Album Notes

We're back-with more power pop! THIS IS ROCK 'N' ROLL RADIO with Dana & Carl! All across the four corners of the globe, avid fans of rockin' pop music agree on just one thing: that globes don't have corners. A fair amount of 'em also agree that the sole source of The Best Three Hours Of Radio On The Whole Friggin' Planet remains our little mutant dog 'n' pony show, THIS IS ROCK 'N' ROLL RADIO with Dana & Carl. Are we deluded? YES! Have we succumbed to our own clueless hype? HELL, yes! But we continue to sprawl across the airwaves every Sunday night from 9 to Midnight Eastern time (with a rerun during the day on Wednesday) on Westcott Radio in Syracuse, NY, www.westcottradio.org Dana and I have been doing this show for nearly eight years now. Before that, we'd done various similar projects together, beginning with a short-lived radio show called We're Your Friends For Now in 1992, and even including a one-off cable TV show called Radiovision. We always wanted to do a show that would play some of the many, many great records that weren't getting airplay. After all this time, not much has changed (well, other than the fact that station management originally thought I was too quiet and should speak more, which turned out to be kinda like telling Bill Clinton that he shouldn't be so shy around girls). But an unbelievable amount of incredible, often transcendent, seemingly radio-ready fare continues to be resolutely ignored by mainstream radio. And that just drives us razzafrazzin' nuts. Why is so much awesome music falling between the cracks? Maybe it's an inevitable consequence of commercial radio's bottom-line-driven mentality. Music isn't even a secondary concern for big radio behemoths; it's only about advertising dollars, and nothing else. I'm not opposed to commercial radio--the radio I grew up listening to, the great AM radio stations of the '60s and '70s, were certainly commercial entities. But love of the music, even just a casual interest in the music, doesn't even enter into the equation now. No one wants to dig deep into the vaults for something you've never heard before, new or old; radio stations want to give you the familiar, and sell you beer, or whatever. I have no quibble with radio stations making a buck, nor with advertisers pushing their wares; I just wish they could give me more compelling music to listen to between ads. Consider The Cowsills, and their flat-out amazing “She Said To Me,” included in this collection. If you don't already know this wonderful tune from the group's Global album back in the '90s, well, it's not your fault. Because where could you have heard it? Every big-name record label in the business passed on the chance to release it, so The Cowsills released it themselves. It's one of the very best records of that whole blamed decade, and it shoulda been an inescapable, # 1 hit; relatively few folks have even heard it. And virtually no one's heard it on the radio. That ain't right. Or how about Screen Test, perhaps the greatest pop band you've never heard? Formed by three members of The Flashcubes (THE great lost power pop band of the '70s), Screen Test has a cache of roughly, I dunno, a zillion nonpareil original pop tunes, which were likewise met with massive record-biz indifference. Screen Test used to introduce “Sound Of The Radio” as “a song about how great it was to listen to the radio, back when radio still played The Kinks.” The visionary Japanese label Air Mail Recordings is releasing a long-overdue CD collection of the best of Screen Test, but you still don't hear enough of The Kinks-or ANY Screen Test--on the radio. That ain't right. Little Steven, bless 'im, does play The Charms, The Grip Weeds and The Dipsomaniacs on his swell Underground Garage radio show (though [ahem] WE played 'em all first…!). But why does it sometimes seem like it's just us, Little Steven and a few other isolated true believers playing this stuff on terrestrial radio? That ain't right. The Cowsills, Screen Test, The Charms, The Grip Weeds, The Dipsomaniacs, this terrific new track by John Wicks & the Records, the randy splendor of astroPuppees, that irresistible a cappella track by Mr. Encrypto, The Blondes singin' an ode to my favorite '70s poster queen, Suzi Quatro, and all these other superb efforts by Richard Barone, The BAR, The Fire Apes, The Condors, Tim Anthony, Eytan Mirsky, The Shamus Twins, Cloud Eleven, Jim Basnight, Raquel's Boys, Beauty Scene Outlaws, Pop Is Art, The Ringles, Lo and the Magnetics, The Spongetones, The Lemon Clocks--all of these great records should be played on the radio everywhere. And yet the task falls to the sorry likes of US?! No, no, no-that ain't right. We don't have any illusions about starting a radio revolution (well, maybe Dana does, but he's funny that way). But we're gonna keep on doing whatever it is we've been doing, sort of the radio equivalent of Helen Keller playing a Rickenbacker 12-string alone in a forest with no one else around--maybe you can't quite hear us, but we do make a sound--a mighty, mighty sound. If you listen, you'll get it; it ain't much, but it's what's right. And this is what rock 'n' roll radio sounds like on Sunday nights in Syracuse each week.