May 18, 2009 - Girls, Girls, Girls.....songs!

Last Friday night I was talking to John while he was on his way home. On the way he stopped for a 6-pack of beer and a couple Barbie coloring books. One of those things was for him and the other was for his 5-year old daughter. I'm still trying to figure out which one went to whom. Because of the Barbie books, I brought up the John Hiatt song, The Wreck Of The Barbie Ferrari. That song got us on to the topic of "girl" songs. Because of that conversation, I decided that this week's theme should be songs with girls names in the title. Since the guest this week was Julie Peel, it all sort of fell together. Unfortunately, Barbie didn't make the cut. I'm saving her for a different show.


On Saturday morning I started pulling music out to send to John and after about five minutes, I already had over 40 songs to send. If I delve deeper into my collection, I'm sure I could come up with a couple hundred more songs, but with 40+ songs to start, I'm sure I will be revisiting this theme several times in the near future.

The Julie Peel interview was pretty interesting. John, as usual, had technical problms at the beginning, but fortunately, everything was worked out and the interview went well. Because the school year has finished, that guy whose name I won't use will not be on the air after us. That means we can run past 10:00pm if we feel like it, and we did. We started with Glen Burtnik about 9:15pm and ended with Frank Zappa around 10:25pm. I got to play 11 of the 15 songs that I sent for the week, which is pretty good. Here is what I played:


Glen Burtnick - Here Comes Sally
The Men - Goodnight Sally
The Spongetones - Lana-Nana
Brian Charles - Christine
Psychodots - Stella
Don Dixon - Helen
Jason Falkner - Wicked Annabella
The Pursuit Of Happiness - Carmalina
Steve Wynn - Carolyn
Richard X. Heyman - Pauline
Frank Zappa - Sharleena


Last week, John threw out a song lyric and asked if anyone knew who it was. It was from Come Dancing by The Kinks. I thought is was too easy and I knew that if anyone in my family was listening, they would get it immediately. My sister Debbie was listening and she agreed that it was too easy. Because of that, I had to play Jason Falkner's cover of the great "unknown" Kinks classic off one of the best Kinks album ever: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society.


I've also been threatening for a year now to play some Frank Zappa. Tonight seemed like a good time to finally do it. Frank recorded two versions of Sharleena. The first one came out in 1970 on the album Chunga's Revenge and the remake came out in 984 on the album Them Or Us. I chose the newer version because it featured a guitar solo by a then 14-year old Dweezil Zappa. Now that Dweezil is touring the world playing Frank's music, it seemed fitting. It was also the last song of the night, so who knows if anyone was still listening at that point. I will be playing the 1970 version at some point in the future.


My very first show was May 19, 2008, which means that I have now been doing this for a year. There will be no show next week because next Monday is Memorial Day. So, on June 1st we will officially celebrate my 1st anniversary on the show. John has told me I get the whole show again and I will most likely head down to Virginia to do the show live with him once again. I've got a few ideas what I want to do for the anniversary show. You can count on some music by some of the bands that I feature regularly, including The BB's, Psychodots and Don Dixon. Other than that, I'm thinking of going back to my mid to late 90's NYC music past an playing some of the bands that I saw regularly like Cheater, Grummer, Valentine Smith, Blood Sugar, Julia Greenberg, The Gravel Pit and others. Hopefully I can get some of those people to tune in and listen on June 1st. It should be a good show. I'm definitely looking forward to it. See you in two weeks!


(instead of posting pictures from the artists that I played this week, I chose to keep with the theme and post pictures that I have taken of several of my female friends. If they see their picture, then at least I know that they have checked the blog out at least once. What kind of comments will I get? Probably none, but you never know...)

Update- I changed one of the pictures at their request, so now you are stuck with my face in here too. Sorry about that!