“THIS IS A TEST…this is only a test.”
Officially OLD SCHOOL SINGLES is a new section on the Retrofit newsletter. Hopefully you’ve been checking out the long form Old School episodes, which will continue, they are just more of a giant Tetris and AI can’t quite do them yet. But I’m sure where there is hope there is a “Sugary Sleep Baroque Playlist for Dreaming” full of Boccherini and electronic riptides hatching somewhere as easily as the sparks that hotwired the great turtle Fords and Chevys Neal Cassady’s rode to Central City. They turned the engines, then powered the AM radios that gifted the soundtracks of generations. Chrome and cowboy boot kicked, thumping metal dashboard war radios which are now about to become things of the past.
But the music goes on.
So many great songs that I run across flashes of brilliance, discovery, power chords, and nonsense on a daily basis. SINGLES is a way to shine the light on solitary tunes designed for the short attention spans, the five or six minute drives, the typical commercial breaks, whatever ever reason you may be needing a handful of seconds for filler that sound so much better than sped up lists of side effects.
As usual, these will show up first in Substack, the newsletter you are reading which you can subscribe to for free and see them show up slightly more regularly than the behemoth-a-thons, although those won’t go away. Professor Mikey continues to deep dive into a half century of records and CDs.
Old School SINGLES should show around podcast sites so you should see them on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and whatever place works for your podcasts. That’s why I need to run a test at this stage.
And new to the list is the Professor Mikey’s Old School channel on YouTube. It’s like running a rock station on Mars from here, but it’s kind of fun.
Thanks so much for listening and having put in some serious detention in this creaky and getting older by the minute school. I’ll explain more later.
A subscribe on YouTube would definitely help. I like to play good requests and learning about new old bands is such a kick. I think it’s so cool that vinyl refused to die. This is fun working under the pretext of education. And the web is the weirdest radio ever.
I can’t tell you how to fix a toilet or drywall, but I can find a song you once loved the best, or one you can’t believe you missed, or one you just need to hear to help put the pieces together on the great and wonderful puzzle of joy we know as music.
So we start at the end with Elliott Murphy’s epic vision “The Last of the Rock Stars” (1973). I have no idea what it did on the charts or how it went over in Milwaukee but I do know it confronts like Dylan and takes you elsewhere. Probably on a motorcycle. Probably with a guitar. And definitely with a harmonica.
And it’s just a single.
“Had this been an actual alert…”
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