Holiday Video of the Day: Joe “King” Carrasco & the Crowns, “Party Christmas”
Tex-Mex New Wave legend Joe “King” Carrasco remakes his classic “Party Weekend” as a Farfisa-fueled Christmas favorite in 1981 on MTV. By the way, Martha Quinn turned 50 this year, just in case you want to avoid the Christmas rush and start banking your holiday depression now.
Video of the Day: Pixies, “Debaser” on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”
Static, Episode 27: Colourmusic
Interview
“Yes!”
“Winter Song”
“Circles”
“Slap Bet” — Fun For the Whole Family
It’s “The Happy Hitting Game.” From “How I Met Your Mother.”
Video of the Day: Jimmy Fallon as Neil Young, “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”
This is so note perfect, it’s a little awe inspiring.
The Spy is On the Air, At Long Last
Yesterday, a good many readers were understandably concerned when, after much fanfare from this blog, The Lost Ogle and other cheerleaders for Oklahoma City’s culture, 105.3 FM “The Spy” did not appear as promised. For those just wakey-waking, “The Spy” went up at 12:01 a.m. this morning. I’ll try to explain this without poking any sleeping corporate bears.
The holdup was caused by one guy — one nameless (to us) guy in an office on the West Coast who needed to sign off on the sale to Ferris O’Brien and Spy Media. When his signature was needed, no one could find him — it was as if he evaporated. ESPN Deportas was still broadcasting on 105.3 while O’Brien basically took all the heat online and his wife kept him away from the computer.
Things are up and running. It will begin to shape into The Spy we knew and loved, complete with DJ voices, very soon. And if you would, for me, please be calm when things don’t work — don’t take the “hair on fire” all-caps stance like a YouTube comments section troll. This is homemade, non-corporate radio run by one of your neighbors, not some faceless functionary in a far-off city, so patience and grace, readers and listeners, patience and grace.
Video of the Day: Edan, “Echo Party”
Super-ecstatic Saturday morning Bollywood hip-hop dance party featuring the Incredible Bongo Band and enough great breaks to make you double-dutch your face off.
Ferris O’Brien talks about the return of 105.3 FM “The Spy”
“The Spy” is currently locked in a basement, but Ferris O’Brien promises to release it in three days.
Five years ago, 105.3 FM “The Spy” left the airwaves, replaced by a Spanish language station, and a great experiment in ultra-alternative rock radio was consigned to history. Now O’Brien, the morning disc jockey on The Spy, has bought the station from Citadel Broadcasting and the long dormant Spy returns to the airwaves Monday.
“I’ve been working on this at least since March — actually physically working on this deal,” said O’Brien. “But in all actuality, this has been something I’ve been thinking about doing, wanting to be doing, for the last 10 years.”
O’Brien, whose career in radio began with KDGE-FM in Dallas, eventually moved to Stillwater, where he was a key player on KSPI-FM, the stylistic precursor to KSYY. KSPI-FM changed formats in 2000, and O’Brien joined 105.3 FM when that station adopted a deep alternative format in December 2002, playing a diverse selection of underground British and domestic rock.
After KSYY changed formats in June 2004, O’Brien continued to work with Citadel, hosting a “Spy Radio” program on KATT-FM. But O’Brien said his dream has always been to run his own station, and he reached an agreement earlier this year to purchase the station from Citadel with his own money and investment from family members.
Since embarking on the process of buying the station, O’Brien has been collecting and programming the necessary equipment and reaching out to past colleagues such as former Chainsaw Kittens singer Tyson Meade, one of the regular deejays on the station. Meade, who now lives and teaches in Shanghai, China, is expected to return to The Spy with a regular show recorded half a world away.
In the meantime, O’Brien is filling his equipment with digital song files, ranging from classics by The Smiths and Talking Heads to local bands such as Pretty Black Chains.
“I’ve had the automation system for about two months, and I am still working on it today,” he said. “I lock myself in my basement, and my wife refers to it as “mad scientist syndrome.”
While he acknowledged that there are big risks involved in this undertaking, O’Brien said he thinks he can operate a profitable business while bringing a radio legend back to life.
“You know, I’m not in this specifically to get filthy, stinking rich, where I fill up a bedroom with 100-dollar bills and roll around naked. If that happens, that’s great, too. But if I break even and make a good living and can pay the bills and keep it on the air, I know I can do that.”
Video of the Day: Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, “Heaven Can Wait”
A Silverlake shuffle from Gainsbourg’s upcoming disc with Beck, IRM, due in January, the video features hamburger skateboards, a wigged lizard, nacho bomb, green fuzzy meanies, fruity pebbles in the bathtub — come to think of it, all this sounds like a thrown-out lyric from the Mellow Gold days.
Video of the Day: Grizzly Bear, “Ready, Able”
A Claymation sasquatch gets sucked into a plexiglass chandelier. Just another day at the office.
