Preface To Traffic: Steve Winwood Is My Summer Romance

Self Help Radio, the most breakfast cereally of all radio shows, has its good themes & its bad themes. A show I once did about sorghum may have netted me tremendous praise from the National Sweet Sorghum Producers & Processors Association, not to mention a couple of scary people who drink sorghum beer, but since it only featured one song, the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Sorghum" (which isn't even a real song), & eighty-six minutes of me trying desperately to talk about sorghum, well, that show is widely considered the nadir of a radio program built on extremely low expectations. By contrast, the "free money" theme was well received, & only cost me four thousand dollars.

This week, our theme will be "traffic," which may or may not be annoying if you're listening in a car on I-35 getting completely fucked up on the fumes of the semi in front of you. I frankly don't care. What I do care about is that you people stop writing me & asking me if I will feature any factoids about Steve Winwood. No! No I won't! & I don't care that I once received a handjob from a priest in a confessional while he was humming "Higher Love"! I'm not proud of that. I'm not even Catholic.

I will, however, slake the thirst of you Winwoodians by telling my favorite Steve Winwood in the world. I know, everyone has their favorite Steve Winwood story, like the one about him dressing up as a priest & giving unsuspecting boys handjobs in confessionals, but this is not one of your average Steve Winwood stories. This one does not feature Jimi Hendrix or Ginger Baker or Eric Clapton or Malcolm X or Stephen Fry or Bunny Wailer or Dick Cheney or Kay Parker or Marc Chagall or Giorgio Moroder or Parker Posey or Marianne Faithfull or Lou Dobbs or Richard Hatch or Pepper Anderson or Roy Clark or Steve Ditko or Audra Lindley or Richard Hilton or Bobby Trendy or Arturo Sandoval or Rodney Allen Rippy or Dave Brock or Joe Mannix or Joe Montana or Josephine Baker or Ahmed Sékou Touré or Richard Dawson or Muff Winwood or Woody Herman or Estelle Getty or Trina Robbins or Kiki-la-Doucette or Jim Corbett or Bradley Whitford or Farrah Franklin or Mary Jane Parker or Saint Anastasia the Patrician or Steve Doocy or Casper The Friendly Ghost or William Tecumseh Sherman or Los Huracanes del Norte or Alf Landon or Barry Bonds or Ali Larter or even, now that I think of it, Steve Winwood. Yes, it's the only Steve Winwood story that I can think of that doesn't actually involve Steve Winwood. There won't be a reference to one of his songs, or one of his bands, or his mental problems, or his famous letters to Penthouse Forum, or his inability to form a complete sentence since quitting cocaine in 2004. In that sense, this is truly a great Steve Winwood story.

& that story is, frankly, too painful for me to tell right now. I will also need to ask my mother how she feels about it. So. Maybe tomorrow. Now, leave me alone, you Winwoodsuckers. There'll be no Winwood on Self Help Radio this Friday. Nor will there ever be any Winwood on Self Help Radio! I mean it!