For Easter this year I headed out back west. I had booked the flight back in December of last year when my son and I couldn't get affordable tickets to Los Angeles. It pays to book early, so we decided to come out for the Spring. In addition to seeing my family, I also got to see my girl, the lovely Wendy. She is moving out to join me in Indianapolis in a few months but we've been doing the long-distance-relationship thing... and it's going great. I think it mostly has to do with being friends for a long time before we ever entertained the idea of getting closer: she and I have known each other for over 25 years. Another person I've known for quite some time-- although not as long --is Coolhouse  vocalist Dolly Ramirez. Our bond is closer to 14 years, but in that time I've seen her go through a few marriages and many different bands. Now, she has joined up with a longtime friend of hers, the other half of Coolhouse: JJ Schoch, a multi-instrumentalist...

I haven't seen  Passing Strange  on the stage yet, but I did watch the movie directed by Spike Lee. I felt a special stake in the production, as it was written and composed by Stew aka Mark Stewart, a singer/songwriter/musician hailing from Los Angeles whose band The Negro Problem was one of my favorite bands of the '90's. Continuing with my focus on obscure small bands that never made the leap to mainstream success, this one is a little different, seeing that Stew won a Tony (Best Book) for his rock musical extravaganza. It always feels good to see something you championed way back in the day get the attention you always knew it deserved. Stew's songwriting talent has been criminally overlooked for far too long, and the success of the musical has only emboldened him to create new and more things for the public to consume and digest. 'Tis a pity The Negro Problem didn't make it to the big time (they toured with the likes of Counting Crows but never rea...

Continuing in the same vein as the past few podcasts, this week's entry is about a three-piece band from the East Coast (Delaware area to be precise) called Papas Fritas. They were on the Minty Fresh label (same as The Cardigans) and I saw them open for a number of bands during the Nineties at small venues in L.A. In addition to opening for The Cardigans, who were riding high on their  single "Lovefool"  which was also featured in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet movie, they also opened for Blur, The Eels, and The Sugarplastic, whom I featured in Hour 30 a few weeks back. They seem to be largely inactive now so listing their links seems almost pointless, but they can be found on  Facebook , which doesn't appear to have been updated since 2016. However, they are worth checking out as all their albums are available  for purchase online. I was a big fan of them, and I re-ignited my interest in them when they guested on  Yo Gabba Gabba   in 2011. The po...

I bought the album Not In Kansas Anymore by ' 90s alt-rap band Basehead  around the same time I was creating a live rap group of my own with my buddy Syndrome. I was a little disappointed that Basehead wasn't really a full-fledged hip-hop group, but it also made me like the music more. It was far more original than I figured, and helped us to forge ahead with our musically adventurous vision of using live instruments behind dope lyrics. Michael Ivey still sticks by his eccentric, eclectic agenda, albeit now it is tempered with a healthy dose of religious and spiritual proselytizing. It's still an unconventional mix of the sacred and the profane, and I am taking time today to pay tribute to Ivey and his one-of-a-kind style. In a day and age where rappers are being accused of mumbling and not being particularly braggadocious, Ivey's influence is both completely understandable and also inadvertently baffling. When the album  Play With Toys  debuted in the early ...

I know, it's been a while... haven't done this podcast since mid-December 2017! So this is the official first podcast of 2018, and for once I've decided to keep the running time in the half hour range... 34 minutes to be exact. I also had a bit of an epiphany over my short hiatus, having moved residences and in the process rediscovered albums from bands that are no more or never had a big profile to begin with... I've decided to devote the first podcasts of this new year to the bands I love that sort of got lost between the cracks of pop cultural awareness. The Sugarplastic  was (and still is, apparently) an alt-pop band from L.A. that I used to watch play live at various hip bars and clubs in the mid-90s. I still listen to their Geffen debut,  Bang, The Earth Is Round , religiously and now that I am a Hoosier and no longer an Angeleno I feel a certain ( ugh ) nostalgia for those days of smoking in venues and braving terrible hipster rock openers just to hear a ...

So I skipped my podcast last week-- I was entertaining a special friend from out of town and didn't have the time nor the gumption to sit down and make this list, as easy as it seems to be. In case you aren't aware, I am making a mixtape version of covers of songs from The Beatles aka The White Album. The previous podcast consisted of Part One, which is composed of songs from Sides 1 & 2 of the famous double album. This week covers Part Two, which is Sides 3 & 4. In actual fact, this particular mixtape project was more difficult than I expected it to be, simply because I second-guessed nearly every single song I decided to use. In terms of comparison to the original playlist I'd made, a little over half of them survived the transition to this new mixtape. I discovered so many better renditions of songs from the White Album that I had a hard time deciding on which ones to use. In some cases I also had to re-record several different versions of the same song...

Back in the day, my friends and I liked to make themed mixtapes and mix CDs. Themes were challenging to make because we couldn't be accused of just haphazardly throwing them together. (One lazy way of putting a mixtape together was to basically plunder someone else's mixtape, particularly the tape of someone whom the recipient had never met) A theme meant that you'd taken more time, energy and thought than normal in assembling the mix. It wasn't just songs you liked-- they had to fit the criterion you'd established for yourself. One of the best theme mixtapes I ever made was based on a friend's idea: he decided to make an "Off-White Album" based on alternate versions of songs from The Beatles' White Album (which, as every serious fan knows, is titled simply The Beatles ) that he culled from the Beatles Anthology 3 collection mixed in with songs from the actual album. I went one further and made a mix composed of covers of the songs from the W...