My band, the Archbishops of Blount Street, were on the radio this past Friday. We were on NPR's "The State of Things" with Frank Statio, who, by an odd coincidence, happened to be an old family friend of our guitarist, George. We were on during their noon show. It was a super blast. Most new experiences are always different from what you'd expect, but this one was pleasantly so. My band T.Rox once had a snippet of our version of Time After Time played on the G105 morning show when they were looking for bands for some fall festival thing. G105 is fairly popular, but they tend to play top 40 almost exclusively which I guess is by definition, popular. Anywhoos, Kimmy, wrote in one morning on the interwebs and they looked at our Myspace page live on the air and said that it was catchy and that we probably rocked live. They butchered our band name, but it was still pretty nifty. The sound bite of the whole thing was buried in a 2 hour podcast of the show.
There wasn't much else besides that with me and the radio. I've had a few tunes I'd recorded played on the radio, but those were mostly local college radio shows with barely a mention of the bands or regional rock and beach music shows with bands that I'd left years ago so I was fairly disconnected.
A friend of mine, Brian Hill, from Regatta 69 was on "The State of Things" back in July to promote the Skankfest he'd put together that we were playing on. He did it as a solo singer/guitarist. Our bassist/manager, Ski, felt that the triangle ska scene needed a stronger representation so he dropped the show a line and they booked us for November. We were originally booked for late October to help us promote our Dreads to Kill KISS/ska show, but we were moved because of a schedule conflict. We didn't have anything decent to promote, aside from a slot opening for the Slackers that Sunday, but they still wanted us to play which was nice.
So nine of us crammed into the studios at WUNC. Our rhythm guitarist, Jon, was on a plane coming back from Omaha so we weren't at super full strength, but pretty close. Frank was also in the room at his station while we played. The room had what looked like a small conference table with about five schmancy microphones sticking up out of it and a computer. All of this was in a little room not much bigger than the table itself with a tad more room off to one side of the table. There was the main control room with the big glass off to one side. We put the drums in one corner of the room and the rest of us crowded around the table.
They had to mic the drums and guitar amp and they had two extra mics for horns which we gave to the sax players. The keys and bass went directly to the board. That made things interesting because there were only seven extra sets of headphones. That meant that Brannon and Brian had to do without since they weren't singing or playing a rhythm instrument. Derek, Richard, Timothy and I had the vocal mics on the table. Mine doubled as a brass mic for Brian and me. Needless to say the sound mixing was going to be a bit sketchy. We made it work though, surprisingly well. They had a really nice mixing board in the control booth.
Our segment of the show was all of 17½ minutes. We were on after an editor who'd put together a book of Kafka stories, and before that was the lady who owned a set of tae kwon do studios. It was an eclectic show. We closed out the show. It went by very quickly. We were told to prepare about 4 songs, one of which was going to be the play out. We chose Sally Brown, Monkey Man, Love Gun (or Message to You Rudy if they didn't mention the KISS show) and Stir It Up to close with. We'd originally chosen Sell Out to close, but I'd forgotten my trumpet as did Derek so we didn't have the right horns for the song. It worked out for the best since Derek got to sing one and we were able to showcase our vocals.
I was one of the ones picked to do the talking for the group along with Ski. I was to answer any questions about ska or the music and he was to answer questions about the band and/or booking. We figured there was no way to keep Derek from talking so we just had to run with whatever he said. He and Ski shared a mic so that cut down on a bit of the vocal clutter that typifies our shows. Neither Tim nor Richard piped up during the interview bits. Frank actually addressed me first and asked about the history of ska, which I started to bumbled through then Ski took over. Derek interjected here and there, but all in all it seemed to go pretty well. One thing is certain, none of us are radio smooth just yet.
Our tunes went over pretty well despite the sound limitations and the cramped quarters. Sally Brown was fairly straightforward. The backing vocals were fairly low. I think they might have been compensating for the fact that our horns were coming through the mic as well. Monkey Man was good as well, even though Bruce was supposed to count it off and just ended up staring at us pointing at him until Ski called out, "one, two, three, four." It just made for a longer pause, although in the studio it felt like forever. My solo sucked a bit, but Tim made up for it by rocking the flute. Love Gun was awesome. It was the best we'd ever played it. Maybe the horns were paying closer attention to the key, E♭ minor. It just clicked. Richard's vocals were perfect. Stir It Up was surprisingly good because of the vocals. I wish we'd had more than 40 seconds of it before fade out.
After it was all said and done Frank shook all of our hands and got our of the way so we could get our equipment out of the room. We managed that in short order, but I had to book it out of there to get to work. I'd like to have hung out a bit and poked around the studios. Everyone there was very nice and helpful. Imagining all of the folks that come through there in the course of a week I'm surprised they aren't more jaded.
Lots of people I hadn't told have come up to me and told me about hearing the show. My boss at Harris Teeter came up to me Saturday morning and just raved about the band. It was pretty cool. The show broadcasts statewide so it was, by far and away, the largest audience we'd even reached. I don't expect there's a huge number of ska fans that listen to NPR, but you never know. It was a very interesting experience.
OK. I'm starting to bore myself now. Time to bye bye,
Jeremy
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