It’s Halloween week and I’m just kicking back with some liver, fava beans and a nice Chianti. So make yourself comfortable and have a listen here to our Arts Express Halloween edition with a story written by, of all people, Washington Irving–whose name by the way is the answer to the question “Who was the first president, Melvin?” “Washington, Irving.” Anyway, it’s a tale called “The Adventure of the German Student.”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear my reading, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio show, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.
“Renee Good, among other accomplishments, was an award winning poet and was deeply interested in questions of faith. She grew up as an evangelical Christian, but in 2016, now married, at the age of 28 she started college, and the clash of religious ideas versus science and secular ideas was explosive for her. In 2020, she wrote a poem about her trying to reconcile the two ways of experiencing the world, which foreshadowed the change in her political beliefs. The poem was called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” and it won the Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize. I’m going to read it now…”
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link to hear a reading of the poem as broadcast on the Arts Express radio show, as heard on WBAI FM NYC, WBAI.org, and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
“Probably one of the strangest interludes in my life was the time I spent as an employee in Alfred Wunsiedel’s factory…”
This time, for Labor Day weekend, I’ll be reading a droll story by Heinrich Böll about a pensive worker who finds his true calling in a world that seems to demand action at all costs. It’s called Action Will Be Taken.
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear our Labor Day Noir, as broadcast on the Arts Express radio program heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.
Monday morning, Huddie Ledbetter, the great blues and folk singer known as Lead Belly, talks and sings about being thrown out of a whites-only boarding house in Washington DC. The recording is listed as made in 1936.
“Jesse Welles has got a voice like John Prine, plays guitar like Bob Dylan, and can write a song that’s as topical and clever as the songs of Phil Ochs or Tom Paxton or Woody Guthrie. It turns out, despite his handsome shaggy-haired babyface look, he has been making songs for a long time. In an age where so much music is artificially created with plastic lyrics and digitally manipulated instruments, it is refreshing to hear a protest song on a simple acoustic folk guitar that doesn’t just talk about generalities, but actually names names, and has a political point of view…”
Click on the mp3 link or triangle above to hear the rest of my commentary on Welles, as broadcast this week on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.
If you are of a certain age, growing up as a high school or college kid during the late 60s or early 70s, then odds are that at least one time as you were toking up, the surrealist record LPs of the Firesign Theatre invaded your brain. As the albums brilliantly shifted in and out of tv, film and radio parody, they broke down walls of time, space and authority. Now in a new book about the Firesign Theater, called Firesign, author Jeremy Braddock provides a wonderful non-linear look at the four influential guys who turned the art of radio and recording upside down. I was happy to have as our guest on the show, the author of Firesign, Jeremy Braddock.
Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above to hear the interview as heard on the Arts Express radio program broadcast this week on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation
Monday morning, It is what it is. Another Jesse Welles gem. This guy is writing topical songs as fast or faster than Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton used to in the Sing Out! days.
Monday morning as we contemplate the omission of Dylan’s greatest love, Sara Lownds, from the recent biopic, we might listen to this epic written by Dylan for her
Monday morning, another great song by Jesse Welles. It’s gotta be one of the best anti-war songs I’ve heard in the last fifty years. Take good care of yourself, kid, the world’s going to need you.
Josh Turner and friends with a rollicking Beach Boys re-creation straight from his apartment. The harmonies, the ridiculous lyrics, and the 1960s vibe are all so much fun.
Monday morning, Toni Lindgren, without her singing partner Elle Cordova (formerly Reina Del Cid), singing a typically great John Prine song. Always wonderful guitar playing, and she really nails the John Prine spirit.
