This special Leap Day podcast features another vintage interview from the Medialoper vaults. Recorded in 1987, this is one of the more unusual Jonathan Richman interviews you will ever hear.

How unusal? Well, I think it’s safe to say that this is probably the first and only time that Jonathan Richman was ever interviewed by a janitor. Of course, these days we call them maintenance engineers, but back in the Reagan era things weren’t quite so politically correct.

The janitor in question is one Big Jim Hunsicker. Big Jim was head custodian in the Speech Arts building at CSU Fresno — home of KFSR FM.

Back in the early 80’s the college radio revolution was just taking off, and running a station that played only your favorite bands was every music geek’s dream come true.

There was just one problem. While we were happy to have complete control over our little slice of the airwaves, we couldn’t always be relied on to wake up at 6 am to turn the transmitter on. Fortunately, Big Jim was watching over us. Whenever the morning DJ would oversleep (which happened A LOT), Big Jim would put down his broom, turn on the transmitter, read the official station sign-on, and cue up Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man (that was the official Big Jim theme song).

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I first heard about Mystery Science Theater 3000 from friends in ‘91 and thought it sounded interesting, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to track it down. Then one Friday night after closing the Video Zone my friend and coworker Mark and I were flipping through channels, as was the custom in those days. we came across a b&w monster movie with silhouetted chairs and figures along the bottom of the screen. I said: “Is this what I think it is?” The movie was Gamera, and while it was never my favorite episode of MST3K, it will always be the one closest to my heart. You never forget your first. I was immediately a fan, and I taped every episode.

The show was canceled in 1999 after a decade, and I figured that was that. It saddened me, of course, especially because I held the heretical belief that the show hit its stride when it moved to the Sci-Fi channel in 1997. I always preferred Mike Nelson to Joel Hodgson, I liked the new direction Bill Corbett took Crow, I found Pearl and Professor Bobo and Brain Guy a lot funnier than Dr. Forrester and TV’s Frank, and…yeah. As I say, heretical.

Still, there’s a lot to be said for quitting while you’re ahead. Or, as the case may be, being abandoned by your network while you’re ahead. Besides, I still had several hundred hours of MST3K on tape should I ever need a fix, many of which I hadn’t watched since the waning days of Bush 41’s administration, so they wouldn’t feel stale. It’s not like I remember any of the jokes from Crash of the Moons or Tormented, though I do know Manos, The Hands of Fate and Mitchell by heart at this point, and woe to anyone dating me who thinks they won’t be subjected to Hobgoblins.

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On Black Friday, the incongruously named day-after-Thanksgiving I rang up Amazon.com and joined the middle class. Yes, I plunked down $1999 for a Samsung LNT4671F. (I know, I’ve railed against idiotic naming conventions for consumer products in the past). It’s a 46″ LCD TV, 1080p, 120 Hz, HMDI 1.3 with built-in spicto-blango-color-correcting-carousel blah blah blah. Suffice it to say it was the top-of-the-line product from Samsung when it first came on the market in October (which of course makes it now hopelessly obsolete by the standards of the consumer electronics industry. It’s the second-highest rated TV in Consumer Reports after the Sony XBR4, but my wife Vicki didn’t approve of the floating glass bezel around that one so we settled for a (very close) second-best.

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I think most of us can remember a Christmas morning like this. You wake up, sleepy but excited and head downstairs to the living room. And there it is. Red. Shiny. Everything you ever dreamed of. You can hardly believe your eyes. Santa has brought you a Kitchen Aid Artisan Mixer.

So, perhaps this doesn’t apply to everyone. But there are those of you out there who wait in breathless anticipation for the new Williams-Sonoma catalog and when it comes, leave it not so subtly highlighted and circled in case your significant other happens upon it. You know who you are. You, the one with

your plans drawn up for dream kitchen. Forget the living room, the dining room and even the bedroom. This is your space. I say, kitchen junkies unite.

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Every year begs to be reviewed. As arbitrary as yearly events are, their placement in a 365-day box has been something that always fascinates us and makes the December weekend newspapers a bit more interesting. Top X [where X=5, or is divisible by] lists spout either a particular reviewer’s or a collection of reviewers’ primary picks in entertainment, sports, business, politics, etc. As handy as they are, lists have a short shelf life and are interesting for about the time it takes to read them. The main reason being that most of what ends up on these lists is forgotten by the following February, rarely to the end of the following year. (Unless, of course, it is a Grammy-nominated record and ends up somehow being relevant 18 months later.)

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This edition of Medialoper’s occasional podcast features an interview with the legendary blues singer Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Jay passed away in February of 2000, but I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with him back in October of 1987.

When I think back to that day, over twenty years ago, a few moments are indelibly etched in my memory. I remember standing in Jay’s kitchen, staring at the coffin propped up beside his refrigerator, and thinking “that’s Screamin’ Jay’s coffin!”.

Jay made quite a name for himself jumping out of that coffin and scaring the hell out of young, middle-class, white kids back in the mid-50’s when the whole Rock-and-Roll thing was just getting started.

As I was to find out, the coffin in Jay’s kitchen wasn’t THE coffin. Instead, it was one of many. For a guy like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, one coffin just won’t do. Jay had nearly a half dozen coffins squirreled away around the country, waiting to be deployed on a moments notice. Which is strange, considering that Jay claimed to have given up using the coffin as part of his act nearly 30 years prior to our meeting.

As it turns out, Screamin’ Jay was always willing to jump out of a coffin provided the price was right.

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I know, I know, Kirk has already done the ultimate appreciation of RSS — what can I possibly add to the conversation? Well, how about a little thing that I like to call the “World’s Most Expensive RSS Reader”? See, it’s not enough to have RSS; the entire experience cannot be enjoyed without a decent way of reading feeds. Sort of like cause and effect but more modern.

Since I switched to a Mac, I’ve been in a sort of RSS limbo. I’ve tried and rejected far too many readers — the built-in reader for Thunderbird came closest to meeting my personal needs (and it’s important to note that there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to RSS — everyone has their own quirks and requirements), but then, for reasons too lengthy to detail here, I stopped using Thunderbird.*

I hesitated over using Google Reader. I am not sure why — it just seemed wrong for me. Yeah, I can’t explain it. I mean, I’m one of those people who, as a matter of course, opens a slate of seven “standard” tabs each time I restart Firefox.** Those tabs represents the websites I must have access to multiple times during my normal day. Adding Google Reader to this group was not a challenge (obviously), but still I didn’t embrace the technology. I half-heartedly rebuilt my feeds feed in Google Reader…and still hesitated.
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People often stop me on the street, and ask me this question: “Jim,” they ask me, “what is it like to be a Replacements fan?” Well, let me tell you . . .

In the most recent of Rolling Stone magazine’s forty zillion 40th Anniversary Editions, they had a section called “The Indie Rock Universe: An Illustrated Guide.”

This so-called “Guide” was essentially a gussied-up list of Indie Rock bands, broken into incredibly arbitrary distinctions surrounding the “Universe” theme. One of the sections was called “Ancestral Planets” — the pioneers of Indie Rock if you will — and it listed a bunch of worthies and honorables: Nirvana, Pixies, The Smiths, Hüsker Dü etc. These are some of my all-time favorites, and certainly worthy of inclusion on any list of great rock of any stripe.

Conspicuous by their absence: The Replacements. Whether it was an oversight or on purpose, it almost immediately jumped out at me, and ironically, this was a few pages away from where Billie Joe Armstrong was talking about how much he was influenced by “Answering Machine.”

This is what it’s like to be a Replacements fan.

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I’m really not liking very much this week. As a matter of fact, most things are making me slightly crabby. So, since Thanksgiving is next week, I’m copping out on our regular “That’s What I Like” post this week and giving you a list of the things in my life that I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful for my job, except when I hate it, which I know several people will say is all the time. I’m thankful for the roof over my head, though I do occasionally wish it were a different roof - one with a backyard and a second bathroom. What I wouldn’t do for a second bathroom!

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Oh, we piss people off.

The schedule for the next few months is posted on flyers outside the theater, and on December 15, we’re doing It’s a Wonderful Life. There was already some internal conflict about it, and some anonymous wag wrote on one of the flyers: “It’s not a bad movie, you S.O.B.s!!!” With three lines under S.O.B.s, so we’ll know they mean business.

Yeah, some people don’t like Bad Movie Night so much.

Me, I do. It’s my baby. I didn’t create the show—that honor goes to Jim Fourniadis and Ty McKenzie—but I was there on the first night: Red Dawn, March 27, 2005. Coincidentally, I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years earlier that afternoon. As a result I almost didn’t go to the show at all, but I was looking forward to it, and the point of the breakup had been (among other things) so I could go do the stuff I wanted, and Bad Movie Night was very much the stuff I wanted to do. I became a frequent co-host, eventually weaseling working my up to de facto curator. It’s still the most fun thing I do on a regular basis.

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