Category: Radio

Barnes is back with his Back Pages

Just in time to celebrate Bob Dylan turning 70 on Tuesday, Barnes Newberry returns to radio with My Back Pages. When? Tomorrow morning at 8! Barnes says…

Okay folks, looks like it is ON tomorrow at 8 am for the debut of My Back Pages with Barnes Newberry. Please join us online at mvyradio.com to pre-celebrate the 70th birthday of His Bobness! Thanks for all your early good wishes (to us both!) and of course, a big thanks to MVY.

WMVY is a commercial FM station on Martha’s Vineyard, and mvyradio is a public Net-only station, and that’s where Barnes will be. It has high-quality (96k) audio, and I’ll be listening on my excellent-sounding Logitech Squeezebox Radio. Note: mvyradio will be posting the complete Neil Innes show I attended last Saturday, A People’s Guide to World Domination, in its archives, and I’ll link to it when available.

Follow-up: Well, that was disappointing. There was a technical screw-up at the station and the show didn’t play over the live stream. It can be heard at this link.

The truth is out there…. waaay out there

Conspiracy theories abound, and all of them make me cover my ears and hum. Not because I don’t want to hear the “truth,” but because I don’t want to hear nonsense. Keith Allen, the father of Lily Allen, the bad girl of British Pop, has a documentary pushing the idea that Princess Diana was murdered by the Royal Family.

http://youtu.be/V5PFWc8DgFw

When has any conspiracy theory ever held up to serious examination? “Water-tight” cases were made that JFK was killed by Castro. No, wait. The Mob did it. Or was it really LBJ? Of course we didn’t actually go to the Moon. And 9/11 was an inside job. A current example is the so-called birther crowd. They demanded to see Obama’s full birth certificate from Hawaii, and when he produced it they declared it to be a fake.

Today’s Diane Rehm radio talk show featured author Jonathan Kay, who has written a book called Among the Truthers.

[audio:http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-podcasts/podcast/305/510071/136247861/WAMU_136247861.mp3|titles=Diane Rehm: Jonathan Kay ‘Among the Truthers’]

Where things get messy is with the Gulf of Tonkin and Saddam Hussein’s WMD. These have been proven to my satisfaction to have been hyped threats, with the intent of justifying military action. The problem is, from these facts people make the leap to saying that because the government has been deceitful in some instances, then FDR wanted Pearl Harbor to happen and a UFO really did crash in Roswell, New Mexico.

Barnes Newberry’s new show!

This just in from Boston-based DJ Barnes Newberry, whose radio show “Highway 61 Revisited” was part of my Saturday mornings for ten years:

RADIO NEWS! Thrilled to announce I will be on-air again very soon with my new show My Back Pages on mvyradio (mvyradio.com). Great station, fine music choices and terrific staff! Show will be Saturdays, 8 am -12 noon, available online only. All shows will be archived. Start date to be announced shortly. Please spread the word. If you were a fan of my old Highway 61 Revisited program, this will be right down your alley!

Thanks Barnes, this is great news! I’m looking forward to hearing you again. MVYradio.com is a great Internet radio station, and it has a high quality 96 Kbps audio stream. After you get started at the station I will become a member and send them some bucks in your name.

Happiness is feeling Crumb-y

A week ago I called Robert Crumb a curmudgeon, and he is, but he enjoys talking about his collection of 78 rpm records. Michael Cumella, aka MAC, snagged an in-person interview with R. Crumb for his Antique Phonograph Music Program on WFMU. The first hour of two is on the audio player, and some of it is on YouTube. MAC will post the rest of his conversation with Crumb next week.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/WFMU_Crumb.mp3|titles=WFMU – Robert Crumb talks about 78 rpm records]

Apple-cation

This quote had me spitting up my tea.

“Apple is a very canny company that doesn’t necessarily originate ideas, but its core strength is in the implementation,” said Little. “This what is what Apple is about: it may one day be a first mover, but in most cases it’s a second mover where it has implemented things across a platform and ecosystem in a much, much better way than others do it.”

It’s from this article on the Huffington Post, which has more second-guessing about Amazon’s Cloud Player service. So it’s come to this, huh? Apple is now like Microsoft — an imitator, but an excellent implementer? I don’t think Apple’s at that point yet, with the iPhone and iPad being innovative, market-leading products (I own neither). However, in a couple of recent examples, Apple has been a follower. Apple took Roku’s lead with a small, diskless streaming video player, and Amazon is offering a service that Apple doesn’t. This quote in the article also seems off-the-mark to me.

“I’m not convinced that there is a huge consumer need” being filled by the offering, said Carl Howe, director of consumer research at the Yankee Group. “I have yet to see this as a big deal for consumers. It goes back to whether consumers are looking for a cloud-based music streaming service for music they already own. Do consumers really want to pay more for music they already own?”

The first five gig on Amazon Cloud Drive are free and available for uploading whatever music files you already have — the catch being they need to be MP3’s. (Correction: AAC is also supported.) For $20/year you can get 20 GB of online music streaming. Maybe that’s not enough for an entire music library, but it’s plenty for what you’re currently into hearing. Once Amazon offers Cloud Drive access on other platforms, especially the Logitech Squeezbox Radio and Roku player, it will be servicing my consumer need very well.

Roxette’s got something on the radio

I still don’t know if I’ve ever heard something by Lady Gaga, and I’m not even sure she’s not a guy with a gimmick. But thanks to BBC Radio 2 I know about the music duo Roxette from Sweden, aka: ABBAland. When I first heard their new song, She’s Got Nothing On (But the Radio), with its great Europop sound, I was surprised to learn they’ve been cranking out tunes for 25 years.