It's not about radio, but it is about music, and I would really like you to click on the link below.

OK, first off, please check out the other part of my life, my musical side, at my MySpace homepage. (My my.) I've put up a few original songs, which you can listen to and/or download, plus there's a bio of my "musical career", as it were. Plus: pictures! And lots and lots of friends... my friends! (They like me, they really like me!)

Secondly, I'm sorry to go off-message (re: radio) here, but hey, it's a blog, right? Free-wheeling, post-modern, blah blah blah? Plus it's early enough in The NYC Radio Gazette's life that I don't have a big audience who would feel peeved or misled or something about me posting something that's not directly about radio, right? Anyway, these songs should have been on the radio... hell, they should've been massive hits, and it's just so typical of the lame radio programmers of my generation that they ignored my genius... Bastards.

OK, I'll shut up now. More exciting radio posts to come. (Plus it was a busy weekend, with the snow and everything.... hey, why am I being defensive? As if anybody's reading this.) Meanwhile, if you're interested, check out the quirky/catchy tunes and the page and find out a bit more about me, OK? OK.

The Big Broadcast on the Moon - tomorrow night

Tomorrow (Sunday) night's a full moon, and Rich Conaty's The Big Broadcast - which you can hear on Sunday nights between 8 pm and midnight on the great WFUV 90.7 - salutes that wonderful fact by playing "One Hundred One Moon Songs Part I". (Part II airs next week. No, the full moon'll be gone, but that night will be a celebration of Nicholas Copernicus's birthday*. From the earliest recorded Moon-themed song Rich could find - Billy Murray's "By the Light of the Silvery Moon", from 1909 - to the latest song he's planning on playing, a 1940 record of Rosemary Calvin's "How High the Moon" (Rich doesn't play much music that dates from WWII or later), you will hear... well... peerless American pop. About the moon.

There are two nice new write-ups about Rich's always-worthy show - this mention in David Hinckley's column and this nice write up by the New York Observer's Terry Golway - but I disagree with Mr. Golway's statement "if there’s a radio program like Mr. Conaty’s in the New York market, I’ve yet to hear it." Dude - just tune to WNYC-AM tonight, or any Saturday night, to catch Danny Stiles' Big Band Sounds show, between 8 and 10 pm, on WNYC-AM 820.

* “All right,” Rich told The New York Observer, “he’s more of a sun guy, but he certainly saw the moon”.

What to listen to this weekend...

• Last night at 7:35 pm on WLIB 1190 Air America, REM's Michael Stipe chatted with Janeane Garofolo on "The Majority Report". (You could have even seen the show as a webcast if you signed up for Air America Radio Premium. Did he look like this?)
• As I've mentioned before, you can indulge in the glorious sound of classic pop on AM Radio on a Saturday Night by tuning in Saturday Night Oldies with Mark Simone on 770 WABC between 6-10 pm... or if you crave more of a pre-WWII vibe, don't miss Danny Stiles' incredible Big Band Sounds show on WNYC-AM 820 AM between 8 and 10pm.
• Too bad all that great oldies radio tonight (Saturday) has to compete against Vin Scelsa's Idiot's Delight (between 8 PM and Midnight on WFUV 90.7), because Vin (who I've also raved about here before) has on as his guest Ken Emerson, author of Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era – the story of great pop songwriting teams such as Goffin & King, Bacharach & David, Mann & Weil, Leiber & Stoller, et al, and their early '60s home on Broadway and 49th. As a Burt Bacharach expert - fiend? - I will not be missing this. (I'm ashamed to admit I haven't devoured the book already...)
• Tonight between 11PM and 1AM on WFAN 660, tune in to the second night of Tonight in Torino, Westwood One's 2-hour nightly recap of what's happening at the 2006 Winter Olympics, hosted by John Tautges and Rich Ackerman. (I plan on doing more of a write-up on Olympic radio coverage shortly... stay tuned. One doesn't think of WFAN fans as being all that interested in the Olympics... but maybe I'm wrong?)
• Tomorrow (Sunday) at 10AM on WNYC-FM 93.9, you can hear On The Media, the consistently excellent NPR show on the weekly goings-on of news media; this weekend, host Brooke Gladstone is in Jerusalem, reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict; one of the things she looks at is how the words used to report the ongoing crisis ("wall" or "barrier"? "Seperation" or "security"?) reveal worlds about the political viewpoint of whoever's doing the reporting.
• Although they don't play nearly as much classic salsa as they used to (and too much reggaetron!), Polito Vega's Sunday afternoon institution, Salsa con Polito, still plays much great stuff - the kind of intoxicating stuff you hear booming out from the streets on New York City weekends - between 12 Noon and 8pm on La Mega 97.9. (Click here for a cool article about the history of Latin music on American radio.)

Satellite Wars: will Oprah kick Howard's ass?

As you may have heard - the way this woman makes news, it's amazing - Oprah Winfrey has signed a $55 million, 3-year deal with XM Radio. While Business Week sees this as a potential knockout blow for Sirius because "Oprah's marketing appeal far exceeds Sirius's radio jock Howard Stern", Rick Munarriz of The Motley Fool points out:

"Sure, Oprah is great. According to Nielsen, her TV talk show attracts nearly 50 million viewers a week. That's more than the audience that Stern was commanding on terrestrial radio. But there's an important distinction here, in that Stern's radio show replaced his popular show on Viacom. Oprah has no plans to give up her prime TV gig. Folks who need an Oprah fix will still be able to check her out for free on the tube every weekday."

The use of the word "fix" is right on the money, because the issue here is about junkie-dom. Howard's hardcore fans are Howard-junkies; Oprah's hardcore fans are Oprah-junkies. Howard removed himself from terrestrial radio, so the only way his junkies can get their fix is to buy a Sirius radio. Oprah has no intention to leave television, and will actually only be on XM's air for a half-hour a week (which is why Oprah's many friends will be there to fill in the rest of all that airtime). Howard - despite his denials - promoted Sirius relentlessly on his FM radio show since his deal was announced; it's not certain how much Oprah will mention XM in upcoming months, although even a handful of mentions by her can do wonders for any company's product. (Look at Random House's "A Million Little Pieces"! Oops.)

To me, Oprah's new radio channel - filled with "topics such as current events, self improvement, health, nutrition, fitness and home" - will be an awful lot like Martha Stewart's channel on Sirius, and will be as fascinating (which is: not very. Then again, I'm not in the demographic.). Now Martha is certainly important and promotable for Sirius, and Oprah is definitely important for XM, a far bigger star than Martha. (A far bigger star than anybody at this point, it seems.) But I think the deal has more to do with corporate posturing and promotability* than it has to do with a bloody battling for audience.

Now - if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity removed themselves from terrestrial radio and went to XM, that would be a fight. But those guys don't have the FCC-punching-bag impetus that Howard did.

* don't get me wrong, that's very very important stuff at this point for satellite radio.

Microsoft's "Smart Car Radio" - a Radio Tivo?

There's not much info there yet, but here's a fascinating* Endgadget story about how Microsoft has just been granted a patent (applied for in 2002) for what's called a "smart car radio". In other words, it'd be a "Radio TiVo" for your car or computer that would allow you - quoting Endgadget - "to record music and filter out 'undesirable audio content (e.g., advertisements and unwanted news).'" As a huge fan of "Radio TiVo"-type technology - the Radio Shark, Radio YourWay and RadioTime are all out there already, at varying levels of coolness - I am excited about this thing, though worried about the Microsoftization of this incredibly important innovation for my fave medium.

What's interesting here is that a TV TiVo don't exactly "filter out" TV ads - they allow you to fast-forward past them, sure, but the big TV business doesn't let TiVo install a simple method to completely "edit out" commercials (though there are workarounds for some of the older models that'll help you jump past 'em in 30 second increments). If Microsoft's Smart Car Radio lets you zip past ads... what's the ad-based radio industry gonna do?

When I first got a TiVo in 2000, I was blown away. The best way I found to describe it is in terms of grades: it transforms a C+ medium (the vast wasteland that's still firmly in place) into an A- medium. In other words, by finding and then recording great shows, the kind of stuff I (or you) want to watch, a TiVo takes out the time-wasting/brain-deadening quality that much of the electronic media has had since the beginning. A TiVo, if you use it well, gives you the good stuff, as you define what "the good stuff" is. A Radio TiVo would do the same, I think, I hope. Unless Microsoft finds a way to completely ruin the concept.

A big part of why I've become such a Sirius enthusiast is because the model I have, the Starmate Replay, records up to 44 minutes of whatever channel you're listening to. Do I want to hear a cool/bizarro BBC Radio One song again? I rewind and replay. Did Howard really say that? I rewind and replay. And, if I'm a few minutes or more behind what's "live" (admittedly a hard concept to grasp until you actually start using this stuff), I can zip past the commercials on those stations that have 'em. Post-Sirius, when I now listen to "regular" radio, I now have that weird/frustrating experience that all TiVo owners report at some point - that desire to rewind to re-hear what you've just heard, or that desire to zoom past the commercials, or that desire to just pause the damn thing, and then you realize you can't, and you're bumming.

* to me, anyway

All we are saying is...give Dave a chance...maybe

Listening to David Lee Roth this morning on 92.3 FREE FM, he had on Billy Altman - legendary rock critic and a former editor of Creem, the best rock magazine ever, R.I.P. - talking about last night's Grammies. It was good radio, with both Billy and David intelligently and (fairly) humorously reviewing the previous evenings performers. David was too robotic in how he kept quickly bringing up different artist's names, as if he was reading the topics off a sheet and keeping the conversation too brisk, without allowing any particular line of conversation to develop, but I guess that's professionalism (of a kind) for a tightly formatted morning show.

Of course, David Lee talking about how well music stars pull off their "acts" is a comfort zone for him, a subject he's perfect for. I was a bit surprised that he nor Billy nor any of the callers brought up the brilliant old Dave quote that "all rock critics like Elvis Costello because all rock critics look like Elvis Costello." Maybe Dave's too polite, or maybe he's forgotten. Mr. Roth is a very smart guy, and has that jive-talking psuedo-Lord Buckley quality that a few other rock-star frontmen famously share, like Ted Nugent, Dee Snider* and Peter Wolf (all guys who do or have done radio, incidentally). I had a former brother-in-law with a similar gift of gab. It's the kind of patter that that semi-intelligent brother-in-laws or uncles or co-workers commonly use to cover up basic insecurities. It can be entertaining, at times.

But Dave also seems... I hate to say it... square. He sounds like a 50-year-old fairly-out-of-touch coddled former rock star. Now - there's nothing saying that a square 50-year-old fairly-out-of-touch coddled former rock star with a well-worn motormouth can't become a good morning radio show host. A metalhead friend of mine, a Dave partisan who's become a regular listener, says he's coming along fairly well and has an interesting take on things. And Howard himself has been saying that Roth deserves at least a year to get good at his gig. Yet the gig might not last that long, according to disgruntled 92.3 staffers. We'll see. I'm rooting for the coddled old bastard, for some reason.

* who had a touching reunion with Howard yesterday - details here - and may be getting a Howard-produced Sirius radio show of own soon. It's interesting how the King of All Media does alot of his radio-boss work on the air.

Bette, talkin' with the 'Cuz, today at 5 on Sirius 103

I once had the chance to meet Cousin Brucie. It was about 10 years ago, at the Tower Records on Broadway, down near NYU, and "the 'Cuz" was standing near the doorway, cheerily chatting with folks. I wanted to go up to him and say something, but I didn't know what to say - frankly, I was star-struck. I've met a few fairly famous people, but Brucie... I mean, he was part of my childhood. He was - is - a God. A goofy God, certainly a cheerful God, but a God nonetheless. (Murray the K was apparently in full swing when I was a kiddie, doing his "fifth Beatle" bit with the submarine racing and everything, but I don't remember him at all. I guess my older sisters Maggie and Cathie weren't WMCA Good Guys fans. Cousin Brucie was IT.)

Years later, Les Marshak - one of the best voice-over guys I ever had the pleasure to work with, a super nice guy and one of Brucie's closest friends - told me I should've gone over to him to say hello. He told me he likes and appreciates fans... and when you hear the guy, his niceness and genuineness indeed seems real. So, if I ever get a chance again, I will try to muster up the courage.

Meanwhile, today at 5, you can hear Cousin Brucie, cheerful as ever, on his "Talkin' with the Cuz" show on Sirius Stars channel 103 - chatting with Bette Midler, who's promoting her new album of Peggy Lee covers. Bette credits Cousin Brucie for "breaking" her first record, "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," in 1972. (Remember that one? That was in the heydey of '30s retro, when art deco was becoming a big deal, and when a record like Norman "Hurricane" Smith's "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" could become a number one hit. That was when I started getting interested in the '30s, in the whole era of depression-era New York - which I still envision in my mind as a Hopper-esque "Nighthawks" nightscape, and the rise of the first "Golden Age of Radio"... I think I was trying to find a way to connect to my father... but I digress. Sorry.) (But aren't such digressions what blogs are for? But I digress further. Oh, never mind.)

Meanwhile, here's a complete, classic WABC Cousin Brucie aircheck from September 9, 1968.

Presenting "Mr. Rhythm" - today at 1 on WFMU

Today (Wednesday the 8th) from 1 to 2 pm on WFMU 91.1, session drummer Sam Ulano – aka “Mr. Rhythm” – is Irwin’s guest. At age 86, he still happily plays weddings and bar mitzvahs, but there’s a bit more to him than that. Sam’s played and recorded with the top names in jazz and pop; he made regular appearances on the Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs shows, and gigged with Moondog and Public Image Limited (sitting in on their infamous 1981 "riot show" at the old Ritz); he’s written over 2500 (?!) instruction books, and even recorded a series called "Drum's Fairy Tales" in which he plays wild percussion solos while simultaneously reciting hepcat Mother Goose; in a word, Sam is cool. Listen in as the man brings recordings and recollections about a lifetime behind the drum kit to WFMU's Jersey City studios. (Speaking of longevity, Irwin - described by Robert Christgau as "a tedious ideologue with a hustle", which Irwin seems to think of as some sort of badge of honor - is himself a bit of an old-timer!)

Tonight - a live taping of the Brian Lehrer Show: Were We Misled? A Debate on Pre-War Intelligence

Brian Lehrer hosts an excellent morning 2-hout talk/call-in show on WNYC every morning; during the subway strike his coverage was unparalleled, with great guests (not the usual suspects), many calls from the subway workers themselves, callers reporting on how their neighborhoods were holding up... every media outlet was going crazy on the story, but Brian's show - by a wide margin - gave a complete, sane, and smart round-up of every day's madness. And the show also felt more authentically New York - more connected to the streets - than anything else out there. You can hear his show every weekday morning on WNYC-AM and FM between 10 and 12 noon (although he's only on FM this morning - the AM side is offering "gavel-to-gavel" the Senate's Wartime Executive Power/NSA Surveillance Authority hearing. Amidst requests for pledges, by the way. Have you given them money yet?)

Tonight at 7pm, Brian will be hosting a live public forum entitled “Were We Misled? A Debate on Pre-War Intelligence,” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture (2 West 64th Street at Central Park West). Admission is free - first-come, first-served - and the panel features Christopher Hitchens, former Florida senator and 2004 presidential candidate Bob Graham, David Corn (editor of The Nation) and Bruce Jackson, co-founder of the neo-con think tank The Project for a New American Century. Fair and balanced? Yep. (Brian hosts the most genuinely fair-and-balanced talk show I've ever heard.)

Look here for suggested readings for the event; the show itself will be heard on Wednesday February 15th at 10am.

And So It Goes: RIP Reuven Frank

Yes, this is primarily a radio blog, but - as an NBC Historian - I would be remiss not to mourn the passing of Reuven Frank, who was a president of NBC News, and an incredibly important guy in broadcast news history.

I am a bit too young to remember Huntley and Brinkley's nightly show - Reuven was responsible not only for the innovative telecast, but for their pairing - but I do remember the seemingly nightly mentions of dead American boys from Vietnam. And I certainly remember "Good night, David..." "Good night, Chet" - although Reuven later pooh-poohed that particular innovation, despite it becoming a major catch-phrase (as he was quoted in Jeff Kisseloff's fine oral history of television The Box, one of the most fun and readable broadcast history books ever published).

Kansas City Star writer Aaron Barnhart hails Reuven for the great 1980's night-owl classic NBC News Overnight, but I most treasure the even-more-infrequently remembered Weekend, a monthly (!) NBC newsmagazine that ran Saturday nights at 11:30 PM, alternating with the earliest days of Saturday Night Live, hosted by Linda Ellerby and Lloyd Dobbins. I believe this was the show where Linda coined her famous "...and so it goes" tag, and I also believe the show presented the first-ever USA footage of the Sex Pistols in a (worried) news report... overall, the show it was smart, funny, irreverent - if a news show could ever be called "sexy", "Weekend" was it. (Am I saying this just because I had a thing for the young Linda Ellerbee? Ummm...)

Reuven was a throwback, a profoundly thoughtful, innovative and decent man in the TV business, a rapidly vanishing breed. (Boy, do I sound like an old fart, or what?) In searching for a way to tie this posting to the subject of radio, I found this anecdote at the end of the AP/Washington Post obit, about how Reuven - then working at NBC Radio - was considering a job at the just-starting Camel News Caravan, TV's first news show of note:

Though understandably reluctant to make the switch, he wangled a $20 a week raise (to $110). Then he asked his new employer why no one from NBC Radio had seized this TV news writing opportunity.

As Mr. Frank recalled in his 1991 memoir, 'Out of Thin Air,' the answer he received was simple: Nobody in radio "who is worth a damn thinks (television) is going to last."

Miss WCBS-FM? Try "Classic Lite"

If you happened to listen to 106.7 LiteFM last weekend, you might have been mildly surprised to hear songs that mildly deviated from the station's usual playlist. (WLTW LiteFM's the kind of station where mildness is king - a gameplan that's firmly placed them at the top of the ratings heap, New York's most popular and successful station by a long shot.)

So last weekend the Celine Dion, Michael Bublé and Kelly Clarkson got put on the back burner, and songs like Jim Croce's "Operator", the Beatles' "Please Please Me" and Steam's goofy yet mysteriously haunting "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" were put in rotation... because the station was having a Classic Lite Weekend. "We got a great response," program director Jim Ryan told the Daily News's David Hinckley. "People really love those old Simon & Garfunkel and Neil Diamond songs that we don't get to play very often on Lite."

The stunt - which apparently got such a great response it will be repeated monthly - was actually devised to publicize Classic Lite, the new HD2 (high-definition) radio station that you can hear as an Internet audio stream here. A recommendation: if your office was the kind of place where the late lamented WCBS-FM was heard, "Classic Lite" will be a perfect replacement. Right now I'm hearing Dionne Warwick's "Alfie" (sigh), and in the last hour or so I've heard such guilty pleasures as the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun", Aretha's "Spanish Harlem", Chicago's "Just You 'N' Me", A Taste of Honey's 'Boogie Oogie Oogie", Creedence's "Proud Mary", and (gulp) Andy Gibb's "I Just Want to Be Your Everything".

I like it. OK, so I'm a cheeseball.

Rodney on the 'ROQ in New Yawk!

KROQ - the legendary Los Angeles rock station - can now be heard streaming live over the Internet. Go to their home page, click on the "Q Stream" button, and: there.

Which means we New Yorkers can finally hear Rodney On The Roq - Rodney Bingenheimer's famed and influential show, running since 1976 - for ourselves, Monday mornings at the somewhat early hour of 3 am ET. (Of course, because I have RadioTime, I can have the streamed show recorded onto my computer while I sleep, then have it in my iPod by the time I have to head to work the next morning. Nyah nyah.)

Rodney, who was Davy Jones' stand-in on The Monkees, has led quite the interesting life, helped countless bands get heard, and has even had a movie made about him. Which I'll get around to seeing soon, I suppose.

Interesting to note that the number one song on KROQ at the moment is Matisyahu's "King Without A Crown" - an catchy number performed by a hasidic rapper. Oy, those kids of today!

Dance, Dance, Dance! (Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah)

Felix Hernandez has the BEST classic soul radio show. EVER. (Editor's note: Am I doling out too many superlatives too early in my lil' blog's history? Perhaps. But maybe that's because I want to write about the stuff that excites me the most right off the bat. So sue me.)

Anyway, you can hear - wait, let me restate that, you MUST hear - Felix Hernandez's Rhythm Revue, the BEST classic soul radio show EVER, on Saturdays between 10am and 2pm on WBGO-FM 88.3* (sans commercials) and on WRKS-FM 98.7 (avec commercials). The fact you can hear Felix play this kind of music on a Saturday and a Sunday makes NYC weekend life worth living, quite frankly. (I've heard the show described as "perfect car-washing music". Which is right on the money, but it's alot more than that too. It's kinda like defining Thin Lizzy's "The Boys Are Back In Town" as perfect pinball-playing music. Of course, but... there's so much more to it!)

And Felix - god bless 'im - is always taking his show to the stage, deejaying his blissfully fun dance parties late into a weekend night. The music is soulful and danceable and perfect, and the audience - a "gorgeous mosaic" (to quote former mayor Dinkins) of all ages and races - is in heaven. He's got two shows coming up this weekend: at the Celebrate Brooklyn Winter Souljam Dance Party at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Friday Saturday 10 and his Valentine's Dance at Roseland on Saturday February 11. (Click on the links for details.)

* (WBGO, which is a very very fine classic jazz/NPR station out of Newark NJ, is holding their fund-raising drive at the moment. Why they're doing it at the exact time as WNYC, I'll never know. Anyway, they deserve your donations too.)

Oh, so you don't care about the Super Bowl?! Well.

Ok, if you're gonna be like that, maybe you'd like to listen to WNYC tonight instead of the Super Bowl. (Although it is time for the fund-raising drive, so consider yourself warned. Hey, give money to them, lots, OK?) The evening starts off at 6, on both the AM (820 Khz) and FM (93.9 Mhz) sides, with the always-brilliant (if sometimes twee) This American Life: tonight's show is about "stories that take place on the edge of civilization, just out of sight." Then, at 7 on the FM station*, there's David Garland's Spinning on Air, tonight featuring Mi & L'au (pictured above), two musicians who make sad, floating, and lovely music. They'll sing and play their songs, and talk about guitars reverberating over lakes, cabin fever, and the Halloween night they met.

At 8, David Garland's music blissfully continues, while - on the AM side - you can hear two straightforwardly-named KCRW shows about show-biz: New York Times writer Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment and Variety writer Claude Brodesser's The Business. Then, at 9, flip on over to the FM side (is this getting confusing enough for you?) 'cause you do not want to miss Tom Brokaw - Tom Brokaw! - on the monthly show Mad About Music, where he "reveals his emotional side to host Gilbert Kaplan and the power music plays in his life – from Bach cantatas in the cockpit flying cross country, to Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Mozart’s Requiem and the American classic 'Shenandoah,' that touches his Missouri River roots and has been picked to be played at his funeral." So there you go. (Have you ever thought about the music to be played at your funeral? As for me, I hope somebody plays "Buckaroo" by Buck Owens and his Buckaroos... at the right moment, of course. Hopefully after everybody starts to walk towards the refreshment table.)

*(On the AM side at 7, there's a replay of yesterday's Studio 360, which will talk about the Super-Bowl-unfriendly subject of Psychoanalysis. "From Freudian slips to videogames to The Sopranos," says the show's website, "we’ll look at Sigmund Freud’s long shadow on our culture". Hmm. Speaking of psychoanalysis, you might need some after listening to Joe Frank's staggeringly weird and innovative show at 11, also on 820 AM.)

The New Golden Age of Radio? Yep.

Here's an article from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune declaring we're in "The New Golden Age of Radio".

I agree - but not just because of satellite radio. We're entering a new Golden Age for several reasons: (a) satellite radio, yeah, but also (b) the exploding new world of podcasting, (c) the fact that the "terrestrial radio" industry is attempting to compete with these new technologies with new ideas, (d) the fact that "terrestrial radio" is cooperating with these new technologies, and (e) the advent of the "Radio TiVo".

I'd say these are very interesting and stimulating Radio Days indeed - which is why I've started this blog.

Turn off the TV and LISTEN to the Super Bowl!!

A Radical Suggestion for This Most American Of All Religious Holidays: why not turn the damned TV off tonight and LISTEN to the Super Bowl on the radio?? There are so many cool ways to do it! Consider:

- tune in old-school-style by catching the official CBS Radio-Westwood One network radio broadcast at WFAN 660 AM today, starting at 4 PM, with the classic, reassuring and post-scandalous voice of Marv Albert at the helm, with the help of Boomer Esiason, John Dockery, Jim Gray, and Bonnie Bernstein.

- you can listen via the Internet to Sirius Satellite Radio's NFL Radio Channel - hearable today for free via RealAudio - with all the pre-game action you could possibly shake a stick at, leading into a simulcast of the official CBS Radio broadcast tonight.

- Go to NFL.com's Field Pass and request a seven-day free trial. All set? Now you're ready to listen to the game in a myriad of wondrous ways! As long as your computer has RealAudio, you can hear:

• the Pittsburgh Steelers hometown radio coverage
• the Seatle Seahawks hometown radio coverage
• the direct press box audio from the game
• the Ford Field announcer (interesting!)
• BBC Radio (hear the game described with a clipped upper-crust English accent!)
• Canal + Spain (the game in Spanish!)
• TV 2 Denmark (in Danish!)
• NTV + Russia (in Russian!)
• BeTV (in French!)
• SMG (Chinese Mandarin!)
• NTV Japan (in Japanese!)
  

(PS - I did suggest turning off your TV tonight, but it might be fun to listen to the Danish or Mandarin feed while you're watching the telecast, no?)

- for you Sirius subscribers, you can hear all of the above international feeds, plus the already-discussed NFL Channel, as part of the company's mad crazy radio coverage.

- last but not least for you Sirius subscribers (especially for those of you who don't give a crap about the Super Bowl itself): you can celebrate the day by listening to any number of goofy Sirius programming "stunts". Three of my favorites:

• In tribute to the Rolling Stones halftime show, the Sirius Blues station (Channel 74) will have its Fantasy Halftime Show, speculating on which tunes the band will play during halftime in Detroit -and spinning the ones they should - at 6pm ET tonight.
• SIRIUS Pops (Channel 86) launches the Sousa Bowl at 8 pm ET, during which Sousa' s classic compositions will be performed by the top US university marching bands, while Symphony Hall's (Channel 80) Super Bowl Battle will offer alternating selections by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, starting at 6:30 pm ET.
• Jam On's (Channel 17) The Phish Bowl will feature hosts Jonathan Schwartz and Adam Foley pitting their favorite Phish concerts against each other, while Andy Bernstein, author of the Phish book "The Pharmer's Almanac Vol. 1-4", referees. To replicate the four quarters of a football game, both hosts will present four songs from their chosen Phish concert to support their argument as to which is the "greatest Phish concert", starting at 7 pm ET. (Yes, this is waaaay geeky.)
  

Radio News You Can't Use - or Can You?

I'm loving WFMU's Beware of the Blog* - as a matter of fact, I'm adding it as a "permalink" on the right side of the page. That's where I discovered Adventures in Amplitude Modulation, which I frothed about yesterday.

Today I'm totally digging Liz B's "Radio News You Can't Use", which is so chock-full of the kind of stuff I want this blog to be about that I'm including as many links as I can find:

February 2, 2006
January 5, 2006
December 1, 2005
November 1, 2005
October 4, 2005
September 1, 2005
August 2, 2006
July 2, 2005
June 2, 2005

Liz B's Tuesday 9am-12 Noon WFMU show, described as "fist-pumping, air-drumming freeform mayhem", is archived here. You make me dizzy, Miss Liz B.!

* a nod, of course, to Burt Bacharach's fine 1958 "Tequila"-pastiche, "Beware of the Blob"

Adventures in Amplitude Modulation!!

Just found this amazingly cool thread, called Adventures in Amplitude Modulation, at WFMU's BEWARE OF THE BLOG, about the art of AM and shortwave radio listening. This is MUST reading - OK, must reading for me - so up my alley it's insane. (The radio pictured here is a GE Superadio, which is the best currently available radio, bar none, for the romance and mystery of listening to AM radio, especially long-distance nighttime AM radio... sigh... which is a big part of why I love radio.)

Wednesday nights: the best worst talk show ever - Seven Second Delay

Imagine a radio show where two hosts bring in their iPods and hook them into the control board. Imagine that one of the hosts is the station's perpetually exasperated program director, the other is an Ed Wynn soundalike and fairly successful comedy writer with self-esteem issues. The comedy writer (Andy Breckman, creator of Monk) claims his iPod - filled with Billy Joel, Beach Boys, James Taylor, and John Cougar Mellencamp - is PERFECT, the best iPod in the world, and that the station director's (WFMU'S Ken Freedman) iPod must be horrible because it contains "bad" music, i.e. the kind of free-form "hippie" music WFMU plays.

So the guys put their iPods on shuffle, then have callers review the first 10 seconds of each guy's songs, without telling the listeners who's iPod they're listening to, and the callers have to say which song is "better". After Andy's songs reach an early triumph with voters, the whole show ends up in a tie. Meanwhile, both hosts disparage the show, each other, and the listeners (well, Andy disparages the listeners, Ken shows them a fair amount of respect).

That was two weeks ago. The whole show was - I swear - incredibly funny. It almost always is.

So tonight (Wednesday) night, between 6 and 7 on WFMU (91.1 around the city and 90.1 in the Hudson Valley), I advise you to listen to Seven Second Delay. Call in, too. (Make sure to tell them you're a "first-time caller, long-time listener".) It's really really funny; here's a fine Slate piece on the show (which nominated it as a "Podcast of the Week"):

The show is a long series of efforts by Andy to come up with clever ideas for segments that involve listeners, many of which crash and burn. But they're usually very funny. (In one of Mike's favorites, Andy and Ken brought in their kids and made a Solomonic listener declare which one was the better father.) Breckman also shares Hollywood stories from time to time, and the show's "benediction" sounds more like a prayer you'd hear at church or synagogue in Beverly Hills:

Dear Lord
May My Show Succeed
And May The Shows of My Friends Fail
And Yet May I Still Be Perceived
As a Team Player
Amen.

You can hear archived shows here or here (as a podcast). You can also download the shows for free as an iTunes podcast. Listen.

RIP Dumont

OK, this post isn't about Radio, but it is about New York City's fascinating broadcast history, which I adore: here's a cool Hollywood Reporter article about the 50th Anniversary (sorta) of the demise of the Dumont Network.

Dumont, in the very very early days of network television (late '40s-early '50s), was the "fourth network" - a true competitor to NBC and CBS - and was probably ahead of ABC-TV in terms of programming and technology, at least in the beginning. The network's amazing history (best known as being the place where Jackie Gleason debuted his most legendary characters, and where Captain Video patrolled the universe) has been written about in a couple of recent books. (This Reason Magazine review of one of the books points out how times haven't really changed all that much at the good 'ol FCC.)

Dumont's flagship affiliate in New York was Channel 5. A few years back, I was able to get into the channel's studios on on 205 East 67th street, and I looked up into the rafters - and could still see some Dumont logos spray-painted onto the lights!