Bill Hick’s Banned Letterman Performance: Dave Makes Good

David Letterman has always been quoted as saying that he regrets allowing the late, great Bill Hick’s 1983 routine to be censored from the broadcast. The bit was about abortion, not exactly the kind of comedy that network suits and the sponsors that own them like to have on during valuable airtime.

But, for whatever reason, Letterman not only had Hick’s mother Mary on his show to talk about it, he allowed the censored standup routine to play.

pt. 2

pt.3

Here it is. Watch it before it gets censored by YouTube prowling CBS weasels.

This is weird to me, because I had just that day turned a coworker onto Bill Hicks and he ended up reading about him on Wikipedia and told me about the impending appearance on Letterman.

EBN – Laurence Welk is Dead

An oldie but a goodie

Dead Air: A Tribute to Those Who Have Flown Away in 2008

This is cool. The Autonomy Hour and The Outside World are having a two-night celebration of the many cool people who have checked out in 2008:

Here’s a list of 2008’s graduating class as compiled by our travelling trubador Brian Cutean:

3 drummers
buddy miles
jimmy carl black
mitch mitchell

4 singers
yma sumac
odetta
miriam makeba
eartha kitt (santa baby just went gold this year)

5 scribes
studs terkel
alexander solzhenitsyn
forrest j ackerman
hayden carruth
harold pinter

3 court jesters
dick martin (of rowan and)
george carlin
bernie mac
Rudy Ray Moore

originals/irreplaceables
albert hoffman
utah phillips
bo diddley
issac hayes
maharishi mahesh yogi
freddy hubbard
vampira
larry harmon
davey graham
rick wright
jimmy mc griff
Majel Barrett Roddenberry

and lest we forget
neil aspinall
bobby durham
dock ellis
teo macero
erik darling
sonny okosun
alan gordon (happy together, she’d rather be with me, she’s my girl)
vincent ford (no woman, no cry +3 tunes from rastaman vibration)
oliver schroer
lloyd thaxton
joe beck
john stewart
al wilson
merl saunders
levi stubbs (four tops lead singer)
eddy arnold
jeff healey
mike smith (dave clark five lead singer)
jo stafford
joe feeney (of lawrence welk show)
edie adams
jerry reed
dee dee warwick

So, the first night is tonight on The Autonomy Hour, at 12am (PST) and the second also at Midnight on Friday on The Outside World.

That’s at 90.7 FM, in Portland and streaming on the web at kboo.fm/listen

Hope you can tune in!

Sonic Stew for Richard Wright, Take Two

Here’s a post from a couple of months back that I am reposting now because the audio was broken at the time and I forgot about it until now. Problem solved. Here it is again, for real this time:

Here’s a spontaneous radio stew that was brewed up at a moment’s notice on last night’s Outside World, with ingredients selected by Yaney, Mssrs Dodge and Phillip and mixed by yours truly.

We played this at about 2AM, seemingly only to some nice lady who wandered in off the streets and was tripping out to it in the back studio lounge.
Play

Download ( 23 mins., 32 megs,)

Praise Song Sitting in a Room

In response to a call-out on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, I submitted my version of Elizabeth Alexander’s ill-advised reading of her poem Praise Song for the Day.

There are so many cool versions of this poem there – my favorites are Fatty Jubbo’s manic reading where he channels Elizabeth Claire Prophet, the one by Jonathan Wall where he simply alphabetizes every word in the poem and People Like Us’ language removal version.

Mine was more or less a piss-take where I turned it into an avant-garde inside joke (with apology to Alvin Lucier).

Here it is extracted from the show:

Download just my track.

But I was pleased as punch (whatever the hell that means) to have it make it to Kenny G’s show where he played them all (I think). You can read and listen about it here.

Trouser Press Tuesday: SIPHO MABUSE

SIPHO MABUSE
Sipho Mabuse (Virgin) 1987
Chant of the Marching (Earthworks/Virgin) 1989

British new wave pioneer Martin Rushent co-produced and remixed veteran Soweto singer/drummer Mabuse’s first American album, recorded in both Johannesburg and London. Mabuse sings mostly in English on the strongly westernized songs, which blend African percussion styles and sounds with rock guitar, popping fretless bass, funk horns and other dance-ready attributes. “Shikisha” and “Ti Nyanga (African Doctor)” both feature backing by a female vocal group and are the most colorfully appealing tracks here; “Burn Out” (previously issued in the US as a 12-inch from a 1985 import LP), with no African character whatever, is just plain terrible(…)

Read whole entry.

Since 1974, Trouser Press has been covering the Other Music beat and currently resides on the web at www.trouserpress.com

I will be posting a random link from Trouser Press on every Tuesday until I just flat out forget.

Art Spiegelman on Words & Pictures

        This
Tuesday morning (January 27) from 9:45 to 10:30am (PST),

 Words & Pictures welcomes Art Spiegelman
to Portland!  The Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist dropped
by the KBOO studios last fall on his way to an appearance at the
Bagdad Theater.  Spiegelman’s body of work runs the gamut from
the Holocaust memoir Maus to political features in
Harper’s and The New York Times Magazine, and his
re-released collection of early underground comics Breakdowns
opens a window into both a personal and cultural history of the late
20th century.

       
“Words & Pictures” airs on KBOO community radio,
90.7fm, Not near a radio?  You can listen to the real-time
webcast at http://kboo.fm/listen  And look for the webcast
version on KBOO’s home page shortly after the show airs.

        For
more info and links to recent webcasts, visit 
http://kboo.fm/WordsandPictures and press the “Audio”
tab.

Some Assembly Required Collage Artist Call-Out

This is cool. The great, syndicated radio show Some Assembly Required is calling all audio collage artists and cut-up geniuses to submit a 50 second track for an upcoming compilation of 50 artists:

To celebrate Some Assembly Required’s Tenth Anniversary, mnartists.org and SAR are teaming up to produce a compilation of fifty-second tracks, by as many as fifty artists…

To have your work considered for this online compilation, please submit your original works of sound collage, featuring at least 50% post consumer audio (sounds found in the media) by March 16, 2009.

Read more here.

So get out your virtual razor blades and start splicing (or cut, copy, pasting)!

Thanks to Empty-Handed for the tip!

Show 01.22.09: Obamanaugurama!

I subbed for The Seamstress of Sound last Thursday evening and spent the night remixing and disassembling the inauguration and anything else that I came across.

We said goodbye to George, listened to bad poetry, some frightening and shockingly bigoted schizophrenic ranting from Francis E. Dec and played some of the new(ish) John Zorn album The Crucible.

Listen:

Length: 1 hour, 59 mins.

Read ridiculously detailed and annotated playlist here.

Download (163 megs @ 192kbps)

Originally broadcast on January 22nd, 2009, on KBOO.

KBOOis Portland’s listener sponsored community radio

AIR: Portland: 90.7 fm * Corvallis: 100.7 fm * Columbia Gorge: 91.9 fm and streaming on the web at http://kboo.fm/listen (iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc.).

Inauguration Ambient Media Mix

I watched the inauguration on multiple streams, usually listening to the audio of Democracy Now as it was the least inane by far.
I routed all this through my little mixer and processed some of it with delay and other psycho-acoustic effects, as well as adding loops from my Buddha Machine. I didn’t think to record any of it until the end, so this excerpt starts with the sound of Bush flying away in his helicopter and then contains highlights from the network streams as they were wrapping up. It also includes some appropriate branding from AT & T, courtesy of Fox New’s webstream.

Download