By William Cooper

Back in the mid-70s, I was in my early tens. Three major events were colliding in my life. I was in my first serious relationship with the girl across the street. The Captain and Tennille were hitting the charts in a big way with their unique brand of lounge-schmaltz. And the 1975 and 1976 Cincinnati Reds were in the middle of clenching two back-to-back World Series wins.

It was almost more than a young man could take. The girl had kissed me in the bushes, so it was obvious this was going to last forever. The music was some of the first “relevant” music I had been into and some of the first pop albums I had ever owned. And baseball was a passion I shared with my father, which involved such things as learning by heart the scoring notations, meeting both Johnny Bench and Pete Rose, and taking routine drives down south to Three Rivers Stadium to watch them play live.

I must have felt that I needed to combine all these things together in order to deal with them. So, like the Captain, I began wearing a Reds cap that I refused to take off. And that cap became part of my smooth operator operations in continuing to woo this older, sophisticated sixth grader. The two of us took photos with it, of it, around it. I must have worn that thing ragged for a solid year.

Eventually, the Reds stopped winning. Pete Rose fell into his own problems. My girlfriend moved on from my amazing wiles. And Captain and Tennille faded away to be replaced by Cheap Trick. But what of my hat, you ask? I’m not sure what ever happened to it. I like to think that perhaps it gained sentience and is off somewhere even now, bringing romantic confidence to some other hapless fifth-grader.

In this episode, we confront our own cheesy haplessness. We begin by battling basement and house clutter and move quickly into a rambling discourse on living the single life while married and strange ways our parents tried to alternately shelter us or prepare us for the world (and sometimes both at the same time). We end up taking on a three-cheese medley of music together, which transports us into the land of the bicentennial, the dubious plethora of variety shows in that era, and and the unsolved mystery of what William was doing locked in a closet in music class singing to the Bay City Rollers. Nibble on bacon and chew on cheese with us podcasting muskrats this week!

Links:
KC and the Sunshine Band, Keep it Comin’ Love
Bay City Rollers, Saturday Night
Captain & Tennille, Shop Around

by William Cooper

There are moments that are stuck in time. As you move away from them, the details obscure, the story blurs, structure slips away and what you are left with is emotion, colors brightening, senses sharpening, the core meaning resonating out to overwhelm memory.

In this moment, I am at the Ohio State Fair in summer. I remember a long day, a crazy amount of fried food substances and processed sugars, wary avoidance of what they used to call the “freak show,” and for some reason a series of prolonged visits with sheep, goats and cows. I do not recall any other circumstances of my fairgoing adventure, or the influencing particulars of, what I realize now, were my mid-teen years.

The ride was called The Himayala and featured a serpentine train car that traveled at speed in loops around a short, rising and falling track while pop music blared through every speaker. I’d reached it at the end of my day, and it was the last thing I was going to do before going home.

As I settled into my seat and the bar locked into place, the train jolting into life, things shifted. Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” started playing and something about the combination of momement, the hot summer night air, and that jangly song brought me out of myself. As I sped around the track, I started singing along and I felt something rise. I left myself behind, became larger than I was, and surrendered to sound, motion and wind. I was happy. I was experiencing life through my own lens, light and of the present.

In this episode, we let it all loose. We debate whether William’s continuing cold or his recently-learned fetus fact is more disgusting all while listening carefully for Mug Sign™, have a return visit from Jo as she provides a retraction and a promise of retracting her retraction later in ever-widening circles of clarification, yell at our devices and wonder why they don’t understand (NOTHING is hovering!), and end up in the land of proto-uber-neo-eurogirlpop with color commentary and real-time German translations from the Sniffling Googler.

Links

Alexa
“Hover”board
Kim Wilde, Tuning in Tuning on
Nena, 99 Luftballons
Kate Bush, Rocket’s Tail

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

by William Cooper

During my first year of living in Seattle, I went on a drunken staggerfest of a New Year’s Eve. I was young and single and still had my liver about me. I’ve always been socially anxious about parties, and being alone without many friends in a strange city only exacerbated the problem. Luckily, the bottom of a glass usually had the solution to my inhibitions.

As we watched the fireworks from a hillside apartment in Queen Anne, I was already wobbly. There was a girl I somewhat fancied who was more wobbly than I was, and so I made it a point to wobble next to her. The night became darker and also fuzzier, and those of us left at the party fell asleep in piles of coats and limbs and drool. The girl I liked nestled into the crook of my arm and made motions that there might be some adult wobbling she was interested in.

But she was cross-eyed with drink and could not remember my name. And the guy next to us was giving me motions that I should probably take advance of some of the chesty flesh that was easily at hand and that he might like to watch that.

So I left, down and disappointed in nobody in particular, maybe everyone in particular and went home.

As I walked outside, I immediately entered this luscious world of back streets and hidden alcoves. Fireworks burst in the skies. People honked as they drove past and danced in the streets. I rambled from place to place, blissed out, exploring this secret wolfing-hour landscape – shadows cast by the full moon, racoon galumphing down alleyways, the wind frosting the tips of madronas. When I finally made it home, I crawled into my comforter, onto the mattress in the walk-in closet of my studio apartment, and fell asleep with a soul full of wild – my kind of wild for what was to come.

In this episode, we explore the wilderness of an unseen year by looking back to look forward. We learn what a cough-button is; visit local, hapless news reporters on New Year’s Eve; travel to British Columbia with a bear whisperer; drop four stone on potassium-rich foods, and end up in a musical reminiscence of some obscure singers named Geddy Lee and Michael Stipe. Oh Canada!

Links:

Sooke, British Columbia

Haida G’waii

Potatoes

My Fitness Pal

Take Off (feat. Geddy Lee)

Michael Stipe and Patti Smith