Rocket Ship Ska Trip

5/16 in a nutshell…

The “Ooh” that got away! From us, anyway. A few wrong-disc/wrong-track/wrong-player errors culminated in the Opening Oldies Hour airing the brand-spankin’ new Caro Emerald/Lokee remix of “Tangled Up” which, fortunately, is a really cool tune! We got things back under our control ‘til a certain UFO from ’47 crashed into our playlist! Oh, well… it was piloted by our own Froggies, and gave us a chance to line up the rest of the “Ooh” which pretty much went off without a hitch. Sherwood then took us around his Planet with the sounds of Matt Wilson’s Arts & Crafts, Eddie Cano, Owen Bradley, YMCK and more, and the Home Stretch saw Brave Combo doling out this week’s Lollipop. The theme of the 5@5:05 was “Night and Day”, including the actual song bearing that title, performed here by After Hours. Bad Manners and Kingston Kitchen (twice!) also figured into that set. The pop/ska “Bang Bang Boom Boom” was by somebody named Beth Hart. She’s entirely new to us, but apparently her recording career dates back to the ’90s! Most of what she does is solidly blues/rock, but whatever she’s singin’, she’s put it over the top with everybody from Joe Bonamassa to Jeff Beck to Les Paul his bad self. Nice pop/ska number, by the way. OK, skassengers, the RSST has the week of the 23rd off to make room for KFAI to mount 24 solid hours of Native American programming, so Tune In… and Stay Tuned! Back in 2 weeks.

5/2/13 in a nutshell…

We noticed The Night Sky Turning Blue during the Home Stretch, and we broke out our favorite Buford O’Sullivan song, which will have greater longevity on this year’s playlists due to the extra hour we didn’t have at this time last year. The 5(+1)@5:05 was strictly East Coast-themed, and opened with Boston greats The Void Union and Bim Skala Bim, and also included New York legends The Toasters. Margherita’s “Tu Sei Pallido”, one of two Italian “Lollipops” in our possession (the other being the feisty Rita Pavone’s), comes from a record whose overly long title misidentifies the geographical origin-point of “Ska” (U.S.A. according to the 45 sleeve… ), but nevertheless isn’t actually a bad version of the song. Sherwood changed his meteorological pitch up, observing the wet weather with Ken Nordine (“Looks Like It’s Going to Rain”) instead of the Soil & “Pimp”/Shiina Ringo collab usually heard here when we’re “feelin’ a change in the air”. Ringo still mentioned rain, though… it turns up in her “Suberidai”, which we heard just before Walter Wanderley launched into “Song of the Jet”. May’s “calendar album” tracks were Emil Richards’ “Emerald” and “Flower Society” by the psychedelically percussive Hal Blaine. The “Ooh” spun ska oldies mostly Jamaican, but also from Mexico (Toño Quirazco), South Africa (Soweto Stokvel Septette), the US (Lester Lanin) and the UK (Colonel Elliott & the Lunatics). Tune in… and stay tuned!

4/18/13 in a nutshell…

This week, let’s fast-forward to the Home Stretch. 2 weeks ago, due to the lack of a 5@5:05, we promised skassengers a 5×2@5:05 the following week, which we didn’t actually deliver last week. So this week, we decided that the whole Home Stretch (except for the Mutant Frogs bumpers and, of course, of course, “The End”) would be Japanese ska, or as we like to say around here, “Skapanese”, including the J-Lollipop unwrapped by Mie Nakao, whose version of “My Boy” manages to liberally reference that other Lollipop, the one by The Chordettes. In a then-future century, an outfit called The Dreamlets would do likewise, but this week we spun their “Nina”, inspired as we were by Sherwood B. Funn’s unplanned airing of Nina Hagen’s delightful “Flying Saucers”. Another Home Stretch highlight: a hat-trick of Runa Miyoshida goodies, one each from her first three Ska Flavor albums, albeit not in numerical order. But back to Sherwood… Imagine Herbie Hancock’s vocoderized voice scatting along with Grappelli and Reinhardt over spaciously chilled trip-hop beatz, and you’ve pretty much got the gist of “Star Scat”, a truly hallounginogenic confection from electro-swingers Caravan Palace. Don’t worry, you’re just hearing things… and I’m spinnin’em! While in Sherwood’s orbit, Shiina Ringo gave us a current weather report (“Rain’s a-comin’ down, rain’s a-comin’ deaaownn…”) while Weather Report gave us Wayne Shorter’s “When It Was Now”. Seriously, as I type this up, rain’s still a-comin’ deeaaoowwnnnn… let’s make it fly back up as we reverse the flow of time and back up into the “Ooh”… what a well-rounded selection of fine old ska goodies we have here, ranging from Clue J. to Stranger & Patsy, from The Dragonaires to The Upsetters. No real theme except, “Ooh, I like this one… and this one… and hold on, we haven’t heard that in a while!” Y’know… wingin’ it. Tune in… and stay tuned!

4/4 in a nutshell…

Ooh! Our Pledge Drive week 1 edition got off to a slightly glitchy start when a deck locked-up in the middle of “Jamaica Ska”, West Side Symphony Steel Orchestra style. Funny, one of our other identical decks played it flawlessly just a few minutes later! It was part of a tribute to the Byron Lee hit that included the song it was modeled on, Marv Johnson’s “Come On and Stop”. We bumpered an early version of a Mutant Frogs thing we’re calling “NASKA Dub”, and hunting around on YouTube yielded an unreleased Don Drummond jam called “Port Royal”. Sherwood bumpered a new Froggie mix of various samples of interplanetary electromagnetic frequencies received by NASA satellites, called… what else? “Interplanetary Frequencies”. This week’s Planet also included Arthur Lyman, The Peanuts, Fred Katz and a guy he used to provide musical backing for, Ken Nordine. Kicking off the Home Stretch, The Ska-Men, featuring an uncredited Ska-Woman, delivered the GotchaSKAvered Lollipop-of-the-Week, and we had the RSST debut of a new Caro Emerald remix by somebody named Lokee. If we had a 5@5:05 planned, it went right down a Pledge Drive memory hole, so we’ll do a 5×2 next week! Tune in… and Stay Tuned.