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Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke
I have been on this quest in recent years to find the best smoked/BBQ flavor there is. I am a junkie for the whole art of grilling/smoking/bbq. Doesn’t matter what time of the year it is. It could be a blizzard with hail the size of basketballs. I will grill. But I have this wild yearning to become a Jedi master in the BBQ/Smoking field. There are very few masters that have satisfied my taste buds to orgasm. I mean, sure, I have had some awesome cookouts at Eagles/Phillies tailgate parties, but they are just filler from keeping the beer from making you stupid and lethargic. The best I have documented mentally, has been that of the Innovator’s. He is probably one of the most talented independent grill/smoke/bbq masters in the area. (Besides being a music/audio expert) He has inspired me over the years with many a meal, and many a photo of his masterpieces. You can even smell the smokedy goodness just by looking at the picture. Running a close second in the sense of bulk, has been the Great Sawicki of Swinefest. This is an event every year that has been attended by some of the world’s greatest…at least in his mind. But nonetheless, this man doesn’t mess around. Sawicki is the master of the vinegar doused ribs. No one makes them like that. Finger lickin good! I must stop this rambling…anyway…it all came to a head last week. My buddy called to tell me that CharBroil had a smoker at an affordable price down at Home Depot. Not an electric one, but a charcoal one. A few friends explained that a water smoker is better than an electric one because you are using charcoal and it has a more ‘real’ flavor. So I ran down to Home Depot in Deptfort, NJ, (the only one that had it) and grabbed the smoker. I was elated. For this price, I have to have it. So in the muggy night, I drove the smoker home and started work on putting it together. That’s when everything took a turn for the worse. I went to pick the smoker parts up and they came crashing down on my toe turning it black. I saw stars. Literally. Worst pain on earth. At least for 20 minutes. I ran to put ice on my toe. That helped for a little while…turning it from black to a lovely shade of blue. I started putting the rest of the smoker together to find that a bolt was missing in the packaging. Nice. Real friggin nice. So my smoker was almost perfect when finished. Anyway, I became hungry as visions of smoked prime rib were dancing in my head. I decided to heat up some leftovers. As I pulled it out of the microwave, I took the cellophane off too fast and received a wonderful steam burn on my finger. So now, I have ice on my toe, ice on my finger, and I haven’t even done or cooked anything yet. And on top of it, I have to get up at 9 AM to be at the Mount Holly Grand Prix for the radio station. My old remedy for burns and the like, is a large bowl packed with ice and water. The extremity gets placed in the arctic water, the burn heals, at least the area stinging with pain, and you are good to go usually within 8 hours. After prepping the bowl, I tightened the rest of the screws on the handles, legs, and frame, intermittently dipping my hand in the ice to provide a brief numbness from the blistering pain. It was off to bed by 2 am only to be awakened at 4:30 am with Opus jamming his face into the cold reaches of the ice bowl. He has two bowls of fresh water, the toilet (yecch), and a dripping tub spout…but that’s not enough. I woke up 3 hours later, and as I got off the couch, I unexpectedly dropped my foot in the bowl.
Well…at least my finger stopped hurting.
Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head
Well, Saturday morning was dreary and bleak. The sky was overcast, the air was thick, and it was a humidity percentage point away from just exploding over the region. When you are going 60 MPH and it’s still hot, you know something’s coming. I arrived into Mt. Holly for the Grand Prix bike race that was set to run through this old Quaker settlement. Upon arrival, I can’t help but always think the same thing. Mt. Holly, even as quaint as it is in some areas, is like a run down Moorestown. Kind of saddening in a way. I arrived at BCC to see our station is at the corner under the tent. Here comes the rain. I’m not talking drizzle, I’m talking sheets of water. We had everything in the world plugged underneath our booth. And because everything is so level in Mount Holly (hence ‘mount’) street wise, water is rushing our way. My first thought was, ‘somebody better get that receptacle away from the water’. No one did anything. I figured, well, if I am going to go, this must be the way. Obviously, I am here to write about it so, I lived. As the morning went on, any rain bubbles on the tent roof found their way of bursting on to me. After a while it got to be a comedy. Brett forced one, and Anchor left before the red shoes got damaged. By mid day, the race closed, and we packed up to go. I headed back home to set up for the show that was supposed to air LAST Saturday. Click here on why it didn’t air. I was wet, sweaty, damp, oh and wet. The storm continued on the way home.
Program 962
I rolled with the same playlist I planned for the week before. Now this is something I rarely ever do. I usually will scrap the whole thing, and move on with something else yet still keep some components of the previous show. I stuck to my guns and went with 961’s show. I kicked it off with the ‘radio’ version of my blog tribute to Syd Barrett. Surprisingly, I upset some of my listeners. They felt that I was far too harsh on Syd Barrett. How? I never said he wasn’t talented. My thought and belief, and still is, that they did far better without him, and that his image was made to be more than it was. Overblown in some ways, but nonetheless, he is an icon to many musicians. I just did my own assessment of Mr. Barrett and apparently made a lot of original Floyd fans a bit upset. I’m sorry about that. Speaking of Floyd and their influences, our new #1 CD (which was last week in reality) is the new disc from British outfit, Pure Reason Revolution. Out since April in the UK, this disc has been getting more and more requests as the weeks go by. Usually a disc that is import only can break into our Top 20 a month before being released in the US. This disc should have been on our top 10 months ago! Titled The Dark Third, this album encompasses many different influences, but the strongest being later Pink Floyd. These guys are it, and will be hard to knock out of the top 5 come the end of the year. We journeyed back to the spring of last year when we were invaded by space rock group Scattered Planets. This was the first performance in our new studios, before they ripped our infrastructure out again to make way for new air conditioning. We featured the new latino progressive metal band in Thessera. Fooled Eyes received quite a bit of response, but not as much as the new Spainish band Kotebel and their new CD titled Omphalos. This was probably the most responded of all their releases. I have watched Kotebel grow in the last few years from just a small project. Kudos to them, and people who never heard them, liked them. That makes me smile. On the Jazz side of things, I featured ¾ of the new album from Mujician and the album There’s No Turning Back Now. The title cut encompasses the entire disc and clocks in at 45 minutes. A DJ’s delight! We also featured the forthcoming jazz tribute CD that will sure to give guitar aficionados a non stop hard on in McGill/Manring/Stevens CD What We Do. I was honored and flattered again to get a thanks on the CD. That made my month. The calls were good tonight, and I headed off into the unknown dark of night, and dreamed of smoking briskets again and again.
The 5 Things I Think For August:
1. Salma Hayek is still the hottest chick I have ever seen. Dating back to 1992, no one touches her. (What does that have to do with anything?)
2. Pure Reason Revolution has nothing going against it in the weekly top 20. Therefore, it will dominate August.
3. I will hit the lottery and move to the shore.
4. I still don’t know if I am going to Progday or the Montreal Progressive Music Festival
5. Major make over production wise on the show. We will have a new voice of the show.