Todays Playlist

If you know who David J is, you are either a Bauhaus- or Love and Rockets fan. Or maybe you are just into obscure stuff. I'll be Your Chauffeur is timeless for me, and the story of how I first heard is fun to tell.

When I was a boy, (cue up all the "when I was a kid stories"), there was no alternative radio. It was all pop--Madonna, Howard Jones--that sort of thing. However, we did have cable, and thus, MTV. For a while, MTV ran a nightly program during the week called Post Modern MTV. They played songs from Morrissey, The Cure, The Mission UK--stuff not in heavy rotation on the local stations.

But it came on at 12 or 12:30 at night in my time zone (Central).

So I got out the manual and figured out how to program the VCR. Every morning during the week I had 30 minutes of new songs to watch.

And it didn't stop there. I was a electronics geek. I figured out how to get a signal out of my television and into my stereo so that I could record selected songs to tape. Listening to those tapes today is quite a bit of fun for two reasons: 1) they are distinctly lo-fi. Completely monaural. And 2) the television signal introduced a very high-pitched hiss that cast a distinct aura over the whole experience. Some songs caught the tail-end or beginning of an MTV segue (you know, the kind that ends with the MTV logo eating something). To this day, I cannot listen to some songs without the segue popping into my mind.

Those were good days.

That feeling is lost now, in the iPod era. One of these days when I am bored I will hop on Google and see if I can find a horde of the old MTV segue pieces. I'll download and place them randomly in my playlists.