Shake A Tail Feather [Fill-in] - "Diamond in the back, sunroof up"

At 3pm Friday, the message went out that the host for CITR's soul and R&B program Shake a Tail Feather [Podcast] had fallen ill. I agreed to fill-in for Jason, which gave me about six hours to prepare for airtime at 10 o'clock. Fortunately, one of my vaguely planned ahead shows had a small soul segment, which I fleshed out by combing my soul archives to fill out the entire two hour show.

So, for regular (?) listeners to my show, this fill-in was my first foray into one specific genre, and one that I'm sure few suspected that I dabbled in. There has been the odd soul song through past shows of mine, though they tended to be either heavily funky or super light. According to iTunes, I have enough material to cover a few more shows if need be, though I have to comb through some of the miscategorized albums to fully figure out what's what.

And overall, the show was solid, despite the tight deadline imposed on myself (somehow, I didn't include Booker T & the MG's song Time is Tight). Threading the show together was relatively straightforward once the songs were pared down to the 30+ that aired; since a lot of soul acts used the same musicians, either through the various labels' house bands or through travel, it was easy to spot commonalities.

The only major technical snafu involved my iPod locking up between Bettye Swann and Aretha Franklin, which required some on-the-fly troubleshooting. Thankfully, the laptop was ready to act as the backup, so a brief verbal segue covered up the change in cabling (though a bit of studio noise can be heard). Aside from that, there was a point where I had to wing together enrichment when I dug up the only Canadian soul album I could find in the station libraries (Wayne McGhie & the Sounds of Joy, which is a sweet little treasure from the past) to ensure I didn't utterly hose the Canadian content regulations.

However, one programming challenge arrived when the host for the next show showed up late (or at all?). Fortunately, I had some extra songs lined up since I had prepared for some overtime, though not an extreme amount. Since my regular show is only 90 minutes long, dealing with 120 minutes required some overcompensation on the usual programming. However, as you'll see in the MP3, the show went for 140+ minutes, which took more energy than I had left at that late hour. For the record, I'll state that two hours feels more complete than an hour and a half, since I'm usually still jazzed for more airtime at the end of any regular Radio Free GAK episode. But, naturally, 90 minutes is much better than 60 minutes, which is similar much better than no minutes at all, so I remain lucky enough as is.

Anyways, way too much blathering here. As I've said repeatedly through the broadcast, I wish Jason a speedy recovery and I didn't scratch the car up too horribly (I hope).

Playlist follows: