TO PRAISE WBCN

Famous deaths surround us these past few weeks. The nature of heat and fame create imagined personal connections to a legendary news oracle, to a Pop King, or a Pin-up angel. But this time, it's personal.

The death of WBCN is a painful loss felt deeply by everyone of us directly influenced by its greatness. 

Every music fan whose ears and taste were shaped by the artists, songs and albums heard on 104.1 lost a friend.

Don't believe everything you hear from Spinal Tap. Boston IS a college town. If you've ever called this city "home," you owe respect and appreciation for the fun, the spirit and the sounds that BCN put into Boston.

My first college internship was at BCN. I remember the intense electric feeling as my heart beat way too fast on the first night inside that studio. That internship was the first step onto a path chasing dreams. I'll always be grateful.

If you're a fellow mourner, do you accept all the nice nice talk about change being inevitable, or can you imagine a new kind of radio powerful enough to make hearts beat way too fast?

Seth Godin once said that one of the problems with radio in the modern age is that it should no longer be called "radio."

What would we call it?

How could we forge a new model for "radio" with the honesty, passion, brains and balls to a co-create a business too powerfully protected by its fans and artists to be stopped?

Where would you launch such a thing?

Just asking. 

---

DADDY-O DAY

DAMN, NEWS (letter)

---

SPINAL TAP is BACK...

The lords of rock return. Get their first album in 17 years, Back from the Dead on June 16.

June 25, they embark on a One Night Only World Tour (2nd show June 30).

Get tickets and pre-order the album now at SpinalTap.com.

We're the luckiest bastards in the world, because yesterday we launched a Spinal Tap Channel. See the first videos with plenty more on the way. Sign up for video alerts and be the first to be rocked.

---

SMELL THE GENIUS

Thanks to our heroes for letting My Damn Channel and Kurt Loder so far inside yesterday's event that you can smell the genius.

See all the action at www.MyDamnChannel.com/Unwigged

See the tour dates & GET THE TIX:  www.Unwigged.com

---

UNWIGGED & UNPLUGGED

I'm the almost dead drummer on the right. Keep your eye on the My Damn Channel home page this Monday afternoon.

In the words of GOD - as played by some guy in the movie, 2010....."something wonderful is about to happen."

---

How 'bout a LAPDANCE ?

LAPDANCE with KURT LODER is our newest series premiere on My Damn Channel.

Kurt Loder saves the world - one interview at a time.

Author, journalist, MTV anchor, movie writer, and former Rolling Stone senior editor Kurt Loder interviews filmmakers, musicians, and anyone else who's around, anywhere in the world, via iChat.

Harry Shearer is our first victim. Four video segments just went LIVE.
 
Topics include: a Spinal Tap reunion, Ricky Gervais, Eddie Izzard, Richard Pryor, Christopher Guest, Tom Leopold, Paul Shaffer, reality TV, TV news, Sarah Palin, Al Franken, and you can find out what kind of world it would be - if it was ruled by Harry Shearer. 

on Spinal Tap: 
http://www.mydamnchannel.com/LD/Harry_Shearer/HarryonSpinalTap_982.aspx

on Comedians:
http://www.mydamnchannel.com/LD/Harry_Shearer/HarryonComedians_995.aspx

Reality TV / News:
http://www.mydamnchannel.com/LD/Harry_Shearer/HarryonRealityTVNews_996.aspx

Politicians:
http://www.mydamnchannel.com/LD/Harry_Shearer/HarryonPoliticians_997.aspx

---

PRESIDENT BUSH "LIES" ON MY DAMN CHANNEL

Press Release 

 

PRESIDENT BUSH “LIES” ON MY DAMN CHANNEL

Harry Shearer’s “935 Lies” World Premieres Today

 

New York, NY – May 13, 2008 – My Damn Channel World Premieres Harry Shearer’s music video, “935 Lies” today. The song is from Harry Shearer's forthcoming record "Songs of the Bushmen."  See it here.
 

Harry Shearer is an actor, author, director, satirist, musician, radio host, playwright, multi-media artist and record label owner. His work is inside the heads of millions worldwide from The Simpsons, This is Spinal Tap, Le Show, and Saturday Night Live. Shearer plunged into the online universe to become a cornerstone of My Damn Channel.  Each week, Shearer unveils a new political or pop culture satire on his own branded channel.

 

“935 Lies” is filmed in what looks like a corporate meeting held by the publishers of "Modern Liar" magazine. Shearer enumerates, with what looks like either pride or insensate rage, some of the almost one thousand falsehoods uttered by Bush Administration leaders that led us to war.  Oddly, as he does so, he sings about other notable things that come in bunches of a thousand.  And food is served.

 

According to The Center for Public Integrity, “President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.”

 

Harry Shearer said, “If it just helps us all to be better liars in our own lives, this damn war will have been worth it.”

Rob Barnett, founder & CEO of My Damn Channel said, "The most powerful force in the world is not a weapon or a nation but a truth...that we are spiritual beings and that freedom is the soul's right to breathe." Barnett was quoting President George W. Bush. 
 

“935 Lies” Credits:

Music & Lyrics HARRY SHEARER; Director HARRY SHEARER; Producer KAREN MURPHY; Music Producer/Engineer JOHN FISCHBACH; Director of Photography MATT MINDLIN; Editor MIKE HALE

 

About My Damn Channel:

My Damn Channel is an entertainment studio and new media platform created to empower comedians, musicians and filmmakers to co-produce, distribute and monetize original, episodic video. Artists create content for the My Damn Channel website and for syndication on the most heavily-trafficked online communities and social networks. My Damn Channel has racked up 22 million views, 7 accolades from the 2008 Webby Awards, worldwide media coverage, major national advertisers and blah, blah, blah…Are you still reading? Start exploring now: www.MyDamnChannel.com

Contact:
Maria Diokno

866.424.8864
Maria@MyDamnChannel.com

---

FAREWELL TO DANNY

This eulogy was delivered by Bruce Springsteen at Danny's funeral on April 21 in Red Bank, New Jersey:

FAREWELL TO DANNY



Let me start with the stories.

Back in the days of miracles, the frontier days when "Mad Dog" Lopez and his temper struck fear into the band, small club owners, innocent civilians and all women, children and small animals.

Back in the days when you could still sign your life away on the hood of a parked car in New York City.

Back shortly after a young red-headed accordionist struck gold on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour and he and his mama were sent to Switzerland to show them how it's really done.

Back before beach bums were featured on the cover of Time magazine.

I'm talking about back when the E Street Band was a communist organization! My pal, quiet, shy Dan Federici, was a one-man creator of some of the hairiest circumstances of our 40 year career... And that wasn't easy to do. He had "Mad Dog" Lopez to compete with.... Danny just outlasted him.

Maybe it was the "police riot" in Middletown, New Jersey. A show we were doing to raise bail money for "Mad Log" Lopez who was in jail in Richmond, Virginia, for having an altercation with police officers who we'd aggravated by playing too long. Danny allegedly knocked over our huge Marshall stacks on some of Middletown's finest who had rushed the stage because we broke the law by...playing too long.

As I stood there watching, several police oficers crawled out from underneath the speaker cabinets and rushed away to seek medical attention. Another nice young officer stood in front of me onstage waving his nightstick, poking and calling me nasty names. I looked over to see Danny with a beefy police officer pulling on one arm while Flo Federici, his first wife, pulled on the other, assisting her man in resisting arrest.

A kid leapt from the audience onto the stage, momentarily distracting the beefy officer with the insults of the day. Forever thereafter, "Phantom" Dan Federici slipped into the crowd and disappeared.

A warrant out for his arrest and one month on the lam later, he still hadn't been brought to justice. We hid him in various places but now we had a problem. We had a show coming at Monmouth College. We needed the money and we had to do the gig. We tried a replacement but it didn't work out. So Danny, to all of our admiration, stepped up and said he'd risk his freedom, take the chance and play.

Show night. 2,000 screaming fans in the Monmouth College gym. We had it worked out so Danny would not appear onstage until the moment we started playing. We figured the police who were there to arrest him wouldn't do so onstage during the show and risk starting another riot.

Let me set the scene for you. Danny is hiding, hunkered down in the backseat of a car in the parking lot. At five minutes to eight, our scheduled start time, I go out to whisk him in. I tap on the window.

"Danny, come on, it's time."

I hear back, "I'm not going."

Me: "What do you mean you're not going?"

Danny: "The cops are on the roof of the gym. I've seen them and they're going to nail me the minute I step out of this car."

As I open the door, I realize that Danny has been smoking a little something and had grown rather paranoid. I said, "Dan, there are no cops on the roof."

He says, "Yes, I saw them, I tell you. I'm not coming in."

So I used a procedure I'd call on often over the next forty years in dealing with my old pal's concerns. I threatened him...and cajoled. Finally, out he came. Across the parking lot and into the gym we swept for a rapturous concert during which we laughted like thieves at our excellent dodge of the local cops.

At the end of the evening, during the last song, I pulled the entire crowd up onto the stage and Danny slipped into the audience and out the front door. Once again, "Phantom" Dan had made his exit. (I still get the occasional card from the old Chief of Police of Middletown wishing us well. Our histories are forever intertwined.) And that, my friends, was only the beginning.

There was the time Danny quit the band during a rough period at Max's Kansas City, explaining to me that he was leaving to fix televisions. I asked him to think about that and come back later.

Or Danny, in the band rental car, bouncing off several parked cars after a night of entertainment, smashing out the windshield with his head but saved from severe injury by the huge hard cowboy hat he bought in Texas on our last Western swing.

Or Danny, leaving a large marijuana plant on the front seat of his car in a tow away zone. The car was promptly towed. He said, "Bruce, I'm going to go down and report that it was stolen." I said, "I'm not sure that's a good idea."

Down he went and straight into the slammer without passing go.

Or Danny, the only member of the E Street Band to be physically thrown out of the Stone Pony. Considering all the money we made them, that wasn't easy to do.

Or Danny receiving and surviving a "cautionary assault" from an enraged but restrained "Big Man" Clarence Clemons while they were living together and Danny finally drove the "Big Man" over the big top.

Or Danny assisting me in removing my foot from his stereo speaker after being the only band member ever to drive me into a violent rage.

And through it all, Danny played his beautiful, soulful B3 organ for me and our love grew. And continued to grow. Life is funny like that. He was my homeboy, and great, and for that you make considerations... And he was much more tolerant of my failures than I was of his.

When Danny wasn't causing chaos, he was a sweet, talented, unassuming, unpretentious good-hearted guy who simply had an unchecked ability to make good fortune and things in general go fabulously wrong.

But beyond all of that, he also had a mountain of the right stuff. He had the heart and soul of an engineer. He learned to fly. He was always up on the latest technology and would explain it to you patiently and in enormous detail. He was always "souping" something up, his car, his stereo, his B3. When Patti joined the band, he was the most welcoming, thoughtful, kindest friend to the first woman entering our "boys club."

He loved his kids, always bragging about Jason, Harley, and Madison, and he loved his wife Maya for the new things she brought into his life.

And then there was his artistry. He was the most intuitive player I've ever seen. His style was slippery and fluid, drawn to the spaces the other musicians in the E Street Band left. He wasn't an assertive player, he was a complementary player. A true accompanist. He naturally supplied the glue that bound the band's sound together. In doing so, he created for himself a very specific style. When you hear Dan Federici, you don't hear a blanket of sound, you hear a riff, packed with energy, flying above everything else for a few moments and then gone back in the track. "Phantom" Dan Federici. Now you hear him, now you don't.

Offstage, Danny couldn't recite a lyric or a chord progression for one of my songs. Onstage, his ears opened up. He listened, he felt, he played, finding the perfect hole and placement for a chord or a flurry of notes. This style created a tremendous feeling of spontaneity in our ensemble playing.

In the studio, if I wanted to loosen up the track we were recording, I'd put Danny on it and not tell him what to play. I'd just set him loose. He brought with him the sound of the carnival, the amusements, the boardwalk, the beach, the geography of our youth and the heart and soul of the birthplace of the E Street Band.

Then we grew up. Very slowly. We stood together through a lot of trials and tribulations. Danny's response to a mistake onstage, hard times, catastrophic events was usually a shrug and a smile. Sort of an "I am but one man in a raging sea, but I'm still afloat. And we're all still here."

I watched Danny fight and conquer some tough addictions. I watched him struggle to put his life together and in the last decade when the band reunited, thrive on sitting in his seat behind that big B3, filled with life and, yes, a new maturity, passion for his job, his family and his home in the brother and sisterhood of our band.

Finally, I watched him fight his cancer without complaint and with great courage and spirit. When I asked him how things looked, he just said, "what are you going to do? I'm looking forward to tomorrow." Danny, the sunny side up fatalist. He never gave up right to the end.

A few weeks back we ended up onstage in Indianapolis for what would be the last time. Before we went on I asked him what he wanted to play and he said, "Sandy." He wanted to strap on the accordion and revisit the boardwalk of our youth during the summer nights when we'd walk along the boards with all the time in the world.

So what if we just smashed into three parked cars, it's a beautiful night! So what if we're on the lam from the entire Middletown police department, let's go take a swim! He wanted to play once more the song that is of course about the end of something wonderful and the beginning of something unknown and new.

Let's go back to the days of miracles. Pete Townshend said, "a rock and roll band is a crazy thing. You meet some people when you're a kid and unlike any other occupation in the whole world, you're stuck with them your whole life no matter who they are or what crazy things they do."

If we didn't play together, the E Street Band at this point would probably not know one another. We wouldn't be in this room together. But we do... We do play together. And every night at 8 p.m., we walk out on stage together and that, my friends, is a place where miracles occur...old and new miracles. And those you are with, in the presence of miracles, you never forget. Life does not separate you. Death does not separate you. Those you are with who create miracles for you, like Danny did for me every night, you are honored to be amongst.

Of course we all grow up and we know "it's only rock and roll"...but it's not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.

So today, making another one of his mysterious exits, we say farewell to Danny, "Phantom" Dan, Federici. Father, husband, my brother, my friend, my mystery, my thorn, my rose, my keyboard player, my miracle man and lifelong member in good standing of the house rockin', pants droppin', earth shockin', hard rockin', booty shakin', love makin', heart breakin', soul cryin'... and, yes, death defyin' legendary E Street Band.

(video tribute to Danny at www.BruceSpringsteen.net)

---

JUDITH OWEN, VALENTINE's DAY GODDESS

There's nothing subjective about the music you love. I love Judith Owen.

My Damn Channel is made up of a buncha boys who sometimes get lucky enough to let a real woman in the house. Judith Owen gave you all a little Christmas present with her version of Spinal Tap's "Christmas with the Devil" (featuring husband Harry Shearer on da bass).

She's back with this Valentine's day gift to the DamnNation. "Let's Hear it for Love" is the first digital single from Judith's next album on Courgette Records: MOPPING UP KARMA (due 6/3/08).

http://www.judithowen.net/

---

JUDITH OWEN

Here's a new Christmas video made for My Damn Channel and for your emailing pleasure. Judith Owen performs the Spinal Tap classic: "Christmas With the Devil" http://www.mydamnchannel.com/channel.aspx?episode=352 The Devil's on bass. Judith Owen combines beautiful music with a sweet and powerful voice. Her stage presence and performance is cutting, comical, honest, and raw. I've taken at least ten uninitiated friends to see Judith play live over the years and everyone leaves high on her cool-aid. You can barely discover new music in the old ways - but we thought My Damn Channel was the right forum to introduce you to Judith. Her bio & her website are linked below. Her albums are weekend essentials gettable off the discography on her site. We just filmed two of Judith's shows last week in beautiful, downtown Burbank. We'll be giving you more videos from this music on The Harry Shearer Channel.....Judith's so in love with this man of all seasons that she married the Devil. http://www.judithowen.net/biography/ http://www.judithowen.net/ CONNECT THE DOTS: http://www.mydamnchannel.com/channel.aspx?episode=154

---