These are the notes I used for the first episode of Runka Punka Go Go, wherein I attempted to explain to Kevin Michael Grace what I intend to do with my live stream.
THE GOAL
To release and sell music online.
To establish a business that can do this.
Establish a community of people online who would like to be involved in the effort, as contributors, viewers and critics. I hope it will function a little like a writer’s room. The community, in “atmosphere,” I hope will resemble an old-fashioned office; very unfocused; one that allows for discussions of all manner of topics but at the end of the day will create a product. My hope here is based on my experience working at the Alberta Report newsroom in the late 1990s; our daily routine included much wasting of time, much joking around, arguing, fighting, relationship dramas, a contest which involved throwing empty soda pop cans across the room aiming for a waste paper basket (because of the drinking hole in the top of the can these would fly in an unpredictable curve); nevertheless we produced a weekly newsmagazine. It was a fun place to work.
I will follow the advice outlined in the book by Donald S. Passman All You Need to Know About the Music Business.
I will set up a Locals Community on Rumble to facilitate discussion.
I will pitch at least one musical idea a week for people to consider.
The public live stream will be on Saturday nights, maybe call this a Saturday Night Dance Party. More shows can be posted, but these will be irregular. Locals will be used extensively for the writers room.
We will write and produce songs. Videos can be created to accompany these.
The effort will include choosing performers from such sites as fiverr.com. Example: Birch Dark.
THE ORIGIN OF THE NAME “RUNKA PUNKA GO GO“
The phrase “runka punka go go” has its origin, as far as I know, in my far off childhood. Think 1970 (approximately), suburb of Edmonton, province of Alberta, Canada. Lower middle class bungalows; the trees were small and the children were plentiful. My father was a shift worker, a steam engineer in a power plant of a company that created fiber board from recycled paper. He had a friend, Claude Landry, a burly French Canadian with a gruff, booming voice who lived down at the end of our street. We lived in the middle. Our gang of street urchins, often roaming wild, would often encounter Claude as he was out walking his dog, Beppo, a noble and mild mannered collie, beautifully groomed.
Claude sold life insurance. He seemed to work whatever hours he wanted. This made no sense to us kids because our parents all worked regular hours 9 to 5, or shift work.
Claude would from time to time drop by our house to share a coffee and some talk with Dad, usually whenever Dad was working something other than the day shift. They shared a love of classical music, particularly opera. We children would be hanging around some of the time and we’d hear this talk though we understood little, other than it was about music.
But we kids, ya know, knew something about music, new music, and we knew something about the “generation gap” and hippies and “peace.” Much of what we knew about music came from listening to the record collection of Buffy, our babysitter, who more often than not would be distracted from her duties while necking on our couch with her boyfriend. I remember once reaching up my hand to a stack of lps (long playing vinyl records in sleeves) on top of the living room stereo console and coming down with the cover of The Beatles “Abby Road” album. I barely had time to consider the four men on a crosswalk and wonder “what’s going on here?” when a suddenly attentive Buffy swooped in and grabbed the precious item, saying in her kind way, “Careful with that.”
But back to the Dad and Claude coffee talk. Sometimes one of us kids, taking up the role of spokesman for the new generation and wanting to cause a little trouble, would chirp in our squeaky little kids’ voice in the middle of this opera talk with something like, “Oh yeah? What about the Beatles?”
It was then that Claude Landry would burst forth in his gruff, booming French Canadian accent, “Dat’s all Runka Punka Go Go!” This meant, I believe though never confirmed, that what we spoke of is all crap.
The phrase stuck with me, and was reinforced over the years by my father who would sometimes mutter it in remembrance of his friend, always followed by a fond chuckle.
So the phrase Runka Punka Go Go began as something of a cultural critique. Will it ever remain thus?
FIRST THOUGHTS
I initially thought that Runka Punka Go Go would be the good name for a musical genre. At that time the idea was to be I would put it out there, and then the live stream would be about trying to create music for this genre, back fill it, so to speak. There was just one problem; I didn’t think I could write the type of songs that might be defined as Runka Punka Go Go. It’s an aggressive sounding name. On reflection, at the time that I first heard Claude Landry say it, in 1970, it was almost squarely between the Go Go era (1964-1966) and the Punk era (1974-1979).
But as I mulled it over, I thought, maybe I’ll create a music label associated with Runka Punka Go Go, and that would allow me to release all kinds of things under that “brand” rather than a genre. So I started researching record labels, figuring out whether this would be the thing to do to kick off the podcast. Seemed like a good idea at the time, as the saying goes.
The final and most recent inspiration, the one thing that convinced me that this was the thing to do, came just over a week ago. I was mulling over the idea of starting a record label, a company, because this would be the best way, I thought to put some flesh on the bone, make it a real thing, make it solid. And so I did a search for “how to start a record label.” Up top in the results I found the iMusician site with an article, The Essential Guide: How to start a record label. Looked on point.
On this page filled with good advice, there was one line that jumped out at me. It comes from a section “3. Register your label and establish its legal status”
The final paragraph goes like this:
“The sooner you set up your label as a business with official contracts, studio time, a trusted producer, marketing and release strategies, licensing deals, etc., the easier it will be for you to keep track of everything and ensure it doesn’t spiral out of control.”
It probably sounds counter-intuitive, but it was the end of that last phrase that caught my eye and excited my fancy: “ensure it doesn’t spiral out of control.” Spiral out of control. My, doesn’t that sound exciting. Wouldn’t that be cool? To watch something spinning out of control? I’ll try my best, of course, These are the notes I used for the first episode of Runka Punka Go Go, wherein I attempted to explain to Kevin Michael Grace what I intend to do with my live stream.but I realized that failure is an option and even that could be fun to watch. I actually jumped out of my chair, began pacing to and fro and said to myself, “I’ll do it.” And here we are. I guess I needed a reason to start.
I think the best term to use when describing what I am doing is “project.”
As I thought about this project, gradually my personal motto became, “Deploy all resources”– in other words, put everything I have toward this project. One of my resources goes back to an online course I took ten years ago about producing and releasing music. I took the course as a way to distract myself from the slow motion tragedy of losing my parents. My father had just died, and I became the main caregiver for my elderly mother, in the early stages of Alzhiemer’s. The teacher of this course, a nice young woman based in Paris, started us off by having each of us inventory all of our previous songs, things we had created to date. It was making that list where I had written nearly 200 songs in the course of my life, most of them for no reason at all. I started writing songs in my youth, at that time for my band, but after that ended around the time I turned twenty, I just writing more songs. So I have all this material (well, some of it anyway) to contribute to this effort.