What Am I Doing Here? Another Damned Substack??!!?!@?
But you're in for a bunch of Musical Fun!
(Less than) three years, three different Substacks …
What the bleeding Hell am I doing?
Quick recap: In early 2024 decided to publish my vanity biography, one chapter a week. This was Steve Terrell’s Snazzy Life.
Then, early this year (2025 by my count) I created Songs the Wild Taters Sang, billed as a “deep dive into songs you probably never heard by a `musician’ you’ve probably never heard of.” It covered, one track a week, the songs I recorded for my two early ‘80s albums, Picnic Time for Potatoheads and Pandemonium Jukebox. But besides my ridiculous “career” as a musician Wild Taters also dealt with my life when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, a time in which I got married and divorced, had my first child and stumbled into a near-40-year career in journalism.
But both those Substacks were predetermined to be “limited series” by the subject matter: a book and a very short recording career.
So this new one, Flaming Spud Rhapsodies, will be different. All things must end someday, but there will be no set final post here.
Basically, it’s a revamp of my old blog, The Stephen W. Terrell Music Web Log, an endeavor that honestly I’ve let go to shit the past couple of years. At first I blamed it on the fact that I was cranking out weekly Substack posts. But that’s a lame excuse because there have been more than 10 months since I ended Wild Taters, and I haven’t done doodly squat with my blog except to post my weekly Terrell’s Sound World radio playlists.
A few weeks ago, leading up to this brilliant idea, I decided I was going to do not one, not two, but THREE Big Beautiful year-end blog posts. And I actually started composing the first one.
But then, while reading recent posts from the musical Substacks I follow — including Joe Bonomo’s No Such Thing as Was, The Tim “Napalm’ Segall’s Substack, Jim Caliguri’s Only a Fool Would Say That, and, most recently, Andy Turner’s Paperback Zero, to name but a handful — I decided why not do my own ongoing music Substack, starting with these three posts I had planned for my blog?
After all, Substack is growing while Google’s Blogger (which I’ve used since late 2003!) is increasingly falling apart. Nearly every week I get notices of coding problems from the Google bros with no clear direction one how to fix them.
So I’ll keep the old blog as a repository for my Sound World playlists. But, while not promising weekly posts here, I’ll make a real effort to post more about new music I’m listening to, old music that deserves more exposure, funny rock ’n’ roll shit — and I’ll starting making more Wacky Wednesdays, Throwback Thursdays, additions to the Stephen W. Terrell Web Log Songbook and other fancy music-related stuff.
The first three posts here are going to be video heavy, but there will be more in the near future for people who like words and stuff.
If you want to receive future posts in your email, just poke that SUBSCRIBE button. As with my previous Substacks, it’s free and always will be. And please use the SHARE button to alert your friends (and proper authorities.)
So be like Dr. Hook and keep an eye out for the first actual post in this dynamic new Substack. And don’t forget to subscribe, tell your friends and wake your neighbors