Rant #2,350: Come To the Sunshine

Is there nothing more boring than being stuck in traffic while in your car, in particular when you are driving home from a very long day at work?

Endless cars, nothing in the terms of scenery, nothing really to entice you to get excited about.

Sure, you have the radio on, but even if you have satellite radio, you constantly hear the same songs--even on the Sixties channel, where I have probably heard the Lemon Pipers' "Green Tambourine" about 9,764,479,007,565 times already (or some number near to that).

So what is a poor boy--or girl--to do when sitting in endless lanes of traffic?

Be creative. Think outside the box. Don't listen to any preprogrammed stuff. Listen to what you want to listen to. Learn something.

That has always been my credo, stretching back to the cassette days.

I used to make myself what were called "mix tapes," where I would put my favorite music on the tape, pop it in when the situation arose (every weekday), and even if the traffic was fierce, at least the music I was listening to was the music I wanted to listen to.

That stretched through the CD era, where I would burn CDs all the time and have plenty of great stuff to listen to.

Now, in the download and streaming era, I still encompass myself with what I want to listen to when stuck in traffic, digitizing my record collection and listening to that in the car.

I have also downloaded some podcasts that I am fond of. One that I liked to listen to was one that I told you about a while back, in Rant #2,178 (July 11, 2018), the "Echo Valley" podcast produced by someone by the name of Bruce Ivey.

That podcast was a rundown of the greatest bubblegum songs of all time, taking in everything from ABBA to the Zombies. It is a fun place to visit, and I have since caught up on all the 134 episodes of this podcast, and hopefully, there will be more to come.

You can investigate that podcast at http://echovalleymusic.blogspot.com/2011/06/echo-valley-episode-1.html.

Well, when I finally finished the run of that podcast, I needed something else to turn to, something else to turn my ears to when I was stuck in traffic.

I had heard of the "Come to the Sunshine" podcast some time back, and I believe I even listened to one or two of these shows in the past, but now, I really needed something to fill in this crucial time of my workday, and "Come to the Sunshine" it was.

The show--named after the Van Dyke Parks tune that was covered by Harpers Bizarre, and became a top 40 hit for them in 1967--is the brainchild of Andrew Sandoval, the producer/writer/jack of all trades who has resurrected the Monkees' vast music catalog on the Rhino label.

Sandoval is a 1960s music geek, someone who knows a lot about even the most obscure records of the period, and he shows off that vast knowledge on the show.

And if anyone has a record collection that exceeds mine, he is the guy. He hunts for records all over the world, and he plays what he finds on the show.

The two hour program sometimes has a theme, as with the Hollies show that I just finished listening to while sitting in traffic last week.

Sandoval played a few of the band's better known songs, but he focused on rarities and different mixes of other songs, and while I didn't know these songs, it was like I was in a Hollies education class and was learning more about the British band than I ever knew existed.

He has been doing these podcasts for more than a decade. The show was at first a weekly show, but now he does it when he does it. He just put up Episode #149, which appears to be focusing on one of those bands that I really liked but which only broke through briefly on the national scene way back when, the New Colony Six.

As I am only on the third podcast of the show--almost all of them, but not all the shows, are up at https://cometothesunshine.podomatic.com--it will probably take me many, many months to get through the entire collection, as these are two-hour shows and one can only listen to so many of these in the car each week.

So I found what I wanted, a show that will keep my ears peeled for more while I keep my eyes on the road.

I highly recommend this podcast, and the Echo Valley podcast, as fun things to listen to while you are in the drudgery of traffic.

And yes, you will hear Traffic on these shows too, so there really is something for any 1960s music aficionado to enjoy with these shows.

Give them a listen, you won't be disappointed.