This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John was Latey McLaterson, referring to his general tendency to be late, which came up when he talked about being exactly on time for a lunch with two other musicians who were really dressing down people who are late.

The show title refers to a very loud train whistle sounding in the background during the recording and John saying: ”There’s my ride!”

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Possums (RL212)

There are squawking seabirds in the background when John answers the call, and they are probably fighting over a dead rat. The other day Merlin saw an infographic about possums on Tumblr and it basically said that we should be nice to them, although they are blind and have rat tails and nobody likes their face, they are terrifying monsters, but they will eat lots of nuisance animals, it can eat ticks and it is immune to lyme disease, it is like Americas’ little garbage man.

Cats and possums will accept each other as co-habitators, which John has seen with his own eyes. He will think: ”Hello cat! There is vermin!” - ”No, this is my brethren!” Another such combination might be whale sharks and remoras, they will just attach themselves to a whale shark, it is nature’s in-app purchase. When John was making his eel analogy ([subscriptions are eels]) he was thinking of the leech-like quality of a certain kinds of eels, particularly a remora, but he didn’t want to confuse people and an eel is much better.

Random banter (RL212)

Flammable and inflammable both mean the same thing. There is regardless and irregardless, but irregardless is not a word. Braggadocios is a word, and Braggadocio. Braggadocios rhymes with Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Merlin has always admired John’s great flow.

John starts singing: ”Man, your clothes look crazy, I wonder where you got ’em. Polyester pants with the big bellbottoms, a big-brim hat that makes me wanna holler, a monkey-plaid jacket with a twenty-foot collar”, which is the lyrics of You Ain’t Fresh by the Boogie Boys. Merlin counters with: ”I get stoopid, I shoot an arrow like Cupid. I use a word that don’t mean nothin’, like looptid. I sang on Doowhutchalike, and if ya missed it. I’m the one who said just grab ’em in the biscuits” from the lyrics of The Humpty Dance by Digital Underground.

There is a very loud train whistle in the background and John says: ”There is my ride!”

John being on time for a lunch (RL212)

John was a little late today, but he had his reasons. He went to a lunch the other day and he was there on time and thought he was OnTime Charlie, and he was going to go in and get a table and wait for these other suckers to roll in. Merlin says that there is no such thing as being on time, but you are only early or late. John walked in and these two m**fuckers were sitting at the table already, one of them Derek Fudesco, the bass player of The Murder City Devils and Pretty Girls Make Graves and now of The Cave Singers. He said: ”Oh, yeah, being late is bullshit! Don’t give me any of that late shit!”

The other guy Brian Jaeger, who is also a pretty Rock’n’Roll guitar player said: ”Yeah, late? Forget that! Don’t be late! That is the lamest thing!” - ”Okay, alright, everybody slow down!” and they both went back a few times, realizing from John’s reaction that he was Latey McLaterson, they were both like: ”Man, people who are late? Fuck those people! You got to be on time or early! Those are the only options!” This lunch was off to a whizz-bang start.

They were dressing him down, but John needs to maintain other people’s expectations of him. Who is he songwriter at that lunch? The songwriter is late because the songwriter has deep thoughts to think. He is not going to take notes from a fucking bass player!

John starting to use SnapChat, getting replies on Twitter (RL212)

John started doing SnapChats (see RL210), which is very confusing still. People want to comment on your snaps, but the only place they can do that is on Twitter, so the only communication he gets on his snaps is on other social media platforms. It is like getting footnotes in a separate book. There is no in-app capability to respond at all, except you can send that person a snap, you can snap back to them, and that is what might be regarded as the ”chat” part in SnapChat, but John doesn’t want people throwing any snaps at him. You can’t heart it, you can’t re-ping it, you can’t do anything.

One person who tweeted him said that his voice was a lot different on his snaps. John is doing video snaps, like Vine, although he hasn’t done Vines in a long time (the shutdown of Vine was announced two months later) and nobody is doing that anymore. John still clicks on links on Twitter sometimes that will take him to Vine because he follows a lot of people on Black Twitter, which is very different from Weird Twitter, although there is some overlap.

Merlin thinks that hashtags made out of sentences are a Black Twitter thing, he sees them in the Trending. John doesn’t recognize that, but there are about 15 different Black Twitters and he is not into the hashtag-sentences world and whenever he sees someone doing that he will generally move away from them. Lately 9/10 tweets in his feed are links to elsewhere, like: ”Take a look at this!” until he sees someone who is using Twitter the way they all used to, like: ”Here is a tweet i made!”, not linking to something or using them as some diabolical clearing house.

Merlin thinks those people treat Twitter like the last row of desks in a 5th grade class, which is what it should be. That is a great Morrissey song. John really likes Merlin’s flow! ”Don’t call it a comeback!”

John asked the person in exactly what way his voice sounds different and apparently it is deeper and fuller and richer on the podcast, whereas on the snaps his voice is being transmitted through the tiniest microphone ever made in history. Whenever Merlin hears his voice on a video he makes with his daughter, he actually talks faster in real life, which seems improbable. He sounds like a 4-year old trying to play a Charlie Parker solo. Philip Larkin, or some other Jazz critic, said that every Charlie Parker riff sounds like the Woody Woodpecker Song.

Merlin thought the whole deal with this social nonsense is all about the commenting!

John finds it interesting that snapping chats inspired him to a different style, something he would not have done on Vine, he just throws something up when he is walking along. John makes some musical noises, and his voice sounds so different, like interstitial wood wind music, like the guy whom he was in a band with briefly who played the flute and also talked into the flute as he walked by. He does scatting over the top of the flute which gives it an accompaniment, then he will do some flute riffing, it is very Jazz.

Arranging the keys on your keyring (RL212)

Merlin has exactly two keys on his keychain right now and he does arrange them into a system. John has a lot of keys on his ring and he arranges them, but somehow they have become unarranged. He took some off to give to somebody while he was away, and then another key had to go off and back on, and now every time he comes to a door he stands there like a fucking ape. It is like you handed 5 cue-balls to an ape and asked him to play Snooker. ”What the…?”

Now he is all screwed up, he is baffled by the keys he has, and he doesn’t know anymore how to arrange them, he feels left behind while everybody else is being raptured while he is standing there, trying to find the fucking keys to the door. Merlin has only two keys, which is very much a system. Putting keys on a keychain is a lot like backing up a truck with a trailer. You just have to tell your mind to do the opposite of what you think you should do.

Grab the bottom of the wheel and do everything backwards. It is like when you are in a canoe and you are in an Eddy, but you are going to enter the stream again from the side. You can not just gradually join the flow of the river, but you have to go straight in from the side, and every cell in your body tells you to lean up-river, but if you do that you are going to flip that canoe. The last thing you want to do is lean down-river and stretch your ore out as far as you can down-river and pull.

There are many situations where your instincts are not just wrong, but they are the opposite. Like saying: ”When is the baby due?” Merlin has done that and now he knows not to say that.

1980s Pop, Missing Persons, Dale Bozzio, Styx, The Posies, bands with two front-people (RL212)

Merlin discovers that Herbie Mann is a Jazz flutist. Didn’t he do all the music for Miami Vice? Or did he do ”Rock it, Don’t Stop It!”? John just conflated three things in the most amazing way: Michael Mann directed Miami Vice. The guy from the Jeff Beck thing (Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group Live), Jan Hammer, did the music, and then Herbie Hancock did Rockit! The music of Jan Hammer holds up. Merlin had the record with him and Jeff Beck, and it was great. He did the song No More Lies with Neil Schon where he is in a cage playing a keytar, from the album Here To Stay.

Lies were a big theme in 1980s Pop. Missing Persons had a song about lies. Merlin thinks they were a good band that suffered from 1980s production, but they were great, they were Frank Zappa’s band. John has some Dale Bozzio stories (see RL41). He saw her on the street while he was riding a bicycle, which he doesn’t do often. She is a tiny little creature with pink and blonde flamboyant hair, at a time before everybody was wearing pink hair. Terry Bozzio was the famous drummer from Frank Zappa’s band with a crazy drum set that had 5 kick drums! In videos of early Missing Persons the drummer, husband of the lead singer, really does believe he is the featured player.

There were quite a few Punky New Wave female lead performers like Dale Bozzio. The tone was set by Wendy O. Williams (see also RL41). There is a video where she is riding on top of a semi truck and they crash through a wall of television sets where she has electrical tape over her nipples, that really made a lasting impression on John. Combine that with some Eurythmics and some Missing Persons and you really have a new model. None of these performers were former Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, they were a new cut of cloth.

The hair was important! Alannah Currie from Thompson Twins had funny hair and a funny hat, but John found that hat so awful, he could not follow her, it was not his jam (It was not Alannah Myles, as first Merlin said). But Bananarama had amazing hair. Merlin loves some Bananarama! There was one member of Bananarama, just as there was one member of TLC that John really fixated on. Merlin calls it the Dennis DeYoung (from Styx) problem or the Peter Cetera (from Chicago) problem or the Beyoncé problem, it happened with Jon Mikl Thor from the band Thor: You get the person who becomes the front person, but what about Tommy Shaw, he saved this fucking band (Styx)!

John never liked Tommy Shaw’s face. His hair and his face did not match his body, and he did not benefit from a white jump suit. That band had sartorial problems! With Paradise Theatre (album by Styx) they finally decided they were going to wear funny outfits. Dennis DeYoung looks like somebody who works on a Midway. There were John and Chuck Panozzo. John Panozzo was the coked-up drinky drummer, God rest his soul, who is dressed like Commodore Schmidlap (from the movie Way… Way Out) with short pants, his brother his the laconic bass player in a skinny red leather tie, which was pioneered by Billy Joel. What about a pair of tab collars? Welcome back to the age of Jive! John gave Billy Joel the gasface. James ”JY” Young was tall and had really unfortunate hair like a split-top butter-top bread with a set of curtains.

This exact thing happened to The Posies, a band with two co-leadsingers / co-songwriters (Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow). Merlin loves The Posies so much! He was still taping stuff off the radio into the 1990s and when he heard My Big Mouth (song by The Posies) on the radio he was just blown away. The reason they talk so much about The Posies is that without them there would be no John and Merlin. It is like the Gwyneth Paltrow movie with the subway (Sliding Doors). Merlin was in Oakland, watching Ken Stringfellow’s show that nobody else attended, he met Scott Miller that night.

When The Posies signed to a major label they decided that Jon Auer was well-suited to be the frontman and they pushed him forward in all the band photos. He had more of some handsome boy good looks, while Ken looked a little like a bottle opener, like a Praying Mantis that had been dipped into frosting. He also has ”Theater Nerd” written all over him. Jon seemed like a guy who had never had sex before, but when he did have sex: ”Look out, world!”, whereas Ken seemed like somebody who had had a lot of awkward sex in locker rooms. He was living in his mom’s sarcophagus before he became immune to sunlight and garlic.

When they had Robert Smith (from The Cure) hair, Jon looks like Rober Smith while Ken looks like a skinny variant from the weird game that your parents would buy you if you were going on a long road trip where you could magnetize a pen and draw on a character of a man with metal shavings (called Wooly Willy). Jon Auer was a great guitar player and he wrote the hits, while Ken wrote all the difficult material, but they both sing on every song.

Merlin has a live-recording of them in France doing Surrender and it seems obvious that they were trying to out-do who could take it up a 5th, an octave, another 5th, another octave, and they keep finding new impossible harmonies until it is utterly unlistenable, and it is awesome. On the pictures from that era Jon is so far in front, they were the only ones the label wanted and all the other ones where the other members were in front landed in the garbage. Auer was so far forward that the other guys were blurry, which is not good for morale. Ken was co-singer, co-songwriter, co-frontperson, they shared the duties on stage. As time went on Ken became more like a real boy and Jon suffered from some aging-related issues.

John’s band photos, Merlin taking photos of John (RL212)

John would hate to be in a band where he wasn’t the sex-symbol and luckily he was always the sex-symbol in every band he was in, although John’s band photos never really quite did them justice, John hates them so much. Merlin’s photos of them, like the photo in MUNI where John is making a face and Sean is staring out from the distance should be their band photo. John still turns to some of Merlin’s photos as examples of how he wishes to be represented. There is a photo of John in a cape, smoking a cigar, pursued by police, and John wants that to be the photo to use for all the promo, and they did use that and Merlin dealt with Barsuk on that. That was a fun night!

John thinks that some of their listeners will think that John is the sex-symbol of this podcast and some will think that Merlin is the sex-symbols of this podcast. They are The Posies of podcasts! There are John-people and Merlin-people. Merlin never really got communications from people where it is evident that they would like to sex him. He had a good 10-day period when he was about 20, but he didn’t utilize it and it has been a rough road ever since.

That picture of Merlin in the Air Force fatigue Henderson jacket, which John still has, and the blonde mustache where he is crouching in a subway station, but he is looking up at the camera and he looks like the prince from The Princess Bride… Merlin used to look like Cary Elwes (the Dread Pirate Roberts character, see RL139), people don’t believe that, and a little bit like Michael Palin. John thinks of that photo all the time, it is his picture of young Merlin before he met him, when he was out there playing in Bacon Ray, going to New York sometimes, wearing a Henderson jacket.

Merlin has never seen John not wearing jokey Rockstar glasses and a beard until John first started sleeping in Merlin’s house in his underwear. Without his glasses he looks so different, and photos of John as a kid without his glasses are the weirdest thing in the world! He doesn’t really look like himself as a kid because he has a beard-shaped face. John say all the time about his daughter that she looks exactly like him, she is just a little child and also a girl, and John doesn’t look like that anymore, he looked like that when he was a baby. Merlin can still see a huge resemblance, she is a beautiful little girl, just a bit impatient in parades and 3/4 of the way through the parade she is looking to the end of the parade (see RL210).

John’s daughter in a parade, Clowns (RL212)

Like clowns, people misremember what was fun during childhood. Some people still hire clowns and put their kids in proximity to clowns and act like anybody has ever enjoyed a clown, and the same is true with parades: Has that ever been that fun for a kid? Some clowns rolled up on them (in the parade, see RL210) and they wanted to put a button on her and talk to her, but she was not having any clowns and she eyeballed him until he slowly backed away. Clowns just want to have fun, but she didn’t like clowns. When John was her age he felt obligated to like clowns.

John remembers very distinctly going to a birthday party where there were clowns and it left a lasting negative impression. Merlin thinks the first thing they should teach clowns is that not everybody loves clowns and they have to gauge what the kid wants, like the Hippocratic Clown Oath: Number 1: Do no harm! Imagine anything a clown does being done by a middle aged man without makeup, it is horrifying! How makes dressing like a fucking clown make that better?

John thinks that happy clowns only exist to contextualize the sad clowns. He doesn’t want any happy clowns except to frame the few sad clowns which are the only ones that matter. He will interact with a sad clown all day. Merlin thinks that clowns as a French art is fine, but there is a lot of French art we shouldn’t force onto preschool-age kids. Pointillism is not going to be appreciated, they won’t understand enough about light and contrast. What kids want to see is knife throwing.

Throwing a pie in someone’s face (RL212)

Merlin is going to be 50 in a few months, and he doesn’t remember the last time he saw somebody getting a pie thrown in their face right in front of him. In this contemporary world of millions of peoples taking Vines of themselves every day, how do you distinguish yourself? What if John and Merlin would resurrect the pie in the face? It is a full-on aggression, but one featuring banana cream, but do not throw a pie at somebody who you don’t feel is ready to have a pie thrown at them.

The other day a woman asked John why men feel like it is acceptable to play air drums at a woman and stare at them while they are doing it, or air guitar when there is a song playing on the radio. They just want to show off, it is embarrassing and humiliating if you really want to shine a light on it, but she thought it is really sexually aggressive.

If John took a pie in the face, he was just out there in the course of his daily life, and somebody said: ”Hey Roderick!” and he turned around and got a pie in the face, he would take that with pretty good grace. He takes himself pretty seriously, but a pie in the face? You have to give it up for them! What if it was a pie from a stranger? Like that Pavement song (actually called Spit On A Stranger). There is a compliment inherent in getting hit with a pie. It is like getting roasted the other person is paying you the hat tip: ”You deserve a pie, but you can take a pie!” and John aspires to be a person who can take a pie.

John is not opening the door for people to throw pies at him, don’t do it, you sons of bitches! But one day, one time in his life if you get a pie, that belongs on your Wikipedia page. Every single man in the world who has thought about what they would do in the event of a street fight is wrong about how they would actually do. You are not ever going to perform the way that you have multiply fantasized. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face (quote from Mike Tyson). Buzz Aldrin punched somebody in the face who claimed the moon landing was fake and he was a liar.

Revealing your vulnerabilities in public (RL212)

Somebody close to John recently told him that the amount of bravado he displays in his public persona, and this is not the thing John talked about two months ago (find reference!), but this was a reinforcing comment that said that you don’t reveal your insecurities in your public persona. You are exactly yourself, but the only thing missing that you don’t reveal is your vulnerabilities. John reveals his vulnerability all the time, and then he sat and thought about it for a while and thought: ”Why the fuck would you reveal your vulnerability to people?”

The handful of time when Merlin and John have come to words, that has been often the topic. John would say: ”I have feelings about this stuff, too, I am vulnerable here!” - ”What are you talking about? You are John Roderick, you don’t have feelings about anything!” and John would be very hurt and Merlin remembered to keep that in mind.

Everybody is insecure!

Donald Trump was cast for Madam Tussauds in the 1980s, and somebody found an imprint of his hand and you can print it out at your home and see how you compare. Merlin has it at his refrigerator, his hand is bigger. John is not interested in things like that.

John’s friend having a dream of John with a frog baby in his front pocket (RL212)

A very good friend of John who lives in a mountain town in the Carolinas had a dream where he appeared to her holding a frog baby in his front pocket that was half-human, half-frog. When it was in human form it was a maladapted baby, but when it went into frog form it was a very elegant frog baby. John asked back if her prophetic dreams are fairly prophetic, or if they skew more to the metaphoric. Obviously a frog baby in your front pocket is a metaphor for something! She had in her front pocket a frog baby habitat and when the baby was in there in her pocket it was happy, but when it was out there it was awkward and wouldn’t make eye contact, and its legs didn’t work very well.

John noticing that his hands are completely different from each other (RL212)

John had the most profound experience last night: He held up the backs of his hands. Merlin says: ”That is going to mean I am gay, right? Remember on the playground: Look at your nails!” - ”They pumped 15 gallons of sperm out of my stomach!” - ”… and it was full of spider eggs!” Now, are the fingers on one hand different from the other? Merlin doesn’t really think so, but he knows it is the case with his feet. John looked at his index fingers and the one that was broken (see RL124, RW71) was visibly fatter than the other index finger.

Then he realized that at the same hand his middle finger was fatter as well and actually all of his right hand fingers are fatter than the one on his left hand, but - increasing the horror - the fingers on his left hand are longer than the fingers on his right hand and his left hand does not resemble his right hand in any way, like he had an arm replacement surgery. They are completely different! On his right hand, the dominant hand, the fingers are much larger, but the hand itself is slightly smaller like a catcher’s mitt, while the left hand is like a fucking spider.

He can spread the fingers wider than he can on the right hand. As a guitar player John has really struggled because his left hand has almost no dexterity and he can’t train it to. He has been working on getting his left hand fingers to even move reliably according to what his brain asks them to do, and they barely can. His left hand is also a much more elegant hand, they are thinner and more tapered, while the right hand is like a meat claw.

John cannot account for this, but mostly he cannot account for the fact that he has lived his entire life without noticing that the two hands don’t even belong on the same person. What is he meant to do with that information now? And where does it end? Like John Siracusa says: It is evolutionary biology, and who knows what John is adapting to. Maybe the left hand is so much more elegant because it is going to be asked with some kind of UFO technology when he is promoted to anchorman. You put your left hand in the machine because as it turns out that is the one that actually controls the alien technology.

What else is different? Is John hemispherical? Is half of his penis good and half of it is too delicate to live? John’s left knee is the one that he blew out and had surgery on, and the right knee is now supporting his entire body in almost any activity. John’s feet are different, too! The right big toe is much bigger and shorter than the left big toe. What does that symbolize?

Both John’s right hand and right foot are bulkier and more working class, while his left hand and left foot are more elegant and refined, more White Russian. After the Tsar was deposed they escaped to Paris, but are now somewhat useless. They have thin blood and they keep hanging around like the aristocratic class of a different era, and they are invited there because they are an arch-duke of some kind, but they don’t have any money. The right side owns some textile factories and is rich, and the means of production are being exploited by the left hand and they are keeping the workers down.

If John was in a pistol battle and had two pistols, he wonders if he would keep the left pistol in the left hand and shoot wildly and indiscriminately with it, or if he would reserve the left pistol until the right pistol is out of ammunition and then switch over the left pistol to the right hand. Merlin answers with a nursery rhyme: ”A frog went a-courtin’ and he did ride, M-hm, M-hm. A frog went a-courtin’ and he did ride, Sword and pistol by his side, M-hm, M-hm.” The left side is for the sword, the right for the pistol, and then you have a frog in your pocket somewhere.

You are going to Courting, you are a frog, coming through the rye, you got a pistol, you pull it out with your right hand and shoot until you are out of bullets, throw the pistol down, then grab the sword with the right hand. If you pull the sword out of the Scabbard you keep the Scabbard in your left hand because you are swording with your right hand and if somebody swings at you the left hand can at least put up the Scabbard to block. You can be like Inigo Montoya (from The Princess Bride) and learn how to do both.

John’s eyes are also very different. They are falling apart. When John reads he will close his left eye, and when becomes aware of it he will open both eyes and move the book more into the center of his face, but gradually he will fall back into closing his left eye and moving the book back to the right and that is how he reads. This means that all the information in the book is going to the left hemisphere of his brain only, and the right hemisphere is reserved for something, sitting around some arch-dukes palace, asking for another bowl of caviar. ”What am I, Anastacia?”

Anastacia is buried in a hole somewhere, but there was talk of her sneaking out. It was just another White Russian trick: All the minor nobility ladies were just asking her for more caviar, but they were just some minor nobility and they will cut your caviar off after a certain point. They have worn out their welcome! Anastacia with the rest of them was killed by the Reds. (???)

Merlin dreaming about having to DJ with a two-foot-tall Frank Sinatra (RL212)

Merlin had a stress dream last night where he was suddenly called upon to DJ a wedding reception and there was a very confusing computer and the mixer wasn’t really working and he had to co-DJ with a two foot tall Frank Sinatra who was mad that they had to do this together and who used together with a guy named Carlos who knew how this whole system worked, but Merlin was not doing well and couldn’t get the crossfader to work, so Frank Sinatra said: ”Carlos never minded the fader!”

Imagine a two-foot-tall Frank Sinatra yelling at Mario Puzo (the author of The Godfather) in a restaurant in Trenton New Jersey! It changes the whole vibe of that scene because he thinks that he is Johnny Fontane, the character in The Godfather (that was actually based on Frank Sinatra). This was the era when Frank Sinatra could scream at a guy in a restaurant and the owner would think it was a fucking honor to have him screaming in his restaurant. The mob made them take the words ”Cosa Nostra” and ”Mafia” out of that movie, and he was screaming: ”Johnny Fontane? Fuck you! I never did any of that stuff!” and Puzo is saying that Sinatra is proving the point right there with his weird Mafia tantrum, but he is also saying over and over that Sinatra was not Johnny Fontane, it was Guy Fieri or Jackie Diamond, or Mack the Knife.

Johnny Fontane was supposed to be Frank Sinatra, it was a Roman à clef, and specifically From Here to Eternity was the movie where they have intercourse in the tides, but that was not Frank Sinatra, nor Montgomery Clift, but it was Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. ”She was beautiful, she was young, she was innocent, she was the greatest piece of ass I ever had and I had them all over the world!” (quote by the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather) John thought it was The Man with the Golden Arm, but that was when Frank Sinatra was chasing the dragon. John thought that was the movie that made him. Then he did his concept albums in the 1960s after he had retired for a while because he wasn’t a teeny bopper anymore, but a serious artist. He also got a better piece and stopped wearing the hat as much.

All the music at the party that Merlin was supposed to DJ was New Order and American Standards. John wants to go to this party! Merlin starts singing the lyrics to Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order: ”Every time I see you falling I get down on my knees and pray!” John thinks that Merlin would DJ so well, he would really read the room. He would still play the Macarena if it is on the computer, or Who Let the Dogs Out. It seems like we are in a period right now where there are no universal novelty wedding songs. What about the cover of Mack the Knife by the guy from the New York Dolls who had a career in the 1980s David Johansen, he did some good covers of classics.

People who are in the September of their years, like Rod Stewart, all the aging folks, come out and start doing American Standards, but how many of them have ever done an entire album of New Order covers? John wants to see Jon Bon Jovi do a whole record of New Order covers with a Big Band. David Johansen is also known as Buster Poindexter and his hit song was Hot Hot Hot. He was often confused with Tim Curry, but Tim Curry never had a mid-1980s hit. He was the Clown in the Sewer in the movie It. John could do a novelty Rap song for weddings, he could do it all with MIDI.

John starts singing Maggie May by Rod Stewart: ”Oh, Maggie, I wished I’d never seen your face… Or steal my daddy’s cue and make a living out of playin’ pool”, but the problem is that this is a song about a young guy having an affair with an older woman and that is not a song that anybody wants played at their wedding, even if it is applicable.

Follow-up: John contributing a song to Dave Eggers’ album for the Trump rally (RL212)

John is still working on his Dave Eggers thing (the album about Trump, see RL210), the song is so good! What is weird about is that John wrote the lyrics on his phone, and he did not transcribe them out to a pad. Traditionally when he is rehearsing a song he will have a pad with the lyrics on it and he will put it on the floor and sits with the guitar and runs through the song and crosses something out and put another thing back in, but the song only exists on his phone and after he is done with a verse he has to stop and scroll and play the next verse, and he has yet to really get a vibe on the tune because he never played it all the way through, although has been working on it for a couple of weeks now.

All that is left to do is writing the lyrics out on a pad, but John keeps forgetting to do that. It seems so simple! Over the years John has done several Rock’n’Roll tunes, particularly covers. He has almost an entire album of covers waiting in the wings, he did a They Might Be Giants cover, a tune by Nico, quite a few Rock’n’Roll covers, and every time he has presented them to his record label that is generally opposed to Rock’n’Roll and they have responded with ”Meh” and he is a little bit worried that all of those Rock’n’Roll tunes that he thinks are great, like the Rock’n’Roll version of Ultimatum on John’s Phoney Award winning album Putting the Days to Bed, which Merlin thinks is a good version.

John gets a lot of letters from people, asking why he remade that song because it was fine already as it was, but John rewrote it because he wrote it and he can do what he wants, but people don’t accept that. Maybe he has a bit of a deficit in knowing and understanding what people want and whether or not they want Rock music from him. He could listen to his hands, they will tell him, but the Me hand and the Russian hand are telling him different things. ”Listen to the pan! What is the pan telling you? No!” Only English people can fly.