Like the site, this is a wide-ranging podcast with a similar aesthetic as the site, though it will primarily focus on music and musicians to start. Hoping to also interview former athletes about famous games/moments in baseball, and sprinkle in-between with other arts, culture, policy and local personages.
Hosted by Chris Parker (The Guardian, Variety, Billboard, Undark, Village Voice, High Times, LA Weekly), who''s been writing about music for three decades and has interviewed hundreds of musicians, including big hitters like Ray Davis, Lindsay Buckingham, George Clinton, and cult faves like Mastodon, Neko Case, Conor Oberst, John Darnielle. Joss Stone, M Ward and countless others. Has also interviewed 4 Nobel Prize winners. multiple senators, and several NBA allstars.
He's the author of 2016's King James Brings the Land a Crown and a forthcoming book on how '80s-'90s country/folk-punks helped create a self-sustaining underground not reliant on labels and charts, tentatively titled, Roots Rebels.
The theme music, "So Why Not" is courtesy of Marvin Etzioni.
- Sports Economist Dr. David Berri discusses WNBA contract, MiLB, & Sports Stadiums
We discuss the WNBA's historic new collective bargaining agreement, put that in context, and discuss minor league baseball, volleyball, how deeply participatory most sports are in relation to basketball and end talking about the economics of public stadium financing. - Musician David Dondero traverses his nearly 40-year career, discusses the troubadour lifestyle, and his new novel, Chaos the Cat
We discuss the Midwestern vibe, moving, Dave's wandering nature, his early DIY punk underpinnings, sobriety and stepping back from music for a moment to better appreciate life, which now includes painting and short story writing. We discuss his book Chaos the Cat inspired by his job doing carpentry on a pot farm, and we discuss his last album, 2023's Immersion Therapy, about the culture and the "orange goblin." The opening comment refers to this song ("When the Pendulum Swings"). - "We Could Just Party Until We're Rich": Talking Tim Fite
We discuss Fite's course as an artist, how viral music success took him off the visual art path he was initially on and he followed that for a dozen years. We don't talk so much directly about his music as the ideas that generated the music. (On some level doesn't the music speak for itself?) We also spend a lot of time unpacking the idea of identity and good and evil, which can be a way for people to avoid their own responsibility and culpability when bad things happen, And we talk a lot about making art and his process and how one communicates whether on the more broad shallow pool of mass popularity or in sinkholes, and how he's kind of merged the two in his video for Resist. It's very much a conversation more than a lot of questions. - Interview with musician Colin Blunstone (solo artist / The Zombies)
The Zombies have one of the most extraordinary stories in all of Rock'n'Roll. They won a battle of the bands to earn a recording contract, and during that first session recorded the iconic "She's Not There" with its slinky bass line, cool organ sound and sweet 3-part harmonies. As it turns out, the first engineer passed out drunk, and had to be replaced. The band were a huge sensation, and washed up a few years later. However, months after they had broken up, with the insistence of Blood Sweat & Tears' Al Kooper, their song, "Time of the Season," became a slow-burn hit. It allowed Blunstone to leave his 9-5, and become a musician again, creating the gorgeous baroque pop solo album, One Year, that would be an enormous influence on many nineties indie pop artists even beyond the obvious once like The Delgados and Belle & Sebastien.We talk about the many fortuitous incidents that led to their creation, the slow slippery slide when you stop atop the pole, and the many mitzvahs that have allowed him to not just endure but grow, and make music with the same set of childhood chums his entire life. - Interview with Author Will Kaufman, discussing his book American Songs of Struggle
We discuss how Will became an expert on Woody Guthrie, Woody's aesthetic, the difference between struggle vs. protest songs, and the Mermaid Avenue sessions with Wilco, notably, Jeff Tweedy, and Billy Bragg, We talk a bit about Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Pete Seegar, as well as the emergence of bee-bop, Ella Fitzgerald and Sara Vaughn.We also discuss hip-hop, punk and the Paul Simon/Martin Carthy row over “Scarborough Fair,” and how that illustrates many of the contradictions of the cultural appropriations argument, which at its core is just about acknowledgment in the first place. We talk about the challenges of describing music no one has ever heard and how one collapses 80 years of modern music history into a single volume. We dig into the challenge of satire and its role as a vehicle of speech and how it dovetails with protest, the question of whether it’s legal to sing your testimony to the court, how protest and satire function to diminish the perceived power of the oppressors and the lessons this might hold for this moment in time. - Interview with musician Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate, The Baseball Project, Gutterball, Dusty and Danny)
We discus how the early eighties Los Angeles scene really designed the template for what became underground music culture and the careers and outside-the-lines existence is due to he and his peers. We talk about how Dream Syndicate ripped off the Stooges and other acts besides the Velvets. How there is no real due for artists, as much as you might feel they deserved more accolades. We discuss how much fun he has with the Baseball Project and Gutterball and his desert isle discs and what a fascinating mysterious weirdo Dylan was and how he feared writing his memoir but now that he has he's excitedly working on the second book. And we spoke about how you stay passionate and don't sell out by not resting on your laurels and always challenging yourself with new potentialities or re-exploring old ones and how much he loves playing solo. - Wolves 2026 Preseason Preview Podcast with Abhinav Bethi
This podcast is to celebrate the coming season, and is sort of the corollary to last week's preseason analysis post, Wolves' Ball Addition Signals Renewed Focus On Transition, Pick'n'roll And Movement. We were inspired to invite Abhinav Bethi by a very good initial Substack post analyzing the Ball addition in the Wolves sub-Reddit. Though he's in India, he was quick to respond to our entreaties and sharp in his basketball analysis by and large. During the podcast we discuss LaMelo Ball's addition, his impact on the offense, and how this reduced responsibility might help Anthony Edwards. We discuss the makeup of the frontcourt and especially the "4" in the absence of Randle & Reid, and how Williams, Lyles and Kuminga bring length, quickness and athleticism that was missing from the position, and for all three, this is a bit of second bite of the apple after disappointing starts to their careers. We also discuss how these moves might reflect the Wolves post-season struggles and specifically what kind of offensive sets this represents and how this increased efficiency will help, alongside what their main issues were in the playoffs last year defensively and how these new additions help to address that. Finally we talk about the issue of spacing, how the added ballhandling will allow the Wolves to take better advantage of it, and how the challenge will be to find a "4" that can consistently hit their threes.