Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Wax Tracks

After three years of entropy, three cheers for Tim and the rest of this year's board of directors for WNMH, the most powerful high school radio station in the country and home of Tributary, our Mondays-ten-to-midnight shot at airwaves fame and invisible fortune. Not only does WNMH, serving Northfield, Gill, Keene and Brattleboro and the farms and villages where Massachusetts, New Hamshire, and Vermont intersect, finally have working turntables, they finally have amps for said turntables.

I was so overjoyed to dig out the seldom-played vinyl of my late adolescence that I decided to wax nostalgic and tell some stories of my high school years to our predominantly student audience. Improvisationally and on the spur of the moment, I staggered down memory lane to evoke three stories more antiheroic in their morality play than anything I would have chosen to write or read:

• The time I threw up in the Boston Public Library, brought on by a first taste of clove cigarettes, which I cannot smoke to this day.


• The time I managed to cut a 2 hour surrealist play down to 45 minutes, when, as the lead in Ionesco's allegorical anti-Nazi Rhinocerous, I managed to forget/never learn a fair chunk of my lines, including the entire second half of the play, without dicovery by director or castmembers, all of whom were utterly shocked during the performance and didn't speak to me for weeks afterwards.


• The time a little kid ran out into the street chasing a ball during my first try at a driving test, at which I panicked and drove up onto the curb.

Ah...good times.

As always, tonight's playlist follows. Vinyl tracks are starred; God Street Wine and Letters to Cleo were from cassettes I found cleaning out the van today.

Bob Dorough -- Too Much Coffee Man
Santana -- Oye Como Va
*John S. Hall -- Help Me
God Street Wine -- Borderline
*Elvis Costello -- Watching The Detectives
Los Lobos -- That Train Don't Stop Here Anymore
Barenaked Ladies -- Life, In A Nutshell (not the live version)
*Dinosaur, Jr -- Just Like Heaven (yes, the Cure song, on a rare 12" single etched on the entirely unplayable B-side with body parts and a box or Rice Krisps )
Patty Griffin -- Poor Man's House
*Robert Palmer -- Woke Up Laughing
Leslie King -- Money (yes, the Pink Floyd song)
Moe -- Captain America
*The Bobs -- Food To Rent
The Biscuit Boys -- You Don't Have To Do That
Letters To Cleo -- Here and Now
*The Police -- I Burn For You (from the Brimstone and Treacle soundtrack)
Emmylou Harris -- My Antonia
*Timbuk 3 -- Rev. Jack And His Roamin' Cadillac Church
Slaid Cleaves -- This Morning I Was Born Again
*Pierce Pettis -- Legacy
*Emo Philips -- Downtown Downers Grove
*Paul Simon -- Song About The Moon
*Blue Rubies -- When You Were Mine (yes, the Prince song)
*John S. Hall -- The Sandbox
Brooks Williams -- She Loves Me (When I Try)
*Bruce Cockburn -- All The Diamonds In This World
Norah Jones -- Lodestar

posted by boyhowdy | 12:38 AM |

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