Playlist Date & Time: 12/13/2008 11:55PM - 3:00AM

Program: Blues in the Night with Jamie Dell'Apa

Great Starts!

 Archived Audio from this show at: 

http://www.virb.com/submariner/music/albums/77583 

Ever notice how many songs have great starts?  Musicians use almost unlimited creativity for a song's novel beginnings, everything from sound effects and esoteric field recordings to their best musical licks.  In contrast, they only use two boring methods to end a song: (1) a gradual fade out or (2) the opposite, a crescendo of instrumental cacophony.  Tonight we explore songs with great starts and frame the show by making up a goofy story about why there are so many great starts in music.  From thin air, here goes:

Musicians want their songs played on radio but the play/no play decision is often made with only a few seconds of preview time per song.  (See the link for video evidence at our first song.)  So as a musician, you better put your creative energy into the first five seconds of the song or you're going to be playing to the tools in your garage for the rest of your life.   

Here is the conspiracy afterburner - evil record companies add killer licks to the first few second of a song to get the song on the air.  Then even if the rest of the song sucks, the company got the song some air time.  So if you hear a crappy song, it is not my fault - some evil corporation tricked me.  

  Tonight's "Great Starts" show was suggested by Ben Pagac of Washington, D.C. after an ad hoc fermented grain festival during last summer's "Make it Sing" seminar at the Center for Documentary Studies.  We were assisted by Chris Bolton who added a documentary of his nephew's great start (underwater childbirth at home) which we serialized and played between songs.  Ben joined us in the studio and was awarded the traditional granting of three wishes by the WWOZ genies.  He was strongly advised to submit these wishes in very clear writing or suffer being a corny joke punch line.  

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