Self Help Radio 020119: Garages

What is a garage, really?  Does it have to have a door?  Does it have to have something parked in it?  Is there any real similarity between a parking garage & your next-door neighbor's cluttered two-car garage?  Do you think it's fair to use the word "garage" as a synecdoche in the case of places where people take their cars to be fixed?  What should we store in a garage?  What should we make in a garage?

None of these questions are asked or answered on today's show.  Honestly, they didn't occur to me until just now.  Which is unfortunate, but that's the nature of my brain.  Instead, I visit a garage, I talk to the officer that arrests the guy at that garage, I hang out with a talking dog, & my wife calls.  Not all at the same time.  That would be craziness.  But the point is, I should've asked more questions about garages.  Oh well.  Maybe if I do a show about carports.

The show of course is at the Self Help Radio website whenever you want to listen.  User the username "SHR" & pass the password "selfhelp" in order to listen.  What might you be listening to?  That's below.

Also, if you need to get in the garage, the code is 123321 & you'll need to hit the arrows to open it.  If it doesn't open, hit the # symbol or the arrows twice, then reenter the numbers.  It's still not opening?  You hit the arrows again afterwards?  Can you just try the opener?  It's in the car, dude.  I swear I put it...  Okay.  I'll be there as soon as I can.

Self Help Radio Garages Episode

"Garage Fire Blues" Memphis Minnie & Her Jug Band _Queen Of The Country Blues: All The Published Sides 1929-1937_
"Two Car Garage" Dick Thomas & His Nashville Ramblers _25 Country & Western Songs Of The 40s_
"À La Porte Du Garage" Charles Trenet _The Extraordinary Garden_

introduction featuring Edgar Lou, the talkative terrier

"In Jim's Garage" I, Brute Force _Confections Of Love_
"In My Garage" Kim Fowley _Sunset Boulevard_
"Garageland" The Clash _The Clash_
"One Fella's Family: Garage Trouble" Bob & Ray _Classic Bob & Ray_
"Paradise Garage" Tim Curry _Fearless_

field report: a visit to Byron's garage

"Death Garage" Peter Holsapple _Big Black Truck_
"Double Garage" Voice Farm _The World We Live In_
"Garage Full Of Flowers" Inspiral Carpets _Cool As_
"Lucky Duck Garage" The Firesign Theater _Dear Friends_
"Joe's Garage" Frank Zappa _Joe's Garage_

interview with Officer Pendragon

"Heartbreak Garage" Pere Ubu _Story Of My Life_
"In The Garage" Weezer _Weezer (The Blue Album)_
"Garage Sales" Collin Moulton _Collin Cleans Up Well_
"My Friend's Garage" The Pearly Gatecrashers _Popsuey_
"Twenty Four Hour Garage People" Half Man Half Biscuit _Trouble Over Bridgwater_

a discussion of garage sales Gary's wife calls

"Man In A Garage" Coldcut _Sound Mirrors_
"Multi-Family Garage Sale (Bargain Bin Mix)" Land Of The Loops _Bundle Of Joy_
"Dwight Twilley's Garage Sale" Red Dirt Rangers _Starin' Down The Sun_
"Big Ass Garage Sale" Bill Chambers _Sleeping With The Blues_
"Garage Sale" Nerf Herder _IV_

the shortest Self Help Radio airbreak ever?

"Stuck In Thee Garage" The Dirtbombs _Dangerous Magical Noise_
"Garage Full Of Love" Xerox Feinberg _Introducing... The Horrible Blob_
"Le Garage" Futureheads _The Futureheads_
"Garage Apartment" Super XX Man _X_
"Garage In Drift" The Hit Parade _Cornish Pop Songs_

conclusion & goodbyes

"Man Of Constant Sorrow (With A Garage In Constant Use)" Half Man Half Biscuit _Half No-One Cares About Your Creative Hub So Get Your Fuckin' Hedge Cut_
"Forty Years Old & I'm Livin' In My Mom's Garage" Austin Lounge Lizards _Never An Adult Moment_

Whither Garages?

For about a month - from mid-December to mid-January - a stray cat lived in our garage.  I spent way more time in the garage than I ever really had.  Normally, I'm in there to get to the car, or the lawnmower, or the foodstuffs we store there.  Until the cat (whose story I talked about here on this blog) stayed there, I never, for example, sat on the garage floor.  There was no reason to.

Maybe that's what inspired this show about garages.  I don't know.  I lived in apartments growing up, & well into my college years, so I never had a garage until I was maybe 36, 37?  That garage also mainly held the car.  It also held our dog food, which was constantly being eaten by rats.  It had rats, too.  I remember my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) being amused when I bought a heavy container with metal edges to store the dog food in.  The edges, of course, were how the rats gnawed into the containers.  I was annoyed at the rats.

That's one garage story, might there be more?  Of course there are more!  Consider that a taste!

The show happens at noon tomorrow at self help radio dot net.  Maybe you have a garage too?  Maybe you'll play the show for your garage?

Preface To Garage: What Is Garage Music?

Here are two musical descriptions of the word "garage":

(This is from Wikipedia: "Garage rock (also called '60s punk or garage punk) is a raw & energetic style of rock & roll that flourished in the mid-1960s, most notably in the United States & Canada, & has experienced various revivals since then. The style is characterized by basic chord structures played on electric guitars & other instruments, sometimes distorted through a fuzzbox, as well as often unsophisticated & occasionally aggressive lyrics & delivery. Its name derives from the perception that groups were often made up of young amateurs who rehearsed in the family garage, although many were professional."

The second (also defined in Wikipedia) is this: "Garage house (originally known as 'garage music'; also 'New York house') is a dance music style that was developed alongside house music. Garage, which had a more soulful R&B-derived sound, was developed in the Paradise Garage nightclub in New York City & Club Zanzibar in Newark, New Jersey, United States, during the early-to-mid 1980s. There was much overlap between it & early house music, making it difficult to tell the two apart. It predates the development of Chicago house, & according to All Music, is relatively closer to disco than other dance styles. As Chicago house gained international popularity, New York's garage music scene was distinguished from the 'house' umbrella. Garage led to other styles of music such as speed garage & UK garage."

Could this have led to any confusion?  Might record stores simply have a "garage" section where both genres (& their sub-genres) ended up?  I dunno, but I do have a story:

In the summer of 1997 (22 years ago!), I was working as the Programming Director at KVRX with a fellow named Chris, who did a house music show.  I don't recall its name.  I wasn't familiar with house, or any modern electronica, really, at the time, so he would talk to me about it & I would listen politely, not really having much interest then in the genre.  But he told me he was going to do a show about garage music.  That was something I knew something about, & wondered how he would manage to mix that into his general repetitive thumping with the occasional vocal.

He was nonplussed.  His idea of garage music was (as the second definition above notes) basically the same as house.  So he played me some garage music.  I laughed & told him that that wasn't garage music, & I played him "Pushin' Too Hard" by the Seeds & "Mr Pharmacist" by the Other Half.  No way was that garage music, he said.  I told him he predated his garage music by two decades & had to bring up a page on the web that traced the history of garage rock.

"Garage rock," he said, as if he'd won the argument.  "This is garage house."

"Don't just call it garage, then," I said.

It was a friendly disagreement.  He didn't like the kind of garage I liked.  I don't think I ever listened all the way through one of his shows.

Put These Faces In Alphabetical Order

(I'm paraphrasing here) Number one wash the affected area in your own usual way & dry as thoroughly as possible.  Did you see the medicated plaster?  Not the unmedicated plaster, that's for later.  Okay!  Yes!  Then number two put the medicated plaster on the place you previously washed.

Wait, did you just say "warshed"?  Where are you from?  Because that is some hicky Southern pronunciation right there.  I have to get the warsh from the warshing machine I bought in Warshington state.  All right, all right, don't get your tank top in a tizzie.

Number three, wait forty-eight hours.  Two days.  Two nights & two days.  Don't be impatient.  Don't be impertinent.  Don't be importuning me in any way about this.  Starting the moment you put the plaster on, forty eight hours.  Four eight.  Six times eight.  Four times twelve.  Two times twenty-four.  Forty-eight mother father hours.

Did I mention soaking?  I thought I mentioned soaking.  Maybe add to number one "soak in warm water."  Unless that's how you clean?  Do you clean by soaking?  Who does that, really.  At best soaking is, as the poet put it, "A twenty-minute soak can improve how you think & feel/That’s time well spent each & every day, you heel."  Or is that in the bibble?

Let's skip number four which is just repeat as necessary & then go straight to number five which is sexy like broccoli covered in wafers: Only do this for fourteen days.  A fortnight!  After that, give up!

The origin of the word "fortnight" seems pretty self-expository.  As the Wickerpedia says, "The word derives from the Old English: fēowertyne niht, meaning 'fourteen nights.'"  It does not, as the Wackapedia says, "derive from the New English fort night, meaning 'two weeks in a fort is like one night in a fort.'"

How do you feel now?  Does it work?  Is the plaster painful?  Is the plaster painful as a pest?  As a pestilence?  As a petulant parrot pretending to pout?  As a portentous polygon past its prime?  As a pretentious primadonna prancing & preening?  As a portmanteau pulled peevishly by poorly-paid porters?  As a puffin pining for the Pacific?  As a possibly pleasant pastry packed with pineapple pectin?  As a peripatetic plumber planting posies in Palermo?  As putrid pumpkin placed prettily on pieces of pie?  As perverse proclivities proscribed from the pulpit?  As people pointing politely at puzzled policemen?  As perturbed payment for pandemonium?  As piles of putty plopped perfunctorily in public by playful Parisians?  As posh poseurs perplexed by polygamy?  As peculiar peroration per Pinter or Proust?  As provocative papal pontification perceived & pooh-poohed?  As pure, palliative potables partaken poisonously?  As paradoxical positions plainly proclaimed?  As peanut passion?  As potato precipitation?  As preposterous parties plagued by penguins?  As pointless pigs prestidigitating? As pitiable partridges parting in poverty?  As parboiled pantaloons?

No?

Well, if you say so.

Taylor

(A picture doubtless taken by Taylor himself; I took it from his Facebook page.)

As one gets older, if one survives, one will have to say goodbye to so many people one knew.  I say this because this past week I had to say goodbye to that gentleman up there.  His names was Taylor Cage & he's one of the many folks I've had the fortune to meet because of my radio obsession.  But I can safely say that none were quite like him.

When I decided to try my luck at KOOP radio in the fall of 2000, he most probably was part of the team that trained us.  I don't really recall - my main memory is that, with the station suffering from a recent schism, the training staff seemed shellshocked.  When I asked one of the other trainers what his name was, he told me that that wasn't important.

The reason I suspect Taylor trained me is that, once I joined the station & its Training Committee, I was teamed with him for the first night's training: he did the station's Orientation class, I taught FCC rules & regulations.  Taylor had a show on KOOP called Queer Waves & therefore it wasn't a surprise that he was openly, proudly gay.  He had a flair for the dramatic & was a marvelous teacher - & I always loved that he taught something called orientation.  Sweet & friendly, Taylor was there to show you how actually different your experience at KOOP would be.

His show was great, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of queer musicians that I have yet to see rivaled.  I saw him weekly as I was usually up at the station on Saturdays to do production work - & since he did his show then, he was often conscripted by me to voice spots.  I put one of them on my server, this was an indecency disclaimer for our webstream overnight, I think he enjoyed this a little too much.  Listen to it here.

He once asked me to sub his show & I just played show tunes - which he was fine with, but I felt like I wasn't really playing what he would play.  Last year, as I helped my mother move in with my sister, I found a bunch of old CDs of my Austin shows, which of course I tossed out, but I kept one to listen to on the drive back to Fort Worth.  It was that very show.  When I got home, I wrote Taylor a message on Facebook, which went like this:

"Hey, I was just in Dallas helping my 88-year-old mom pack up her place - she's moving in with my sister tomorrow - & she had a ton of burned CDs of my old KOOP shows.  I threw them all away (I have copies in digital form) but I saved one to listen to on the drive home, which was the Queer Waves show I subbed in 2006 on which I played show tunes.  I almost never listen to my old shows because I'm not a masochist, but I wanted to hear what I'd chosen & it was an all right show, but there was something I said that made me laugh out loud.  I had been saying something silly about you being gone & I said, 'Please don't tell Taylor I've been trash-talking him on the air.  He'd find it delicious.'"

His response was: "Yes! Or in Gay, YAAAAASSS!"

Two moments stick in my mind when I saw Taylor troubled or otherwise not as happy as he usually was.  One of them was after an anti-gay marriage amendment passed with a huge majority in Texas.  Now, Taylor was not someone I thought of as being for marriage of any kind, but he said it bothered him because, in the liberal bubble of Austin, he just forgot "how many people hate us."  The second time involved someone at KOOP who was of the Baha'i faith who arranged for us to use their temple for meetings after one of the fires we had, & it became known that the Baha'i had some issues with homosexuality.  When some members of the station either refused to discuss this, or thought it didn't really matter, it disturbed Taylor.  He confided in me, "This used to be one of the places I felt at home."

He left KOOP in 2007 I think.  I would leave a year later.  We didn't stay in touch, but we found each other on Facebook later on, where would occasionally talk.  We never had a social relationship - he did come to a party at my place once, but didn't seem too comfortable.  After meetings I would often take him home, which allowed us to talk about the station & our lives.  He invited me in to see his beloved dolls a couple of times, & I discovered he loved Jethro Tull more than I could have imagined.  Not much Jethro Tull on Queer Waves!  I should've got him to sub Self Help Radio once to just see how he'd do.

He did return many times to KOOP as a guest, on Dennis Campa's show, & I'm glad - he was made to be an on-air personality.  I hope I have some of his shows saved somewhere.  As my friend Ken said when we discussed his passing, he was "inimitable."

He died last week at the age of 63.  He had a twin sister I never met, & she shared his obituary on Facebook, & I share it now.  Now I'm thinking about how Taylor & I would sit in the station & make each other laugh, how he was perfectly happy to listen to me discuss how I thought the station should be run & all that nonsense, but how a simple phrase, subtly barbed, would deflate my self-important rants & make me laugh at myself.  He was a wonderful person that I'm sorry I didn't get to spend more time with.  I hope KOOP does something to celebrate him.  He really was one-of-a-kind.