkin and her ilk just might be full of it.

sometimes my job is pretty cool

Yeah, so we just hired Iann Robinson (formerly of MTV/MTV2) as a DJ on WBCN.  He’s an exceptionally nice dude who truly loves music and knows his stuff.

 Tonight, Hardy called me in the middle of his shift.  He had to leave due to a family emergency and, as I am a whore who’ll do anything for a buck a good friend and dedicated employee, I hopped on my bike and high-tailed it to the station to take over.  And there was Iann, learning the ropes.   He’s done lots of TV, but not so much radio, so I was showing him how to take calls and run the board and he wound up co-hosting my show for two hours. 

So, despite not knowing where I’m going to live at the end of the week, and having a sore throat, and being generally pissed at the world at large, and having a LOT of packing to do…. tonight was pretty cool.

WBCN Band Camp, 2007

WBCN Band Camp, our big summer concert, happened yesterday at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston. I spent most of the day sneaking into the front two rows to take photos – it’s crazy how much you can get away with if you have a laminated pass. So yeah, I took the picture above, which would be a perfect concert photo if not for the arm.

You can check them out over at Flickr - unfortunately, no Incubus pictures, because I had to leave early. Lots of Perry Farrell going crazy-go-nuts, though, as well as The Bravery, B.R.M.C, and Township.

Here’s one of my faves, as a taster.  It’s the guitarist from The Bravery.