There is something I have been meaning to post for the last two weeks. The commercial station that I listen to in toronto has one DJ in particular that has always been a special sort of geek. He has always been the guy who dug up the strangest stuff. Think popup video on lots of crystal meth. A few years back they actually gave him a show just for that stuff. It has been consistently good, sometimes awesome, but always at least good. He does hour long specials on hidden tracks, or three part history of bands like Joy Division. The last couple weeks he's been doing a series on electronic music.

It started with the electric harpsichord in 1759 and ran through the Theremin, the Moog, to Kraftwerk. The next weeks installment picked up there and ran through the introduction of reliable drum machines and sequencers and Howard Jones as the first one-man-band top40 act, and ended with the introduction of the Synclavier. This coming week will cover from there to around 1995. Which means skinny puppy and ministry! I hope! So if there are any readers who will be in Toronto or WNY sunday at seven eastern the dial is 102.1 fm. They also broadcast on the net but the morons at the station have switched off real player to windows media, thus requiring linux types to dual boot if they want to hear it.

While on this topic of 80's syth pop bands. Sometime in the early 90's I actually saw Howard Jones play at the El Mocambo with just a yamaha grand piano and accompanied on about half the song by a woman playing bongos. How did a man who can't stand synth pop wind up in that place?

As many stories of this type often start out, "there was this Girl,". It's really amazing what we menfolk will do when we see a woman we love mistreated. It makes the picture of the salmon swiming upstream right into the grizzly's jaws almost make sense.

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of seeing a show at the ElMo it's like this. The room is about thirty feet wide and about eighty feet deep. If they put the stage at one end of the room you'd feel like you were watching the performance in a tunnel. So they don't. The stage is right smack in the middle of the long north wall. Except for the bar proper there is no way to be more than 25 feet from the performer(s).

It's just plain an incredible venue. In addition to a variety of personal things that I'm just not going to share here, I learned something that day:

When you get rid of all the technology, sequencers, sythesizers, drum machines and stuff, Howard Jones is a much better musician than he appears.

And not too shabby a songwriter either
thanks(kind of) to Erratic (several months upgraded from nutjob) for sparking an all too vivid recollection.