Surely part of the reason that I enjoyed music so much more this year is that I met my roommate, Bob, this year. Well, technically he moved in last year, but it was in December, and we know each other better now. Anyway, Bob is younger than me (he's 24, I believe) and knows about a LOT of music that I've never heard of. It's great. We'll be sitting around and he'll say, "Oh man, this is what you really need to hear right now." And he'll put on something mind-blowing. Also, his own music is pretty damn awesome, and you should listen to it (I especially like "Thoughts Are Leaves").
I can think him for introducing me to Cold Sun, Girl Talk, Pere Ubu, the Free Design, Caribou and much more. And he also played me some key Animal Collective and Jens Lekman cuts before I heard them anywhere else, adding much joy to my life.
I'm mounting a plan: I want to be a DJ on WPFW. Larry Applebaum (who, incidentally, discovered the previously unissued recording of Monk and Trane at Carnegie Hall in 1957, which is some incredible music that you should hear right now) was kind enough to give me some advice the other night about how to get into the station -- I called him while he was in the studio, amazingly remembering the phone number which I had last called months ago to score a few free tickets to Twins Jazz.
Then I called the program director and said, hey, let me on the air. Then I e-mailed him to ask for an application form. Next I'd supposedly take a training class, then, if the p.d. is down with it, I could subhost.
I would love to host a music show on FM radio. I did it at WFDD back in the day, but those shows were probably hard to listen to. I was young and idealistic--"everyone should like the music I like!"--and also not the best at delivering voice tracks. (Weird, Coltrane just came up at random on my iPod.) I think I could do a good job now. The thing is, I sometimes doubt myself because I think I might not know enough about any one genre of music to program an entire show every week. On the other hand, a few hours a week seems like a lot of time, but I know from experience that it goes by fast. My ideas about songs to play could get me by for a while.
So call WPFW and say, "Allow Mike Janssen to be on the air!" And then, I will invite you to come on my show and play one of your favorite songs, and I will interview you about it, and ask you why you like it so much. And thus we will have an interesting conversation, and I will stop writing like Junie B. Jones now.
Tonight I scored some nice used CDs at Orpheus Music in Arlington, prior to attending my Scrabble game night. A Willie Bobo comp, a Vijay Iyer disc, Steve Lacy playing Monk, a two-disc set of John Zorn's Masada live in Jerusalem in '94, and a disc of gamelan. Dudes, gamelan is the next pop music. I swear it, you're gonna turn on your radio tomorrow and hear some crazy-ass gamelan shit spewing out as the DJ says "This is the new one from Gamelan Batel!!!!!! Tune in later for our remix of the Ramayana Monkey Chant, as seen in Baraka, the summer blockbuster of 2004!"
I'm embarrassed that this is such a serious fantasy. I'm such a snob.
Currently rocking to: McCoy Tyner's solo in "Afro Blue" on Coltrane's One Down, One Up, a scary good album. As Miles Davis would say, or would he, McCoy Tyner was a motherfucker.
The clerk at Orpheus told me that they never play albums at the store, just CDs, because the turntable is covered with 150 CDs that they'd have to move. I found this quite ironic. I'd like to produce a narratorless piece for WAMU about that. Dude, I should pitch it to Metro Connection. Dude, I'm going to. Anyway, I just found that terribly ironic. And the part-time clerk was a talker, and Zappa geek, which I used to be in a half-hearted kind of way.
"Guest Host: NULL." Do you think Gary Null guest-hosted all those shows? I fricking love Gary Null. Something about his voice is like 280-grain sandpaper.
Couraje.
Posted by nedlog at December 19, 2007 10:36 PM | TrackBack