Dizzy Heights #100: The Very Guest of…

Features David Bowie, Pugwash, Fine Young Cannibals, Robbie Willilams, and more

You should know, it pained me to shut the show down four episodes away from Show #100. I WAS SO CLOSE.

And then it took another year after moving before I was properly motivated. Well, that’s not entirely true. Getting used to the new routines, the kids going to different high schools, it was a LOT of change. I basically sacrificed my time to be available for them. And I think it was the right move at the time.

At the time. After a while, I was ready to start it back up. And now my youngest is only a month away from getting her driver’s license. I’m so close to retiring from my part-time job as a chauffeur that I can taste it. I only hope that with more free time comes more good show ideas.

Speaking of which, this show is a callback to a column we did in ye olden days. There is no doubt that I play several songs here that were highlighted in those columns, but I don’t know that for a fact – I was too scared to look. I didn’t want to be accused of peeking at someone else’s test.

Boom! There’s a cannon for the first hundred shows. Boom! There’s a cannon for the next.

Thank you, as always, for listening.

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Dizzy Heights #99: ‘Love’ Songs

Features The Human League, Le Flex, Howard Jones, Climie Fisher, The Pixies, and more

Lots of songs, oodles and bunches and tons of songs to choose from when the subject is love. Too many, really, which means that I have almost certainly not played any of the first five songs that popped into your head just now. But maybe there’s something here that you will enjoy anyway. A master of the sales pitch, that is me. “Yeah, you might like this, I dunno, whatever.”

Thank you, as always, for listening anyway.

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Dizzy Heights #98: So It’s Come to This: A Covers Show

Featuring Siouxsie & the Banshees, Robbie Williams, Duran Duran, OMD, Mark Ronson, and more

Truth be told, I’ve been wanting to do a covers show since I launched the show in 2017, but it just felt wrong, lazy, too easy back then. I am knocking on the door of 100 Dizzy Heights shows, and it’s 2025. I have no shame about doing one now.

I mention two rules for making the show in my talkie bits, but I overlooked the third one: it had to be a studio recording. If you welcome live covers into the party, well *the universe explodes*

Also, I was wrong about who wrote one of the songs. It was Danny Whitten. That’s probably a giveaway for a lot of you.

Thank you, as always, for listening.

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Dizzy Heights #97: The Re-Beginnening

Featuring OMD, Roosevelt, Editors, Gorillaz, and more

There is clearly something wrong with my microphone. My daughter has been using it for gaming purposes for the last year, and my kids’ rooms tend to be the places where good electronics go to die. I should have known better. I will do better with the next show.

So what was all of that talk about calling it quits two years ago? I couldn’t yet tell you the truth – we were planning to move, and the kids didn’t know that yet. Knowing that there would be no time to make shows in the months leading up to the move, I decided to say that the show was done, but I never really wanted to stop. You don’t get this close to making 100 of anything and willingly walk away.

Already prepping the next show, so I’m not going to disappear for three months like I had been. At least not right away. 😊

Thank you, as always, for listening.

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Karl Wallinger Was One of the Good Ones

I should be used to it by now. I’ve lost dozens of musicians and artists that I’ve adored over the years. Never mind the insane group of people we lost at the tender age of 27 (Hendrix, Cobain, Winehouse, Joplin, that asshole from the Doors). It was never some triumphant act that I outlived them. What’s weirder to me is I’ve now outlived Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, George Michael, Robert Palmer, Adam Schlesinger (I may never get over his death), and legendary film critic Gene Siskel. And I’m only a couple of years away from catching up to Prince and Pete Burns.

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The Last Day of Our Acquaintance

“You look good, -ish.”

This is going well.

I’m at a diner, one with an affinity for Cuban-influenced fare. We haven’t even placed drink orders yet, and she’s already cast her first stone. I look good. Ish.

It had been 15 years since my college girlfriend Sam and I last traded messages, and decades since we’d last seen each other in person. I still had a working email address for her when her mother passed away, so I reached out to offer my condolences. I had also recently welcomed my first child into the world. She already had two kids, so I thought she’d be happy for me. We were adults now, doing adult things. That’s how this is supposed to work, right?

But she never wrote back, so between that and her opening salvo here, it seems like a no. Cool.

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Happiness is an Option

In 1989, Kate Bush released The Sensual World. On that album is a song called “Never Be Mine.”

Let’s look at the first verse.

I look at you and see my life that might have been

Your face just ghostly in the smoke

They’re setting fire to the corn fields as you’re taking me home

The smell of burning fields will now mean you and here

Kate does something clever with that last line. By associating a scent with a memory, the listener does the same with her song. For almost everyone who listens to “Never Be Mine,” the song becomes a fixed point that conjures a moment in time.

And given the melancholy nature of the track, it’s probably not conjuring a happy moment in time.

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What’s Up

This is an extended, revised version of the letter I wrote to go with our Christmas cards this year. I’ve received the occasional text asking, “How are things going?” This is how it’s going.

“Hello, Wisconsin!”

Of course I started the letter with a reference to “That ‘70s Show.” I’m not clever enough to think of something better. Plus, Cheap Trick performed the opening credits theme song, a cover of “In the Street” by Big Star, for all but the first season of the show. So, Cheap Trick.

It’s early January as I write this. A little over four months ago, we packed up everything we had collected over our 19 years in Ohio (!!!) and hightailed it to Madison (technically Verona, but also Madison, and Middleton schools, it’s weird). We lived in Ohio almost twice as long as I lived in Chicago, but it feels like it was the other way around.

My lovely wife is from Madison. Her mom is still here. Two of our nieces currently go to school here. My sister-in-law is a Senior Lecturer with the UW-Madison School of Business, so she’s here a lot. That is why we’re here. But it’s not the only reason why we’re here.

We were all ready for a fresh start.

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Movie Review: Elemental

Okay, maybe one more.

With my previous review, I said I was finished writing about movies, but I wasn’t 100% truthful about why. It has gotten harder to do, it’s true, but the fact of the matter is that when I move to Madison (for those not connected to me on socials, we’re moving to Wisconsin), I have to resign from the Columbus Film Critics Association, so bye bye early screenings. Once that happens, odds are you all will see more movies than I do. You probably already do, at this point.

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Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3

Can I tell you something?

It really feels like this will be my final review.

When I went to see “Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3,” that thought couldn’t have been further from my mind. When I sat down to write about it, though, something strange happened.

I didn’t feel like writing about it. AND I REALLY LIKED THE MOVIE. That doesn’t happen, like, ever.

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