'da Friday Blues with Big Mo – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Big Mo Pod Show: “Cheers to Kevin”

I’m a little slow getting to the Big Mo Pod Show after his blues show this last Saturday night. I guess that’s just the way things go. The title of the pod show “Cheers to Kevin” is a shout out to somebody important in Big Mo’s life. It turns out Kevin was really supportive of Big Mo when he was just getting started years ago when he was first starting on the KCCK blues show. Kevin has also made many donations to KCCK to support the show. Big Mo calls him his favorite bartender.

Big Mo Pod Show 081 – “Cheers To Kevin”

That gets me started with the last of the 5 songs Big Mo and Producer Noah talked about, which was Bob Margolin singing the song “Brown Liquor in a Dirty Glass.” I remember speculating in a past blog that the “dirty glass” part might have meant putting olives or olive brine in the drink—but I don’t think so after listening to the song again.

I’m pretty sure it means the singer is feeling so down and dirty himself that he might actually want a dirty glass in the usual sense of the word.

And by the way, Big Mo mentioned “mambo” again. Last week, it was hard to tell what he meant, but this time it sounds like he might be referring to a Latin American dance rhythm influence—maybe. The influence of different rhythms on blues music was a topic in that maybe steered the discussion about one song on the list, and I believe it was “Star” by Gary Clark, Jr., which Big Mo thought had more of a reggae than a blues rhythm to it.

One interesting song was from someone who has been around a long time but I’ve not heard her before, Duffy Bishop. She sang “69 Years Old.” It mentions Viagra, which is in line with the general theme, which is sex and not just for the old. I stumbled on an article in which she’s interviewed about her music. When they start talking about this “69 Years Old song,” Bishop has this funny anecdote. She had just finished singing it at a club in Daytona Beach and some old gentleman walks up to her and says, “Here, I got something for you, pass these on to someone who needs them,” and then hands her some Cialis.

I’m 70 and I’m a little embarrassed about it but I want to pass the tune on to you guys because we just never know.

Big Mo Pod Show: “Blues: The Universal Mixer”

We listened to the Big Mo Pod Show (Sena stuck with it for about the first hour anyway) last night and then I got a mini-education in the forms of music, at least, as it relates to timing and rhythm. The theme was “Blues: The Universal Mixer.” Frequently, the blues show and the podcast remind me of previous eras in my life and lead to a few free associations.

The 5 songs reviewed by Big Mo and Noah are probably recognizable to many listeners. As usual, I have to search for the lyrics because I seem to have an inborn tendency to hearing mondegreens. And as usual, I don’t always pay the most attention to the songs chosen for the podcast.

But Big Mo did a little teaching session about rhythm forms, which he related to a couple of songs on the list. One of them was “Wait on Time” by The Fabulous Thunderbirds. I happened to notice that a couple of lines in the lyrics of “Wait on Time” reminded me of another artist who didn’t make it to the list on the podcast but was on the blues show playlist last night. That was Junior Walker and the All Stars. Their song “I’m a Road Runner” was one of my favorites because it reminded me of how I ran all over the hospital as a consult psychiatrist. But I can’t relate to the song as a whole.

The lines the two songs share are:

“Wait on Time” lyrics:

“Well, I live the life I love
And I love the life I live
The life I live baby
Is all I have to give”

“I’m a Road Runner” lyrics:

“And I live the life I love
And I’m gonna love the life I live
Yes, I’m a roadrunner, baby.”

Although the lyrics are similar, the themes are different. The guy in the song “Wait On Time” is promising he’ll get back to his lover someday. On the other hand, in the “I’m a Road Runner” lyrics, that guy is making no such promise and is actually is saying just the opposite.

Big Mo pointed out that there is a common rhythmic form in blues that easily mix with other forms of music, including Latin forms (I don’t understand that music lingo but I think I hear and feel what he means). He mentions that Bo Diddley mixed certain rhythms like that into his music, which surprised me because I didn’t know that. It may be why I like Bo Diddley.

Big Mo didn’t play “I’m a Road Runner” last night but played another hit from Junior Walker and the All Stars: “Ain’t That The Truth.” Just an aside, that tune is mostly instrumental and has a total of only 4 lines apparently, which express a common blues sentiment about relationships:

“Say man, what’s wrong with you?
Oh man, my woman done left me
Say it, man, play me some blues, jack
Get it, baby
Ain’t that the truth”

Several artists covered “I’m a Road Runner” including but not limited to the Grateful Dead and Steppenwolf. Bo Diddley did a song called “Road Runner” but it was not the Junior Walker tune. There’s a YouTube video relating it to the cartoon Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.

I’m not a roadrunner by any definition, but I learn a little something new just about every time I hear the Big Mo Pod Show.

Thoughts on the Big Mo Pod Show “Funkin’ Down the Highway”

This is a post about the Big Mo Pod Show we heard last night on the KCCK FM radio dial 106.9. Incidentally, the KCCK fund drive was enormously successful this year, earning $100,000 in donations, according to Big Mo (aka John Heim) himself.

One item is the cover by Buddy Miles of the song “Tobacco Road.” This rendition was different from performances by other artists. Big Mo liked it and so did I. I did a little web search on it because I couldn’t catch all the lyrics. It was originally done by John D. Loudermilk in 1960. Miles’ version is essentially the same.

What interested me even more about “Tobacco Road” are the associations I have about it with specific literary works. I’ll admit I’ve never read nor seen the film adaptations of Erskine Caldwell’s books, “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.” But one of my favorite short stories by James Thurber is “Bateman Comes Home,” which was published in a collection entitled “The Thurber Carnival,” in a hardcover edition in 1945. You’ve got to read it to get a sense of how comical the parody is of the regional dialect used in Caldwell’s novels. In fact, Thurber himself gives the game away about his intent in writing “Bateman Comes Home” by adding a wry comment as a subtitle:

Written after reading several recent novels about the deep south and confusing them a little—as the novelists themselves do—with “Tobacco Road” and “God’s Little Acre.”

He also adds another comment at the end of the short story: “If you keep on long enough it turns into a novel.”

The other thing I noticed about the podcast last night is that one of the songs which was not included in the list, “Joliet Bound,” was performed by an artist I haven’t heard of, the Reverend Shawn Amos, who is no relation to me, of course. But my background as a psychiatrist made me take special notice of details about his family, one of which is that his mother, Shirl-ee Ellis, a singer herself, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Sadly, she eventually died by suicide. Shawn Amos is also the youngest son of the Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie founder, Wally Amos (again, no relation), although I’ve gotten a lot of friendly ribbing about that.

The song “Joliet Bound” is about a guy who expresses that he’s wrongly accused of killing a man over a woman and is on his way to Joliet prison in Joliet, Illinois. The Joliet Prison is a tourist destination nowadays and has other distinctions attached to it. It was featured in the 1980 film, the Blues Brothers. There were some famous inmates there, among them John Wayne Gacy, who was once evaluated and diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder by psychiatrists at The University of Iowa in 1968 as described in Dr. Donald Black’s book, “Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy).”

Congratulations KCCK Radio!

Big Mo Pod Show “King of the Segway”

Hey, I managed to catch the Big Mo Blues Show on July 19, 2024 and then listened to the podcast the next day. Because our big Bose wave radio is packed away in storage as we wait for our house to be built, I had to use our little portable Sony Dream Machine in the hotel. I think it dates to the early 2010s. I couldn’t get the local Iowa City KCCK 106.9 or 88.3 station unless I switched the radio to AM first, then tuned to 106.9, then flipped back to FM. It gets staticky if you hover over it or touch the radio, but if you leave it alone, it sounds OK.

Now I’m just going to comment on the theme of the pod show, which was “King of the Segway.” This is in the spirit of my frustrated grade school English teacher, Miss Piggott. One of her comments on my report card was, “A little too exuberant.”

OK, that segues into my correction of the use of the word “segway” in the podcast theme title. If you listen to the show, Big Mo clearly uses the word as a verb that mean to move without stopping from one theme, song, etc to another. That should be spelled “segue.” The word “segway” is a trademarked name for an electric transportation vehicle. To be fair, the two are often confused.

Big Mo did a pretty good job of getting most of the points on the 5 songs; at least he could name all the artists. The first part of the ‘da Friday Blues show played a couple of numbers that show the funny edge of Blues music. The latter part played Blues numbers that are on the gritty side.

I’ll take the funny side over the gritty side of the Blues any day of the week.

The funniest number was the song “Lustful Earl and the Married Woman,” by Tony Joe White. I remember his tune “Poke Salad Annie” from way back. Lustful Earl is hilarious and had me laughing out loud.

Big Mo Blues Show Podcast: “Chromatic Rock”

I caught the Big Mo Blues Show June 14^th last Friday night. And I also caught the Big Mo Pod Show as well. Produce Noah got the month wrong for some odd reason. He said it was May 14^th. Let it go. Anybody can be temporally impaired from time to time, including me.

Anyway, the theme of the podcast was “Chromatic Rock,” which I gather applies mainly to harmonicas in this context. But in a more general sense, I think it means adding more color to music, mainly by variation in notes. The specific artist in the podcast was somebody I’ve not heard of by the name of Sugar Blue. He blew a tune on the harmonica called “Krystalline,” which is some kind of cocaine.

Big Mo got most of the items in the quiz. He always does pretty well, because of his encyclopedic knowledge about music. His memory is really strong. I bet he even knew what month it is.

Well, here comes my selection from last Friday’s Big Mo Blues Show, a number called “Plain Old Common Sense,” performed by Kenny Neal. Common sense is pretty important. It can keep your head above water and clear of cocaine.

Thoughts on the Big Mo Pod Show: Theme “Music Changes Context”

I heard the Big Mo Pod Show, which relates to the quiz about 5 songs he played on the Big Mo Blues Show last Friday night. He got all the artists right, just missed 3 song titles!

I had a couple of thoughts about the song lineup related to the theme “Music Changes Context.” Actually, the point was that one of the songs had what might have made some people mad. It was “Funky B***h.” The idea was that some words might be offensive if you say them, but when words are sung, that might make them not offensive, in a way. It’s a matter of opinion.

How that happens is not clear. Big Mo’s example of it was in a historical context related to slavery. Slaves could not say certain words while they were working in the fields. But the overseer would let them get away with if they used the words in a song.

I heard one song that was not part of the Big Mo Pod show that might put a different spin on the idea of how music changes context. It’s about brotherly love, in a manner of speaking—or in a manner of singing, I should say.

Big Mo Pod Show 006 on KCCK Radio Iowa!

I got an update to the Big Mo Pod Show on Iowa’s only jazz and blues radio station KCCK 88.3 in Cedar Rapids (translator 106.9 in Iowa City). Last Friday on the Big Mo Blues Show, host John Heim (aka Big Mo) played a lot of tunes, which he gets quizzed about a day or so later on the Big Mo Pod Show.

He gets quizzed about the name of that tune, the artist, and why he picked that tune for the show. He got them all except for one; he said “East Coast Blues” instead of “West Coast Blues” as the song by Blind Blake. He was almost perfect.

I was listening that night, but the Seasick Steve number I missed. It’s misspelled on the KCCK website on May 5, 2024 as “Internet Coyboys,” but it’s “Internet Cowboys.” Maybe by the time you read this, it’ll be corrected. It’s all about spending too much time on the internet. We need to disconnect. I’m sort of a fan of Seasick Steve, ever since I heard him do “You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks.” It means something special to old dogs like me.

Big Mo Blues Show KCCK and MayRee’s Hand Battered Catfish

I heard John Heim (aka Big Mo) on KCCK talk at length about MayRee’s hand battered catfish tonight. There was much more detail than usual. I can’t remember all of them. One I do remember is that her joint is on the corner of Highway 6H and Snowflake Road-sort of.

MayRee will give you a choice of 3 beverages that sound like a crazy cross between a soft drink and white lightning moonshine or something. One flavor is “clear” and another could be something like pumpkin spice, but I probably misheard that.

I got a comment from a blogger, Everyday Lillie. She has not heard of nitrates in catfish but appreciated the information.

MayRee cooks them with “manic delight.” They are really something, I guess.

I heard this Sonny Landreth piece tonight on the show.

Big Mo Blues Show KCCK

Heard this on the Big Mo Blues Show KCCK radio again. The last two years have been hard times. I’m hoping 2023 will be better.

Jazzed Up Mr. Grinch for the Big Arctic Blast

I heard this last Friday KCCK on ‘da Friday Blues with John Heim aka Big Mo, believe it or not. So it’s a little late, but I had trouble finding it. Stay warm!