More miscellany...

SO LONG, "BUD"
Was saddened to learn of the death of Calvert DeForest, aka Larry "Bud" Melman of David Letterman Show fame.  He was a funny little dude in the same way the late Jackie Wright was on "The Benny Hill Show"—he was the little bald man Benny was constantly slapping on the head—just by way of his mannerisms and facial expressions, not to mention that goofy voice of his!  "Bud" died Monday at the age of 85 in New York.  Rest in peace, "Bud"...

OH, THE PAIN…
Had a real bad headache early yesterday afternoon at work that seemed to coincide with Dubya’s visit to Kansas City to waste good taxpayer money on his security escort just to make a speech that no one believes anyway to a bunch of auto workers who will probably be laid off next week.  Headache went away as soon as he left town.  I seem to remember that Daphne on "Frasier" had a similar affliction every time Lillith came to Seattle…

"SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS…
…makes me sunburned…Sunshine in my eyes can make me blind…"  That’s my #2 all-time John Denver parody.  I think it was Arte Johnson on some variety show (Sonny & Cher, maybe?) back in the mid-‘70s.

Here’s my # 1 all-time John Denver parody, courtesy of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Just scan down to the one at the bottom of the page. Not quite as funny since he actually died, though…

And here’s my #3 below:   Don't mean to pick on JD—just having a little fun here.  I’ve actually learned a new respect for his music over the years, even though I do admit to ripping on him pretty good back in the day—it was very uncool to be a John Denver fan when I was in Jr. High in the late ‘70s!  Songs like "Take Me Home, Country Roads" and "Rocky Mountain High" certainly hold up well after 30 some-odd years, and I think the very underrated "Calypso" was John’s finest hour. I can honestly say that yodeling never sounded better to me than it does on that record, and it’s a really beautiful song. Ol’ Jacques Gusto was surely humbled by it, too.

CLASSIC MISHEARD LYRIC #19
"(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction"—ROLLING STONES (1965) "I’m watching my TV, and a man comes on and tells me how white my shirts could be…"  Dopey me—I actually thought Mick was referring to some bigoted TV preacher making some sort of racial commentary, "how white my church could be."  After all, that song did come out during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.

FUNNY STORY
Was reminded today of a humorous incident about ten years ago when I worked in the x-ray film library at St. Luke’s Hospital.  I was standing in the file room one day near the "J’s", when one of the resident docs. (a male) comes up beside me and says, "Excuse me, I just need to squeeze in here and grab one of these Johnsons."  To which I replied, "Fine, so long as you don’t grab mine…"

Great Moments In Radio, Vol. VII

The worst seque from one song to another in the history of radio occurred one afternoon in early June, 1989 on K-JO 105 FM in St. Joseph, MO, barely more than 24 hours after I’d handed in my notice there.  Imagine, if you will, grooving to Deep Purple’s "Smoke On The Water" (the infinitely superior live Made In Japan version, no less) and then being abruptly thrown into Wham’s "Careless Whisper".  I’m not making this up—it really happened.  The crowd noise following Ritchie Blackmore’s climactic crashing chord hadn’t even begun to fade when the listener was immediately launched into the lush saxophone intro to one of the wimpiest songs of the ‘80s—talk about stripping one’s musical gears!  One of my biggest pet peeves with radio stations is when they play a hard-rocking song, then bring you crashing back down to earth with something wussy next.  There’s such a thing as FLOW, and I always made sure to put on something like The Doors’ "Love Me Two Times" after a really heavy song to cushion the fall before playing something wimpy.  The DJ who executed the above bon mot seque—whom I’ll simply refer to as "Mildred" to avoid lawsuits—knew absolutely nothing about flow.

Since I’m on the subject anyway, it’s time for me to take out some mental garbage here and vent my wrath on a couple people at my former radio station whom I never properly told to "piss off!"  It’s kinda long, and a bit self-indulgent, so I’ll leave it up to you, gentle reader, whether to pass or play…

Mildred is a woman I have precious few good things to say about.  At the time I worked with her, she was a late-30-something Bette Midler wanna-be who would often go around the station singing "Wind Beneath My Wings", and was our music director at K-JO—in name only, that is.  She’s one of these people who wanted all the glory in radio, but didn’t want any of the work that went with it—sort of a female equivalent of Dr. Smith on "Lost In Space".  She was not only lazy, but chronically late.  In fact, after my very first airshift ever at K-JO, she was due to follow me on the air at 6AM on Saturday, and I actually had to call her at home and wake her up around 6:15—having never even MET the woman before!  She was quite the partier too, and I seem to remember she had a penchant for calling in sick a lot, for a variety of excuses—everything from hangovers to hangnails.  She and I never really hit it off, and our working relationship was strained, at best, throughout my brief tenure there.

What drove a permanent wedge between me and Mildred was her PM drive shift show appropriately called the "Afternoon Barnyard"—you always felt like you'd stepped in something while listening to it!  On the AM side in the weeks leading up to the big format switcheroo (see my January 27th entry "Radio Ga-Ga, Part 2" for the details on that), she and another jock whom I’ll call "Dork" tried (and failed miserably) to really yuk it up on their show with these half-baked David Letterman Top Ten List rip-offs, many of which included jokes at MY expense!  I’m not talking good-natured ribbing here, but rather snarky sophomoric barbs about things I did on the air, including my nightly rundown of the hockey and basketball scores.  In my defense, what else did I have to talk about at 2:00 in the morning, the fucking dew point?!?  Now I can take a joke, and I sure don’t mind a little harmless jibe or two directed my way now and then, but this shit got downright vicious and personal towards me at times, and it was totally uncalled-for.  It’s one thing to razz someone from a rival station, but have you ever heard of radio personalities constantly targeting someone from their own station?  I took it up with the station manager and he got Mildred and Dork to cease and desist aiming their verbal bazookas at me, but the damage was already done.  I never even received an apology from either one of them...

Just as an aside, Dork—an average DJ, at best—is another phony person I encountered along the way in radio.  Tipping the scales at well over 325 pounds, Dork did a ludicrous series of commercials for some weight loss outfit in which he bragged about how many pounds and inches he’d supposedly lost.  "Look behind you, Dork, and you’ll find them," I would often grumble to myself as I played those ads on the air.  Many’s the night I had to clean up after this Neanderthal, as he’d always trash the studio with empty Dorito bags, candy bar wrappers and Mountain Dew cans.  He also made the mistake of leaving copies of his resume that he was shopping around to other stations laying around the studio one night, one of which I still have in my possession.  He puffed his experience and credentials up more than the Michelin Man, and it was laughable how he claimed to single-handedly "bring in strong numbers" during his airshifts.  I hadn’t seen a load of bullshit like that since that time the manure truck fell over on the highway—his ratings were no better than mine were on graveyard shift!  But I digress…

Getting back to Mildred, her exploits were fairly humorous.  She did not use her regular speaking voice on the air, but rather she put on this fake macho bravado tough-broad tone that made her sound like Pinky Tuscadero from "Happy Days" (minus the Brooklyn accent), thus rendering her kinda butch and slutty-sounding at the same time.  I never understood why she didn’t just use her regular speaking voice, which was actually quite pretty—think Roz on "Frasier", only more soft-spoken.  Hell, about the highest compliment I can give Mildred is that she had a lovely speaking voice in normal conversation.  She could have excelled at being a phone sex operator—she probably does now, come to think of it!  I also loved how she would mispronounce easy words when she did commercials, like "cooking", which came out "KOOKing", and "Jacuzzi", which she pronounced "ja-CUE-zi"!

Among her other peccadilloes, Mildred often would borrow equipment from the station to do her own personal moonlighting DJ gigs, and one Tuesday evening in November, she came barging into the studio and proceeded to unplug the cassette player that I was currently using to record election returns for later broadcast.  I found out later after I left the station for good that she went around claiming that she "blew me out" (that’s radio talk for "fired"), which is a total fucking lie—I resigned that job and everybody in the building knew I was going to before it happened.  I can honestly state that I have NEVER been fired from any job in my life, either.  Oh well, what goes around comes around, because about a year or so after my departure, Mildred got knocked up by one of the part-time weekend DJs there, thus her partying days came to a crashing halt.  Not long after that, Mildred got fired after she was caught in a big lie over some equipment she "borrowed" from the station and never returned, as well as attempting to gaslight my good friend Easy Earl by trying to implicate him for it.  Earl is as honest as Joan Rivers is ugly, and the station manager knew he wasn’t lying when Mildred tried to make him take the rap for her misdoings, so they booted her lazy ass out the door.  When I heard that piece of news, I laughed.  Hard.

What a waste of pretty red hair, too…

Ad Nauseam

NCAA TOURNEY UPDATE
Well, in spite of my poor showing during Friday's games, 10 out of my Sweet Sixteen teams are still in the show, thus I have only one less team remaining than ESPN's Dan Patrick.  Unfortunately, Wisconsin isn't one of them, so there goes my Final Four. I still say UNC's gonna win it all...

CLASSIC MISHEARD LYRIC #18
"You Don’t Mess Around With Jim"—JIM CROCE (1972) "…and you better believe they sung a different kind of story with Big Jim hit the floor." I always he was referring to a newspaper and said, "you better believe the Sunday Journal got a story…"

Man, could that dude write some great songs, or what?  He died long before he would have peaked, I think.  And why the filth-flarn-filth isn't HE in the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame yet?

NUMBER 32!
You can add American Beauty to my Top 30 Most Overrated Movie list.  I just watched it yesterday for the first time, and I'd really like a detailed explanation about how this piece of cinematic caca won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2000.  There was not one single solitary likeable character in this whole blasted film!  Kevin Spacey is kind of a weasel too, and I think Annette Bening is way overrated.  I actually liked Borat better than this disasterpiece.  Yeesh!

EXTREME MAKEOVER-COURTROOM EDITION
Check out the spectre of Phil(lis) Spector all this week on Court TV!

Randy Rhoads, 1956-1982

March, 1982 was a rough month in the entertainment world.  John Belushi died on March 5, and it was 25 years ago today we lost one of the most phenomenal Rock guitar players of all-time, Mr. Randy Rhoads.  With all of Ozzy Osbourne’s notoriety, Rhoads has been virtually forgotten over the years, and I find that very sad.  He was the Stevie Ray Vaughan of heavy metal, both in terms of his musical prowess and the manner in which he died, and to lose him at the age of 25 was a crushing blow for Rock ‘N’ Roll.

When Ozzy first went solo in late 1980, I couldn’t stand him.  I hadn’t really gotten in to the back catalog of Black Sabbath yet (all I knew of them at the time was "Iron Man" and "Paranoid" and the newer stuff with Dio on vocals), and I was pretty repulsed by Ozzy’s biting-the-head-off-the-dove thing.  "Crazy Train" really didn’t really blow me away at first, either, but when I first heard that chugga-chugga-chugga intro riff from "I Don’t Know", I was immediately hooked!  I said, "Whoa—who is that guitar player?"  Not long after that, the second album, Diary Of A Madman, came out with "Over The Mountain", "Flying High Again" and "You Can’t Kill Rock ‘N’ Roll", and I realized then that this guy was something special.  Randy played so aggressively, yet very melodically at the same time, and made some amazing sounds with his fingers, not unlike Jimi Hendrix once did.  Even I had forgotten that Randy was in the original lineup of Quiet Riot—I’ve never heard any of that material before.  The man was an amazing talent, yet he’s never truly been given his due.

Based on everything I’ve heard and read about him, Randy Rhoads was a really good human being, too.  Mature beyond his years, and seemingly totally devoid of ego, he wasn’t your stereotypical arrogant Rock star partier, and he didn’t allow Ozzy’s legendary excesses to corrupt him.  He had a steady girlfriend and was real close with his mom, too.  With all the assholes (Axl Rose), talent-less posers (Kid Rock) and overblown egos (David Coverdale) in Rock ‘N’ Roll, it sucks that much more when the truly good guys like RR are taken away so soon—S.R.V., Eric Carr of Kiss and Jim Croce being a few other prime examples.  What’s worse, Randy’s death was so utterly senseless!  By all accounts, RR had an aversion to flying, so why the hell was he even on that plane in the first place?  And of course, the pilot had a couple major malfunctions, A) his pilot’s license had expired, and B) he had Cocaine in his system—a fine time to go around buzzing the trees and the parked tour bus that Ozzy was sleeping in.  We could have lost Ozzy that day too.  What an absolutely needless waste…

One wonders what Randy Rhoads might have gone on to do in his career.  I imagine he would have eventually outgrown Ozzy and/or grown tired of his shenanigans and either formed his own band or had a successful solo career—a Ted Nugent of the '80s, if you will (minus the arrogant macho bravado).  Hell, it's no big stretch to think he would have easily supplanted Eddie Van Halen and the ultimate Rock guitar god. In any event, he’s deeply missed.