Skinny Moo front man Jay Goodman came out tonight to provide some guest vocals for one of our upcoming songs. As always it’s a pleasure to include his performance on some DD69 music.

He provided guest vocals on Funk Out With Your Junk Out, adding an entertaining spoken word part to “Freaky Whacked-out People” and some patios-inflected bridge vocals to “Player”.

This time around his stylings will be featured in the song “No Time for Sleeping”, a song which has also recently been featured elsewhere.

Thanks for your time and performance, Jay.  The check’s in the mail.

While we’re not fans of coloring our idea juice, we still enjoy a chance to raise a glass on this holiday.  Coincidentally our shirts are the right color.

Charley and I were at the Greenville Inn, Cleveland’s legendary “dive bar that rocks”, ready to play what has become an annual St. Patrick’s Day gig with Skinny Moo, so I believe we were not in violation of rock t-shirt etiquette – you know, wearing your own band’s t-shirt at your own band’s gig.  Allegedly.

Here’s a classic, discovered during a recent Skinny Moo gig at a groovy roller rink in Brunswick, Ohio. I should have looked inside.

locker 69

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: