Category: Show Notes

Halloween is next week, so this Saturday’s show will feature a Halloween theme, including a salute to Pittsburgh’s own Joe Flaherty, who died last year.

On Sunday night, I’ll be at Arsenal Lanes in Lawrenceville for a Sunday Night Oldies Party from 9 p.m. to 12 midnight. I’ve already got my funny face on for that.

Coming up in a couple of weeks (Nov. 22), we’ll be broadcasting from McKeesport’s annual Salute to Santa Parade, which gets underway along Fifth Avenue at the McKees Point Marina at 11 a.m. I’ll be handling some of the live video commentary.

I’d love to do some more remote broadcasts on Saturdays, but generally no one asks. So if you have a non-profit event in the Mon Valley area and you’d like Uncle Jay to bring the oldies caravan to it from 12 to 3 p.m. on a Saturday, email me at jaythurbershow@gmail.com. There’s no charge for the service (and believe me, it’s worth every cent).

And for those of you who asked, I’m generally at Arsenal on the second and fourth Sundays of each month. The second Sunday is usually indie rock and alternative pop from the 1980s through today, while the fourth Sunday is an old-fashioned Mon Valley style oldies rock ‘n roll fest.

On Saturday (Nov. 16), WRCT-FM will pre-empt our show for “Anatomy of the Ear,” and I’m using that as an excuse to take a rare week off.

Instead of a new show, I’m dipping into my archive of old “Radio 9” broadcasts going back 20 years to bring you a rerun from November 2004. I haven’t heard this show myself since it originally aired, so it will be interesting to find out just how bad I was — and to compare it to more recent shows to see if I’ve ever gotten any better.

I think the show’s gotten a lot better; in 2004, I hadn’t yet worked in commercial radio and gotten a lot of additional training from the late Clarke Ingram. So this could be a painful thing to listen to.

Anyway, tune into Tube City Online Radio from 12 to 3 p.m. (Eastern U.S. time) Saturday and hear for yourself. Again: Don’t look for us on WRCT.

Next Saturday (Nov. 23), we’ll be live in Downtown McKeesport at a pop-up holiday market at the corner of Fifth and Walnut streets. McKeesport’s annual Salute to Santa parade will be from 11 a.m. to 12 noon, and we’ll be going live from the pop-up market right after that. That show, good Lord willing, will air both on Tube City Online Radio and WRCT.

ICYMI: Last Saturday on the big Radio 9 show, we talked to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie about her article in the current issue of The Saturday Evening Post, called “How Ice Cream Made America.”

If you missed the show, you can hear the interview here:

Or read the article here. You can find Linda’s other stories and links to her books at her website.

I was about 14 when I discovered that Martin Mull was more than a character actor who turned up playing minor roles in mostly forgettable movies. It might have been this appearance on the Smothers Brothers’ short-lived 1980s CBS variety show that hepped me to his comedy.

It was the perfect age for a nerdy white teen-ager to discover Mull’s particular brand of nerdy white humor.

It was about the same time I first learned that Chris Elliott, the funny, weird, nerdy guy on Letterman’s “Late Night” show, had a dad who had been in radio, but that’s a story for another time.

The genius of Martin Mull’s comedy — much like the genius of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding for that matter, or David Letterman, come to think of it — is that it usually conceals a very, very nasty edge beneath a very, very bland, show-business veneer. In Mull’s case, the edge was often used to attack bigotry, specifically of the kind that he grew up with in suburban Cleveland and Connecticut.

During an era in the 1970s when it was still acceptable for white comedians to tell jokes about Black and Hispanic people, or for male comedians to do jokes about shrewish wives and girlfriends, Mull would come out onto stage with his guitar and also start to tell — with a wide smile and great bonhomie in his voice — what sounded like a racist or sexist joke. 

The audience would start to giggle uncomfortably, but then, instead of the expected lame punchline, Mull would veer off into an absurd, over-the-top, almost surreal exaggeration of racism or sexism or antisemitism that made himself — and prejudice itself — the butt of the joke. For a while, Mull cornered the market on exposing the phoniness of bland, homogenized, lowest-common-denominator content that elevated white suburbia as the highest (and only) acceptable form of American culture.

His 1985 mockumentary, “The History of White People in America,” is simultaneously a parody of shallow public-television celebrations of ethnic diversity and a devastating satire of brain-dead American exceptionalism during the Reagan years.

As a disc jockey, Martin Mull’s music has been a staple of my shows from my very week at WRCT. I even occasionally slipped them in during my stints at the commercial AM stations where I worked, much to the aggravation of the program director.

But he had so many great, funny, droll songs: “Licks Off of Records,” “Flexible,” “Jesus Christ, Football Star,” “Normal.” Every time I hear some phony Christian fundamentalist preacher, I start thinking of Martin Mull:

I tried women
Oh how I tried ’em
I took little boys in leather suits
Outside and had ’em tied
I tried a poodle, a collie
Kukla, Fran & Ollie
But Mary in the manger’s got me satisfied

Oh, Jesus is easy
Just get down on your knees
He’s gonna listen to your every prayer
Jesus is easy
Just get down on your knees
He’s everywhere
Jesus Christ! He’s everywhere

Martin Mull died Friday at age 80. I tried, unsuccessfully, several times to get contact information for him over the years, not to interview him, or get an autograph, just to let him know how much I appreciated his work. Maybe I should have tried harder.

Anyway, I guess I know what I’m playing on my show Saturday.

Reminder: Tomorrow’s show is ONLY on Tube City Online Radio – McKeesport. Like these headlines say, you shouldn’t fear the Internet!

If you have Siri, Amazon Echo, or Alexa, just ask it to “Play Tube City Online Radio.” Otherwise, you can find it on:

Airtime: https://tubecityonline.airtime.pro/

Streema: https://streema.com/radios/WMCK.FM_McKeesport

Radio.Garden: http://radio.garden/visit/mckeesport-pa/-9Zzpk38

Happy Thanksgiving! On this weekend’s show, I’m playing “Pilgrim’s Progress (Take an Indian to Lunch)” by Stan Freberg, from his brilliant 1961 satire, “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume 1: The Early Years.“

“Pilgrim’s Progress” is a parody of the first Thanksgiving, as it was traditionally taught in American schools — and still is, in a lot of places.

You know, the humble Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, and nearly starved to death — except that they made friends of the noble Native Americans who helped them through the winter. In solemn thanks to the natives and to God, the Pilgrims celebrated by inviting the indigenous tribes to a Thanksgiving feast in 1621.

As Roy Edroso points out today, almost no one still buys that story: “The kind of paternalistic bullshit you’d hear about it a couple of decades ago sounds ridiculous to everyone now; not even readers of the Wall Street Journal are buying it.”

Myself, I’m not so sure about that. I’ve heard from friends with kids in religious schools that the noble-savages-kindly-pilgrims myth is still taught.

But the Thanksgiving myth was definitely the dominant narrative in the early 1960s, when Freberg and a cast of the best talent from old-time radio (a veritable who’s who of early TV cartoon stars, too, including June Foray, Daws Butler, Peter Leeds, Paul Frees, Billy May’s orchestra and Jud Conlon’s chorus) recorded “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the rest of “United States of America” at the famous Capitol Records studios in Hollywood.

As a result, I’m not sure that listeners in 2023 appreciate just how vicious this satire was. In fact, I’m almost worried that some folks may think that Freberg was celebrating racism.

Continue reading “Two, four, six, eight? Who do we tolerate?”

“Radio 9” will not be heard this weekend on our flagship/namesake station, WRCT 88.3 FM. Instead, students will be presenting “Anatomy of the Ear,” an annual event where — for three days — usual programming is suspended in order to feature solid one-hour blocks of music from a variety of styles and genres.

This year, for my contribution to “Anatomy of the Ear,” I will be presenting an hour of big-band music, all from records, and most of the records will be original 78 RPM records from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

The bad news? My hour will air at 3 a.m. Saturday. Make sure to set your alarm.

Since I know most of my listeners go to bed right after they watch the lottery numbers and won’t be up at 3 a.m. (unless they have to go pee), I will re-broadcast the hour of big-band music from 2 to 3 p.m. Saturday during my regular timeslot on Tube City Online Radio in McKeesport. (The other two hours of my show on Tube City Online Radio also will be pre-recorded this weekend.)

I thought some folks might be interested in the mechanics of playing 78 RPM records almost 100 years after they were first made, so I did this short video.

Basically, if you try to play 78 RPM records on most modern turntables, they will sound terrible, even if the turntable says it can play 78 RPM. You need to make sure you have the correct needle.

The opposite is also true: You should not try to play any modern records (33 or 45 RPM records made since 1950) on a turntable designed to play 78 RPM. You may very well destroy more modern records.

The needle (technically, “stylus”) for a modern (“microgroove”) record is tiny compared to the needles for which 78 RPM records were designed.

Mat from Techmoan has a much more detailed video that will explain everything you ever wanted to know about playing vintage records on a modern turntable.

And here’s a link to V-M Audio Enthusiasts in Michigan, which has a wide selection of turntable needles and record cartridges to fit most vintage (and some new) record players. This is not a paid endorsement; I’m just a very happy repeat customer.

You can find the entire schedule for Anatomy of the Ear on the WRCT website.