Dave McBride – A Nail In The Head

Radio listeners in the mid-west are familiar with the name Dave McBride as he was drive-time humor essayist for the Steve Dahl comedy and talk show on WCKG-FM. Now residing in sunny Florida, as you can tell from the liner photo, and working out of Live 85 AM, Dave McBride’s brand of comic audio essays is an interesting blend of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest Of The Story”, Dave Barry, and is very similar in some ways to what most stand-up comics do when they riff about life and relationships. A Nail In The Head, a 2 comedy CD 32 track compilation of the best of Dave McBride is a very enjoyable, funny, and sometimes thought provoking listen with a caveat.

Now, Dave McBride knows what he is doing and he is very good at it (as is clearly evident on A Nail In The Head). Names like Paul Harvey and Dave Barry were tossed in just to give an idea of what kind of material McBride does.

You might think being associated with drive-time radio ensures this material is the kind of stuff you hear on too many drive-time radio shows and is full of bleeps, references to the female anatomy, and the kind of humor that never rises above what is funny in a locker room if you are a knuckle-scraping jock on steroids. Far from it. Dave McBride is an educated, verbose, erudite, word-loving, velvet-voiced sometimes fustian -Dave McBride will get this one– pundit who comments on daily travails and interesting lessons about life (such as accepting what life has to offer be it in terms of greenery for your garden or the inevitable death of any form of aquarium life) while dropping as many alliterations and learned references and names as he can. A Nail In The Head contains 32 such pieces, some profound and some just plain funny and weird. Nothing compares with CD 1 track 10 The Physics Of Frozen Dinner Rolls where supposedly a listener asked McBride if he could keep dinner rolls frozen over a 6-hour cross-country trip by having them outside the car and relying on wind chill to keep them frozen. This, as many other observations and commentary by Dave McBride is highly enjoyable, pleasant, relaxing, thought provoking and, bizarre enough to keep you listening. The Caveat is coming.

Other funny commentaries by Dave McBride on A Nail In The Head include a humorous pseudo-job application titled If I Ran NPR, a track that includes a savage but humorous attack on NPR and All Things Considered. How To Speak To A Teenager is something any parent and teacher should definitely listen to a couple of times, not only to bask in the understanding of someone’s who’s been there but also learn a few tricks of the trade of dealing with the hormonally challenged.

Dave McBride’s funny bone is subtle but very present on A Nail In The Head, a great -with a caveat-2 funny CD set of humorous observations, essays, and commentaries, including personal fave The Festival of Gotmar (about a village in India where people gather yearly to throw stones at each other) and From Out of the Mouths of Coots, a brilliant essay on the loss of interesting expressions such as “rattlers big enough to puke up a buck deer” “careful as a naked man climbing a barbwire fence” and “busy as a one-eyed cat watching nine rat holes” and so on. The caveat is next.

The Caveat: A Nail In The Heat by Dave McBride is a high-quality very funny 2 comedy CD set of interesting and thought-provoking commentary and essays. However, whoever engineered this set should be tarred, feathered, shot, made to listen to Barry Manilow CDs on perpetual rotation while a six-year-old plays the kazoo in his right ear while flying long distance in an airplane full of teething babies. There s no way in hell that Dave McBride a professional radio personality speaks as fast as he does on A Nail In The Head to the point that he is at times incomprehensible and it becomes a little annoying not to hear the guy take an actual break while reading his very funny commentary and observations so that he sounds like some guy who is rushing through his text because he’s got a severe case of the trots and the outhouse is a mile away and there’s a foot of snow outside. I would much rather blame some idiot engineer or producer with a shareware sound editing kit who just went too far compressing the various recordings Dave McBride made for A Nail In The Head. Compression, for those unaware of the term, consists in taking out pauses and silences to reduce a track’s length by a few seconds. Someone really went nuts here.

A Nail In The Head
Dave McBride
2 CD Set
From The Treasury of Dave’s Raves
Independent Release Comedy CD

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