Radio Interviews and Music Shows
Misfit Toys understood from the beginning that
people will not beat a path to your door to listen to your original music. Most
bands original songs either sound like a copy of someone else's hit played poorly
or it is a bizarre pairing of awkward verses and chorus so that ultimately a
guitar solo can be over played. Clubs are well aware of this and are right fully
leery of hiring an unknown local band to lure a sizable crowd to their club.
Bands spend years trying to prove themselves worthy of being listened to either
live or on record. From the very beginning at our first gig we played original
and cover material. People do not generally go and see a band they have never
heard of so bands must find a way to get their name and their original music
in front of their intended public.
The 80's were a great time for bands with a small following to
be signed by record labels. Many fantastic albums were released and followed
up by another one or two before disappearing into oblivion. There were many
excellent albums coming out almost every week so that it was difficult to keep
up with the new bands and albums unless you hung out at a record store where
the news was always on top of things and by the late 80's you could buy concert
tickets there.In the Washington DC area it seemed like everyone
was into music and the numerous clubs were always full. I know that is simply
an incorrect memory but it seemed that way. There were hundreds of bands all
vying for a chance to open for a national touring band and Misfit Toys were
no different. The local idea was the 9:30 Club and The
Bayou Night Club. The two main radio stations were WHFS
for a progressive or alternative variety of music or WWDC (DC 101)
for mainstream rock. Both stations developed a spot to promote local bands and
each week they would select one or more to play on air and possibly interview.
Misfit Toys did a lot of radio interviews both at home and on the road. As my
personal habit was of collecting live recordings and interviews of bands I liked
I carried it over to Misfit Toys and recorded all of our concerts
and radio interviews. Some are quite lengthy and others are short and performed
by collage radio station volunteers who had no idea about how to interview a
band.
I am going to upload several here to the band's official website for
our enjoyment. Some of these recordings made their way into circulation after
the band stopped touring and I have come across people in other countries who
had been listening to copies of the interview music for years until our recent
release of "Closure". In some cases the music played
by the radio station was a special mix of newly recorded songs that had not
been released yet.
Here is a short version of the "Local Licks" radio
show from DC 101 in 1986. The other bands have been edited out because
this is all about Misfit Toys. I am presenting it as a .wav
file for fidelity reasons and so if you choose to download the songs they will
be high quality. Again, these are not the same mix as songs on the band's initial
cassette tape or the "Too Short" CD. Feel free to
leave comment s at our
Face Book page
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There will be more recordings to follow.
DC 101 Local Licks Spring 1987 DC 101 Local Licks Summer 1987