Tomorrow morning I’ll be visiting the Q104 Morning Show.  I am bringing my most portable keyboard. It runs on five “D” batteries.  It’s got built in rhythm accompaniment, vibrato and sustain effects, and reverb.

I’ve had it since I was about twelve.  I bought it at Service Merchandise, a catalog showroom where you’d find the item you wanted in a display, fill out a form, and the item would roll out of a mysterious conveyor at the front of the store NIB*.

I bought it with my own cash.  I wrote and recorded many songs on it (mostly on an old Sony reel-to-reel tape machine, which is lurking around here somewhere).  It’s traveled with me through all of these years and I’m just cackling with glee that I’m bringing it to play on the radio tomorrow morning.

Without further ado:

Yes.  It is my Casiotone.  I plan to rock its retro chassis with abandon.

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* = New In Box

We had the great pleasure to hear “Check Yer Thang” on the radio tonight. Our friend Kenny Roda at ESPN Radio WKNR 850 AM in Cleveland enjoyed the tune enough to use it as “bumper” music during the show. We particularly enjoy the part where he asks Chris Fedor to “turn it up”. Twice. The Roadman knows that your rock must be savored in a loud stylee.

And Chris, don’t worry – we have a sensitive spot in our collective drunkdude heart for Kelly Clarkson.

Here’s what it sounded like:

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Since we instituted studio night, we’ve been pretty productive musically.  While it took us a number of years (okay, eight f#cking years) to finish our first record, it’s taken us about a year to get the bulk of another one done.  Meanwhile we’ve found that, with the old stuff out of the pipeline, we’re writing more and more new stuff.

One of the new songs has been code-named “Today Special” (maybe one day I’ll get around to explaining that), and we sent that over to Jay Goodman who fronts the living jukebox known as Skinny Moo, along with me on keys.  We collaborated with Jay before for some spoken word type vocals in the middle of “FWOP” on the Funk Out record.  We thought that perhaps Jay would suggest some lyrics, and maybe come in and split singing with Scotty.

Instead we found ourselves in for a treat.  Cleveland talk radio host Kenny Roda has been enjoying Skinny Moo shows for some time, and he and Jay had talked about the possibility of Skinny Moo doing a theme song for his radio show “In the Zone with Kenny Roda” on WKNR 850 AM.  Jay happened to sieze on the music for “Today Special” for his inspiration, and asked if we could put together a song for the show using that music.

Mike and I polished up the arrangement for use as a shortened theme song, and Jay and I sat down one night to hammer out words that made sense: it’s about calling in and talking to Kenny about sports, finding the “voice of the fans” and being able to get your opinion across to a wide audience just by dialing in.  After hours of tooth-gnashing and fisticuffs, Jay and I finally had our words.

One thing was missing, though – Kenny!  It seemed to make sense to have a couple snippets of Kenny at a couple spots in the tune, so we called him up and asked if he would make like he was on the radio (he was driving in his car at the time).  He obliged us with some soudbites that ultimately had us cracking up – we had to edit things down because you could hear us laughing hysterically in the background.

The final result was a great collaboration between Jay, Mike and I.  It’s on the air every weekday at the start of Kenny’s show at six o’clock.  Entertainingly, when Mike first listened to the final mix he thought Jay was saying “drunkdude69″ instead of “weekdays six to nine”, and he asked, “Will that make it on the radio?”.

Here’s the song, and a vid of Jay and I in the studio with Kenny.  First, the theme song:

And a clip from our in-studio appearance with Kenny: