9/6/2012 Rocket Ship Ska Trip

(9/6/12)

 Watta debut! The RSST kisses the 3-hour tour goodbye (with a little help from The Upsetters... na-na-hey-hey) as we inaugurated our new 4-hour tour, now chasing Sherwood's Planet down an extremely-fast subquantum wormhole some 650 million light-years across the universe to a 3-way intergalactic traffic accident vaguely resembling Tinkerbell! Taking this hyper-fast warp lane (not "war plane") oddly enough added only 15min. to our trip, and a bucket of extra tunes to our "Ooh" playlist... including another old Upsetters scorcher called "So Bad"...  so badass! It joins longtime ska faves by The Skatalites (both sides of the Kildare/Sucu 45), Sir Lord Comic ("Ska-ing West"), Buster's All Stars (an earlier take of the same tune titled "Driving West") Justin Hinds, Carlos Malcolm and more to pack a jam-packed hour+15min. "hour"!

 At the other end of the warp lane (again, not "war plane"), Sherwood's serving up some Martian coffee (imported all the way from our solar system by one Andre Popp ;^)) ...should go good with whatever it is Teddy Mertens is passing aroud! If you've got the munchies afterwards, try some of Herb Alpert's "Tangerine".  The psychedelically percussive "Soulful (September)" by Hal Blaine gets Sherwood's party launched, and eventually Emerson, Lake & Palmer show up in a "Tank"! Yeah, drive THAT thing around under our Starview Dome, will ya! Oh, well, at least there's no war planes...  (not "warp lanes" ...we've got those!)  Tokyo Jihen, Perez Prado and "The Outlaw" Joe Chambers also turn up in this week's Voov... but, back through the warp lane (not "war plane"!)...

 GotchaSKAvered now precedes what's become the 5@5 in what's now "The Home Stretch"... and the GotchaSKAvered Ska Cover-of-the-Month selection for September is... (the envelope, please... )   ...r-r-rip... "Guns of Navarone"!  This week, a new big band outa Ska-alifornia does the honors. Western Standard Time (previously the name of a Roy Richards 45 on Studio 1) has released their debut "Big Band Tribute to the Skatalites" and we'll be hearing more from these guys in future weeks! The 5:00 5-in-a-row this time goes "2 Tone International" ...late-'70s/early'80s Ska from Italy (Donatella Rettore), Belgium (Lou & the Hollywood Bananas), Japan (Yellow Magic Orchestra), England (The Planets) and, uh, England (Morgan Fisher's Hybrid Kids). Hey, it was another excuse to play MacArthur Park, right? Couldn't pass that up, even if it was pre-2Tone by about half a year...