Van Halen III, exploding pagers, and Atari Swordquest
WILT Wednesday: Podcast recommendations for What I'm Listening To Wednesday
Oh boy. I kinda want to send this first one to my old boss Jay Clark to see what he says, but Jay is retired now and I don’t want to upset him. He’d lose hs mind with all the bad habits these guys have. Let’s dive in on Regarding…Van Halen III.
If you were to get through the first 40 minutes (FORTY!!!) of Regarding Van Halen III there’s a pretty decent discussion of a song.
The eventual discussion is about Van Halen III, the one VH album with Gary Cherone as lead singer. Now I like Cherone, and if you like Van Halen, I will encourage you to check out Extreme’s latest release Six STAY WITH ME TRUST ME and realize what Van Halen could have sounded like if they didn’t make Gary screech into Sammy Hagar’s vocal range.
I digress, I will get into that on Music Monday.
Back to the Van Halen III podcast.
I think the podcast hosts are musicians, maybe even music producers, but I don’t know and it’s their job to get that information into my brain whether through an intro or context clues.
Everyone om the pod has on their DJ Voice. Everyone is trying to be a Personality instead of just speaking the way normal people speak. At least one guy seems to have his mic set to some sort of FM DJ Processing. The entire show has music beds for some reason, and the beds fight the voices of the hosts. Someone has a soundboard, because it is 1994, and LOVES to play drops. The third time the same Looney Toones drop plays is really something!
If you can make it through all THAT, and if you really like Van Halen, skip the first 40 minutes (FORTY!!!!) and you will find a reasonably good analysis of the song Without You and how it could have been better.
What really makes me laugh, is their central premise is that there’s some good art in VH3 that could have used a good producer. Ummmm. YEAH. Imagine that…. lol.
For this next section: I didn’t sleep well Sunday night. Some nights I play podcasts to calm my brain. On Sunday I was drifting in and out as I played these next two, so I can’t tell you I heard every word, but I did like what I did hear.
The Legend of Swordquest is something something an old Atari 2600 game and a contest and the narrator’s quest to win the contest or something. I dunno, I was half asleep. But I liked the storytelling and they had me at Atari 2600.
The Guardian included this next one on their list for the week, or I would never have noticed it. Unpacking Peanuts! Oh, I only got the peanut packing riff now. There’s a riff there right? We pack peanuts? Are peanuts packed? I guess? Is that a thing?
Let me borrow from The Guardian here:
This delightful series celebrates the cartoon strip that turned kid worrywart Charlie Brown and his daydreaming beagle into global icons. Three professional cartoonists – Michael Cohen, Jimmy Gownley and Harold Buchholz – are working their way through Schulz’s output chronologically from 1950, and with the entire Peanuts archive free to view online, listeners are encouraged to read along. The veteran trio and their producer Liz Sumner have an easygoing rapport, and offer perceptive insights into author Charles M Schulz’s artistic development and empathetic sense of humour. With eight seasons banked, the epic read-through has already reached the mid-1980s.
I listened to the 1989 episode, in and out of sleep, and it was nice enough. I plan to go back to episode one.
Pager Protocol made the news this week, from my company, and we even did an interview about it in “The Press / Thing You’ve Heard Of” (Will share once it is live.)
The setup here is - a bunch of bad guys’ pagers explode. Who did it? Why? How did this all work? Like a good James Bond movie, my business partner Mark took a real world premise and made it into a cool fiction story.
And GOOD NEWS, the world seems to be a happier place. There has been so much good news lately that I have 5 Good News Stories recorded through the end of October. (I can always add something in if there is Timely Good News).