radio ezraWelcome to Bound and Gagged for Glory broadcast to you live from the boiler room of Anabel Taylor Hall on the Cornell campus. I’m your host Ezra Kidder and I’ll be with you for the rest of life in some form or other - call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, call it a bad trip. Call it what ever you want, you’ll going to having flashbacks – I guarantee it. How many hours of hammer dulcimer music can the average human being listen to before they go off the deep end. I’ve had listeners call in and tell me that, after a couple of hours of hammer dulcimer music, they’ve signed up to serve in Iraq. I mean, these guys were long haired hippies, carrying signs right out there on the front lines of the peace movement. Suddenly they turned overnight into cold blooded killers for Uncle Sam, M16, jackboots, the whole works. Something snapped. Did you know that the CIA used to broadcast hammer dulcimer music behind the Iron Curtain? You think Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War single-handedly? Think again, it was some guy playing the hammer dulcimer. It’s a good thing nobody in the Arab world knows how to play the hammer dulcimer. Imagine if Al-Quaeda ever got hold of it?
Students are returning from spring break so that means we’ve had to retreat back to the basement level here at Anabel Taylor. That’s alright, we’re used to it - it’s just like the Ithaca weather, you either get used to nine months of winter or you go insane. That’s when it’s time to tune to 135.6 FM on your radio dial and listen to the comforting sounds of the hammer dulcimer.
Tonight we have a very special guest. Well, we had a very special guest until he tried some of the rat food they put out in little trays around the boilers. You know we tried to break into the dumpster up there behind the End of the Rope Café. When you get the munchies……. well, you understand what that’s all about. So our special guest can’t be with us tonight but we still have 75 hours of taped hammer dulcimer music. While I strip the body, let me put on this little number from Bill Smokehouse and the Down-trodden Country Boys.
--this guy doesn’t have a credit card. I figured as much. Here’s a union card, a lottery ticket – now what’s this. Looks like a photograph of Joni Mitchell – wow – it must have been taken at one of those nude beaches. I’ll keep that. At least I make a few bucks off the stuff he’s wearing. They love those 60’s clothes down at Trader K. Yeah – and there’s this hammer dulcimer…..
We’re back live at Anabel Taylor Hall. Our special guest has gone on to glory. But we have a taped interview that he did in 1962 during the salad days of folk music. Those were the days. Everyone wanted to run away Greenwich Village in those days and be a folk singer – live in some flea-bitten hotel with a hundred other folksinger wannabes, have sex with these wispy looking brunettes from Sarah Lawrence -- you know the kind of girls I mean - heck, they’re your grandmothers now and they probably haven’t changed much. They still wear those long dresses and granny glasses and get that far away dreamy look in their eyes whenever they hear a hammer dulcimer. Boy, if you could play the hammer dulcimer back in those days, you had it made. Now if you play the hammer dulcimer, you’re a candidate for the psych unit.
Ok – we’re get to that interview in the second half of our show. Now it’s time for a word from our sponsor, the Fourth Dimension Head Shop right on the corner of Seneca and Tioga. Oh….they moved? That’s where they’re putting up that new hotel? Shit, why doesn’t anyone tell me these things? We have no sponsors? (Pause)
Let’s go to another musical look back at the glory days of Folk when everybody knew who Woody Gutherie was and nobody knew who Bob Dylan was. Here’s a hammer dulcimer standard from Richard Purina and Mimi Buzzsaw….. Sad Eyed Lady of Cleveland.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 12:13 PM
