Well, friends, it's been almost a year exactly since I quit my job at KTSH in a dramatic gesture of principle. Have these been the smoothest eleven months of my life? No. But they've been full of rediscovery and opportunity, and I have to say the future is really looking bright.
Case in point: I've been asked to do a guest DJ spot this week on Orange County's favorite classic rock station KXOJ (The Juice!). As you know, I've been lining up more and more of this subbing gigs, and this summer's going to be a great time for them, as a lot of the more steadily employed disc jockeys will be taking off on vacation. I think it's only a matter of time before Lost Moon Radio and I find a new permanent home.
I'm especially excited about this week's job because I'll be broadcasting live from the KXOJ Tent at the Orange County Fair. (Stop by and grab a bumper sticker!) So I'm loading up the ol' rocket with travel snacks and plotting a return course for Earth. As always, I'm looking forward to visiting the mother planet, and particularly the OC Fair. I haven't been in a number of years, but as a kid the fair was always one of the highlights of summer for me. I remember it like yesterday: tromping around in a the scorching heat, losing two month's allowance on the carnival games, betting on the pig races while eating chocolate-dipped bacon, and forcing my little brother David onto the tilt-a-whirl. He never wanted to go, but I know deep down he really loved it. The whole place was a kid's dream. I felt like Pinocchio on Pleasure Island, but no one tried to turn me into a donkey.
I also always love the fair for being the site of my first ever rock and roll concert: the Kingston Trio, who I saw under the stars in the open-air amphitheater when I was just seven or eight years old. I can still remember those perfect harmonies, calling my juvenile heart south of the border....
Speaking of musical guests, on the day of my broadcast the OC Fair is going to feature a very exciting pair of them, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart! The Wilson sisters are old friends of mine from before I left Planet Earth, so I'm really looking forward to seeing their show. I'm hoping I can even convince them to drop by the KXOJ tent for a quick hello on the air. Fingers crossed.
Anyway, you should get tickets to Heart's show at the Pacific Amphitheatre, and you should be sure to check out their new album, Red Velvet Car, which debuted at #11 on the Billboard Album Chart a few months ago. (Not bad for a band that first charted back in 1976.) It's a terrific record, and it continues Heart's triumphant return to their hard rock roots, following up on 2004's underappreciated Jupiters Darling (an album that I won't claim to have inspired ... though I certainly consider myself a member of its target audience).
So tune in this week! In the spirit of the season (and my return trip to Earth) I'm dedicating my broadcast to the theme of Travel, and I'm putting together a set list of terrific tracks. I'll see you at the fair!
It's a cold, blustery night here on the Lost Moon of Jupiter, but here inside my interstellar radio booth, the aliens and I abound with warmth and gratitude. Why, you might ask? Because this past week, Lost Moon Radio made its triumphant return to commercial FM radio!
Those in my erstwhile hometown of Los Angeles probably heard a familiar voice when scanning past SoCal's favorite praise-rock station, KRST, between midnight and 1 am. Yep, that was yours truly preaching the gospel of rock 'n roll on Christian radio, and I think it was a big success-- my inextricable agnosticism notwithstanding.
We heard tracks about karma and tracks about fate... tracks about God and about the Devil... about long-dead Greek deities and about a living one named Leroy. I also learned that my late mother's relationship with Catholicism makes Madonna look like the Pope. And I got more information about Dave Chappelle in a three-minute phone call than Viacom's private detectives have gotten in the past four years of searching his trash bins.
Now a bit of sad news. Despite a highly fulfilling evening back on the commercial airwaves, I won't be returning to KRST. My station contact, Pastor Gary Thompson, and I agreed that Lost Moon Radio wasn't quite the right fit for Christian radio. Specifically, Gary objected to the content of some of my more mind-expanding records, and (privately) I objected to the station's policy of playing Creed at 5, 25, and 45 minutes past each hour.
So the odyssey continues. Lost Moon Radio won't be back on KRST, but it will find a permanent home even if that means DJ-ing a test of the emergency broadcast system. Or even worse... working on AM.
Hello, Earth! Sound the trumpets, because I'm coming at you with some tremendous news! After nine months wandering in the wilderness, far from the light of the FM dial, this intergalactic DJ has finally found a new home for Lost Moon Radio!
I'm pleased to report that my show will be returning to Los Angeles's airwaves for good. My new permanent home: KRST FM: The Lamb of God and Greater Los Angeles.
Now those of you are familiar with the station may be thinking, "Jack, isn't KRST a Christian music station? Since when do you do religious radio?"
Well, you're right. I'm more or less a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic, and KRST will definitely be a format shift. The truth is I've been mailing resumes and proposals down to all the Earthside stations I could think of, and KRST's the first one to get back to me and actually offer me a spot (for reasons that I won't go into at the moment).
So I'm going to try to make it work. I guess my feeling is that religion's really about the search for truth and meaning in this crazy galaxy of ours, and isn't that what Lost Moon Radio's always been about, too?
Now I'm off to sort through my records! I want to make sure I've got the perfect setlist for this new debut. So check the KRST listings and tune in this weekend! They haven't told me my exact timeslot yet, but I'm probably going to filling one of the late-night hours previously occupied by a computer reading selections from First Corinthians.
Well friends, it probably comes as no surprise that my current transitional employment status has led this extraplanetary disc jockey to reflect on the highs and lows of the ol' curriculum vitae. Though I've spent the better part of my adult life in the Steel Tower of Radio, I've also held my share of odd jobs here and there. Some of you may recall my mentioning, in a Tweet of Solidarity with the costumed characters rousted from Hollywood Boulevard last summer, that I once spent two months portraying Happy the Dwarf at Disneyland. I figure I owe you the story.
Like many boys and girls of the 1950s, I spent a large portion of my childhood engaged in a fervent love affair with all things Disney. I was a committed Mouseketeer, an avid collector of Uncle Scrooge comics, and a dedicated viewer of the Disneyland TV series. (I was a little young for the height of the Crockett craze, but I was a great fan of some of their subsequent frontier serials, particularly the ones about Elfego Baca, a Mexican-American lawman portrayed surprisingly convincingly by Robert Loggia.) My preteen imaginative romantic energies were entirely focused, in succession, on Annette Funicello, Haley Mills, and Julie Andrews. And I was fascinated by the feature films about boy genius college student Merlin Jones, whose experiments inspired many failed invention attempts on my part: hovercraft, robot servants, hypnorays. (I also liked that Annette Funicello played his girlfriend.)
By the late sixties, however, my Disney loyalties had been supplanted by a new fixation on rock n' roll and the thriving counterculture. From my parents' Southern California living room, I jealously watched the Summer of Love play out on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. I vowed that the following June I'd be making my own way to San Francisco, as many flowers as possible in my hair. It was only when the next school year ended, and I discovered how much a bus ticket alone would cost, that I realized I was going to need to save up some money. I volunteered to mow our neighbor Mr. Sanderson's lawn, and he paid me a generous fifty cents. When I showed up the next afternoon offering to mow his lawn again, I think he realized I was looking for a more long-term sort of employment. Turned out his brother was mid-level management at Disneyland, and he put in a good word for me. And that's how I, somewhat reluctantly, took a summer job at the Happiest Place on Earth.
People often ask me, "Jack, do you eat sushi on the Lost Moon of Jupiter?"
As you may know, I was present in Southern California for the birth of the American sushi craze, and I rapidly embraced the phenomenon. As a young bachelor DJ, my diet already consisted of a lot of Rice-A-Roni and Gorton's Fish Sticks, so I relished the opportunity to translate those ingredients into a more upscale culinary experience. I recommended the tempura bar at the sublime Tokyo Kaikan restaurant (since closed) numerous times on the air, and I actually introduced Supertramp's Roger Hodgson to his first California Roll. (In gratitude, he presented me with my first tin of kippers.)
But it probably won't surprise you to hear that sushi has been harder to come by in the years since I've moved to space. Contrary to popular belief, there are fish on the Lost Moon, but they live two miles below the surface in a massive subterranean ocean that's very hard to get to. Also, unlike most of the inhabitants of the Lost Moon, the fish tend to be pretty hostile.
So the concept of eating seafood is basically unknown around these parts. (I've introduced the aliens to Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime," and they're big fans, but the lyrics about "fishing" are totally lost on them.) And while I've repeatedly written to the Gorton's company about having some frozen entrees shipped up here, they've yet to oblige. Apparently, fish doesn't keep very well on a 365 million mile journey across the vacuum of space.
Basically, as far as sushi goes, this interplanetary traveler's learned to live without.
But it looks like my luck's about to change, friends! The brilliant minds at Japanese cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and food product conglomerate Kracie Holdings, Ltd., have finally done for sushi what NASA did for ice cream!
Popin' Cookin'! As soon as I get 258 yen together, you better believe I'm going to get my hands on this intellectual education candy.
For us vintage record collectors, there's always a list of fabled vinyl relics that urges us onward, whether our treasure hunts take us to the garage sales of Boyle Heights or the flea markets of Titan. Every time we flip through a stack of cardboard sleeves, at least some small part of us is hoping, against all odds, to find one of these Golden Fleeces or Holy Grails. Some of them are rare editions of well-known masterpieces, like an original track pressing of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan or a Butcher Cover edition of The Beatles' Yesterday and Today. But my personal quest visions have always revolved around more obscure 45s, garage rock rarities like the Hush Puppies' "Hey, Stop Messing Around" or Denise and Company's "Boy, What'll You Do Then," singles on forgotten record labels that only ever printed a few hundred (or dozen) copies to begin with.
For many years, one of my favorite, nearly-impossible-to-find records was a 7-inch called "Politicians in My Eyes" by the band Death. Death was a visionary protopunk trio from Detroit, made up of the brothers David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney. They recorded an album's worth of tracks in the mid-seventies, but their iconoclastic sound (and, according to legend, their refusal to change their decidedly non-commercial name) alienated them to record labels. In 1976, Death put two songs from its studio sessions on a self-released single ("Politicians" and its B-side, "Keep on Knocking"). 500 copies were pressed.
Well folks, I had a blast this weekend subbing in as host of the popular romantic call-in show Love Notes with Veronica. For a thrilling hour on Saturday night, I calibrated the Lost Moon's radio transmitter for Southern California's KUPD and beamed down a line-up of my all-time favorite love tracks. It felt great to be on FM radio again, even if just for one evening, and the whole experience only heightened my resolve to get Lost Moon Radio back on the air in a permanent way in 2011!
I took some listener calls between the tracks (boy, have I missed those!) and while dispensing a bit of encouragement to a Lonely Heart in Encino, I ended up relating an anecdote about my old friend Mary Jankowski and our personal Valentine's Day tradition.
It all started back in the 8th Grade when I decided to ask Mary to the big dance with a homemade Valentine: a picture of Rod Serling glued onto a construction paper heart, upon which I'd written, "Submitted for your approval: will you go to the St. Michael's 8th Grade Cotillion with me?" I slipped it under her desk during morning roll call. At the end of the day she told me she was already going to the dance with Kevin Donnelly, but that my card was the weirdest thing anybody had ever given her.
Friends, Valentine's Day will be here before we know it, and as such, it's time for me to reveal a lifelong crush of mine...
I'm talking about commercial radio. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. True, commercial radio is the beast that brought us shock jocks, Rush Limbaugh, and the ludicrous concept of a Top 40. But she also brought us War of the Worlds, Wolfman Jack, and Jim Ladd. For 30-some odd years, I was proud to call her my special lady.
But as my regular Lost Moon Radio listeners know, this love affair has been on the skids since this past June, and it's been a humbling experience. Sure, I've had my dalliances in the meantime, broadcasting from a high school basement, ruminating into a dictaphone up here on the Lost Moon ... but they're just not the same. Just as Dick Burton couldn't stay long away from Liz, I can't resist the siren's call of wide-band FM. A love as grand as mine can only be measured in megahertz! I've gotta channel my broadcasts through the most powerful transistor towers outside of a U2 concert!
On Saturday night, February 12, I'll be filling for my old industry buddy Ronnie Krantz (better known to many of you simply as "Veronica") on the home of Southern California's softest love hits, KUPD: The Cupid. Ronnie's got an unmissable date that night and she asked me if I could sub for her. Obviously, Love Notes with Veronica's usual blend of easy listening and power ballads is a little different from my regular format, but I'm confident that her base of female adult contemporary fans ages 25 to 54 will adapt comfortably to Lost Moon Radio's brand of psychedelic freeform rock. In the spirit of the approaching holiday, I'm building a set around the theme of "Love."
I hope you catch the show. While I'm only preparing for a one-night stand, I could be ready for a relationship in the right situation. I'm putting myself out there.
