I feel like revealing a bit of the process that goes into making a "recent" Dusty Show. Here's how it's been going in recent months. Step 1 - After work, I go to either Union Square Park, Madison Square Garden/Penn Station, Bryant Park, or Grand Central Station and I attempt to gather about 9 to 11 decent-lengthed interviews. I record them to my cell phone. I try to get a good mix of male/female, younger/older, Dem/Repub/Indie, etc. However, usually I end up a little male-heavy, older-heavy, and Dem-heavy. I actually hve to kind of "profile" people to try and single-out who I belive might be Trump voters. Dems are easy to spot by their clothes.

So, most times the recording process goes fairly smoothly. Sometimes it is a very fast process if I "get on a roll." Sometimes it is like pulling teeth and I am recording for two-and-a-half hours or more. Know that, in the not too distant past on Dusty (when I was unemployed for a long stretch) I used to spend 4 solid nights-a-week working on shows. This was when I used to do everything on microcassette and a dual cassette deck with vinyl. God, that sounds romantic. I tottaly sold OUT! Got a day job, honed my show production time down to one grinding 15-hour session. went digital (mostly), and create Dusty on a laptop.

Acually, I never WAS an analog purist. Not really. I like the old gear, the great sound, the wax, the album covers ... but I like didge, too. It's all in what you DO with it, y'know/? Didge is even more of a challenge because of the endless track-availability. You can go on and on and on with taking things another level into sound effects or whatever.

Step 2. After recording the interviews I generally walk home for exercise and get some kind of rough plan in my head for how to collate the raw audio into some type of cohesive whole. I like that ... cohesive whole. Corrosive hole. The Bobbish Dole, The Barber's Pole - The Jelly roll - Filet of Seoul, Old King Cole, Pole to pole - you see?

Once I get hom, I have to dub down all of the recorded interviews onto my laptop. This is time-consuming, but it gives me a chance to revisit the interviews, make notes, consider edits, and keep that cohesive whole gelling and formulating. Gelled and formulated cohesion. That's what is aimed for. Not really. So, once I dubbed the interviews onto my laptop, I also select five to seven audio soundbytes from YouTube, or wherever, to play between songs. Geberally these are topical, or they allude to pop culture references made by the interview subjects. Example: The Game of LIFE was featured in this Dusty Show, so I grabbed a sample of a 60's TV commersh from YouTube. Is that even legal? I hope so. It's not like I make a damned dime doing this stuff, though I love it, the attention, the music, the moment, the accu-vets, and Jersey itself, frickin' Jersey, man. I love it. More each year.

Now I go in and edit the living shaving cream out of those interviews. You have NO idea how much the interviews you hear on Dusty have been edited to within millimeters of their lives. I take out a lot of "uhs" and "likes" and jibberish and muddled phrasery. I don't change the MEANING of what people say. I don't. I amy edit to lend power to my point, or my "side." (I shouldn't even HAVE a side!). Anyway, when it's all said and done, many seven-minute interviews are whittled to 3:20. They all get whittled and I enjoy that whittling, and as self-effacing as I can be sometimes, I am proud of the editing. No, I am not drunk.

So once the editing is done and the soundbytes are whittled, too, it;s MATH time. That's right, math. I have a 60-minute show. I add up the combined length of all the interviews and soundbytes and arrive at a figure. Usually it's about 35-minutes or close to that. Then I figure out how much time is LEFT in the hour. In this case, 25 minutes would need to have content generated in order to fill them. So, I would take that 25-minutes and divide it by 10. Ten songs. How long could they be? It comes out to 150-seconds per song, or, 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Perfect! I now need to select ten songs, which will all need to be edited to two minutes and thirty-seconds. This means whether a song is eight minutes long, or two minutes and fifty seconds long, I am editing it to as close to two minutes and thirty seconds as I can. I like the uniformity of it. Oddly, I don't think most of you have even noticed that the songs are all edited and uniform in length. It's basically just fun for me. So now ... theoretically,... if my math is correct ... all the pieces should fit together and be sixty-minutes long. Now to assemble them.