Another week closer to summer, the blog turns its mind to those carefree days with the window down when songs jumped out the radio at you. Enjoy!
First Word
As trailed last week, logistics mean that the blog has been prepared to a theme this week with the added benefit of (slightly) less verbose ramblings – huzzah! However, if anything major has happened in the last seven days, say like the Co-Op Arena in Manchester actually putting on a gig, it’s not going to get covered.
The blog did a radio theme a while back so this time round I’m going for a similar but subtly different theme of songs about the ubiquitous disc jockey. Yup, the people that choose the choons, the shysters that shuffle the shellac and the idiots that often talk over the good bit in the record because they think it’s all about them. Looking at the type of songs that have made the playlist, they’re nearly all about radio DJs with one referring to a club DJ thrown in for good measure. Not surprisingly, it’s a bit old school so those waiting for Pon de Replay are going to be sadly disappointed…
Rex Bob Lowenstein – Mark Germino (1991)
I don’t know where I first heard this song but I bought the single in 1991 so I guess it must have been on the radio somewhere. It was first recorded by North Carolina-born country rock singer Mark Germino as an acoustic ballad for his 1987 album Caught In The Act Of Being Ourselves and released as a single which did nothing sales-wise. Four years later, Germino hooked up with a band and released an LP called Radartown credited to Mark Germino and The Sluggers. He must have believed in this tune as he recorded it again, this time with the band filling it out to a country rock tune with a thumping snare beat. Still wasn’t a hit though.
For me, it’s all about the story Germino tells of a morning DJ on local radio station W.A.N.T, who is clearly at the heart of the community. A guy who loves a wide range of music and connects emotionally with his listeners: “And his name is Rex Bob Lowenstein/He’s forty-seven, goin’ on sixteen/His request line’s open but he makes no bones/About why he plays Madonna after George Jones.” But, of course, The Man hovers into view demanding a more commercial approach from the station and insisting that the DJs play “the song list we send in the mail”. Inevitably it’s all to much for Rex and things get messy but listen for the lovely touch with the judge’s request and then lyrical play-out on the call sign of the station. Germino produces a rose-tinted love letter to how radio should be and it’s all great stuff.
D.J. – David Bowie (1979)
Maybe too easy a choice to make for the playlist, this was the second single to be lifted from the third album in Bowie’s so-called Berlin trilogy. The Lodger was released in June 1979 and I say ‘so-called’ because, unlike Heroes and Low, most of the LP was recorded in Montreux in Switzerland. Interestingly, they worked in the studio that was re-built on the site of the famous fire in 1971 that Deep Purple wrote about in Smoke On The Water. Written by Bowie with Brian Eno and guitarist Carlos Alomar and co-produced by Bowie and Tony Visconti, it is often said that the layered sound of D.J. is modelled on Talking Heads. Bowie’s vocal delivery does have shades of David Byrne about it but it’s Adrian Belew’s guitar that dominates the song, with shards of sound cutting across the bubbling bass beat throughout. His guitar track was cut and pasted together by Visconti from multiple different takes in the studio, which gives it that jumpy sharp angularity.
Written in the 70s long before the rise of the likes of Fatboy Slim and Calvin Harris in the ‘DJ as celebrity lead musician culture’ we have now, Bowie’s lyric could be seen as prescient: “I am a DJ/I am what I play/I’ve got believers/Believing me”. At the time of its release, I was just beginning to do a bit of hobby DJ-ing for friend’s parties, earning a few extra bob for supplementing my ever increasing singles collection. Getting the records to cross-fade was as great a DJ skill as I ever learned. In the early 80s, I do recall trying to do some scratching and sampling between the two decks and I was woeful at it!
Final trivia point – the rigid use of the full stops in the title of the track on the record’s label (if not the sleeve!) is rumoured to be at Bowie’s insistence as they were the initials of his given name, David Jones.
Satellite Radio – Steve Earle (2007)
When Steve Earle bade farewell to Nashville (the Guitar Town of his acclaimed debut LP) and moved to New York City in the mid 2000s, he had just released two of the most politically powerful records of his career in Jerusalem and The Revolutions Starts Now. His newly adopted city begat a much more mellow and introspective view of life in Washington Square Serenade. He hooked up with producer John King of The Dust Brothers and his use of beats rather than traditional drums caused some consternation with the Americana fan base. However, while it might have jarred on some tunes, when the quality of the songwriting was high enough it didn’t really matter. For example, the red-tailed hawk’s view of the Big Apple on Down Here Below and the gorgeous duet with Allison Moorer (Mrs Earle the seventh) on Days Aren’t Long Enough. Despite all the naysaying, it won the 2008 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album.
Satellite Radio tells the story of a dedicated DJ broadcasting to the universe through the then relatively new border-crossing format of satellite radio, which still remains popular in the US today, even in the days of internet radio and streaming services. I get the sense that the DJ has moved from a local FM radio station and he is finding the change in scale slightly disconcerting. Taking a lead from the home page of this blog, Earle’s DJ asks: “Is there anybody out there? One-two-three on the satellite radio?/Big daddy on the air, are you listening to me on the satellite radio?/At the galaxy’s end where the stars burn bright, are you tunin’ in and turnin’ on?”. In 2008, Earle became a DJ himself on the largest US satellite radio station Sirius XM and has been broadcasting his Hardcore Troubadour Radio Show on there ever since.
Just to return to the question on the blog homepage, it is actually not nicked from Steve Earle but from another musical source closer to home, but naturally more obscure. Sometime in 1986, Lynn and I saw Glaswegian singer-songwriter and artist, Peter Nardini, supporting someone at a gig – I forget who and where! He was excellent and I immediately bought his LP full of beautifully observed, witty tunes called Is There Anybody Out There? where the title track follows up with the “Am I talking to myself?” line. So now you know…
Last Night A DJ Save My Life – Indeep (1982)
Taking me right back to those days where I might have referred to myself as a DJ without blinking an eye, this is a fantastic record with an absolute belter of a bass-driven rhythm track. A stonewall ‘floor filler’, as those of us in the turntable trade were rather embarrassingly wont to say! Released on the Sound Of New York record label, it was written and recorded by a guy called Michael Cleveland with two backing singers, one of whom was Rejane Magloire who went on to sing for Belgian techno-house outfit Techntronic of Pump Up The Jam fame. Last Night features some fairly pedestrian rapping by Cleveland and some gloriously cheesy sound effects which somehow add to the tune when they really shouldn’t. The toilet flush on the line “Said away goes trouble down the drain” is laugh out loud funny, it’s so naff.
This was the group’s only hit reaching No13 in the UK. The 12inch version not only came with the usual vocal and instrumental tracks but also with a track full of all the sound effects used on the record to encourage DJs to get creative and mix them into other records at the appropriate bell ringing and lavatorial moments. The original vocal version has been remixed and re-released several times over the years since it first appeared. There was one released as recently as April 2023 which went under title Smeddles More Ass Mix which rocketed along at about 128bpm compared with the more languid, but still very danceable, 112bpm of the original. I hope you are all impressed with my DJ terminology there!
Capital Radio – The Clash (1977)
So this is where I am maybe stretching the DJ angle too close to the previous radio theme but I would argue that Joe Strummer’s introductory shout of “Yes, it’s time for the Dr Goebbels Show!” makes it qualify on this occasion when it fell off the list the last time round. Long before Capital nominated themselves as “The UK’s No 1 Hit Music Station”, the station was launched in London in 1973 as one of Britain’s first two commercial radio stations with a general brief to entertain Londoners. The other being London Broadcasting (LBC) which was licenced to provide news to the capital’s residents. To redress this geographical imbalance, the next station to be licenced 12 months later was Radio Clyde, bringing us they…erm… joy of Tiger Tim!
Capital soon moved to a music only format which, with the need to keep advertising revenue up, took no risks whatsoever in its choice of music – see Rex Bob Lowenstein above! Strummer saw a huge missed opportunity for a diverse capital city music station reflecting the people of London and penned this diatribe which finishes with a play on the station’s strap line – ‘in tune with London’ of course became ‘in tune with nothing’. The songs main riff is lifted from The Who’s I Can’t Explain and the ending riff is a variation on the one in the Small Faces tune I’m Only Dreaming.
Recorded in Feb 1977, the single was never released commercially but was given away with if you had a coupon from the NME and one of a limited number of red sticker inserts from the band’s recently released first LP. My hunch is that all those red stickers went on the copies sent to London shops because I sure as hell didn’t get one in my copy and I was pretty fast out the traps!
W.O.L.D – Harry Chapin (1974)
It’s the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that we have to thank for the call-signs attributed to radio stations in America. Internationally, the US has been allocated K, N and W as the initial letter of their call signs and in 1923 the FCC began allocating K signs to broadcasters on the west half of the country and W signs to those on the east. Strikes me as a slightly counter-intuitive choice but it is what it is. And this is how Mark Germino devised his W.A.N.T station for the lyrics of Rex Bob Lowenstein and suggests why New York-born Harry Chapin imagines his mythical radio station commencing with a W. It certainly confused by early teenage mind when this guy was singing about a radio station with letters as it’s name when I was listening to the single on something called Radio 1.
Singer songwriter and social activist Chapin is much better known for his US No1 single Cat’s In The Cradle from his 1974 LP Verities & Balderdash, a much played album in my old friend Mark’s collection. W.O.L.D was Chapin’s only UK hit (reaching a modest No34) but it came from his previous LP Short Stories. I have always been a sucker for a good story song and this one about an ageing DJ trying to earn a living in a young person’s world caught my young ear. However, it was many years before I got the O.L.D. reference in the title! The story plays out as a phone call to his ex-wife as he arrives back in his hometown with his latest job. During the call he confesses how his life has passed him by as he has travelled the country eeking out a meagre living on the radio. Having her ear, he launches his pitch: “I’ve been thinking that I should stop disc-jockeying and start that record store/maybe I could settle down if you’d take me back once more”. Of course, she has found someone else and as he is painfully rebuffed. The song ends with his hollow claim that it’s OK as he’s happy playing his records but we all know that’s not true. Yeah, its schmaltzy but it’s beautifully done.
Last Word
The blog will be back on the week-related nonsense next week but studying the calendar in the next few months there are going to be opportunities for a couple of guest blogs in June. These have been a great success in the past so if there is anyone out there who has the urge to pick six tunes and write a few words on why they like them, then please get in touch. It certainly doesn’t need to match my Tolstoy-length ramblings and also requires no knowledge of the software – just a passion for the music.
The DJs in this week’s list of six songs have been sent to join all the other tunes in the virtual chart rundown of the Master Playlist. Not ‘arf, as Fluff Freeman might have said…
AR
Week In Sound 
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