By The Beachwood Music Choice Affairs Desk

Descriptions of the Music Choice channels available in Comcast Area 2.
Sounds of the Seasons: Enjoy the holidays with tunes that capture the spirit of the season. Now playing: DJ Shadow, “Building Steam With A Grain of Salt.”
Today’s Country: Description not available. Now playing: Keith Urban, “Who Wouldn’t Wanna Be Me.”
Classic Country: Swing on through the doors of the Opry and step back in time to your kind of country. Now playing: Johnny Cash, “Guess Things Happen That Way.”
Bluegrass: Catch breakneck pickin’ and high-lonesome singing straight off the mountain from the masters. Now playing: The Seldom Scene, “Blue And Lonesome.”
Hip Hop and R&B: Description not available. Now playing: Rhianna, “Take A Bow.”
Classic R&B: Groove to classic R&B, funk, soul and Motown from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Now playing: Stevie Wonder, “That Girl.”

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Posted on August 27, 2008

By Don Jacobson

Love her or hate her, you have to admit Liz Phair knows her ’70s music. And she knows how to pick a good TV show. In fact, she’s kind of made a cottage industry out of both of those things with her involvement in CBS’ Swingtown, which, I’m thinking, would have ended up becoming a minor hit of the 2007-08 network TV season if it had debuted when it should have in January instead of being derailed by the writers’ strike.

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Posted on July 28, 2008

By Julia Gray

Recently, on a return trip from Salt Lake City, I had to get my musical kicks from the Delta Tunes after my iPod crapped out at 29,000 feet somewhere above Kansas. Here is a sampling of what I had to endure.
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Channel 5: Classical Masters and Cirque du Soliel Kooza
What was playing: La Boheme (Giacomo Puccini) Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Robert Spano, conductor. Also, Quando me’n vo’, Musetta: Georgia Jarman, among others.
The Cirque soundtrack explores “universal themes of fear, identity, recognition and power.”
What I heard: Since Salt Lake is a Delta hub, I am almost positive that both of these selections had added lines about the virtues of magic underwear in them to appease the LDS passengers. I’m not sure, however, since I don’t speak opera or Mormon.
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Channel 6: Summer’s Greatest Hits and Party in the Sky
What was playing: Many summer classics from my youth, like Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park,” “Groovin'” by the Rascals, and a recent classic, “Soak Up the Sun,” by Sheryl Crow. Then, there were the not-so-classics performed by Miley Cyrus and Yves La Rock.
What I heard: Again, I swear I heard a few extra refrains about magic underwear and Mitt Romney, but then that could’ve been an after-affect of the Polygamy Porter I consumed over the weekend.

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Posted on July 10, 2008

By The Beachwood Inflight Music Affairs Desk

What United Airlines is currently offering, ripped from the pages of Hemispheres.
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Channel 2: 20 on 20
Description: What’s hot, right now.
Who You’ll Hear: Justin Timberlake, Fergie.
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Channel 3: BPM
Description: Pure, mainstream dance music.
Who You’ll Hear: Madonna, Ferry Corsten.
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Channel 4: Bluesville
Description: Blues music of the past and present.
Who You’ll Hear: B.B. King, Buddy Guy.

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Posted on July 2, 2008

By Don Jacobson

Chicago music guy Perry Bax has a definite winner with his twice-monthly podcast, The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. It’s a very nice mixture of classic and punk rock rarities and remixes mingled with a heavy dose of ’90s alternative rock and some sparkling samples of the newest and coolest of that genre. It lives up to its title – you indeed have never heard this kind of great music on “radio,” by which I believe Bax means the commercial FM outlets in Chicago and elsewhere in this great land.

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Posted on June 20, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

In sum, Comcast’s “Music Choice” channels provide a nice overview of most – not all – genres in the universe of popular (and not so much) music. This hour from the Classic Country channel illustrates how much of a primer these channels can be on each respective category. Plus, the trivia is phenomenal.
I’ve added some value from Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.
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May 29, 2008
3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
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1. He Stopped Loving Her Today/George Jones.
Indeed one of country’s classic songs by one of its classic artists, this was released in 1980, though it sounds like it was made 20 or 30 years earlier.
“The song was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee at CBS Studio B,” according to the song’s Wikipedia entry. “The recording process was lengthy. Jones was frequently intoxicated and later said in an interview that the four spoken lines of the song had to be recorded over and over because he could not speak without slurring his words.”

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Posted on May 30, 2008

By Don Jacobson

You’d think that after all this time I’d despair of finding yet more podcasts that feature the kind of late ’60s/early ’70s psychedelic rock that I love beyond all reason for Playlist. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong because, my friend, apparently anyone who’s ever felt the urge to light up and kick back with the likes of Kaleidoscope, The Creation and The Playground has become a podcast DJ and has taken to the Internet like a hippie to a microdot. There’s so much out there, man. This time, it’s a British dude named Andy who hosts Toffe Sunday Smash, and it is indeed smashing.

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Posted on May 12, 2008

By Don Jacobson

In Mr. Suave’s very British part of the musicverse, everyone speeds on scooters through rainy seaside resort towns at night, popping amphetamines while riding around in their tight suits, looking to spazz their way through a rumble, amped up from listening to Pete Townshend shred a perfect power-pop riff over their transistors. In this place, all the boots are Beatle, the pills are green and the music is mod.

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Posted on March 2, 2008

By Don Jacobson

Atlanta’s Ben Coleman is one of those musicians who seem to be at a vortex of a coolness swirly-gig. Not only is the native Londoner a member of two very active and well-received Atlanta-based bands, Judi Chicago and Early Modern Witch Trials, he’s also the best classic rock DJ on the Internet with his show Stonehenge, which is broadcast locally by WREK-FM, the student-run, non-commercial station at Georgia Tech University.
Stonehenge goes out live every Friday night at 7 p.m. CST on WREK-FM, and is also available after-the-fact here on the station’s mp3 show archives and as a podcast here.
Coleman’s live sets with Judi Chicago, a band that seems to be either an homage to or a spot-on, over-the-top parody of disco dance acts, have been described by Creative Loafing as spectacles of “sweat, booty-tight shorts and pasty-white legs,” dominated by much pelvis thrusting and shouting of garbled lyrics. Early Modern Witch Trials, meanwhile, couldn’t be more different. There, Coleman goes the shoegazy, psychedelic route, channeling the Monks and ’70s European avant-rock, complete with squawking saxophones and spacey keyboards.
Either way, it’s kind of strange that Coleman’s bands are so loud and dissonant when his Stonehenge DJ persona is so low-key, intellectual and laid-back as he unfurls an encyclopedic knowledge of the most obscure deep, druggy classic rock. One of the best things about the three-hour weekly show is that he starts it off with an album played in its entirety. In recent weeks, these have included such crispy classics as Fleetwood Mac’s first album (1968), Jethro Tull’s Stand Up (1969), and Gentle Giant’s Octopus (1972). All treated with the historic respect that they deserve!

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Posted on January 11, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

20 original hits from 20 original stars.
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SIDE ONE
1. “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.”
Get your party started with Elton John’s version of a rock song.
2. “I’ve Got The Music In Me.”
You know, Kiki Dee had her moments. This is one of them.
3. “Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me).”
One of the great “list” songs of all-time. By Reunion. Here we go:

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Posted on December 17, 2007