Meet The Merkelson's

I promised you a preview of what's to come on the new That Damn Podcast and here it is. First, a little backstory.

Since I was a little kid, I've been messing around with tapes and doing recordings. I fell in love with Firesign Theatre, the old National Lampoon records, as well as old time radio shows. I was never far from my portable cassette recorder, then reel to reel, finally DAT and digital. I absolutely loved doing this stuff. Oddly enough, I had to teach myself how to draw and do comics and that's always been work, you know? But doing voices, and recording stuff, that's always been the thing that comes easily. But as I came of age and had the oppotunity to do this stuff, spoken word recordings sort of fell out favor. FM radio was music and AM became talk radio and sports. The age of the comedy album had passed. But now things are starting to change. Satellite radio, looking for programs to fill hundreds of channels, and perhaps more importantly, pocasting, digital downloads and stuff like that mean the audience for this type of entertainment is growing again. And so I decided to crank up the old equipment and see what happened.

And the result was my decision to launch That Damn Podcast.

Today's preview clip is a bit called "The Merkelson's." The idea was re-create the sound, music, voices and feel of a 40's era radio show. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get the sound just right. I want you to think you're sitting in front of an old radio listening to this program.

http://youdamnkid.com/sr_themerkelsons.mp3

"The Merkelson's" will just be a small part of the upcoming podcast, but it was the hardest to do. I hope you enjoy it!