(tune of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”)
It was 20 years ago, in a rush
Sgt. Matthews told the bus to flush
A boat was underneath the loo
A hundred tourists got coated in poo
They needed tetracycline
The driver had to pay a fine
So let me introduce to you
Together after all these years
Dave Matthews’ Chicago Poop-Filled Boat!
First: Tomorrow’s show is going to be pre-recorded, so if you have a request for your favorite song from the ’50s. ’60s or early ’70s, queue up early, as Phil Musick used to say, and post it in the comments.
You also can call 412-385-7450 and leave a voice mail with your name and your request.
Second: I’ve been having some weird-ass dreams lately.
I woke up this morning with a start and realized that when Bill the Cat was running for president of the United States in “Bloom County,” Opus could not have run for vice president; because, canonically, he was born in the Falkland Islands and therefore was not eligible to serve.
I gotta lay off the politics for a while, I guess.
Third: My boss asked me yesterday to explain the “brat” thing to her, and specifically why Kamala Harris “is brat.”
I was like, “you’re asking the Gen X white dude to explain current slang? Ask me about 1980s sitcoms or something.”
I know it has to do with a new album by the British pop star Charli xcx. Brat supposedly means being a little bit messy but self-confident — “accepting your imperfections but embracing the chaos.” I’m just not sure how VP Harris embraces chaos; if anything, she seems super with-it.
Unlike me; I was never with it.
It’s electric, boogie-woogie-woogie
This month’s “Pen Avenue” for Print, Pittsburgh’s East End newspaper:
Print is not available online; you can only read it in (what else?) print. It’s available at Giant Eagle and other stores in Pittsburgh’s East End, or subscribe on the website.
Original rough sketch:
Every 1’s a winner, except me and thee
In case you missed it, Pittsburgh’s The Bubba Show has been selected by Pittsburgh City Paper as a finalist for its “Best of Pittsburgh” awards under the category “Best Radio Personality or Duo,” while Star 100.7 has been named a finalist under the category, “Best Radio Station.”
In what can only be described as a stunning coincidence, Star 100.7, on which the Bubba Show airs, is the sponsor of the “Best of Pittsburgh” awards. What are the chances?
I keed, I keed! Anyway, congratulations to all of the finalists.
I also want to thank everyone who took the time not to vote for me; my perfect 20 year streak of never winning anything remains intact. (I was told by an insider that one problem is that I can’t be nominated under the category “Best Radio Personality” because I don’t have one.)
It’s nice to see Bonny Diver on the list, along with Lily Sixx. Make sure to vote early and often.
I hope Joe Biden spends the rest of the year driving his Corvette across the lawn at Trump Bedminster National Golf Club, doing donuts on the greens, spraying turf everywhere, and saying, “The Supreme Court says I have immunity, motherf-cker!”
If Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee — and I think it would be suicidal for the Democrats to turn this into an intra-party squabble, but I never doubt their ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — then I sure hope that Maya Rudolph has Saturday nights free on his schedule this fall. She’s going to be busy.
Lots of people are messaging me privately saying they don’t think Harris could win because of racism and misogyny. They said, “The Democrats should play it safe and pick a white, middle-aged guy, like Gavin Newsom.”
I have three deep thoughts on that subject.
The first deep thought is that bypassing the vice president is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons. It would alienate core Democratic voters — women and people of color — and also would allow the news media to focus on chaos and infighting. The Dems have already lost a month since Biden’s disastrous debate; instead of talking about Biden’s success stories (and he has been successful, despite what your elderly uncle posts on Facebook) the entire media narrative has been “Biden is frail.”
My second deep thought is that people who wouldn’t vote for a Black woman weren’t going to vote for Joe Biden anyway, simply because he’s a Democrat. There is no mythical bland Midwestern white guy who is going to be acceptable to Trump’s base. That well of potential voters is completely poisoned; they are utterly captured by Christian talk-radio, cable TV news and the vast right-wing bullshit machine, which is being ably assisted by billionaire technology companies funded by people such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.
(If Biden’s administration is doing such a bad job, ask yourself this: Why are people such as Thiel, Musk and Andreessen spending billions of dollars to try to defeat him? Because the Biden Administration is finally enforcing anti-trust laws that have been on the books for decades, and they’re gearing up to come after the Internet monopolies.)
Deep thought 3: Democrats need to stop pandering to mythical white male Republicans who they think can be persuaded to vote for conservative Democrats, and start pandering to their own voters for a change.
The solid base of Trump dead-enders are not persuadable by any Democratic candidate. I talk to them; I listen to right-wing talk radio. Trump’s core supporters are firmly convinced that Democrats are pedophiles who drink the blood of infants and want to turn the United States into a Communist dictatorship with open borders and perform forced sex changes on kindergarten kids. The propaganda has worked on them.
On the other side, people who were going to vote for Joe Biden no matter what — even if the Democratic Party had to do a “Weekend at Bernie’s” on him — are not suddenly going to refuse to vote because Biden’s vice president is the nominee.
I suspect, however, that there is a vast middle ground of voters who were unenthusiastic about Joe Biden, or who weren’t closely paying attention because they figured 2024 was just going to be a rerun of 2020. Maybe that’s not a very large group of people. Maybe it’s only a few percentage points. But in an election that was going to be close, no matter what, a few percentage points could make the difference. I suspect they are much more “gettable” for the Democrats with a new, energetic candidate. If those votes are now in play, it’s hard to see that as bad news for the Dems.
But hey, what do I know? I thought the Edsel was a good idea.
Anyway, today is National Ice Cream Day. Joe Biden has had a crappy couple of weeks. I hope he’s enjoying some really good ice cream today.
And if Kamala Harris is looking for a bland middle-aged white male from Pennsylvania who will bring balance to the ticket, I’m tanned, rested and ready to serve as her vice president:
Radical thought: Maybe each of us should try to live our lives so that if someone tries to hurt us people don’t laugh and say things like “too bad they missed”
I swear this is all true.
(Photo: Google Reviews)
Jay’s local drug store. Jay is standing in line to pay for a prescription. Behind him is an older lady, picking up a large bag of prescriptions. The pharmacist is at the cash register.
Pharmacist: “Don’t bother writing a check, your co-pay is only $3.”
Jay: “Well, then I’ll pay cash.” (Takes out wallet, drops money on the floor)
Pharmacist (laughing): “Anything that falls on the floor is property of the store.”
Jay (laughing): “Did you ever hear the one about what the pastor did with the collection after church? He threw all of the money up in the air and said, ‘Whatever God wants, He keeps, and whatever comes back down is mine.'”
Older Lady (clears throat)
Pharmacist (clears throat): “Actually, Sister Mary Ann is here picking up prescriptions for the rest of the nuns in the convent.”
Jay (turns red)
Older Lady (laughs): “Nevermind, actually, I thought that was a pretty good one.”
Pharmacist (laughs)
(the end)
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.
This is about politics. If you can’t handle that, skip this.
And if you think “Oh, boy, I love to talk politics!” but you want to give me a bunch of MAGA talking points (like the guy who recently messaged me, “Make jokes now, loser, you’re going to be crying in a few months”) you will be blocked and deleted. Again, skip this.
You have been warned.
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.