by William Cooper
My father worked at a CBS affiliate in Columbus Ohio, and this, obviously, is how I grew up without cable. After all, anything truly worth watching could be watched on the four local television stations, or so I was told, down the end of his large-pored nose as he read the paper, sipped his jet-black coffee and devoured his burnt toast. And although the four basic channels had expanded to six by the time I had graduated from high school, the mythical bonus programming could only be picked up on cold, clear nights, only on two of the sets in our house, and only through carefully positioning yourself in a corner of the room and desperately hoping for some Red Green.
My first exposure to David Bowie was through “Ashes to Ashes,” but not via MTV, which of course hardly existed in my landscape (we had a poor, shaky knockoff of MTV called “Friday Night Videos,” which at a few hours a week offered the briefest window into pop culture and was barely enough to keep me from getting punched at school). Instead, I experienced his music like I experienced so much other music, driving with friends in endless loops late at night on the ring road around the city.
On those slow, thoughtful orbits, it was my high-school buddy who introduced me to Bowie, Credence, and weirdly Rolph Harris. It was another friend later in my school years who introduced me to Peter Gabriel (“driving round the city rings, staring at the shape of things”) and Marillion while out chasing storms in her bright, blue pickup. And it was with my future podcasting partner Scott that I heard an exciting parade of songs and artists, and reviewed our recording sessions covering some of those same tunes.
There’s a happy marriage between driving and music. Always has been. But there’s a particular magic in shifting purposefully to the outskirts of your life, circling the twinkling lights of normality, knowing that if you keep travelling onward and onward, the exit home is only at most another circuit away.
In this episode we circle back on ourselves with the first appearance by our Executive Producer, Jo. We rankle with jump cuts, visit the ghosts of podcasts past, discuss a Subway employee who might be putting too much “art” into our sandwiches, and end up in a cathartic chat about the Thin White Duke and the non-ordinary world he shared with us before he left.
Links:
David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes”
David Bowie, “Lazarus”
Venture Brothers and Major Tom
David Bowie, the Sovereign (From “Venture Brothers”)
Peter Gabriel, “Shock the Monkey”
Kate Bush Live at Hammersmith Odeon
