Michael Giberson
Reading and writing about Jeremy Rifkind’s distributed energy proposal has been made much easier for me this morning because I’ve had Pandora running music in the background.
More specifically, Pandora has been playing my “A message to you Rudy” station, and by clicking here you can listen, too. It has been a beautiful mix of The Specials, The Toasters, Gregory Isaacs, The Ethiopians, The Melodians, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Burning Spear and others.
One neat feature in Pandora, currently not available in traditional, over-the-air radio, is you can click on the artists name (or song name, or album name) and learn more. For example, I did not know that Rob Hingley started up The Toasters by gathering “several employees at the comic-book store he managed to form the band’s first incarnation.”
Here are two YouTube videos of the song that inspired the station – The Specials, “A message to you Rudy” – both interesting documents of the era and scene yeilding two tone ska some thirty years ago.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGDQ85Dg-ss&hl=en&fs=1]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVcD1xAMTo8&hl=en&fs=1]
BTW, during the four days I spent at JazzFest I received more comments on my The Toasters t-shirt (4), than on my Bob Wills Day shirt (1), or my Los Lobos shirt (0), or my The Slackers shirt (0).