You
can hear the blues blast out of the bowels of RIT’s Student Alumni Union
Building every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Just like it’s done for the past
15 years — that’s 105 in dog years — with Gary Reinhard and Jeff Harris,
hosts of Bad Dog Blues, 89.7 WITR’s
weekly foray into American music’s black roots.
Reinhard
and Harris pack each week’s five-hour show with early rare recordings, new
releases, anecdotes, history, and interviews, forming an intensive crash course
in the blues.
Reinhard
was destined to DJ when he started the show in October 1989. He fondly
remembers what lit the fuse.
“1965,
the Paul Butterfield Blues Band,” he says. “I wore two vinyl copies of their
first album out. It had all these guys, black and white, on the cover. The
music was unbelievably great. That was the first true blues album I ever
bought.”
Harris
joined up in 1998, having already spun blues into rotation on his alternative
show.
“Blues
is actually the first alternative music,” Reinhard says.
After
listening to ’60s blues-rock, Harris got B.B. King’s Live At The Regal. He then dug deeper into Robert Johnson.
“I’d
never heard anything quite like that before,” Harris says. “It was all over
after that. I started buying up Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Bukka White,
all while I was still in high school. All my friends were still listening to
Quiet Riot.”
It’s
hard to gauge the size of the show’s audience, but the phones blow up every
time there’s a ticket or CD giveaway.
And
they’re e-mailed requests from places like Turkey, Israel, Russia, Sweden, and
Denmark, where listeners can hear the show in real time via the Internet. The
website, www.baddogblues.com, boasts about 80 hours of archived shows available
for download.
“There’s
a guy in Japan who tapes the show and plays it in his car,” says Harris. “So
there’s some guy riding around in Tokyo listening to Bad Dog Blues. And that’s pretty cool.”
You
can hear Bad Dog Blues every Sunday,
10 a.m. to 3 p.m., on 89.7 WITR. Next week’s show will feature a live in-studio
performance by Joe Beard backed by Steve Grills & The Roadmasters. Info:
www.baddogblues.com
—
Frank De Blase
Youthspeak
On the heels of her budget presentation, ROC City Coalition presented County
Executive Maggie Brooks with the preliminary results of their first-ever survey
of young Rochesterians during a forum in High Falls. With 163 respondents, the
survey is far from a representative sample, but its findings should generate some
conversations among the region’s movers and shakers about how to attract and
keep this coveted demographic.
One significant finding: we really like it here. Only 12
percent of respondents wanted out, while 51 percent of native or local college
grads decided to stay put. Another 23 percent came specifically for a job and
15 percent left, but found they missed Rochester too much to stay away. Another
sign that there may be more jobs for youth than we thought: “Career” tops the
list or reasons why folks stay at 64 percent. On a more negative note, only
four people (2 percent) said “singles opportunities” made them want to stay.
But perhaps the best part was the two open-ended questions
asking for suggestions at the survey’s conclusion. Answers ranged from the
terse “Buy Local” to veritable essays. Here are a few samples of answers
received so far:
“If cities like Providence, RI, and Scranton, PA, can have a
legitimate retail downtown, why can’t we?”
“It’s the jobs dammit! Time to let go of the lifeless
‘quality of life’ crutch.”
“A functioning public transit system with more frequent and
cleaner buses and a greater effort to get middle-class passengers to ride.
Unlike other cities I’ve lived in, it seems like most people on public transit
in Rochester are the poorest of the poor.”
“A better newspaper. The D&C is mostly terrible. Local writers aren’t great and the Sunday edition pales in
comparison to even such modest papers like The
Buffalo News. It’s all AP wire articles.”
“The liquor law should be changed til 4 a.m. like Buffalo so
the clubs will stay open longer.”
“I like the idea of consolidating the county and city
government because the area has been shrinking and I don’t believe that big
government can adequately address the needs of the community.”
“More opportunities to live near, and play on, Lake
Ontario.”
“Build up the city area around the river. Make the city a
place to hang out in.”
“Bike paths. Better concerts.”
“I would imagine jobs would be a biggie. With jobs, the rest
will come.”
To read these and many more responses, or to participate in
the survey yourself (it’s ongoing), visit www.roccity.org.
Outing
Fox
A
crowd of nearly 40 people turned out at Fox Rochester’s East Avenue
headquarters Monday evening to protest the airing of what they say is an anti-John Kerry documentary by the
station Friday. The station’s corporate owner, Maryland-based Sinclair
Broadcasting, told all 62 of its stations nationwide to air Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal, a
documentary on Kerry’s anti-war claims made to Congress from the perspective of
other Vietnam veterans.
Sinclair
is described by the L.A. Times (who
wrote that the 97 percent of political donations from company execs went to
Republicans) as a conservative group. The group came under fire — notably
from Senator John McCain — after it told stations in April not to air a roll
call of the US troops killed in Iraq.
The
local protest was organized by the group stopsinclair.org, which says in a
statement on its website, “We believe that it is inappropriate and unfair to
air partisan propaganda in the last 10 days of an election campaign.” The group
is also soliciting petition signatures online.
The
Monroe County Democratic Committee claimed to have referred more than 60 local
signers to the online petition in a press release Monday. They’re urging people
to not watch the piece, and are offering an alternative: entertainment by a
group called Artists for Kerry at the Visual Studies Workshop (see this week’s
Urban Action on page 4 for details).
Joan
Allen visits ROC
The
High Falls International Film Festival announced on Monday that three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen will be in Rochester on Saturday, November 13, to accept
the festival’s Susan B. Anthony “Failure is Impossible” Award. Also receiving
the award: actress and voiceover superstar Sally
Kellerman, who played Hot Lips in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H.
The
awards will be given as part of the festival’s closing night ceremonies. Keep
reading City Newspaper for the
official festival guide (October 27) and City‘s
own take on HFIFF (November 3).
Correcting ourselves
During the editing of Herbert M. Simpson’s review of After Sondheim at Blackfriars Theatre
(“Song of the Heirs,” October 13), the second-to-last paragraph was
accidentally repeated. No extra emphasis was intended, and nothing was omitted.
This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2004.
