A not so brief History of what's on TV...

 Not too terribly long ago, (less than 100 years ago) when I was a kid (the younger version of the kid that I am now), we had 4 channels on our television. We weren’t being punished and it wasn’t because we were poor (we were), that’s just all there was! I grew up near Nashville, TN. Our channels were; 2, 4, 5 and 8 (the PBS station). If you watched television in those days, you were watching one of those 4 channels. If you missed a show, you missed it. You’d have to hear about it at school or work the next day but it was gone. If Evel Knievel was going to jump the Snake River Canyon, it was going to happen at 2:00PM eastern and you’d better calculate the time change to central and be in front of the tube! You could only watch one show at a time, so if you wanted to see Starsky & Hutch you would have to miss the Jeffersons. Then of course, thanks to Charles Paulson Ginsberg and the fine folks at Sony, we were blessed with VCR’s and we no longer had to miss George and “Weezie”. 

 So last night, I’m scrolling through the menu page on our TV, looking for something to watch. I’m restricting my choices to HD channels only to narrow down my options. I browse good old 2, 4, 5 & 8 (or in this case 1002, 1004, 1005 and 1008), nothing really grabs me there so I start to move out. Out past TBS, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, CNN, CNNI, HLN, Fox News, MSNBC and into the wild frontier of what is now Cable Television. I see AMC, OVC, HSN (I’m entranced by David Venable and his amazing kitchen wares! So much so that Buff and I almost order a giant spatula. Seriously this thing is incredible!), I see the Food Network. I can’t watch the Food Network too much because it makes me hungry. I like Guy Fieri. he seems like a good guy. Kind of a cooking version of Sammy Hagar. His show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives has led me and my band to more fantastic lunches on the road than I can count! The Food Network, however, isn’t the only channel that will make you watch food. I stop at the Travel Channel for a moment to watch a show about a guy who goes around eating huge amounts of food within a certain timeframe (this episode was an 8 patty burger, two hotdogs w/slaw, fries, a coke and a milkshake made with butter pecan ice cream and with coffee cake mixed in it. He had to eat it all in 20 minutes. He did it.). I guess they show that on the Travel Channel because he has to ‘travel’ to these places to eat. We have a Weather Channel. The Weather Channel always seems to be talking about the weather somewhere else, usually where there’s a big storm, flood or tornado. It’s kind of like Weather porn. Then you get to the History Channel (and yes there is a History Channel 2 for even more History!) On the surface this channel seems like a great idea for kids. I wish, when I was in school, there had been a channel that I could watch to learn my history homework (Manifest Destiny, The War of 1812, the Missouri Compromise) but then again, in my school, we didn’t spend a lot of time studying Swamp People, Pawn Stars or Mudcats. We studied WWII, where we learned about Hitler but it’s only lately that I’ve been educated about Hitler’s bodyguards. I never really thought about Hitler having bodyguards. I don’t like Hitler. I think he was a real bastard and getting burned up in a ditch with a bullet in his head seems like fair play but I watched every episode of that show. It was fascinating I have to admit. I still think Hitler is an a**hole though. As well as being a crappy painter. You’ve also got National Geographic Channel, Animal Planet and the Military Channel all of which have captured me on many occasions. I watched some seriously disturbed Texans catching diamond-back rattlesnakes the other night, *shudder*!

 Then you come to the “women’s section”. I only call it that because the target audience seems to be definitely female. Lifetime, Hallmark, OWN (which is, of course, the Oprah Winfrey Network). There’s even a channel called Lifetime Real Women, not sure what there after there. When I watch these channels I want to curl up in my Snuggie with a cup of hot tea and just have a good cry. (Oh not really, I don’t watch those channels too much, nor do I have a Snuggie). I do watch a suprising amount of Disney Channel, Family Channel and Cartoon Network. My daughter and I are fans of Adventure Time with Finn and Jake. This may be one of the best shows on television. Seriously.

 The movie channels! Finally! I know that I’ll find a movie that I’ll enjoy watching. maybe Die Hard or Smokey & The Bandit! I remember the first time I heard about HBO. One of my friends went to visit some relatives and came back talking about how they had “home box office”. I thought for a long time that he meant they owned their own theatre. HBO! As a 12 year old, red blooded male, HBO could be your first chance to see real, naked ladies! Probably why my mom fought us getting cable for a long time! As I cruise down the list of HBO channels (Oh yes, the old days of one HBO channel are gone like acid washed jeans and the Fonz) HBO, HBO West (oddly and sadly not full of cowboy movies), HBO 2, HBO Family (probably no naked ladies there), HBO Family West, HBO Signature, HBO Signature West, HBO Comedy, HBO Comedy West, HBO Zone, HBO Latino and (yes, you guessed it...) HBO Latino...WEST! And that my friends is just HBO! You still have Cinemax (a whole ‘nother level of naked ladies, first time I saw it I thought we had somehow gotten free porn! Now it IS porn but it ain’t free!) Showtime, TMC, Starz and Encore. Each of which has at least 3 versions. I’m no mathmetician (and I’m too lazy to go back and add up all the channels) but that is a lot of television real estate. About 5,000 movies per hour or something like that.

 Sometimes I like to watch Univision, Galavision, Telefutura and of course Telemundo. I don’t speak very much Spanish but I think if I watch long enough I’ll get it by osmosis. Still waiting. I like to watch BBC and pretend that I’m British. I’ll sit in front of the “telly” with some beans and toast and get the latest football scores and see what Labour MP Eric Joyce is up too. (Apparently, getting into a bar fight!) I don’t watch much MTV anymore. I used to watch it all the time and sometimes, late at night, they might show a Jimi Hendrix video! I saw Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean video, Prince’s Little Red Corvette video and Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher video. I don’t know what happened. I know artists still make videos. (The Black Keys, Katy Perry and Beyonce are hard at work but with little love from big old MTV) Not so much music videos anymore on the Music Television channel. They might think about changing the name to RTV (reality television). Oh wait, there is an RTV channel already (Retrovision, awesome!). Sorry MTV. Now MTV has a lot of shows about young people living together, having babies, being Italian, a lot of punching, kicking, yelling, drinking and scratching. Kind of like some of the joints I play in (without the baby-birthin’)! Of course you’ve got your VH1’s, BET’s, CMT’s and GAC (wow! I just realized country music has two channels and they still play very little COUNTRY music - George Jones & Merle Haggard are you listening??) There should be a Blues Channel. Satellite radio has a Blues Channel (God Bless Bill Wax!) How come there’s not a TBC (The Blues Channel)? “The Blues Channel, all Blues music all day!” Maybe they could do a news report in the evenings and get B.B. King to read the days news headlines! Buddy Guy could do sports and Shemika Copeland could do the weather. I would only watch TBC for all of my news!! Maybe they could do a Blues version of The Real World with B.B., Buddy, Lonnie Brooks, Kim Wilson, Bonnie Raitt, Lou Ann Barton and Shemika; “This is the true story...of seven blues artists...picked to live in a house...work together and have their lives taped...to find out what happens...when people stop being polite...and start getting real...The Real Blues World!” It would be amazing!

 So I’m back to my own TV quest; 5,386 channels later, no movies to watch, nothing interesting on, I switch off the TV and pick up a book. Books never let you down.

If I Had A Radio Station...

I am not a fan of talk radio. I like music. I LOVE music, actually (not like I love my wife but very much like I love Mexican food, actually MORE than Mexican food! But much, much LESS than my wife!!). I like for my radio to play music. I expect it to play music. That’s it’s job as far as I’m concerned. Maybe it’s not your radio’s job and that’s fine. Maybe you like talk radio and that’s fine too (If you love it so much why don’t you marry it?!...sorry I’ve been watching a lot of Pee Wee Herman lately!). I’m just talking about MY radio and what I like to hear. When my radio stops playing music, I put in a CD, turn on my iPod, sit down at the piano or pick up a guitar because I want to hear music. Talk radio is very popular these days. There are stations that talk about sports, news, conservative issues, liberal issues, science, comedy, cooking, etc. there might even be a station that talks about music! I’ll have to check. I have many friends, musicians and music fans among them, who listen to more talk radio than music. I am not one of them. If I had a radio station it would play music 24/7. According to the current paradigm, it wouldn’t be very successful to most people I know. My friends would listen to it because I asked them to, (at least they would claim to be listening to it, probably while listening to talk radio). I would limit advertisers (you have to have the ads to pay for the airtime, or maybe I could be like XM and just sell subscriptions!) to 5 second commercials; “Buy Ford Trucks!”. The news would only come on if something major happened and then wouldn’t repeat until a really new development actually happened. There would be no hours and hours of commentary about the implications of this major event on the rest of the world, blah, blah, blah, unless there was an implication for the rest of the world to be concerned about, and then the implication would be explained and we would move on.  The news would come on with that sound that they used to use on TV when news would break; click, click, click... We don’t use that sound anymore because news is ALWAYS breaking! Turn on any news program and while they’re talking about news, a scroll is running underneath telling more news. Sometimes it’s important; Japan’s earthquake and nuclear disaster, but sometimes it’s not important; the warlock Charlie Sheen. That’s not news. It’s strange and interesting like a car wreck is interesting, but it’s not news like Libya and yet it’s on the same scroll as news about the economy or the health care debate. Sometimes, they break in to the news with more news! It’s like; “That’s interesting news Bob but we’ve just heard this even more interesting news!” 

 My station would be unlimited when it comes to genre. I don’t recognize them in the world so why would I recognize them on my radio station? Blues would be next to Rock, which would be next to Country, which would be next to Jazz, which would be next to Pop, etc. I think other than making it easier to find CDs in the record store (if you can find a record store and even know what a CD is...) Genres are kind of useless anyway. It gets very hard to categorize some artists and figure out which section they should even be in; (is Johnny Cash in the Country section or the Folk section?) For that matter, if “Pop” is short for “popular” (it is) wouldn’t all artists who’s records are selling well be considered “pop”? Currently, according to Billboard magazine’s chart of the top 200 songs, R.E.M, Sara Evans, Bruno Mars and Jason Aldean would all be considered ‘pop’. Hmmmm. On my radio station, they would all get played anyway, so I guess the categories wouldn’t matter.

 On that thought, genres are kind of like us humans. We’re always looking for the differences in ourselves that separate us from each other and yet there’s way more stuff that make us the same. Just like music! Race, sex, religion, social class, nationality, eye color, weight, skin color; all that stuff that we use to differentiate ourselves, separate, put apart. Categories are great for a simple explanation but they rarely tell you anything about a song, a movie, a painting, an artist or a person for that matter. I’m not sure why we feel the need to do that. I have a young daughter that I’m trying to teach about life and the world and trying to teach her that all people are the same is a very important part of that. I try and explain to her that we don’t judge people. We get to know them. That tells more about someone than the color of their skin or their height. Music is like that too. Don’t dislike something out of hand, listen and judge it based on if it moves you or not. 

  My playlist of artists would look something like this:

• B.B. King
• Ms. Aretha Franklin
• Motorhead
• Justin Bieber (just wanted to put his name right next to Motorhead!)
• Roy Hamilton
• Buck Owens
• Rhianna
• The Statler Brothers
• Albert Collins
• The Police
• Elvis Presley
• Jeff Buckley
• Jeff Beck
• Jeff Bridges (I could just do a day of ‘Jeffs’)
• George Jones
• Salif Keita
• Buddy Guy
• Eric Clapton
• The Monkees
• Hound Dog Taylor
• Material
• Sonny Sharrock
• Fleetwood Mac
• AC/DC
• Steve Earle
• Jimi Hendrix
• Merle Haggard
• The Beatles
• Van Halen
• Tammy Wynette
• Spinal Tap
• Ali Farke Toure
• Robert Johnson
• Prince
• The Rolling Stones
• Stevie Ray Vaughan
• The Sex Pistols
• Hank Williams
• Scott Holt (well, it IS my radio station!)
• John Coltrane
• Sam Cooke
• T.V on the Radio
• P-Funk
• Jerry Lee Lewis
• Billy Idol
• Sly & The Family Stone
• Wes Montgomery
• Miles Davis
• Santana
• Skip James
• Faron Young
• Mozart
• Bob Dylan
• the cast of Glee (seeing if you’d actually read the whole list down!)
• etc. (by that I mean, I could go on and on. Etc. is not to indicate a band called etc. although I’d probably play them too)

Possums and the Stimulus Package

Sometimes I get asked about what it’s like to live in Nashville, here’s a snapshot of an average day; Buff and I are running errands on Sunday. We stop at Best Buy to pick up a new hard drive and as I’m stopped in the parking lot, waiting on a car to back out of an extremely good spot (near the door, first row, you know the kind of spot you find and it just makes you want to stay all day!), a SUV is crowding behind me, trying to pass me on the INSIDE! In other words, between me and the space I’m waiting to turn into. I look in the rearview and it’s an older guy. I give him the ‘look’ and speak to him like you do when you’re driving, as though he can hear me, and I tell Buff, “That old guy’s trying to run over us! He looks like George Jones.” We get parked, get out and start to make our way to the front door. The SUV is now almost on the sidewalk right in front of the store!! (better spot than I got) Buff looks at the driver and says, “It is George Jones!” tag on the car was NOSHOW4!! If you have to get run over, it might as well be by a legend I always say. Just another day in Nashville.