Records & Rockstars

While last time the effect in the spotlight was the talk box, this time it's an equally cool effect and rather strange sound from the studio that makes the music and/or the vocal, sound like jets overhead! Call it phase-shifting or stereo flanging, nothing but that this time in a trippy episode titled after the classic song "Phasors on Stun" by the classic Canadian band known as FM.

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The 2nd of a 3-parter, this time an episode featuring the finest examples of the magical effect in which mouth and guitar meet to produce an unmistakable sound on some big ones from the 70s, 80s, and nineties.

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The first of a 3-parter that begins with a wizard, a true star, and HIS first big song, plus a game called sounds of the studio, in an episode that also features bagpipes, slide whistle, home-made kazoo, and a dog fronting a band that plays to no one. The strange continues with didgeridoo, sugar packets, and more.

Plus a call to you for theme ideas.   

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This time to follow our choice night songs, an episode featuring select songs about the day in your life, and the day trips, the beautiful days, and perfect days, starring everyone from Beatles to Beatle influencer Buddy Holly, and Beatle soundalikes Badfinger, and a surprise even to JW, one day in the middle of the 1990s, Sheryl Crow did a duet with Johnny Cash about the kind of day Bob Marley had long ago sung about.

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After 800 weekly radio show episodes it seems like high time we do a 2 parter on day and night songs. Here comes part 1 and it features Bob Seger recounting how in Toronto, he laid down a song he believed in despite his management wanting him to do three other songs, and it became a career maker!

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Can you think of any bands that share their names with songs? Here comes nineteen now.

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Not only the Billys of ROCK, because we've adopted the adage, "untethered by genre or era", happily colouring outside the lines this time again, with Williams turned Billys and with Billies too, from rock and jazz and blues and more, and a few Billy Joes to boot.

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There's something about the sound of the instrument, smallish in size, that adds something special to select rock songs. It's Italian. It has strings. It's part of the lute family of stringed instruments with long necks and and rounded bodies. Most often played with a pick, it typically has four courses or sets of 2 strings, tuned in unison and making it an 8 string instrument, and when you put two strings close together like this, you get more volume, just like with a 12 string guitar has that shimmer of strings vibrating against one another. Mandolin after the Italian mandolino, and it's in the spotlight this time in nothing but the songs of Led Zeppelin.

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Songs that start not with the verse but with the chorus, with lots of Beatle angles, plus Bowie, Blur, and a funky interlude or two.

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Jeff packs another ton of bands from the 1950s to now, into the 2nd of two parts celebrating bands with brothers and bands with sisters. This time, brother and sister bands from the letters I through V. Q: recognize the brothers in the photo? The cradle will rock is right! That and more right here.

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