There’s a “Bring Back Steve LeVeille” campaign. Link here. Also, a small but significant change has been made to Steve LeVeille’s homepage.
I was talking to my buddy SamJay, another former radio biz guy like myself, and I mentioned that if Steve were back on WBZ, but his start time was moved down to 1 AM, I’d have a hard time catching him, because I listened during his first hour, before going to bed. Sam pointed out that Overnight America starts at 1 AM because it’s midnight in St. Louis, so WBZ cuts the last hour for its morning drive slot. Which means that even if Jon Grayson somehow gets Boston fans, they’ll be ticked off because they can’t listen to the whole program. SamJay says the only explanation is CBS wants to ditch WBZ AM 1030, and maybe all of the stations that are carrying Overnight America, so nobody there cares, and I think he’s right.
K3 in HD! If you’ve been paying attention, and you’ve got a really good ear, you’ll recognize a snippet of a piece of music that’s been heard previously here on DogRat, and it’s not by K3. I’ll point it out later.
One more time trying to put my appreciation of K3 into perspective. I once posted the Rubettes’ song “Sugar Baby Love,” but it was lost eighteen months ago when a bug-ridden WordPress plug-in allowed my database to be destroyed, forcing me to restore from a backup. Here again is “Sugar Baby Love.”
http://youtu.be/3X7PvU6qYEA
No, I never cared in the least for The Bay City Rollers, but this I love. If I were going to write and produce a pop tune, you can bet it would sound like “Sugar Baby Love.” Next, ABBA ranks right up there with the best of the 70’s sicky-sweet stuff.
Listen to the 15+ seconds that start at :45 into the song. That’s it! For me that’s the song. Perfection! The same bit is repeated at 1:45. (The song is over a little after 2:30, but they drag it out.) If you think my liking ABBA means I would be inclined to see “Mama Mia!” then you don’t get it. It’s the song itself. How it’s put together, and how it sounds, that I appreciate. Something that’s “based upon it” is of no interest to me at all. In the case of ABBA, the “how it sounds” aspect depended completely upon the girls, Anni-Frid and Agnetha.
And now K3, in a piece I can’t praise enough. “Hart Verloren” pushes all sorts of buttons in so many ways, even with the terrible quality of this video. And I’m speaking as a confirmed disco hater from the 70’s who favored The Ramones, Elvis Costello and The Clash.
http://youtu.be/sEackIhp-O4
The people who create this stuff really know what they’re doing. But the thing that I didn’t get when I first encountered K3, but I certainly do now, is that K3 is successful not because of the formula, but because of Karen, Kristel and Kathleen. Accept no substitutes, of which there are now two sets.
Finally, another reason why I push K3 so much is the fact they’re happening NOW. I caught them before they stopped having hits, broke up, or went into semi-retirement. Not everything I write should be about the pop culture I loved when I was 10-15 years old. There’s also the fact I can’t compete with the big sites that talk about the Beatles, Marvel Comics, etc., and here in America I have K3 practically all to myself as a topic.
As a good counterpoint to the audio clip I posted with Jordan Rich introducing Steve LeVeille’s replacement, this is a brief excerpt from an interview LeVeille did a couple of years ago with Ed Walsh, when he was replacing longtime WBZ morning man Gary LaPierre.
