Duality (recap)

Ladies and Gentlemen,

the only way I can recap this show is by internal time line which, unfortunately, corresponds in no way to the way things were pieced together on the show. It reminds me of this puzzle I had when I was a very small boy where each piece was it's own character and the pieces fit together not only geometrically but logically because each piece had it's own little story. It was a crazy conceptual thing and that's kind of how this episode fell together.

This is your dong - is the thing that's been kicking around in my head the longest. This was not my idea but came from Robert Jeffrey Gross and may not have been his idea either. Rob was the keyboard player in the original Black Tie Martini Club. Like many keyboard players and classic rock fanatics, he was very fond of Elton John. We, and when I say "we" I mostly mean "I" used to write parody lyrics and often very rude parody lyrics of our own songs. I mean you rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and at some point you can't help but make fun of them. One day Rob starts singing, "And you can tell everybody, this is your dong. It may be kind of skinny but at least it's long".

I was amazed at such filth! I'd never thought to make fun of that song in that way. I know I asked about it at the time but I don't remember if it's something he had actually worked out the lyrics to in a previous band or with a school chum or if it was just something that popped out of his head that moment but the thought that there could be a complete version of that parody has stuck with me for over a decade now.

Kevin Whitehead of the FCC - this idea has been in my head and notebook for almost a year now. I wrote it down while watching either the documentary "FUCK" or the documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated". I saw them both around the same time and somewhere in there, probably in "FUCK" they had examples of really prurient media being made under the auspice of being a warning. I'd seen a couple drive in type films from the 60's done the same way. Proto-porn disguised as anti-drug movies. So I had the notion of doing something really raunchy as an FCC warning for a long time but had no clue as to what the content would be.

Commercial Break - Then some time last week I was struck by the odd notion that if the FCC didn't keep sex off of TV that you might have porn interrupted by a commercial break. Bookending that with the FCC thing only made sense. Transitioning through a couple of scenes from that is a blatant ripoff from Firesign Theatre but my birthday is in August so I am a fire sign though not a Firesign.

American Idol - If one was going to show the world as it would be without the FCC, then it only made sense to include the Your Dong parody in an American Idol kind of context. Throwing hitler in on the end... I think I stole that from Monty Python. Anyway it gave me a nice out.

Cartoon intro and outro - That just came about because I had this idea of doing a whole episode scored with cartoon cues when I picked up a CD's worth of Carl Stalling music. I still may attempt it but there are so many individual cues in the 15 or so tracks , it could be a full time job cataloging them all into submission.

Note This Podcast has an Implicit tag - is an obvious ripoff of the great Guy David's Night Guy intro www.guydavid.com I was thinking about asking him to record a truly explicit version of his explicit tag warning as I thought this show's filth content needed a little heads up at the beginning. But eventually I decided that it was better to make the warning more surreal than risqué because I've already done warnings like that and because Guy is always asking, "Is the world surreal enough"

Irony Man - came as a reaction to the Implicit warning and the fact that they're making or have made an Iron Man movie. Weird. Seems like if you were going to make a movie out of any Sabbath hit you'd go with War Pigs.

The Intro/Outro is just pure Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. It seemed like a fitting outro since I hadn't had the normal intro, plus I just watched their 40th anniversary DVD and was in a Doo Dah mood.

Finally, Martin Luther King Jr's I have a dream speech. The last time I heard this was on the radio in Austin Texas a couple of years ago. I was out of work and home in the middle of the day and this guy has this show called Eklektikos where he just plays whatever the hell he wants to and it's awesome. On Martin Luther King Jr. day, he just was playing the whole speeches. I almost did this last year but I wasn't feeling either as gutsy or possibly as schmaltzy. Anyway, it's argued to be the greatest oration of the 20th century and one of the greatest of our nation's history. If I told you you could hear the actual Gettysburg address, or hear mozart conducting his own symphony or see Shakespeare performing at the globe, you'd drop everything you could for that experience. The I Have a Dream speech is up there with those, only because we can listen to it whenever we want, we don't feel as much urgency to actually do so.