How did inconstancy, trains and wartime espionage end up in the same song?

Beats me, but I still call “Shortwave Radio” one of my best, even 40-plus years after I wrote it. While it’s hardly mystical, it benefits from being more impressionistic than is usual for me and yet remains a vivid self-portrait.

Early and late, the song was a repertory pillar of my band the Fashion Jungle (1981–1989), and various FJ lineups can be heard performing it in 1981, 1982 (and 2023, in a reunion show excerpt). It also appeared in sets by the Boarders and even the supposedly country Cowlix.

But for the March 2024 Song of the Month! I present, instead, Howling Turbines playing “Shortwave” in 1998 — by which time drummer Ken Reynolds and I had been doing the song for many years, starting with the FJ. That long familiarity infused with the energy of Gretchen Schaefer’s bass make this one of the rockingest “Shortwaves” I have on tape. — by Doug Hubley

Hear “Shortwave Radio” by Howling Turbines: Doug Hubley, Gretchen Schaefer and Ken Reynolds. Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Shortwave Radio” copyright © 1981 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo above: Hallicrafters shortwave radio in an apartment in Portland, Maine, 1989. Below: Howling Turbines photographed by Jeff Stanton outside the Free Street Taverna on a hot day in 1999. From left: Ken Reynolds, Gretchen Schaefer, Doug Hubley. Additional Fashion Jungle personnel: 1981, bass by Mike Piscopo and organ by Jim Sullivan; 1982, bass by Steve Chapman)

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First posted as the Song of the Month! for December 2022, “Blue Shadows” certainly qualifies as a Yuletide number — although, as a song about people exiting relationships with neither warning nor explanation, it may serve better to end, rather than launch, your holiday party.

In fact, that melancholy theme may suit January better than December. Where the Christmas season is supposed to provide various anesthetics against the realities of life, January is just the opposite, complete with hard light, bare branches, cold dry air, broken resolutions and other symbols of harsh truth. (Not to mention snow, something central to the song but hard to come by along Maine’s south coast in recent Decembers.)

And by the way, Happy New Year!

Hear “Blue Shadows” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Blue Shadows” copyright © 2022 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Photo above: Saugus and Randolph streets, Portland, Maine, photographed by Doug Hubley. Below: Doug Hubley, with mitten, and Gretchen Schaefer. NOTE: This recording uses sound posted under the Creative Commons 0 License by DBlover on the Freesound website: https://freesound.org/people/DBlover/sounds/505999/)

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Not to be confused with one’s birthday suit, “Nudie Suit” refers to the makers of the stage costumes that epitomized the dazzling Western wear that country musicians once favored — outfits whose eye-popping images of horses, cacti, wagon wheels, etc., were drawn in glittering rhinestones on boldly colored cloth.

Kiev native Nuta Kotlyarenko, doing business as Nudie Cohn, and his wife, Bobbie, started building their business in Hollywood in the 1940s, and ultimately sold Nudie Suits to, among others, artists like Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Porter Wagoner (who would eventually own 52 of them). I first learned about Nudie Suits through the Flying Burrito Brothers: Singer Gram Parsons, a mighty influence on country-leaning rock musicians like me, sported a Nudie infamously embellished with images of pills, poppies, marijuana, nud(i)e women, and a cross.

“Christmas Nudie Suit” is the portrait of a country singer facing some tough realities on the eve of the holiday. Incorporating sounds of the obligatory Fender Telecaster as well as a metal mixing bowl and a guitar scratched with business cards, it was written and recorded during the past three weeks — just in time for that last-minute Christmas shopping!

Hear “Christmas Nudie Suit” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“Christmas Nudie Suit” copyright © 2023 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Above: Illustration by Gretchen Schaefer. Below: Doug Hubley in a polyester Western shirt, not a Nudie Suit, in a photo by Jeff Stanton.)

Something that distinguished the sound of the Fashion Jungle during the first year of the band’s existence was our use of a Farfisa rock organ. Manufactured in Italy, these keyboards were popular in the U.S. in the 1960s because they cost so much less than instruments that inspired them — e.g., the Vox Continental.

The Farfisa sound, arguably, fell short of the Vox, but as this recording of my song “The End of the Affair” demonstrates, it had charms of its own.

That song stayed with the Fashion Jungle throughout the band’s existence. This late 1981 version was recorded on a Sony two-track in my parents’ basement by three members of the founding FJ quartet: drummer Ken Reynolds, multi-instrumentalist Jim Sullivan on the Farfisa, and me on guitar and vocal. The fourth player was bassist Steve Chapman, who had just joined the band, after the departure of Mike Piscopo. (Ken, Steve and I would go on to become the most durable lineup of this combo that was briefly prominent in Maine’s punk–New Wave scene.)

A 1981 composition, “The End of the Affair” borrows its title from Graham Greene’s novel published 30 years earlier, which I’d read during a Greene binge that made on me a literary impression of singular depth. But the song’s emotional direction is all mine. Written over Labor Day weekend in an inn in Georgetown, Maine, the song draws on a big breakup — in a way. The characters, setting and actions are all fiction, but the vortex of pain, blame, guilt and relief at the heart of the song is exactly as it happened all those years ago.

Hear “End of the Affair” below! Buy it on Bandcamp! (“End of the Affair” copyright © 1984 by Douglas L. Hubley. All rights reserved. Above: Banner photo by Doug Hubley. Below: Two photos by Jeff Stanton. The first shows Jim Sullivan at the Farfisa rock organ during a performance by the original Fashion Jungle at Kayo’s, 1981. The second shows the Fashion Jungle at a barn dance in June 1982, for which Jim joined us on several numbers . From left, Doug Hubley, Ken Reynolds and Steve Chapman.)