"DANNY THE DOG INTERVIEWS"...

I pitched an idea to Glyn Duncan at the “Hearts of Country Radio” Internet station (which is playing, I believe, seven of my songs now), and she liked it, and now I’ll need to follow through on it. It’s the “Danny the Dog Innerviews,” that I did briefly (actually, only did one of) for Len Amsterdam’s “Whitby Shores” radio program in Canada.

Danny is a rather engaging pit bull with a Scooby-Dooish personality. He figured in a couple of radio plays scripted and mixed by a lady called “Country Rose” (her real name is something French, that I don’t remember), who did a weekly “radio show” on Soundclick, showcasing country music written by unknowns like me. Rose would enlist people she knew from all over to do speaking parts in her radio plays, and I got to play Danny. It was, I think, sometime in 2009 I got to interview Rose—as Danny—for Len Amsterdam’s program. Len was expert at spotting trends in entertainment, and Rose was symptomatic of a potentially important change in the music industry: she was using the Internet to broadcast music the Big Boys wouldn’t play.

These days, Internet radio stations are ubiquitous; Glyn’s “Hearts of Country Radio” is one of many. But I don’t think anybody since Danny has set one of these operators down and pointedly asked, “Why are you doing this? What do you intend to accomplish? Why is this important?” And maybe it is time to ask those questions again.

Danny is an ideal interviewer persona; he can frame issues in very simple terms (being a dog, and all), and jump around a lot (having a dog’s attention span) while never straying far from the subject. Being a dog, issues like “What did you have for breakfast?” and “Do you have a big refrigerator?” are every bit as important as the future of the music business, and get people talking about their lives and families. So we humanize our subject by (shall we say) “caninizing” the interviewer.

Doable? I think so. I’ve reviewed the recording of “Danny Interviews Country Rose” and think most of the stuff is applicable. One thing that is obvious in that interview is Rose and I know each other; I’d want to make sure I could do the same thing here. Glyn and I should probably talk before I draft up questions.

And could it go further? I’d like to continue the same tack I had with Len Amsterdam—find people who are doing “cutting-edge” things, that have the potential to bring about change, and talk to them about why they’re doing it. Economic depressions is when a lot of innovation takes place, as folks struggle desperately to make ends meet; like Bob Dylan said, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.” And hunting down those people and getting to know them would be good for me, too. I don’t know a lot of the cutting-edge stuff that’s going on out there. I might well be able to take advantage of it myself.

There is a “Rest of the Story.” I got dropped from Len’s radio program because I announced the second person I wanted to interview was Len himself. (I still think it was a good idea, but His Amsterdamness apparently didn’t think so.) And Danny, who is a real dog, had a puppy (no, he didn’t give birth to the puppy—Danny is really male), and his humans, Greg and Deb, named the puppy “Joey”—after me.

Practice tonight (Wednesday) with 45 Degrees North, Writers’ Guild Thursday night; gigs Friday and Saturday. Still don’t know about the dang job.

Joe