Mohawk Show Back On The Air!

Well, by now, all of my long-time fans are aware that The Cure For The Common Show, Mohawk Radio, is back on the air every Monday and Wednesday night at 8:30 PM Pacific time, 11:30 PM Eastern.  Our new and improved Live365 station is now known as Chief Jack Radio (isn’t that easy?), and we are looking for big things to happen in this, our 39th year on the air.  You can tune it in HERE 24/7, and as always, we have the biggest variety of “established” stars and “Indies”, with music in English, French, and Spanish.  Hope you’ll join us!

The Latest Mohawk Radio Show Info

  There is currently a rumor going around that the Mohawk Radio Show will be back on the air by Labor day.  The station will have a new feel, although rock and Indie music will still be the basis of our mix.  Further info: the actual show will probably just be on twice a week instead of the old three times, with the most likely days being Tuesday and Thursday, at either 8 or 9 PM Pacific Time.  The station’s playlist, as it has over the last three years or so, will play 24/7.

   If you are an Indie or “minor label” band looking for airplay, Mohawk Radio will again be your home for great exposure, as it has been since 1969.  We’ll let you know shortly how to get in touch with us, so that you can be heard on the station that was first to broadcast the latest hits by Pearl Jam and such Indie stars as Sebastian Sidi, Javelyn, and Marston Smith.

CLASS REUNIONS ARE OVERBLOWN

     Ah, yes, the class reunion.  The very thought of a reunion makes us wax nostalgic and think about “old times”.  That expression, come to think of it, sometimes dates us, but we don’t usually seem to mind, referring to the past as “the good old days”. 

Were they really that good, or is our memory suffering from premature Alzheimer’s disease?  For some of us, the “old days” were indeed good, as we may think back about that first car, a huge, chrome plated, brightly painted hulk with a V8 engine the size of an atomic reactor tucked under a hood that could easily house a small town.  Did we care that it only got 8 1/2 miles per gallon?  Of course not!  In those days, gas was 27 cents a gallon, and the best memory of all regarding that car is the night you got Sandra Wilson to take her blouse off at the drive in theater and she wasn’t wearing…. 

Oops!  Did I go too far back with that?  I see some hands up in the back. What was that question?  “What’s a drive-in?”  Hold that thought.   Yes?  “Sandra Wilson told you YOU were the only one she’d ever shown her breasts to?”  No, I don’t know her personally, so you can put that knife away. 

A drive-in, of course, was a place where you drove your car to a big field to watch a movie on a huge screen while sitting in your car.  You would grab a speaker off a post, hang it on your window and watch, sometimes, as many as four movies through the night.  Of course, drive-ins were always built on cheap land, usually a former toxic dump that was home to mosquitoes large enough to make off with a small cow, so the theater’s management would give you these little discs called “Pic Repellent” that you lit up so their smoke would keep mosquitoes away.  “Pic coils”, however, were not a deterrent to the flying bloodsuckers.  In fact, I believe they were attracted to the smell of “Pics”, eventually figuring out that where there’s smoke, there’s a free lunch. 

Remember how when we were in high school we couldn’t wait to get out?  Now, here it is, some 30 years later, and your old classmates are trying to get everyone together for a reunion. Naturally, you find out about it through some Website because you’re still as unpopular now as you were back then, and you wouldn’t be invited if you were the only graduate of that class left alive. 

Class reunions do strange things to people.  Women find out to their chagrin that they really no longer fit in that slinky prom dress of theirs.  Guys discover all of a sudden what their mirror has been hinting at for years.  When you got out of high school, you needed just one mirror to check yourself out, but now you find that you’d need to see your reflection in a bay window to see the total package. 

Ladies take hours to get themselves ready for one of these evenings, just in case they should run into their old flame, and in order to try to look better than all the other would-be prom queens who’ll be there.  The hair, nails, and makeup have to be perfect, because women know they have to look perfect for guys to even give them a glance. 

The men, though, really take the cake.  Even though they have only seven strands of hair left that must be strategically placed to simulate a full coiffure, and their stomach will get into the reunion hall 45 seconds before the rest of their body, they still think they look great.  They’ll put on that yellow and green plaid jacket and orange pants they wore at the prom, even though it means that they’ll have to buckle their size 32 belt under that size 48 stomach. 

Instead of talking about old times, many people who attend class reunions spend all their time either bragging about what they achieved, or make something up about how they work in the movie industry, if you consider polishing the stars on the sidewalks in Hollywood working in the movies. 

The music at these reunions is always what was popular at graduation, and it doesn’t help our self-consciousness to know that some of the bands back then are still around today, like the Stones, KC and the Sunshine Band, and even Paul Anka.  Paul, by the way, just like Frankie Avalon, still looks great, and this means that the women will use them as a yardstick to rate you.  That’s OK, though, guys—if they start on that particular line, we can remind them of how terrific Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch still look. 

Let’s talk food.  I’ve never attended a class reunion, but people I know have, and they invariably say that the food is not what you’d opt for if you were catering the affair, with such delicacies as caviar and little colored bits of sealing caulk on oddly-shaped crackers, chased down with the same spiked punch from the prom in 1977 that somebody brought out of cryogenic freeze for the occasion. 

Yes, nostalgia runs deep in our lives, and we spend a lot of time, the older we get, trying to recapture our youth by refusing to listen to new music and in extreme cases even dying our hair to hide the gray (yes, men do it too–just ask Mike Wallace) and spending a small fortune on a sporty convertible to try to look cool for the ladies. 

That will never be a problem with me. Even if I wanted to dye my hair, there’s wasn’t enough left on top for anyone to notice, so I now shave my head (and friends tell me I look much younger).  I no longer have a need to impress any ladies, and if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be my car that impresses them.  The only way my car would attract women is if it suddenly became a magnet and all women had metal plates in their heads. 

I have no need or desire to attend a class reunion.  I laughed off invites for the 20 year and 25-year meeting, and now that the 30-year mark is behind me, I still sincerely hope that none of my old classmates will ask me to go to one.  If I did, I would be a crashing bore.  When I graduated high school, back in the days when people used papyrus and carrier pigeons, I was doing my radio show and working in an automotive parts department.  Today, the only difference is that my radio show is on a hiatus, but I am still in automotive parts. 

Guess that’s why I’m not the reunion sort of guy.  When you look up “excitement” in the dictionary, my name is listed as an antonym.  For you, however, a class reunion may be just what you need to spice up your life.  I understand there’s a new color for that sealing caulk on the crackers this year.

The Mohawk Radio Show:Coming Back?

   Long-time fans of my Mohawk Radio Show have been asking me for months about my comeback.  Of course, it depends on what Sound Exchange and their cronies, the RIAA and Copyright Royalty Board, do about Internet radio royalty rates.  At this time, my future is cloudy at best.

Those of you unfamiliar with what’s happening in  Internet radio circles, the RIAA/CRB proposed new, excessively (actually, criminally) high royalty rates for us in that end of the business.  The new rates are so high that even a relatively small broadcaster like me would have to pay royalties so high per year that I would be able to buy several Corvettes with the money.  Not sure about Corvettes?  Then let’s say it comes out to an amount that exceeds the salary of most Congress members.

Naturally, there’s no way I can afford that kind of money, so if the rates get jacked up to what Sound Exchange is proposing, most Internet broadcasters will be put out of business, and the odds are you may never hear my show again.

You can help stop the death of Internet radio by contacting your representative in Congress and asking them to support the Internet Equality Act, which will keep our royalty rates at a decent level.

Eve Of The CRB Rate Rape

As I write this, it is the eve of the Copyright Royalties Board/RIAA/Sound Exchange rape of webcasters. It’s still Saturday the 14th on the West Coast, and in a couple of hours, July 15 will be here—the date that these bandits have set for the new music royalty rates to take effect, rates that none of the webcasters can afford and will put us out of business.

Earlier this week, Sound Exchange tried to sneak one past us, trying to dupe major webcasters such as Live365 and Yahoo Launchcast to sign an agreement to keep the rates as they are pre-July 15th. SE was hoping we would jump on it, but we were smart enough to read the small print before signing the agreement, an agreement that could cost Live365 and Yahoo BILLIONS of dollars a year within the next couple of years.

That small print stated the rates would only stay as they now are until the end of 2008, when SE would again try to bump them up–and there was a clause in there that all webcasters agreeing to the contract would give up their right to ever go to court to stop future rate hikes while dropping their challenge of the current proposed rate hike.

This is the kind of criminals webcasters are dealing with, ladies and gentlemen. They are trying to pass royalty rate hikes that would go 90 percent into their own pockets (which they call “administrative and processing fees”), and the remaining 10%, after a few more deductions, would be crumbs offered to the artists and songwriters.

Even under the current rates, artists sometimes have to threaten court action in order to get their meager royalty payments. By the way, over-the-air radio stations pay NO royalties, and satellite radio pays amounts WAY lower than what they want to charge webcasters. The plan is so crystal clear you can read through it from here. Web stations have Indie artists, the ones the major labels are trying to shut out of the process, in heavy rotation, and this increases their popularity while decreasing major label artists’ airplay.

Webcasters may attempt to pay these exorbitant fees and wind up bankrupt as they try to follow the law, and after they shut down, any money they’ve paid goes into Sound Exchange’s pocket and eliminates the competition for the majors—a win/win for SE.

Whether or not I get back on the air depends on what is decided in regards to the new royalty rates. It won’t kill Internet radio as a whole, but it will drive many of us to do our broadcasting in a “pirate” mode. I’ve been there before, as a DJ for “small market” broadcasters, so I know it CAN work. If we’re driven to that, everyone loses because Sound Exchange won’t get a penny of royalties while we continue to broadcast on the sly, which will make it harder for our audiences to find us .

Support Internet Radio! Get in touch with your Congressperson and demand that they support the Internet Radio Equality Bill TODAY!!!!

Death Of Wrestler Benoit May Not Match Official Report

The official report on the death of Chris Benoit, the Canadian wrestler with a long and illustrious career, on June 25 may not be what we’re being told it is. This isn’t the first time that a wrestler who’s been at odds with World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon met his death with drugs as the main villain. It’s been a convenient set-up on a number of occasions.

Without going into details because I still plan to write a book about this subject in the future, many of the athletes employed by McMahon who became involved with trying to help me in regards to something that McMahon’s dad did many years ago have met an untimely end or wound up being blackballed.

The lucky ones were just eradicated from the sport, often due to injuries in the ring. Some of those who were tougher eggs to crack wound up paying the ultimate price, usually in some way related to drugs, both legal and illegal. In almost all of these cases, the official verdict was a drug overdose, accidental or suicidal.

Some of the names that fall in this last category include the British Bulldog, Eddie Guerrero, Brian Pillman, and Owen Hart. Hart’s death differed in that it involved an “equipment malfunction” witnessed by thousands of live audience members and many more on pay-per-view TV. He was polished off in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, my sources told me the day of the “accident”.

Right now, police in Fayetteville, Georgia are saying that Chris bound his wife’s hands and feet, then suffocated her on either Saturday or Sunday, then did the same to his 7-year old son the following day. This fairy tale goes on to say that Benoit placed bibles near his wife and son’s bodies then hung himself using the cord from an exercise machine. His wife, Nancy, was formerly married to pro wrestler Kevin Sullivan, and herself was a wrestling personality known by the name “Woman”.

According to a WWE press release, Benoit sent “curious” E-mails to friends, who then forwarded these messages to the WWE, which led the wrestling organization to contact Georgia authorities so they could check up on him. The “Canadian Crippler”, as he was also known, is said to have cancelled a weekend wrestling show appearance set for last weekend due to “a family problem”. Benoit, who earned about $500,000 a year for his services, was certainly not suicidal or had any murderous tendencies. Why would Chris’ neighbors first contact the WWE instead of the police if they suspected anything was amiss? If you thought a co-worker was, let’s say, beating up his wife, would you call your employer or the police? Do you also smell that rotting fish?

A late update states that drugs, including anabolic steroids, were found in the Benoit home, but a WWE statement says Benoit was tested for drugs, as are all WWE wrestlers, in April, and he was “clean”. Chris got his superb body the old-fashioned way: he worked out hard for it. perhaps that “drug-free” WWE report was a mistake by an overzealous employee that will hurt the kind of police report McMahon is hoping for.

Benoit was a remote cousin, so the “murder-suicide” angle just doesn’t click with me. He wasn’t that kind of man, and if a REAL investigation is conducted, instead of one probably financed by McMahon, we may find out what REALLY happened. Even if anybody in the WWE crowd knows what went down, they’ll no doubt never tell because of the possible repercussions.

People who work for and with McMahon refer to him in terms that would make a sailor blush if they know he’s not within earshot. The animosity over what his family has done to mine runs deep, but with his immense wealth, he’s managed to keep it covered up. To him, it’s a fun game to perform this covering up, and even though he’s spent a fortune to keep it up, he enjoys every minute of it. Some day, the truth will come out—unless, of course, I also die from a “drug-related event” or “accident” before my book gets done.

The Day Of Silence and the CRB/RIAA Decision

Tomorrow (June 26) is being called “The Day Of Silence”, a day when almost all the major Internet broadcast services, along with quite a number of terrestrial radio stations with Internet simulcasts, will go silent in order to bring attention to the fact that the RIAA and the CRB are trying to kill Web radio with unrealistically high rates.

Under the proposed new rates, a Webcaster like Mohawk Radio could be assessed a royalty fee high enough to pay for at least 10 Chevy Corvettes. Where do they expect regular Joes like us to come up with that kind of money?

In order to further irritate Webcasters (and collect even more money if Congress fails to stop the CRB/RIAA), they have delayed their “judgment day” to July 15.

Here at Mohawk Radio, we have decided to wait until that decision is made before making our next move. Again, we thank you for your continuing support.

Chief Jack™ and the staff

Attention Classic TV Fans!

If you’re a fan of the classic TV shows that are now only available in syndication, if at all, I believe you’ll enjoy the series I’m currently running on Associated Content about these programs. I have a new one coming out within the next few days about police shows, but in the meantime you can check out my latest one on science fiction shows by clicking HERE. From there you can access all the others by clicking on my avatar photo on my AC page.

My UFO Article On Associated Content

I recently published an article about UFOs and why our government is denying the truth about them. In less than two weeks it has drawn more page views than my last 10 articles combined, so I guess there’s still a lot of interest in this subject. Among the cases examined in the article are:

The 1942 battle over Los Angeles between the army and a giant UFO

How the Roswell UFO crash led to cell phones

Are UFOs responsible for America’s largest blackouts?

You can access the article HERE.

Is Our Government In Cahoots With ET’s?

I will have, within the next few days, a new article on Associated Content about why our government is denying the truth about UFOs. Once it publishes, I will supply the link for it.

Picture at right is a UFO that launched from the dirigible hangars in Santa Ana, CA on August 3, 1965. Once traffic increased after the road was widened, UFOs were no longer stored there, instead being moved to either Area 51 or several other military bases in the western United States.