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One of the byproducts of doing a show like this for as long as I’ve been doing it is that it’s really hard to shut off your brain… I’m always thinking about topic ideas, ways to link facts and trivia together, reading lots of books, talking to lots of people, and otherwise trying to come up with a constant stream of things we can talk about… The result of all this researching and thinking and writing are some ideas and perspectives on music, music history, how music is made, how it’s consumed and distributed, and how seemingly small things have led to big changes…that’s one thing… Another is the opinions formed by observing the opinions of others…why do people like some things and hate others?...and another is a list of ideas that aren’t quite fully formed…it seems like I’ve almost grasped a concept but it doesn’t feel right yet—but I feel that there’s a germ of truth in there somewhere… I’ve also learned that when you’re not sure about something, source the crowd…you might like the answers, but it’s better than living in your own head… So lemme bounce a few of these things off you and you can tell me if I’m onto something or if I’m off-base—or if I’ve completely lost the plot… I call this episode “theories, thoughts, and half-baked ideas”…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every once in a while we come across someone who is famous and iconic for being...well let's be honest...nothing more than a monumental eff-up. There is nothing about them we should admire...but for some reason we find them intriguing...fascinating...compelling. This is the story of one monumental eff-up. Books have be written about him...movies done....his image has graces more T-shirts than you can imagine. And he was one of the least musically talented punk rockers of all time.  This is the story of Sid Vicious. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the last decade, there has been some very, very long overdue attempts at reconciliation with the First Nations and Indigenous Peoples of North America…there’s still a long, long way to go, but at least the process as begun… The treatment of Indigenous people makes for ugly history…but it has also been enlightening in positive ways… For example, we’ve been learning more about First Nations music and the role people who identify as Native Canadians and Americans have played in the world of rock…some are full-fledged First Nations people…others have at least some Native blood… Some are well-known…others have been hiding in plain sight…and I think it’s time that we go through some of these contributions…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This the 23rd annual ongoing Christmas show…and yeah, I know that 2020 has been a challenging year, but let’s look at some of the good things that happened… Many of us learned to bake bread…drive-in theatres made a comeback for both movies and concerts…sweatpants are now accepted work attire… “Tiger King” was fun, wasn’t it?...and—uh…well, i’m sure there were many other nice things about 2020… Oh!..oh!...less pollution because of less traffic…dog shelters were emptied out because so many people were adopting…we got out for more walks…oh—here’s a good one: Africa was declared free of polio in 2020…that’s definitely brilliant… 2021 will be a transition year…vaccines have to be administered, COVID cases will come down, and by this time next year, we’ll in a much better place…optimism is the best cure for anxiety… So with that...let's dive into some our annual not-so-traditional Christmas show.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Okay…let’s start the annual office cleanup…this is the time of year when I go through all the scraps of paper, all the scribbles on various notepads and all the post-it notes hanging everywhere…then there are the computer and phone notes that contain even more information… The goal is to determine if anything I’ve written down or squirreled away somewhere is of any use for this program… See, when you do a program like this, you always need to be on the lookout of interesting stuff…arcane knowledge…bits of trivia…oddities and strange connections…it’s a practically a 24/7 thing because you never, ever know when you’re going to run across something mind-blowingly fascinating… The problem is that many of the cool things I discover don’t fit in with anything that I’m doing or writing about…but it seems a shame to discard or otherwise ignore any of this research because it’s still fascinating stuff… So I spend the year collecting all this orphan material for this specific program every December…essentially, it’s a big data dump of music-related information…I just put it out there and let you do with it what you may… Got that?...prepare yourself…this is the annual look at 60 mind-blowing things about music in 30 minutes…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We are always pouring sound into our heads, whether we’re using some kinds of speakers or wearing headphones… I’m going to make a guess here, but I’m going to assume that most people demand a certain level of audio quality to what they’re listening to…you don’t want distortion and you’re hoping for a certain level of sonic realism… You want to be able to close your eyes and feel the music around you…you want to be immersed in it…these sensations, as important as they are to our enjoyment of music, are now taken for granted… But the technological journey to that led to us enjoying music this way took decades…and along the way, there were many twists and turns, false starts and dead ends, promising leads and utter failures… This is the story of stereo, part 2See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You’ve heard the stories. You’ve felt for the people involved. But what happens after the cameras shut off and the reporters walk away? Just because a story disappears from the news doesn’t mean it’s gone. So whatever happened to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima? or the trapped Chilean Miners? And did anything actually come out of the Ice Bucket Challenge? Join Global News reporter, Erica Vella on this unique history podcast as she takes you inside these stories and talks to the people at the heart of each one to find out exactly what’s happened since. Listen now at https://link.chtbl.com/whtSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

 Our ears are amazing things…evolution has created an ability that allows us to tell the direction of a sound…left and right, up and down, front and back…we can tell how close something might be, whether it’s stationary or moving, and if it’s coming towards us or going away…in other words, we hear sound in 3-d…very helpful for humans on the plains of Africa who had to be worried about being eaten by a lion… This directionality also makes listen to music so enjoyable…the very same things that prevented us from being eaten allow us to appreciate music, whether it be live or recorded… With a live performance, we’re in the same space as the musicians, so our ears and eyes work together when it comes to how we interpret what’s going on in front of us…we’re able to pick out all kinds of individual details…that includes the bad stuff like unwanted echo and reverb…and we’re always at the mercy of whoever is controlling and the mixing the audio for a gig… But let’s focus recorded music…how do you create that illusion of sitting in front of a performer?...and I’m talking about the ability to close your eyes and visualize where everyone is onstage?...the singer out front…the guitarist slightly to your right…the keyboardist is slightly to your left…you can tell that the drummer is further back than everyone else, but parts of the kit are slightly spread out…and the bass player is in there somewhere, but doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the instruments… For the last 60-plus years, technology has relied on a set of principles and techniques that allow recorded music to sound exponentially better that 99% of live performances—at least in terms of audio quality…listening to music this way is a totally immersive experience… We call it “stereo”…and this is how this part of our musical lives came to be…it’s The Story of Stereo, Part 1See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The universe is a weird, random place that has little regard for what us puny humans think…this is something we find very, very hard to accept…we’re always looking for explanations for the weird, random, and sometimes evil things that befall us… Occam’s razor—the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one—doesn’t cut it for some people…they believe that there are nefarious things afoot… For example, I know someone who is all-in when it comes to this QAnon rubbish…quick explanation: a government insider believes that Donald Trump is leading a secret global fight against a cabal of Satan-worshipping politicians and celebrities and journalists who are engaged in everything from child sex trafficking to cannibalism… Everything about qanon is bat-guano crazy and nothing to do with reality…yet there are people who believe that people Barack Obama, George Soros, and Tom Hanks will soon be arrested and jailed for their hideous crimes… This is more nutty than even the most out-there “JFK-was-assassinated” or “9/11 was an inside government job” theories…or the idea that the moon landing was faked…or that Sandy Hook was a false flag event…or that Bill Gates is big on vaccinations because he wants to inject miniature tracking chips into all of us… What else is out there?...chemtrails…the truth about the Denver airport…the UFO cover-up…the evils of fluoridation…flat-earthers, weather control machines, the illuminati, freemasonry… Okay, what about music?...are there any conspiracies that have taken root?...the answer is “yes…plenty”…and here’s another look down that rat hole of insanity…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I’ve always been something of a nut when it comes to the space program…but even though I’ve read all the books, seen all the documentaries, and watched all the movies, I was still surprised to learn something new with the movie “Hidden Figures”… This was a 2016 film based on a book of the same name…it told the true story about black female mathematicians who worked at nasa during the hottest period of the space race… They were “computers” in the original sense of the word: people who computer things complex things like flight trajectories, re-entry methods, and landing coordinates…they were even assigned to check and correct the calculations spit out by NASA’s big ibm mainframes…their work was essential to the American space effort… But this being the 60s, these women were segregated away from the other scientists, meaning that their work was largely forgotten until the movie and book came out… This got me thinking…are there any forgotten figures in music?...I’m talking about women who did awesome and important things but have largely been ignored by the traditional history of rock?...I’m talking about people beyond Deborah Harry, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, Chrissie Hynde, and Courtney Love… Well, yes…yes, there was…and we need to know about them…let’s do that now…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2020 has been a miserable year…the pandemic…economic ruin…the crazy U.S. election, which featured an impeached President…Kobe Bryant’s helicopter crash…the death of George Floyd…murder hornets arrived in North America…swarms of locusts descended on Africa… There were so many hurricanes that they ran out of names…the Olympics were postponed...out-of-control wildfires in both North America and Australia… And we lost more musicians…Neil Peart…Eddie Van Halen…Spencer Davis and dozens of others… Yeah, it’s been rough…what we need is something to remind us of the before times, the better times, the times when we could count on certain things always being there… A time when we could just turn it up, rock out and forget all the bad stuff… That something has arrived…an event that shows us that things can turn around; even when it looked hopeless…it’s the return of AC/DCSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Creating art is hard…if it wasn’t, everyone would do it—and everyone would be successful at doing it…even those who can create art—the people with the right stuff—have a finite supply of good stuff within them… Take Margaret Mitchell, for example…she wrote exactly one novel…but that novel was “Gone With The Wind”…Pulitzer Prize, a classic movie with multiple Academy Awards, 30 million copies sold, endless adaptations…it even got her face on a stamp…in short, “Gone With The Wind,” first published in 1937, was and still is, a cultural phenomenon… But that’s all she ever did…ol’ marge hit it out of the park on the first pitch and that was it…one novel…she is perhaps the greatest literary one-hit-wonder of all time… Maybe that’s all she had in the tank…or maybe she looked at all the success she got from just that one novel and said “right…my work is done her…anything else I do will just be a letdown…I’m stopping while I’m way ahead”…totally understand that… Other artists, though, keep trying after that one hit…but for whatever reason, the magical pixie dust that they managed to harness that one time disappears forever… Man, to get a taste of standing on the mountaintop only to be denied it ever again…but—and let’s be clear about this—at least they made it to the top of that mountain, even if it was just once…and if they’re lucky, that one trip can sustain them for the rest of their careers—the rest of their lives… This is another program featuring those who got to the top just one…its great alt-rock one-hit wonders of the 90s, part 2….See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The deadliest shooting spree in Canada’s modern history left us with far more questions than answers. Join Sarah Ritchie, a reporter for Global News in Halifax, as she tries to unravel how something like this could happen there. Sarah will take you through every hour, as it unfolded and together you’ll try and piece together what happened, what could or should’ve been done to prevent it and what we can learn to make sure a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again.  13 Hours: Inside the Nova Scotia Massacre: Listen NOW! https://link.chtbl.com/13hoursSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

 Artists who manage to have only one hit are often the butt of jokes…getting tagged as a one-hit-wonder can kill your career…but let’s turn this around: how many hits do you have?... There is so much music out there, so much competition for our attention, that if you managed to break through all the noise just once, that should be considered a giant victory… And remember, too, that thanks to streaming and the tens and tens of millions of songs available at our fingertips through our smartphones, that today’s artists are not only competing with their contemporaries but with essentially humankind’s entire recorded musical history… So, yeah…being a one-hit-wonder is a genuine accomplishment…and while you may burn brightly and then quickly fade, it is possible that one song is all you need to set you up with some royalty cheques for the rest of your life…at the very least, you’ll end up as a trivia question… Some of these acts are gone forever…others have moved on to other things…and others still just keep plugging away, hoping that lightning strikes twist… Here are the stories of some alt-rock artists who hit it big exactly once…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I do not dance…I’m too awkward and too self-aware of my awkwardness…I know we’re all supposed to dance like no one is looking, but when it comes to me, people will look, point, and judge… My wife realizes this…since we were married decades okay, she’s had to be content with the fact that she got that dance at the wedding and that’s pretty much it…and that’s because she’s not into dancing, either… I can feel the judgment.... stop it! This doesn’t mean that music doesn’t move me…I’ve got that involuntary need to move when the music is great…and I don’t mean tapping a toe or nodding my head, although that’s where it starts… Put it this way: I’ve done my time in the pit…I’ve been elbowed, kneed, kicked, head-butted, burn with cigarettes and joints, and doused with water (at least I hope it was water)…no problem because that’s all part of the pit experience…the only thing I haven’t done is stage dove or crowd-surfed…I’m not sure why… But here’s a question: why is there a pit in the first place?...who came up with this idea?...how did it spread?...and is it the same everywhere?... These are important anthropological questions…we’re deal with a type of human behavior that’s seen all over the world…I think we need to study this…here a whole hour on the history of moshing…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You may be aware of a podcast that came out in the spring of 2020 that sought to get to the bottom of a certain musical mystery…it’s called “wind of change” and it explores the possibility that a metal power ballad was a contributing factor to the fall of the soviet union in the very early 90s… Stay with me… “Wind of Change” was a global hit for The Scorpions; a metal band out of Hanover in what was then WestGermany… The Scorpions sing in English…but they also recorded a Russian version under the name “Veter Peremen”…and when the song was released on January 20, 1991, it became a worldwide hit… Estimates are that it sold 14 million copies…it’s the best-selling single by any German artist…and because it was such a big hit in the USSR, the band presented Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev a gold record…even today, the song is a massive, massive hit among several generations of fans in Eastern Europe… For years, rumours have swirled about this song…it is said that it was the product of a CIA operation design to destabilize Soviet society with its message of change and revolution…it worked so well that by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had crumbled… Did the CIA commission someone to write “Wind of Change,” get The Scorpions to record it, which somehow helped bring about the end of the USSR from within?...I’m not going to cover that here, so you’ll have to listen to the podcast… But I can tell you that this might not have been the first time rock music was used by a foreign intelligence operation to drive a wedge into a specific society…the popular music of the west—especially the music produced by the USA—was feared by Soviet bloc authorities…but the Soviets also knew that music could also be a weapon against the west… Here’s another theory…could it be that punk rock was actually KGB plot against the west?...did things also operate in the opposite direction…here’s what we know—or at least think we know…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ride along with 25 year veteran Crime Reporter Nancy Hixt, from Global News, on her award winning podcast Crime Beat as she takes you through some of Canada’s most high-profile criminal cases. Real People, Real Crimes, Real Journalism. Each episode takes you deep inside cases she has worked to give you detail you didn't hear on the news. Season 3 is available NOW - LISTEN​ Crime Beat is the 2020 winner of the Edward R. Murrow Podcast Award (RTDNA).See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here’s a list of words that shouldn’t go together but do…alone together…how many times did you uses that during the coronavirus pandemic?...deafening silence…I know what that means, but when you think about it, the juxtaposition is strange… Definitely maybe…good name for a Britpop album, but an odd combination of words…random order…walking dead…original copy… Here’s another one: pop-punk…you know what I mean by that…but those words should not go together…punk was originally created as an attack pop… Over the decades, pop and punk merged to create a hybrid that’s responsible for selling hundreds of millions of records and concert tickets… How did this happen?...that’s what we’re looking at…this is part two of a history of pop-punk…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before we get to the topic at hand, I’d like to revisit the movie “Forrest Gump,” specifically Forrest’s shrimp boat buddy, Benjamin Buford Blue—but you can just call him Bubba…he knew all the ways one could serve up shrimp… What Bubba could do for shrimp, other people can do for punk…punk rock comes in as many different varieties of shrimp…there’s hardcore punk, ska-punk, cyberpunk, synthpunk, anarcho-punk, cowpunk, gypsy punk, Christian punk, Celtic punk, art punk, garage punk, glam punk, crust punk, horror punk, street punk, melodic punk, afro-punk, skate punk, Chicano punk, folk funk, trall punk… There’s punk blues, punk pathetique, punk metal, riot grrrl, queercore, rapcore, straight edge, emo, and oi… And then we can get into all sorts of subgenres…hardcore punk includes bent edge, deathcore, pornogrind, screamo, powerviolence, positive hardcore, nard core, nintendocore…and that’s about all I know about that… Most of these punk derivatives are pretty niche and none of them have a hope in hell of growing beyond a cult following…but a few have blown up into worldwide phenomenon’s—including a version that I haven’t mentioned, which remains one of the most popular forms of punk rock of all time… This is the history of pop-punk, part 1…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At some point, you may end up being invited to your high school reunion—and you’re probably going to go because you wanna see what happened to all those people… Where’s the jock that made your life miserable?...the girl or the guy who snubbed you for that date and broke your heart…the shy, nerdy guy who was really smart…who did well?...who got what was coming to them… But—oh, wait: people at the reunion are going to be thinking the same about you…how’s your hair and your waistline and your complexion?...dammit!...what am I gonna wear?...what am I gonna say to these people?...and so the anxiety sets in… But you’ll still end up going…why?...because we’ve all got the “where-are-they-now” gene…it’s only natural to be curious about the whereabouts of people we were close to (or at least in close proximity to) during an important time in our lives… Connecting people this way was one of the first projects for the internet…classmates.com went online way back in 1995…its sole purpose was the find anyone you might have gone to school with from kindergarten to university… This was also the purpose of a site called “Friendster” back in 2002…then came MySpace in 2003…anyone remember “hi 5?”...it showed up in 2004…then finally, Facebook in 2005… You know what we need?...a site that links together all the artists and musicians we once knew—a proper one-stop-shop where-are-they-now resource for music… As far as I can tell, such a site doesn’t exist so we have to piece together things ourselves….so let’s try to do that again…this is another look at lost Canadian alt-rock bands of the 90s and beyond… Damn…would someone get on that idea?...it would make doing a show like this a lot easier…See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.